It’s been the holidays, and I was part way through two books before we even left to go to the West Wales seaside. So this is a bit of a round-up.

One of these was The Party and The People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century by Bruce Dickson. For someone like me who knows so little – reading a bit, two trips to Beijing – this is a wonderfully informative book. There is a lot about the institutions and processes of government, including the importance of the regions, and post-Mao developments in politics. Each chapter addresses a question – for example, How are Leaders Chosen? Does China have a Civil Society? – with a mild inclination to debunk received wisdom (such as the trope that China is becoming more nationalistic over time – it is one of the most nationalistic countries along with the US but if anything that is diminishing over time). There’s very little on the economy, the focus is entirely politics. I took away two messages: the over-riding concern of the Communist Party with social stability and its own role; and the fact that Xi Jinping may have destabilised an unusually stable regime by undoing the system that was in place to limit leaders’ terms and have an orderly succession. Highly recommended. My sense is that even real China experts would find this interesting.

I’ve also re-read after many years Scott Lash and John Urry’s Economies of Signs and Space (1994), which I first read in 1997, just as my first book The Weightless World was published. They cover (from the sociological perspective) exactly the same territory as my book and I must say I think we were all equally prescient about the kinds of changes being brought about by digital technology and the subsequent structural changes. One way in which they were far ahead of me though was identifying the importance of environmental pressures – I’d forgotten it was in there. Another difference between them and me is in their conversation with the literature on post-Fordism, emphasising changes in consumption rather than production; economists are generally not all that familiar with that literature. Anyway, I went back to it because I have the honour of giving this year’s Urry Lecture at Lancaster University in late October.

Other holiday reads: Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa, an absorbing account of what other creatures can feel and think (who knew fish can distinguish blues and classical music); Jean Rhys’s brilliant Wide Sargasso Sea; Eric Ambler’s Mask of Dimitrios with the frisson of the mood of the late 1930s and that sense of inevitable upheaval on the horizon; Legacy by Thomas Harding – a history of the Lyons commercial empire from a single immigrant entrepreneur in the late 19th century to one of the UK’s biggest food producers and retailers which en passant invented the LEO computer and was then broken up by the late 20th century.

I devoured Amartya Sen’s wonderful memoir, Home in the World. It covers his early years growing up in what is now Bangladesh, his schooling in Santiniketan (attending the school established by Rabindranath Tagore, to whom his family was close), college in Calcutta and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. The book ends at the early part of his academic career, in Cambridge and visiting posts in California and Massachussetts.

It’s a beautifully-written book and illuminates Sen’s intellectual formation. Clearly his family and Tagore played an enormously influential role, and so too the intellectual ferment in Calcutta in the early 1950s. Tagore’s school sounds remarkable in the freedoms it gave students and its emphasis on the role of reason, in unreasonable times. The political upheavals of the British withdrawal and partition play a relatively low key role in this story; but it has a lot to say criticising the religious and caste divisions in the sub-continent then and now, with many excursions into its history. Needless to say, the British don’t come out of this well.

The account intertwines the history of Bengal with Sen’s personal history and his intellectual development – particularly why he became interested in social choice theory at a time when few other economists were working on it, and his Cambridge colleagues warned him against pursuing it. There are interesting sections on Buddhism, and on Marx – in effect what each contributed to Sen’s reaction to the Arrow Impossibility Theorem (the possibility of agreement in restricted domains even if not about fundamental metaphysical views of the universe in the former case, and “a pioneering contribution to the understanding of the epistemic implications of observations” in the latter.)

Among all this, a personal history, with the most gripping episode being early treatment with radiation therapy for oral cancer as a new student in Calcutta. Thank goodness he survived. Anyway, highly recommended.

I also read this week The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country by Tom Hazeldine. The divided country in this case is England, and the book traces modern divisions pretty much back to the Dark Ages (it is nevertheless quite short!). It essentially portrays the northern (and south western) regions as colonised by the capital, and repeatedly sacrificed for the sake of the financial sector. The book argues that it is not surprising the Conservatives should always favour southern financial interests: “The Conservatives are first and foremost creatures of the South,” (although they have won more Northern English seats more of the time than I had realised). Hazledine’s quarrel is with Labour Governments that tilted the same way, from Macdonald and Snowden, to Wilson, to Callaghan and Healey, to Blair and Brown. This is the main point of the book. It concludes, “[Labour] has routinely swallowed a definition of the national interest that puts sterling and the City ahead of manufacturing and the North.” Looking at the trajectory of sterling over time it is hard to believe many of our governments have really wanted a strong currency, but I’m easily persuaded that City interests have generally dominated. Or at least a Southern governing class perspective that sees all the rest of the country as uncouth provinces. Brexit may prove the exception – we will see. Not that damage to the City in this case will do anything to influence the North-South divide.

Then this weekend in the garden Kazuo Ishiguro’s very fine novel Klara and the Sun. More than any other novelist I can think of, he presents the world comprehensively through the perspective of one character – in this case, a humanoid AI. Very thought-provoking, and a page turner, finished it in a day.