I picked up Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything by William Germano and Kit Nicholls thinking it might be a quirky little history of the course syllabus. after all, I enjoy reading other people’s syllabuses/syllabi. However, it’s really a passionate book about teaching well, using the syllabus as a framework within which to discuss how to embark with students on the joint endeavour of learning. I like its philosophy: “People learn far more by doing things than by watching others do things. If we accept that this is true, then it quickly becomes clear that a syllabus isn’t primarily a shopping list or manifest: it’s a design for student work.”

The chapters cover: how to generate energy and community in the classroom or lecture hall; how to pace the course; what reading lists are for; understanding students’ contexts, abilities and concerns; grading and giving honest feedback; and finally back to how to design the syllabus. Some of the insights and advice will be familiar to lecturers, some not so much – there are some really good ideas. I also like the way they portray designing the syllabus as a way of furthering ones own ideas; certainly in my case Markets, State and People began life as a course syllabus. I’ve always found teaching a great way to learn things myself: how can you explain anything you don’t understand yourself? How else to hear those terrific questions from enthusiastic people who haven’t yet been socialised into how they ‘ought’ to think?

The book is very nicely written too. For example, this made me laugh:

Oh yes.

One for all who value teaching.

Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack is really interesting. The author is the librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, which was the first big, scholarly library I used after my local lending library in the Lancashire mill town of my girlhood. I love libraries and have alsways loved the joke that humans are the means by which libraries reproduce.

Burning the Books is fundamentally a warning about present vulnerabilities to the loss of knowledge. It is roughly historical, from the ancient loss of the Library of Alexandria to the fate of the archives in Iraq and Sudan recently. On the way, of course, the Reformation, other wars, and the Nazi book burning. Record keeping started as an administrative matter of course, and the requirements of states to measure, assess and record grew over the centuries; but over time too came the idea of records as a public good and vehicle for accountability. There are stories of loss but also of rescues, painting a picture of the importance of archives and libraries as vehicles of historical memory and cultural identity.

The book ends with a sober chapter about the difficulty of archiving in these digital times, both because of the volume and the ephemeral nature of digital records. And also, importantly, because the historical record has been privatised and outsourced to the big tech companies. So the author ends with two excellent proposals: that tech companies should be required to ensure public bodies charged with the responsibility have access to all the data records – this shouldn’t be a matter of serendipitous web scraping; and that a tax on the tech giants should pay for these important memory guardians.

When Emma Barnes, the author of Mr Keynes’ Revolution, got in touch to tell me about her new novel about an episode in the life of Keynes, I was a little sceptical although always happy to read a new book. Because it isn’t as if people haven’t tried to turn economics into fiction before. There are the very jolly Marshall Jevons crime novels, and Russ Roberts’ The Price of Everything and The Invisible Heart. However, these examples use fiction to teach readers economic concepts. Barnes’ novel is different: it’s a novel about a remarkable character in turbulent times. And a very good novel too, one I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

The book starts with Keynes storming out of the Versailles Treaty discussions in despair at the shape of the settlement, his arguments about the need not to make it impossible for Germany to recover, and writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It ends with his similar failure to win the argument about not returning Britain to the Gold Standard. In between, he meets ballerina Lydia Lopokova and eventually marries her. We are served some (Keynesian) economics, with a light touch. Ms Barnes is a Cambridge economics graduate; she makes Keynes’s arguments seem like common sense, and manages to drop hints about how The General Theory, published a decade later, took shape in Keynes’ mind.

But there is nothing of the worthy wholemeal about the economic thread in the novel. If you want the ins and outs there is no shortage of books about Keynes, from Skidelsky’s magisterial biography (in one volume or three) to more recent examples such as Richard Davenport’s Universal Man or Backhouse and Bateman’s Capitalist Revolutionary. The point of Mr Keynes’ Revolution is the story – the Bloomsbury background (they all emerge as dreadful people), and above all the unlikely romance. As I read, I thought the book would make a terrific film or TV series, and the afterword admits it was first conceived as a film script. It also promises a sequel. I look forward to it!