It has been a busy term indeed. As well as all the usual, we’re working towards the transformation of the Bennett Institute into the Bennett School of Public Policy, an important initiative for the University of Cambridge. Which is by way of saying I’ve been reading a bit less than usual and am certiainly blogging less. So this is a catch up post.

I enjoyed Wages for Housework by Emily Callaci, a history of this aspect of 1970s feminism. It’s a campaign I wasn’t much aware of as a callow teenager during that decade, although very much into reading classics like The Second Sex, The Female Eunuch and The Women’s Room. The author is US-based and although the book covers activities in Italy and the UK also, my sense is that there was more energy in the campaign in the US. The book does a good job in delicately drawing out the tensions that the slogan Wages for Housework created: did it literally mean paying for the hours of unpaid work every household involves? If so, where would the money come from – and would it even be desirable to bring care for one’s own household into the monetary economy? Or was it rather a way to draw attention to the structural dismissal of the importance of household labour – and if so, why focus on such a restrictive slogan? Of course, I’m all in favour of measuring the value of unpaid work in order that it is valued in policy decisions, and that measurement will typically be monetary; but monetising the home is another matter entirely. The story is told through a biographical approach to the movement’s leaders, and the book is an enjoyable read, capturing well the flavour of 1970s feminism – the energy, the exhilaration, the justified anger.

Stefan Zweig’s Journeys was – as was to be expected – a somewhat depressing read, essays about his travels in the 1930s. But it ends with a rather lovely tribute to the calmness of the English, which he attributes to our love of our gardens: “A half hour or an hour spent daily in the company of flours, of trees, of fruits, in the company of the eternal in nature, that hour or half hour during which they are totally detatched from events and matters on the outside, seems to me by its power of relaxing to be at the origin of the marvellous calm the English people, enjoy, which to us remains incomprehensible or at least inaccessible.” (Respect for the length of the sentence btw.) Seems like we’re back in “Keep Calm and Carry On” territory.

I was looking forward to Worldbuilders: technology and the new geopolitics by Bruno Maçāes as I’d read a couple of intriguing reviews. Sad to say I found it impossible to follow and gave up. What to make of passages like this: “During the Cold War it was still possible to delimit two geographic areas under the control of Washington and Moscow. You could say the natural element was still present. Neutral space made something like the separation between these two spheres logically conceivable. Today, we inhabit a fully developed technological system. Can Washington and Beijing break it apart into two spheres?” After several reads I think I understand this – the claim is that it’s not possible to achieve the same complete separation between systems in the digital (rather than physical) environment. But if this is right, I disagree. In any case, I don’t know whether the difficulty is over-literal translation or an originally challenging writing style but this wasn’t one for me.

Otherwise, a lot of non-work reading, including through long flights to Stanford and back. I recommend Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue, and A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar. As a committed notebook-writer (and stationery fetishist in generaI) I thoroughly enjoyed The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.