Event announcement
True crime comes to the book club! In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland’s Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland's history.
Mark O’Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk. As the two men circle one another, O’Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?
Mark will be joining us on Zoom on 23rd July. You can join just for this session for £22.50 or become a member of our non-fiction club for £15 a month, which includes the price of the book. Some of the world’s best writers of non-fiction have joined us as guests so far, including Patrick Radden Keefe, Tim Marshall, Katherine Rundell, Sathnam Sanghera and Christina Lamb.
Upcoming events
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HENRY JEFFREYS, Vines in a Cold Climate — 10th July, 7.30pm
Summer is finally here and what better time to look at the remarkable rise and rise of the English wine scene. Henry Jeffreys will take us through the quirky characters behind what is now a multi-million-pound industry with quality to rival Champagne.
ANDREW O’HAGAN, Caledonian Road — 25th July, 7.30pm SOLD OUT
Backstory summer sessions — the return of our popular music nights at the bookshop. Book your £5 ticket now to secure your spot:
Fiction book club on Zoom, 16th July, 8pm: Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
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Your summer reads
Download our 16-page guide, packed with suggestions for summer reading from literary fiction and thrillers to non-fiction and kids books
THE MAN WHO is tired of London may well be tired of life, but if he can be cajoled on to a plane I prescribe a long weekend in New York to bring him to his senses. It certainly did the trick for me. Since I returned this side of the Pond on Wednesday, I’ve been seeing home through a new lens. How fresh the air! How green the streets! How clean!
The politics, too, are refreshing. America faces a choice between a glow-in-the-dark felon and a decent but doddery man who is yet to be convinced to do the most decent thing of all: stand aside for another Democrat. Across the English Channel, the Far Right is horrifyingly close to power. Here, though, voters are almost certain next week to elect the most reassuringly boring prime minister in decades, a sort of national detox after the overindulgence of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Still, it is fair to say that Keir Starmer will arrive at No 10 on a wave not of enthusiasm but of relief. Labour’s one-word campaign slogan promises “change” but the party’s manifesto is much less radical than its prospectus at the last election under Jeremy Corbyn.
For a country scarred by recent brushes with policy with a capital P — the torturous Brexit negotiations, Liz Truss’s helter-skelter mini-budget — a period of quietly competent government may seem welcome. But there is hardly an absence of big challenges to which an ambitious government might respond: climate change, vast inequality, how to restore a shared appreciation of facts and civil disagreement.
Which brings me, neatly enough, to a book recommendation. In place of the parties’ manifestos, I suggest you read Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, which has recently been published in paperback and must be the only book to be endorsed by both Owen Jones, a columnist who championed Corbyn, and Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England.
Its author, LSE economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler, would be my pick for PM. But in the real world, we can at least suggest the actual next PM, and those around him, read his book.
Chandler is a John Rawls fanboy, if dead John Major-lookalike philosophers can have such things. He spends the first half of the book making a convincing case for Rawls as the most significant political philosopher of the 20th century and explaining the outline of Rawls’s “theory of justice” in a (relatively) accessible way.
“Relatively” because this is political philosophy. Several times I found myself flicking a few pages back to remind myself of the formulation of, and rationale for, Rawls’s two principles of justice. Occasionally, I’ll admit, I felt I could sympathise with the hypothetical citizens in Rawls’s thought experiment because I, too, felt like I lingered behind a veil of ignorance.
Even so, it is flattering as a reader to be trusted with something complex to get your head around, rather than the more usual diet of airport book-style “key takeaways”. And even if you’re left with questions after the first half — or abandon it altogether — the second half of the book is the most interesting.
It asks what a fair society — ie one that was arranged according to principles of fairness to which Rawls, and now Chandler, claim hypothetical citizens would all agree — would actually look like. Better still, it examines practical policies that might get us there, looking at examples from countries that are closer to (and further away from) this ideal.
Using the principles of justice as a starting point, Chandler examines the practicality and desirability of such policies as a universal basic income, spots for workers on company boards, wealth taxes, various approaches to climate change and the crucial political question of whether a bakery should be required to make a gay cake.
It’s heavy stuff, at times, but, my goodness, it’s exciting, too. We were lucky enough to have Chandler join us for a session of our non-fiction book club recently and everyone came away fired up.
Let me know how you get on. Just don’t come to me with your questions about the difference principle.
Tom
P.S. We are about to commission articles for issue 3 of our Backstory magazine. If you’ve read either of the first two issues, please can you fill in this very quick, anonymous survey? It will really help us as we shape future issues.