Essential reading: nine experts on the books that inspired them | Books | The Guardian

4. american film noir edited by manthia diawara (1993)having studied english literature instead of film at the university of manchester, i’m still not qualified to talk about film other than as a lifelong enthusiast, something that only takes you so far. In an attempt to fill in the great scholarly gaps in my knowledge, this seminal collection of essays from the AFI [American Film Institute] Reader Series proved invaluable. In the preface, Diawara speaks of tackling both “a black cinematic aesthetic focusing on the black artist” and “the thorny issue of the cinematic viewer”. This authoritative volume covers filmmakers from Oscar Micheaux to Spike Lee, and it’s as relevant now as it was when it was first published.

5. Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies(1985)Along with horror/fantasy film critics Nigel Floyd and Alan Jones, Kim Newman was a guiding light when I started out in film journalism, and I continue to be amazed by your work. First published in the 1980s, ever since massively expanded and updated, Nightmare Movies is unrivaled material: a textbook that turns Newman’s encyclopedic knowledge into a readable romp through the hidden paths of cinema. Horror. Just like the Mark Primos movie story, it’s a book that never fails to amaze and delight me.

economics: noreena hertz“great economic thought must straddle politics, ethics and history”

noreena hertz has been economics editor at itv news since may last year; She is a Cambridge Distinguished Scholar, a Visiting Professor at Utrecht, and an Honorary Professor at UCL. Her books The Silent Takeover (2001), IOU: The Menace of Debt and Why We Must Defuse It (2004), and Eyes Wide Open (2013) have been published in 22 countries.

1. john kenneth galbraith’s affluent society (1958)I read this when I was studying economics for a middle level at age 15 and it opened my eyes to the fact that it was a discipline much richer than the graphs and numbers of the dry textbooks to which he had been exposed. Here is a thinker who made it clear that economics was inextricably linked with politics and that economists not only could, but must, take views on major social and political issues and challenge prevailing beliefs and norms. that was very influential reading at such a young age. It’s also beautifully written and showed me that you could do yourself a real service as an economist if you could write well.

2. exit, voice and loyalty by albert o hirschman (1970)this is a really thin book but with a good idea: essentially that our power lies not only in our ability to walk away but also in our ability to sit still and complain . Until then, the economic orthodoxy was that the market was the regulating force, so what regulated the behavior of companies was that customers could leave if they did not like their product, and what regulated governments was that elections be held. But what Hirschman said was that it can be even more powerful to stay and exercise your ability to complain. I thought it was a powerful idea when I read it in college and it definitely influenced my thinking behind silent acquisition.

3. institutions, institutional change, and economic performance by douglass north (1990) this is probably the hardest reading on my list, but the ideas are some of the most influential i have come across: this was when i was studying for my doctorate. his big idea was that when you try to understand why some countries get rich while others remain poor, you have to look at the complex interplay of the country’s history, culture, social norms, laws, and belief systems, not just the markets. we ignore history and culture at our peril. i was looking at russia in the early 1990s and i realized that you couldn’t just impose a market economy on it and expect something like the united states or the united kingdom to emerge, but rather a very particular russian form of capitalism would emerge .

4. if women counted by marilyn waring (1988)i read this in college and it was the first feminist economics book i read, i didn’t even know the branch existed. waring talks about how much of women’s work in the home is not included in gdp calculations, and how women are ignored in the mainstream economy. she argues that the production of well-cared-for children is as important as the production of cars or crops. sparked my interest in where gender and economics intersect and continued to work around who we value in society. I think there has been progress, but the whole care economy is still significantly undervalued.

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5. development as freedom by amartya sen (1999)Essentially, this argues that economic development is not just about increasing income, but also about political rights: health, opportunity, safety, security, ideas that were very influential in the creation of the UN human development goals. i spent a few years working in africa and the middle east and sen’s work really resonated with the realities on the ground, how a person’s life wasn’t necessarily bettered by an increase in gdp in that country, how you had to look at how the money was being distributed and who had access to it. what all my authors have in common is that they straddle politics, ethics and history. sometimes when people think of economics, they see it as much narrower and less rich than it really is.

law: helena kennedy‘we have to keep remembering that we are capable of terrible things’

helena kennedy qc is a co-worker and an expert in human rights, civil liberties and the constitution. Her books include Eve Was Framed (1993) and Just Law (2004). She is President of the Helena Kennedy Foundation, which promotes social inclusion in higher education.

1. the universal declaration of human rights(1948)this little booklet stays in my bag and i refer to it constantly. my work is increasingly about human rights and this founding document shows their development and reminds us why they are important. for example, it addresses the right to equal access to education. I’m the president of a scholarship program that helps the underprivileged get a fresh start in education: girls who get pregnant at school, youth in trouble. we have found that people fleeing persecution who are given asylum are charged as if they were foreign students and article 26 argues that this is unfair. I believe that human rights must be integrated into our daily lives by recognizing that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security.

2. archbold’s criminal arguments, evidence and practices (published annually)archbold is the bible of the criminal lawyer: a great legal tome that I spend my life carrying. I now have one shoulder that slopes lower than the other. the book sets the law and is regularly updated. it serves to address homicide law, for example, which has been modernized, and to analyze issues such as diminished responsibility, which has evolved thanks to advances in psychiatry. explains the change in position on the murder of newborns and the law on joint ventures. the fine print is incredibly important to the way you present legal arguments, a journey of investigation that culminates in the use of relevant cases in court.

3. the rule of law by tom bingham (2010) bingham was the chief justice of our supreme court, or the appellate division of the house of lords, as he was then known. he was a wonderful judge and an inspiring man and he wrote this little book in which he lays out the meaning of the rule of law. he emphasizes the importance of knowing the rules of society and the social contract and encourages equality before and open access to the law, something that worries me now due to the cuts in legal aid. he talks about the sovereignty of parliament and I’m sure the judges had him in mind during the recent decision on the role of parliament in any important constitutional matter (triggering article 50).

4. Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering, and Hope, 1899-1999 by bruce bernard and terence mcnamee (2002)I have this fantastic book in a support in my studio. It’s an incredible commentary on the 20th century, in many ways a century of horror, but it gave us the reasons why human rights matter. On every page beautiful black and white photographs show the inhumanity of war, lynchings in America, Belsen, poverty, events around the world. I learned human rights sitting in cells, in immigration detention centers, in refugee camps. but it is also learned by understanding our history and there is nothing more powerful than an image to remind us. In the field of law, we must continue to remember that we are capable of terrible things unless we speak to our best angels.

5. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times edited by neil astley (2002)I often use poetry when speaking to the jury, and share the same taste as neil Astley, who edited this anthology. it is wonderful to find words that speak of the human experience. This includes many poets that I love, such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Mary Oliver. She wrote a poem called Wild Geese, which is about how we’re all connected, and you want to remind the jury of that connection, particularly in difficult cases. poetry reaches parts you otherwise couldn’t. You can quote Martin Luther King about “the story arc,” or use Seamus Heaney to describe a moment to seize and say that as human beings, we must rise to the occasion.

life writing: olivia laing ‘near the knives of wojnarowicz is the book of my life’

olivia laing is the author of the river (2011), the trip to the echo of spring (2014) and the lonely city (2016). In 2014, she was Eccles Writer-in-Residence at the British Library. she is currently working on everything, on freedom and the human body.

1. the diary of virginia woolf (five volumes, 1915-1941) everything begins for me with woolf. I first read Orlando, but my abiding love is for the five volumes of her diaries in pastel dust jackets. she began on January 1, 1915, writing after tea and using the notebooks as a laboratory of ideas, a place to catch stray thoughts and observations: full-day weather reports. it’s this gritty quality that appeals to me, the feeling of someone thinking at full throttle, working their way toward new concepts, new forms of language. As for the last and firm entry: “l. she is doing the rhododendrons… ”

2. collected poems of frank o’hara (1995)my battered copy is littered with pink and yellow post-its. A queer poet and curator who was killed by a buggy on Fire Island in 1966 at the age of 40, O’Hara is one of the most talented and agile writers who ever lived. his poems are a scourge of pomposity: casual, intimate, and expansive, reveling between registers, crammed with high art and oranges, taxis, and exclamation points. I keep trying to put it in a book, but it slips away. anyway, he has my heart.

3. andy warhol’s diaries(1989) I’m not sure I’ve written an article without consulting the formidable index of andy warhol’s diaries. he knew everyone, went everywhere, had a keen eye for the absurd, and was never shy about telling off friends and foes alike. Originally started as a way to record his expenses for the IRS, Warhol dictated the diary over the phone every morning to his secretary, Pat Hackett, which explains the wickedly giggly tone. Forget self-reflection: Andy was the consummate mirror of his time, which makes this the best story of the bright and empty 1980s imaginable.

4. Modern Natureby derek jarman (1991)I always find it amusing that the nature writing currently in vogue never involves sex. I much prefer the sublime and criminally understated modern nature of Derek Jarman, a memoir diary and planter, written as a kind of spell against the ravages of AIDS. Jarman is a magically keen observer, celebrating wild nature in all its forms, from the poppies and kale on Dungeness Beach to the midnight boys strolling Hampstead Heath. reading it now, I am amazed at how deeply it shaped me. my aesthetics, my politics, my model of how to be an artist, even my style as a gardener, were founded here.

5. near the knives by david wojnarowicz (1991) this, by artist and activist david wojnarowicz, is my book in a whole life, my book for these dark times, an antidote to stupidity, cruelty and oppression of all kinds. knife is about wojnarowicz’s life: his childhood as a homeless hustler in new york, his AIDS diagnosis, the death of his best friend, but it’s also about art and power, sex, freedom and the resistance. he has been out of print for a long time in the uk. happily, next march will be back in circulation by canongate. get those pre-orders now.

writing from nature: richard mabey‘lewis thomas changed the way I think, write and laugh’

richard mabey is a journalist and broadcaster whose writings examine the relationship between nature and culture. Mabey’s published works span more than 40 years and include Free Food (1972), Flora Britannica (1996), and Natural Cure (2005). His most recent book is El Cabaret de las Plantas (2016).

1. the lives of a cell by lewis thomas (1974) I’m on my second copy of lifes of a cell and its wine stains and frayed pages give it the air of one of those ancient and sociable organisms that swarm the text. I first read it in the 1970s after it uniquely won two US National Book Awards. USA, in the science and arts categories, and it changed the way I think, write and laugh. Thomas was a witty, well-educated polymathic biologist, and this collection of short essays covers topics as seemingly unconnected as moth pheromones, language as an evolving ecosystem, and the meaning of mythological animals. but his genius was in finding and exploring their connections, in a cohesive story of reverberating wisdom and sublime prose.

2. the poet as botanist by mm mahood (2008) professor molly mahood is an eminent scholar of english literature and her description of this book as an exploration of “the relationship between biological thought and the poetic process” does not give credit to his quick intelligence and mischievous humor. She traces the works of writers such as Crabbe, Wordsworth, DH Lawrence, Ruskin, and especially John Clare to examine how her botanical knowledge informs her poetry and vice versa. poetry emerges as a kind of science, truth is alloyed from keen observation and imaginative perception.

3. insectivorous plants by charles darwin (1875) when he was younger, he had a fashionable romantic disdain for darwin as a cold mechanist. Then I started to read him properly and discovered that he was a passionate, uncertain, magnificent writer and full of Keats’s “negative capacity”. I once recited the concluding paragraph of On the Origin of Species, with his famous rhapsody to “the infinite most beautiful forms,” ​​while appearing secular grace in a bridal breakfast and handkerchiefs. Insectivorous Plants is a classic expression of both his scientific method and his prose style, and as he experimentally feeds the sundews the contents of his larder, you feel like you’re in a fizzing farmhouse murder mystery.

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4. ancient forest by oliver rackham (1980) oliver rackham, who died in 2015, almost single-handedly turned historic ecology into a national enthusiasm. Ancient Woodland is his masterpiece, a comprehensive survey of the forest heritage of East Anglia embracing as evidence Anglo-Saxon charts, carpenters’ receipts and the habits of molds. He criticized generalizations and what he called “factoids” in elegant English that had its roots in the precision of Gilbert White and the robustness of William Cobbett. he had little to do with the egocentrism of modern nature writing, but we are all indebted to him.

5. findings, lines of sight by kathleen jamie (2005, 2012) the alan bennett diaries They are my regular secular journals collection, but to see how “nature” prose should be done, I repeatedly turn to Kathleen Jamie’s essays. writing about the moon and the night sky, or the skeletons of embryos in a medical museum, has a clarity, a mindfulness that clears your mind. she has no ego and no need for extravagant metaphorical frames. “The outside world opened like a door,” she writes, “and I asked myself, what are we not seeing?”

thought and language: steven pinker‘dawkins inspired me to write for a wide audience’

steven pinker is a psychology professor at harvard who writes about language, the mind, and human nature. His books include The Blank Slate (2002), Our Nature’s Best Angels (2011), which argued that violence in the developed world is declining, and Sense of Style (2014).

1. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1986)This was one of the books that inspired me to try my hand at science writing for a wide audience. It’s a model of how to explain complicated ideas without simplifying or boring readers, and Dawkins’s description of how he refuted a creationist’s claim that bombardier beetles couldn’t have evolved made me laugh out loud. I consulted him both for explanations of evolutionary phenomena and for examples of lucid prose, including his masterful use of analogy, which I reproduced in my book The Material of Thinking.

2. Thomas Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict(1960)So many profound ideas were explained for the first time in this ingenious masterpiece: the strange logic of nuclear deterrence; the paradoxical value of being defenseless and incommunicado or irrationally excited; why negotiators split the difference or settle for a round number; why bribes and threats are often veiled; the best way to meet someone if you haven’t made plans and your cell phones go dead.

3. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum (2002) I turn to this enormous reference work to understand the logic of English. Unlike the primary linguistics literature, where you’ll find a mess of conflicting theories and a blizzard of jargon, this book analyzes every grammatical construction in English in a consistent framework, with depth and insight that are nothing short of astonishing. I go to him for my research on language, my tinkering with definitions and usage notes for the American Heritage Dictionary (for which I am chairman of the usage panel), and for guidance in my own writing. Especially when I had to commit to a set of parsing and technical terms in my writing guide, the sense of style, I adapted them from Cambridge Grammar.

4. Retreat from Doomsday by John Mueller (1989)It seemed reckless in 1989 to publish a book with the subtitle “the obsolescence of the great wars”, but in this one the Mueller’s book, forceful and full of wit, correctly predicted the end of the cold war and the decline of interstate conflict. he also made magnificent analyzes of the periods of war and peace in the last two centuries and fascinating reflections on the nature of moral progress, such as the abolition of slavery. this book was a great inspiration for me, the best angels of our nature.

5. the beginning of infinity by david deutsch (2011)this 21st century statement of enlightenment ideals offers a new perspective on a host of topics, including the workings of human cognition, the paths of science, and the engines of progress. deutsch does not strive to be provocative on its own and never conveys conventional wisdom: everything is patiently thought out and explained.

music: paul morley ‘as a rock critic you are writing about much more than music’

paul morley is a music journalist and television spokesman. He wrote for the NME from 1977 to 1983 and has chronicled the era of British post-punk culture in several books on Joy Division. His part memoir, part biography, The Bowie Era, was published last year.

1. awopbopaloobop alopbamboomby nik cohn (1970)cohn wrote this book at age 22 in seven weeks devoted to the mighty sound of string quartet no. beethoven’s minor, instead of little richard, dylan, james brown, the beatles, who and the stones was vividly mythologizing. cohn helped me understand how exciting writing about pop can be. The old adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture is wrong because, as Cohn made brilliantly clear, as a rock critic you are writing about much more than music: personality, appearance, illusion, myth, emotion, desire, and ultimately instance, about yourself. your answer should be enlightening, exaggerated, inspired, serious, mischievous, and put the reader in a new and special place, like music.

2. Richard Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock (1970)This was another book that ambitiously invented a new way of writing, a new way of talking about art that fixed the intensity of an amateur on a self-styled specialized knowledge. As a philosophy student at Yale for a brief period, Meltzer wasn’t afraid to see rock music as the world unto itself, a battle between purpose and purposelessness, and take it from there. he made rock criticism an obsessive, dramatic, and ultimately futile search for meaning, an epic contemplation of possibility. Meltzer advocated writing as performance that mixed enthusiasm, insight, mystery, and a strange sense of absurdity. the idea of ​​writing as a projection of your own personality became, for better or worse, an important factor in my own writing.

3. silence: readings and writingsby john cage (1961)a timeless book on ideas that is itself full of ideas, a series of conceptual invitations. in the early ’70s, when cage music was hard to listen to, I thought of him as a writer as much as a musician, and not just about music, but about the mind, the performance, the pleasure, the future. After the influence of Meltzer and Cohn, and their indirect connection to the new journalism of Wolfe, Mailer, Didion, and Sontag, my search for an innovative form of nonfiction writing led me into the poetic and provocative cage. It was never just about what he said, but how he said it, his experiments with form and content.

4. stockhausen: conversations with the composer jonathan cott (1973)I choose this as much for its influence as a book on the nature of the interview as for the ego, spirit and cosmic synchronization of the musical illusionist karlheinz stockhausen, and for its enigmatic blue cover and its minimal pompous elegance, which at the age of 16 were irresistible. the way cott, a writer for rolling stone magazine, slipped through the looking glass into the mildly menacing otherworld of star man stockhausen, etched the idea of ​​the interview into my mind and became something i wanted to do as badly as being the rock critic of personality: hanging out with my favorite musicians, catching their glamour, but also getting some clues about life, the way of living, and other mysteries.

5. arts in society edited by paul barker (1977)this wonderful book compiles the thought-provoking and idealistic writings of the weekly magazine new society, first published in 1962, which expanded radical approaches to popular culture and media communication pioneered by walter benjamin, roland barthes, and richard hoggart. It included groundbreaking essays on style, pop, art, television, and architecture by Angela Carter, George Melly, and John Berger, all performers and animators in their own way. these were a huge influence on me as a new 20 year old writer at the nme, serious about the role of critic and trying to bring speculative urgency to rock writing. it is the original thinking and writing about art that was often itself art and remains invigorating today.

story: david olusoga‘malcolm x’s book is one of the great denunciations against american racism’

British Nigerian historian David Olusoga is the co-author of The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2011) and the author of The World War (2014). He produces television and radio programs for the BBC that investigate ideas of colonialism, slavery, and racism in military history and in contemporary Anglophone culture.

1. the autobiography of malcolm x (1965) like many people who write about race, this book changed my life. it’s actually two books in one, and strictly speaking, neither of them is an autobiography. The introduction and epilogue, by Alex Haley (of Famous Roots), could easily be a poignant snapshot of Malcolm X in his later years. The main body of the book is the fruit of more than 50 face-to-face interviews and storylines of how young Malcolm Little transforms, first in the criminal Harlem Detroit Network and then, through the American prison system, into Black Muslim Malcolm X. . Over the months of interviews, Malcolm has bared his soul to Haley, but often his accounts of others are the most revealing: describing the rise and fall of his underworld boss, “West Indian Archie,” the character of his closest friend, “shorty”, and the suffering of his own parents; his father was killed by the kkk. Along with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, this is one of the great literary indictments against American racism.

2. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951) Arendt is best known today for her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. but, for me, her greatest work is this classic from 1951. a lot of my historical work focuses on the idea of ​​linkage; that what happens in the colonies and on distant battlefields seeps into europe. More than any other thinker, it was Hannah Arendt who identified how such movements of ideas, racial theories, people, and methods come about, showing how they merged with other forces, notably European anti-Semitism, to shape and ultimately disfigure the world. 20th century.

3. heart of darkness by joseph conrad (1899) you can read this in a day, but then you can spend years reading the many books written about it: few Novels in history have generated so much speculation and debate. That’s because, as well as being one of the most compelling and impactful novels, it’s also a brilliant exercise in ambiguity. Whose voice do we hear, the anonymous narrator or the witness to the events, Marlow? where is the book? Conrad never mentions Africa or the Congo, but he does talk about a great river on a great continent. The biggest mystery of all is who, if anyone, the central character, Kurtz, was based on. Historians have assembled a whole host of possible contenders, men whom Conrad may have met during his time in the Congo. it is impossible for me to have a complete idea of ​​the age of empire, audacity and horror, without reading conrad.

4. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray (2007)Since Darwin, millions of people have accepted the idea that humans are small unlike other animals. In Straw Dogs, John Gray forces us to examine the difficult corollaries of that easy statement. It is a book that has become famous for its pessimism, but I have always found it hugely liberating as it challenges many of my own unexamined assumptions. Gray dissects humanity’s seemingly innate need for the solace of religion, our addiction to the myth of progress, and our darwin-proof belief that “we belong to a species that can master its own destiny.” This, the so-called “philosopher of pessimism” warns us, is “faith, not science.”

5. George Orwell’s Collection of Essays, Journalism, and Letters Vols 1-5 Orwell is a victim of his own versatility. Because she went from journalist to novelist, her posthumous fame centers on the novels 1984 and Animal Farm. For most of his life, however, Orwell was an active journalist and an eloquent witness to the political upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s. These volumes of his collected journalism are not simply a masterclass in journalistic prose, they are history. written in real time. no one skewered the hypocrisies of his day more precisely and no one was more willing to own up to his own mistakes and misplaced loyalties. In my opinion, if you’re a journalist and Orwell isn’t one of your heroes, then something went wrong.