Booklaunch
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Issue 12 | Summer 2021 | £2.50 where sold
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How much can we The case of the disappearing rely on Keynes to get us out of hock? wife—and other mysteries In this issue, two economists go head to head. John Maynard Keynes wrote, after the Great Depression, that governments could head off financial disaster by expanding their programmes of public works. Greater spending would boost consumer demand, and government borrowing could be paid off in the future, when the economy was back on track. His thinking was widely adopted by the Allies after the war. But David Kauders argues that with one-fifth of all economic output spent on interest payments, payback never comes. Instead of saving us, national debt is now crippling us. Pedro Gomes thinks the question is more nuanced. He argues that Keynesian intervention, which dominated until the 1960s, became discredited during the 1970s and was quickly resuscitated in 2007 at the start of the Great Recession, is a useful tool if short and sharp. If consumer demand is to grow, we not only need money to spend but the time to spend it in. More free time is therefore crucial—and this can be created by instituting a statutory three-day weekend. Read extracts from both on pages 10 to 11.
A question of character
The Fabian Window, now installed in the Shaw Library, highlighting the male founders of the LSE. The window was created by Charlotte Shaw’s cousin, Caroline Townshend, from an idea by Charlotte or GBS or both. Women who marry and give up their name may also give up their identity. When we think of Booth, Shaw, Tawney and Beveridge, we’re thinking of Charles, George Bernard, Richard Henry and William, not of their wives—Mary Catherine, Charlotte Frances, Jeannette and Janet (or Jessy)—whose memories have been disgracefully eclipsed. The Shaw Library at the LSE, for example, is named not after GBS, as many suppose, but his wife Charlotte, one of the School's first trustees. Charlotte regularly supported the LSE and other radical organisations, as well as carrying out the research that GBS needed to write St Joan. Ann Oakley's impassioned study Forgotten Wives is one of five books in Booklaunch #12 that look at gender issues. We also showcase the need to talk about menopause in Caroline Harris’s M-Boldened, the reality or otherwise of Amazons in Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe, John Perrott Jenkins's unravelling of masculinity in Representing the Male, and Janina David’s The Hopeful Traveller, a collection of short stories about middle-aged single women trying to find themselves in the years before feminism. See pages 3 to 8.
Dickens was wrong ON OUR INSIDE PAGES In Hard Times, Dickens satirises Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian teacher, for demanding “nothing but facts”, as if facts were cold and hard. Britannica’s latest offering Listify! proves the very opposite: that facts are a joyous romp for all clever children to gobble up. See pages 15 to 18.
Holbein, like his Northern European contemporaries Cranach and Dürer, was a realist rather than idealist or dogmatist: he depicted what he saw—not what his mind conceived. Supposedly. But here’s a challenge. The subject in the painting above is evidently wealthy and “splendidly attired”, wears a necklace and rings, has a smooth complexion and soft, full lips. But is it a man or a woman? And has Holbein deliberately amplified this ambiguity? A similar question is asked in two other of our books. In Representing the Male, John Perrott Jenkins looks closely at ambivalent representations of miners in Welsh novels while in The Eurasian Steppe, Warwick Ball considers (among much else) the plausibility of female warriors—the Steppe Amazons of mythology. Read extracts from all on pages 12–13, 4 and 7.
aunch
EDITORIAL Page 2
Bad language, Word records, Lingualia quiz
BOOKS ABOUT WOMEN’S ISSUES Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 8
Janina David’s fables about single women How Welsh fiction fetishises the male History’s erasure of married women Amazons: heroes of the Eurasian Steppes Twenty-one essays about the menopause
CULTURAL HISTORY Page 9
What Columbo reveals about surveillance
ECONOMICS
Page 10 Unsustainable debt: the case against Keynes Page 11 Shorter working weeks: the case for Keynes
VISUAL CULTURE
Page 12 Holbein and the depiction of character Page 14 To see the world as others see it … Readership 50,500 UK copies plus website users booklaunch.london booklaunch.london
@booklaunch_ldn @booklaunch_ldn
CHILDREN’S
Booklau
Page 15 Britannica’s new wonderbook for kids
ENVIRONMENT
Page 19 After Covid: learning to love the city again Page 20 Flying-foxes and the threat to human life
Booklaunch Literary Challenge