Enemy You Should Know - Niall Ferguson
The historian, biographer and author, most recently, of “The Square and the Tower” owns books by people who have insulted him in print: “I do research before taking vengeance.”
What books are on your nightstand?
I am a few pages from the end of Tom Holland’s marvelously readable “Rubicon” and about a quarter of the way through Mary Beard’s somewhat more earnest “SPQR.” Those were part of my challenge to myself this year to get better educated about the fall of the Roman Republic. I’m still dipping into Maya Jasanoff’s beautifully written travels in the footsteps of Conrad, “The Dawn Watch.” Newcomers to the nightstand, which were both recommended to me by friends: “China in Ten Words,” by Yu Hua and “Lives Other Than My Own,” by Emmanuel Carrère.
Tell us about the last great book you read.
Great in the sense of “up there with the Columbia Core”?I would nominate “2084,” by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. As a vision of Islamic totalitarianism, it is blood-chilling. But it is also a masterly piece of writing.
What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
I was rather fascinated to read in Tom Holland’s book about Baiae, the Roman resort on the Gulf of Naples which was the Roman equivalent of the Hamptons or Malibu, complete with that combination of sexual libertinism and dietary epicureanism which I associate with certain members of today’s American elite.
What’s the best book on economics? And the best work of economic history?
The best book I’ve read recently on economics was probably Ian Kumekawa’s “The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics.” Amongst recent economic history books I would have to pick Chris Miller’s very insightful “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR,” which shows why the Russians could not achieve in the 1980s what the Chinese did achieve, namely (partial) escape from the pathologies of the planned economy. Of course, economists and economic historians these days are discouraged from writing books. Most of what I consume in these fields comes in the form of working papers and journal articles.
What books do you think best captures your own political principles?
I suppose it would have to be Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” I wish I could force-feed — or perhaps force-read — it to every progressive who is convinced that her latest untested and hare-brained policy initiative will magically eliminate inequality, discrimination, climate change and all the rest, without any unintended consequences for individual liberty.
Do you and your wife, the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, share similar taste in books? What books has she recommended to you, and vice versa?
Very similar, so books frequently cross the bedroom from one nightstand to the other. A good example was Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty,” her favorite work of political philosophy, which she urged me to read. I recently gave her Tom Holland’s “Dynasty,” the sequel to “Rubicon,” and of course his “In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire,” which I am waiting my turn to read after her.
Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?
I shared the widespread enthusiasm for J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” last year, but the must-read book for Trump’s election and presidency remains Charles Murray’s astonishingly prescient “Coming Apart.” I wish the contemptible “students” who disrupted his lecture at Middlebury College earlier this year — not one of whom I’ll bet had ever read a word of his — would read “Coming Apart” and then look in the mirror and realize: “Oh God, I’m a member of that loathsome coastal cognitive elite that is completely out of touch with middle America.”
Which fiction and nonfiction writers — playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — inspired you most early in your career? And which writers working today do you most admire?
I’d have to begin with A. J. P. Taylor, who was the first historian I ever read and who inspired me to believe a) that historical writing should never be dull, but should bristle with irony and paradox, and b) that historical knowledge is a prerequisite for worthwhile commentary on contemporary matters. Another major influence at the early stage was Norman Stone. But it wasn’t just historians who inspired me as I was starting out. As a sixth-former (high school senior), I lapped up Tom Stoppard’s plays, painted a mural inspired by the poetry of Thom Gunn and read compulsively the reviews of punk bands in the New Musical Express. At Oxford, I came under the influence of The Spectator, then edited by Charles Moore, one of the most gifted English journalists of his generation and now Margaret Thatcher’s biographer. But my favorite writer at that time was Flann O’Brien, the great Irish humorist. I have always liked his description of himself as “a spoilt Proust.” No one writing in English today is remotely as funny as O’Brien. Only the French can still produce real men of letters. Chapeau, therefore, to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq.
Which historians and biographers do you most admire?
Amongst those currently writing, Simon Schama stands out as the Dickens of modern historiography: bewilderingly erudite and prolific, passionate in his enthusiasms and armed with the complete contents of the thesaurus. We agree to disagree about politics. I have also hugely admired Anne Applebaum for her trilogy on the Gulag, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe (“Iron Curtain”) and, most recently, the Ukrainian famine (“Red Famine”). Walter Isaacson has established himself as the great American biographer of our time. “Leonardo da Vinci” is his best book, I think. Whereas the earlier books were pure journalism, he is now showing academic scholars how to write accessibly about subtle and even recondite subject matter. I read quite a number of biographies while researching “The Square and the Tower.” My favorite was probably Michael Ignatieff’s on Isaiah Berlin, which led me into the vast, delightful rabbit warren of Berlin’s correspondence.
And which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?
Everyone has at least one vice. Mine is reading (and re-reading) 19th-century novels. It’s hard to pick just a couple of favorites but I unreservedly adore Wilkie Collins (e.g., “The Moonstone”) and Theodor Fontane (“Der Stechlin”).
Which genres do you avoid?
Historical fiction, especially of recent vintage. The brain simply cannot compartmentalize. I noticed while writing “The Pity of War” that I was subconsciously drawing on Pat Barker’s “The Ghost Road” novels as if they were the real thing. Since then I’ve abstained completely. In any case, I would much rather read an authentic contemporary diary than a work of historical fiction. A good example is the diary of Ivan Maisky, the long-serving Soviet ambassador in London. Gabriel Gorodetsky’s edition — abridged and unabridged — is a work for the ages.
How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night?
I’ve tried electronic but I can’t read on a screen for pleasure. It has to be the paper-and-ink book, preferably a robust paperback. From an early age, I’ve liked to have five books on the go at a time — that was the maximum number one could borrow from the Ayr Public Library. As for when I read, always at night. In the morning, there are too many distractions.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
I own books by a number of people who have insulted me in print, but I don’t think it is all that surprising that I do research before taking vengeance.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I read a lot and quite systematically. Once I had identified an author I liked, I read everything by that person the library possessed. I vividly recall devouring the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse in this way. I have tried (and continue to try) as a father to impart my love of reading to my children, so the books I loved as a boy — Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” for example, or Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” — are books I have reread multiple times. The greatest works of literature benefit from being read aloud. A wonderful example are the “Just William” stories by Richmal Crompton, which deserve to be much better known in the United States. She was the Dorothy Parker of provincial England.
If you could require the American president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister?
I agree with you that it would be wonderful if both Mr. Trump and Mrs. May read one book. I don’t much mind which one it is.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. I’d call it The Last Burns Supper.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
The first book I ever abandoned was Captain Marryat’s “The Children of the New Forest,” which came highly recommended but bored me rigid. I also struggled with “Swallows and Amazons.” At the time, I felt quite guilty about these sins of omission. As I grew older, however, I became more cavalier and now treat books with the contempt they mostly deserve. To give an example of a book I found overrated, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” was both conceptually unsound and tediously executed.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?
Volume one of “Kissinger” is the best thing I’ve done. Second prize goes to the first volume of “The House of Rothschild.” Both these books were constructed on a foundation of prodigious research. But I am also very fond of “Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power,” because it so infuriated a certain species of second-rate professor of post-colonial studies — though not so much that they actually read the book.
Who would you want to write your life story?
I would discourage anyone from wasting their energies on what would be a very dull narrative.
What do you plan to read next?
The new biography of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. by Richard Aldous. I grew rather fond of him by reading his correspondence with Kissinger and his diaries, so I expect to enjoy as well as learn from it.