Deeply amoral reading: "Power - Why Some People Have It and Others Don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer

In July 2013, I was fortunate enough to attend a Stanford Business School course. It's title was "Leadership and the Effective Use of Power". The term 'power' makes many uncomfortable. At the very beginning of the course, the professor put the question to the class: "Which of you wants power?" A couple of hands rather hesitantly went up, but everyone else looked rather uncertain. Then the professor asked a second question: "Which of you wants to change the world?" No problem this time, lots of hands up. Then the professor again: "So how are you going to do that without power?"

The course was about leadership, and far from being a education in the brutal subjugation of others, it was about things like building effective teams, influencing without direct authority,  giving and receiving feedback, accessing resources, managing upwards... All rather Californian in fact. So it was something of a shock to the system when, on the penultimate day, a guest professor was brought in to stir things up a bit. His name was Jeffrey Pfeffer, and he had us out of our new Californian comfort zone in no time at all.

He started his class by contrasting the behaviour of two corporate leaders in broadly quite similar circumstances. The first was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the second Tony Hayward of BP. Both were testifying before Congressional committees following disasters their companies were responsible for, sub-prime lending based financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His point was that Blankfein, for all that his company was - in Pfeffer's view - even more culpable than Hayward's, came out of the process completely intact, having cowed the congressmen with a display of personal and corporate power, communicated in what he said, how he said it and in his general demeanour and body-language. Hayward, by contrast, was weak: he evaded questions, he hid behind lawyers, he stonewalled, he deferred to his questioners, allowed himself to be interrupted and, ultimately, he apologised. "Never apologise!" 

Deyfusard reading: "An Officer and a Spy" by Robert Harris

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you can't go far wrong with Robert Harris. Not is the same way as you can't go wrong with, say, Sebastian Faulks or Paul Auster, because he is not that kind of literary genius, but because he is an infallible storyteller: sophisticated, super-well-researched and utterly gripping. He combines the merits of the instinctive thriller writer with those of the journalist, and for me it is no accident that his novels are almost always based on real and/or historical events, reported, adapted, extrapolated. 

You never know where he is going next. He still has to complete a trilogy set in the political world of ancient Rome, he has famously imagined Nazi occupied Britain (Fatherland), recounted the extraordinary story of Bletchley Park's WW2 code-cracking (Enigma), related the eruption of Vesuvius (Pompeii), visited modern Russia (Archangel) and analysed the motivations of Tony Blair (The Ghost). However, it was, for me at least, something of a surprise that his latest novel, An Officer and a Spy deals with historical events which seem rather more arcane.

That is undoubtedly the consequence of my own ignorance and a certain cultural conditioning. As a Guardian review I read nicely put it: "the Dreyfus Affair is one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about". Yes, one is vaguely conscious that the Dreyfus Affair was a big deal in late nineteenth century France, yes, one knows it was a miscarriage of justice with a strong anti-semitic dimension and, yes, wasn't that the thing that Emile Zola wrote his J'accuse thing about..? 

Unexpected reading: "Stoner" by John Williams

It's not often these days that I read a novel cover to cover in one day. And yet this is what happened yesterday, entirely unexpectedly, with this book, Stoner, by John Williams. 

Stoner... who? you might say, as indeed I did. It seems to be a common reaction. I was given the book, in a nice hardback edition, by a very good old friend, but when I picked it up I couldn't remember what, if anything, she had told me about it or why she had decided to give it to me. Only after I had finished did I check online, to find that this was a widely-reviewed 2013 must-read, awarded the Waterstones Prize, no less. Strange though that, for all its eminence, every review of the book starts by remarking on the obscurity of the author and the slow-burning nature of this novel's success. It was first published in America in 1965, and in the UK in 1973. It seems to have been picked up by some critics, particularly in continental Europe, last year and to have enjoyed huge sales. Perhaps fittingly (as we shall see), this is all considerably too late for the author, who died in 1985.

However, I didn't need all those reviews and accounts of revival to register the quality of this book. For one thing, I read it in a day. For another, though I was at a concert in Bozar last night, I heard little of the music, as my mind was stuck on trying to work out how and why this book worked its peculiar power.

Jokily philosophical reading: "Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates", by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

In the last review on this blog, after a particularly (and unjustifiably) long slog over Bring Up the Bodies, I said:  "I'm pining for a book that grabs me, a page-turner that needs to be read at every opportunity". 

So here I am writing about a book on philosophy as it pertains to death... Not really what I had in mind.

Not the obvious page-turning choice, perhaps, but - d'you know what? - it is a page turner, and I did pick it up whenever possible. Perhaps it's the jokes. Yes, the jokes help a lot... And the cartoons. For this is, to quote the blurb, "like the Intro to Philosophy class that you wanted to take in college but couldn't because it wasn't offered". The authors, Messrs Cathcart and Klein, are the real deal, that is to say they know their philosophy, being Harvard philosophy graduates and having written a lot (not all of it jokes), but feel the need to communicate it in a way which your regular guy (he's called Daryl, by the way) can understand. That means a lot of jokes and anecdotes.

Yet more Tudor reading: "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel

I feel I should be brief. So here goes.

This is once again an extraordinary and outstanding novel, a brilliant evocation of a historical period and the minds and motivations of the characters in its great political drama. It also took me an extraordinarily long time to read it. Though I wanted to dedicate quality time to it, I never seemed quite to manage it. 

In my post about Wolf Hall, best part of a year ago, I mentioned a similar phenomenon: the paradoxical experience of these books as both wonderful novels and rather hard slogs. Many people have since told me they feel the same. On this occasion, there was perhaps less difficulty - after reading Wolf Hall, it is easier to slip into Mantel narrative mode - but also less discovery.

And yet, don't get me wrong, this is a must-read, and when part three of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy comes out (The Mirror and the Light, apparently, expected 2015) I will definitely be reading it.  All the nice things I said about Wolf Hall hold good.

But right now, I'm pining for a book that grabs me, a page-turner that needs to be read at every opportunity. How that works out will emerge in the next review, coming a bit sooner than this one did, I hope.

And that's it. After the length, the brevity.