Books History Women's history

Notes from Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940

October 4, 2023 – 4:10 pm

p. 48 “Women not protected in the higher reaches of society met secretly in restaurants and bars, travelled by train and hired cans, and frequently risked exposure, if not legal punishment, should they reveal their sexual orientation through dress of publicly demonstrated erotic attachments. … The Marquise de Belbeuf became an object for woman-haters, who considered her perverse and degenerate. Adopting male dress and forms of behaviour, the marquise reversed the premises by which patriarchal society functioned, assuming for herself male pivileges and power … On 3 January 1907, the Marquise de Belbeuf and Colette were very nearly arrested for enacting a scene of lesbian love in a pantomime skit at the Moulin Rouge…. the mime portrayed the awakneing of a mummy from her eternal sleep by the kiss of a former lover. The scene incited a near-riot in the theater, making it necessary to call in the police. Future performances of the play were banned by Lepine at the request of the marquise’s ex-husband; Willy, Colette’s estranged husband lost his position no the newspaper L’Echo de Paris, and the two women were forced to stop living openly together.”

p. 99 For women, America was a particularly oppressive environment, and amond the expatriate women were those who took up Edith Wharton’s ‘argument with America’ on the ‘woman question’ finding in their personal sense of alienation from their native land important literary themes.”

p. 101 Janet Flanner’s only published novel, The Cubical City, recreates the cultural life of New York in the 1920s… the t hematic concerns of the novel turn on American sexual puritanism – in particular its double standard of behaviour for men and women – and it contrasts life for a modern woman set ‘in the midst of a mechanical civilisation (New York City) with that of ‘ancient females who in small select numbers had received in absentia grain, praters, milk, worship of hyacinth buds placed on credulous rural shrines… “for thousands of years the concernrated aim of society has been to cut down kissing. With that same amount of energy … society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.”.. reflects her determined effort to break free of midwestern puritanical thought.”

p. 139 In 1937, “writing from Budapest following her trip to Salzberg and Vienna, Flanner commented almost as an aside that ‘history looks queer when you’re standing close ot it, watching where it is coming from and how it is being made.” .. It was precisely her avility to capture the ‘queerness’ of history observed close up, her instinctive knowledge of ‘where it is coming from and how it is being made’ that is revealed in retrospective reading of the Paris Letters.

p. 188 “Stein distinguished herself by making herself appear to be a man… Once her liaison with Toklas was established, Stein made the following remark in her notebook: ‘Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussie, perhaps.” (A Different Language, 136, fn 31)… Unable to step outside the heterosexual cultural imperative, Stein clothed her homosexuality in heterosexual forms.”

p. 194 Adrienne Monnier – “An unabashedly feminist analysis of women’s relation to books, ‘Les Amies des Livres’ examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman’s work rather than of leisure: ‘Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious”.

p. 217 “the misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard who was – briefly – Louis Aragon’s mistress. “…Women plated a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrillling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes.The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or uppper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate.”

p. 243 Djuna Barnes “poetry did not seem to follow the currenst of the most recent American and English poetry – and there is no reason why it should have … her interest in earlier historical periods and to the use of outmoded and antiquated verbal forms. But Barnes was also at work reconstructing the ‘abandoned traditions’ of woman’s culture. This effort simultaneously searcged for woman in the patriarchal culture that had abandoned her and sought to give back to woman the voice that had for so long been silenced… Barnes’s work has fallen prey to the same set of received notions that until very recently informed studies of Gertrude Stein: both women have been chastised for being significantly different from their Paris colleagues and for failing to maste the Modernist enterprise.

p. 268 Natalie Barney “saw in English culture and extreme form of patriarchal power and described England as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men”. (Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 15)

p. 400 “The thirties has been defined as a ‘masculine decade’, a male preserve in which narrowly defined class distinctions exluded ‘issues of gender and sexual politics’. The collective experience of this generation of writers was masculine, its participants products of the English public school The Auden Generation, like the men of Bloomsbury, shared preparatory and public school experiences, were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and were predmoinately homosexual.

p. 401 “homosexuals of the period defined themselves against a romanticized image of the rugged and heroic young men who died on the battlefields in World War I…. feared a failure of courage and conscience, imagined war as the ultimate ‘Test’ of masculinity, and dreamed of ways to escape the death sentence meted out to those who passed the ‘Test’.”

p. 411 Woolf saw in the Fascist state a more violent and indoctrinated form of the patriarchal dominance already at work in Western society, a force that associated the female with weakness in order to keep women (and other marginal elements) outside the societal power structure. As an alternative to the masculine values enforced by the Fascist state, Woolf proposed in Three Guineas that women establish themselves as a Society of Outsides, defining the goals of freedom, equality and peace in terms radically different from those established under state patronage.”

p. 415 Natalie Barney shockingly racist, anti-Jewish views

p. 419 Nancy Cunard “began her work as a journalist at the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, reporting first for the Associated Negro Press at the League of Nations. During the Spanish Civil War she wrote for various British publications, including the Manchester Guardian, the most prestigious of the pro-Republican English papers, and practiced a form of activist jounalism more common roday than in the 1930s… also took an active part in relief work,”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Derek Thompson On Work

October 4, 2023 – 10:35 am

p. x The decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress in their lives. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many people today ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy … these workers – particularly highly educated workers in the white-collar economy – feel that their jobs cannot be “just jobs” and that their careers cannot be “just careers”. Their jobs must be their callings.

p. 45 “There is new enthusiasm for universal policies – like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized childcare and a child allowance which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans’ devotion to work for work’s sake, since it’s the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the center of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working. It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Williams… In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that have them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies. How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief… that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Britain alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation

October 4, 2023 – 10:26 am

p. 10 Put simply then, nationalisation means making the state more national… The concept developed in this book has two inspirations. The first is in the historical and sociological scholarship on nationalism, which situates it as a general feature of modernity. The second is Britain’s unique history of capitalist development through empire, and its post-imperial experience of ‘nationalisation’.”

p. 15 Nationalisation… to reuse Gellner’s working is the process in which the boundaries of the state are made more congruent with the boundaries of the nation. This process cannot be reduced to either cultural or economic forces. The redistribution of resources (which might typiucally be though of as economic) cannot work or make sense without the formal and informal boundaries of the nation (which might typically be thought of as cultural).

p. 18 It might seem off to describe the NHS as a founding myth to a nation that has existed for centuries. It might be more accurate and specific to instead characterise the NHS as a founding myth of post-imperial Britishness. The shift from empire-state-nation to nation-state produced Britishness as a kind of national identifiy we recognise today. It is a national identity made through the Second World War – the so-callled People’s War, where plucky Britain stood strong as Europe fell, with Britishness coming to stand for anti-fascist, tolerant and ordinary – and thereby conveniently placing colonialism and empire to one side and out of the picture. Post-war nationalism was not just for the British people then, it also helped cement the British peoples, shorn of empire. This is part of the meaning and significance of the National Health Service for a declining imperial power: it was as much a post-imperial project as it was a post-war project.

p. 23 Austerity was also nationalising in the way that it stoked social conflict over the distribution of resources. In short, existing conflict over who gets what, when and how – including struggle over the boundaries of the nation – intensidied. If the state governs on the basis that there’s not as much to go around and that failing to get spending under control is a matter of national survival, then there are going to be effects… Those with resources – ranging from the tangible, such as wealth, to the intangible, such as whiteness – worry that they will lose out, either by falling down a rung in social status or by losing out to others. People wonder where the money went, and which people – or what types of people, more accurately – took the money.”

p. 24 “For this post-crash situation, two or possibly three viable nationalisation projects emerged… The first… is obvious enough: Brexit…. Eurosceptic elites developed a nationalising narrative that mobilised a unique coalition of voters through concerns over inequalities, including with immigration. By claiming to speak up for the ‘left behind’, those elites could tell a compelling nationalist story about how leaving the EU would take control back from the so-called metropolitan elite. By detraying the left through their pro-immigration and out-of-touch metropolitan values, thise metropolitan elite also betrayed whiteness and its links to the British, and especially English, nation.”… The second… Scottish independence. The third, .. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party … able to mobilise through the sense that stagnating growth, low wages and years of austerity meant that some parts of societty were losing out and staying poor as a feature of the system … the most high-profile policies .. invoked post-war and post-imperial nationalisation, especially in public ownership of key industries such as railways and increased profressive taxes.”

p. 185 new opportunities for nationalist, or class, political mobilisation. Based on the conflict of the last decade, mobilisation against inequality is more likely to take the form of fiscal populism through wealth taxes – in which the nation reclaims its rightful wealth from a small, immoral elite that have cheated their way to riches – rather than through rejigging capital-labour relations to redistribute resources through the social relations of employment… This kind of revenue could help fund a Green New Deal in the style of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and American Great Jobs plan. The potential for nationalisation here is evident.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

August 25, 2023 – 11:52 am

Nancy Fraser p. 38 “the ecological dimension has to be front and centre. It is not reducible to, but it is deeply intertwined, with the dynamics of the economic, financialisation and social reproduction crises. It was when I took this objective of a crisis critique that I found I could not any longer keep the ecological dimension in the margins”

p. 48 Akwugo Emejulu “If you see something that needs to change, you have to do it yourself. The idea that someone else either understands the issue better than you or has beeter ideas than you seems anti-egalitarian. This does not mean you are making someone else take responsibility for their own liberation… Rather , it’s to say: “If you want change to happen then you actually have to grab a broom and gather with others to make that happen.”

p. 53 In the UK you are one of 24 Black female professors out of 19,000 professors nationwide, 14,000 of whom are male.

p. 68 Sheila Rowbotham “After abolition the memory of the extraordinarily far-sighted and creative things that had been done just got completely pushed aside. The GLC’s radical scope was much wider than previous left councils in the past. Ken Livingstone had been influenced by Harvey Milk in San Francisco and was aware of the liberation and feminist politics in a way that was unusual among Labour Party politicians. I worked in Industry and Employment, the area for which Mike Ward was respobsible. Mike had been inspired by the visionary measures adopted by the Communist council in Bologna, but he also knew in detail about the history of local government in Brighton. Robin Murray, the chief economic adviser, had experience as a development economist and in community politics in Brighton where he lived. My immediate boss was Hilary Wainwright, then in her early 30s. … She contrived to link the creation of forms of democratic planning with economic policies that served human needs, transplanting the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Alternative Plan into Local government.

JL So what did you do at the GLC?

“I initiated policies on childcare, deomstic labour and contract cleaning for the London Industrial Strategy. … creating jobs by funding women’s workplace co-ops and nurseries. We also funded a launderette run by older women under the Westway. About 20% of people in London at that time didn’t have their own washing machine. Many were pensioners. There had been municipal washing places that were being closed. The women who used one had campaigned for a replacement, a community laundrette. Westway was funded by Industry and Employment and the nursery by the Women’s Committee, headed by Val Wise. So the women who used the launderette had contact with the little children, and they also used to do the washing of all the nappies for the nursery.”

Veronica Gago Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires p. 85 “I think in Latin America the vocabulary of environmentalism has more to do with anti-extractive struggles than with ‘environmentalism’. The vocabulary is changing fast with younger generations. Whilst comrades in other areas talk about ecofeminism, I think that here, in Latin America, the struggles, the vocabulary, the imagery, have to do more with strategies of anti-extractivism and indigenous movements… extractivism for us is the main issue in rethinking the exploitation of land, the exploitations of corporations and the distribution of common resources… the agro-business model is now exploding in terms of environmental problems, both with the basic issues of food and water, and with the dispossession of indigenous people through the expropriation of plants. There is also a very long discussion about the colonial frame of developmentalism in ‘the Third World’, and the dilemmas ralted to the international division of labour for our countries.”

p. 92 Wendy Brown, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berleley. “One of the things I paid too little attention to in Undoing the Demos (2015) was the disintregration of the social… In erican case that disintregration has had two important effects. First, this process literally takes apart social bonds and social welfare – not simply by promoting a libertarian notion of freedom and dismantling the welfare state, but also by reducing legitimate political claims only to those advanced by and for families and individuals, not social groups generated by social powers. Second, something I didn’t emphasise adequately in 2015 … is the extent to which neoliberalism could generate a political formation that combined libertarianism with a very strong statism that works to secure, essentially, the deregulated public sphere that neoliberalism itself generated.”

p. 97 “We live in such nihilist times. By which I mean, drawing from Nietzsche, not that there are no values circulating, but that our values are commercialised, trivilaised, fungible; they’re traded, trafficked in, used for branding and profit.”

p. 107 Lynne Segal – “The mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. This is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. For instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. According to the Sutton Trust, there was a 50 per cent cut in early years day care provision between 2010 and 2017, and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it is all so short sighted.”

p. 114 Lynne Segal “Biology and culture, biology and environment are never in any way separable. Donna Haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an “endless resource” of “multiple possibilities”. Similarly, the neuroscientists Steven Rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. Genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. So, when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men – if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into – the complexity is quite phenomenal! The idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. And yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as Richard Dworkin, providing “biological” reasons why women wear high heels and tight dresses. However laughable, the media present these biological musings as gold standard science. Thus, popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists.”

Hilary Wainwright p. 130 After 2019 general election”one of the reasons why we lost, say, in the North East, and, to some degree, Wakefield, some of the north-western towns, and certainly in Stoke, is because in fact people’s political alienation, their experience of having no control over the decisions shaping their daily lives, was not actually a result of their experience of Europe, but rather their daily life experience, especially of Labour Councils that took their voters completely for granted, treating them more or less with contempt. Even on the interviews on the election night, you heard working-class people who voted Tory explain their decision by saying “Labour’s done nothing for us round here” as much as they talked about Brexit.”

p. 185 Angela McRobbie, Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London “Most of the time I’ve been working in Germany in the last three years has been dedicated to an AHRC three-city study of fashion micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan…. The argument has emerged that it is the existence of a social wage which permits small creative enterprises to function where there is support and subsidy for rent of studio space and equipment, and a huge number of courses for upskilling and further training. Germany is the land of free at-the-point-of-delivery vocational training. The social democratic heritage, even as it is being transformed, remains pretty intact. And since Fashion is a female-led field, these provision benefit the context of women’s employment.

Gargi Bhattacharyya Professor fo Sociology at the University of East London

p. 197 “from Thatcher onwards – and escalating when we come to 2008, and the formal new institutionalisation fo the new austerity – part of how any public consensus around welfare or any social support operates is by increasingly making all of us guilty until proven innocent. Nearly all state functions become modelled as punitive, so instead of via the cuddly daddy who will tell you off, who will give you all a sweetie if you’ll just come and line up. Instead, we’ve got the state patriarch sating “Well I’m not sure any of you are my kids anyway. Can you prove it?” And so then we’re all endlessly having to prove how we are deserving of t he smallest indulgence, even the indulgence of being allowed to live our lives. That really shifts expectations. … it’s always “How can I avoid punishment?” even if the punishment is only taking away some of the small supports … everyone gets trained to look over their shoulder and to not ask for help because sometimes the threat of punishment is greater than the small social good that might be gained… The machinery enacting our rights is becoming increasingly punitive.”

Sylvie Walby p. 214 JL You describe feminism as a project, rather than an identity. Why?

“The concept of a ‘project’ contains the implications of change, of movement, of fluidity, of possibility. The concept of ‘identity’ is very fixed. I’m not comfortable with the concept of identity because of its tendency to essentialise, albeit on the level of culture rather than biology; hence I find it a relatively unproductive term … the concept of ‘project’ is better than ‘movement’ because it contains notions of practices, as well as ideas.”

p. 218 “There is a possibility of a cascade of changes, something which appears to be quite small can have very large effects … The concept of a cascade is really important. It’s an analysis of society as being made up of multiple systems. .. of two main kinds: regimes of inequality and institutional domains. The notion of the crisis ‘cascading’ is that it cascades through these interconnected systems. It’s not that the whole society will move at once, but that steo by step, one system could change another. But there’s no inevitability; and any specific system could absorb it. I used the example of the financial crisis, for example … there was no inevitability that there should be austerity. You might say the same with Covid there’s no inevitability that the closing down of the economy had to mean austerity. The government can simply print money” And if we compare the two crises, the government in this instance has simply printed money, whereas it didn’t in the previous one.”

Sophia Siddiqui, Institute of Race Relations

p. 250 “The reproductive labour of migrant women is essential to maintaining the capitalist system, as the care work needed to sustain families is increasingly outsourced onto their shoulders. But in every conceivable way, migrant women remain cordoned off from the body politic through immigration regimes that exclude them and push them out to the edges of society. And these immigration regimes often prevent them from being with and caring for their own families, who they have to leave behind in their countries of origin, to care for the families of more affluent others. We can’t look at these issues in silos; we need to see them together, particularly in the context of the multiple crises of care and of capitalism. That was how the term ‘reproductive racism’ emerged”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

August 22, 2023 – 9:02 pm

P. 15 While material consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the Us and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at breakneck speed. … in 2019… we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. .. you could have said the precisely the same thing about every year since 2012… out appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8% in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling.”

p. 67 “geologists … estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosion processes.. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955… by 2020 the total weight of human-made products … was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet…. The sum total amount of material that we have dug out of the ground in the past century … 6.7 teratonnes (or to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). .. for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.”

p. 70 “Sand is serious business. According to the UN Environment Programme, if we are to avert a ‘sand crisis’ we should be treating it not as a commonplace resource but as a strategic mineral, something to be uttered in the same breath as metals like copper or even battery materials like lithium.” (Fibre optic cables eg)

p. 75 The recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland Stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether ASpidin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else.”

p. 82 Cement production accounts for a staggering 7-8% of all carbon emissions. At the time of writing, those emissions were split roughly 60:40 between the chemical reaction occurring in chalk or limestone as it burns off its carbon in the process of becoming cement, and the energy needed to heat the kiln. The latter is relatively easy to resolve .. but the chemical reaction is a far harder nut to crack.”

p. 108 better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings, TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world .. founded in 1987 …a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm… pushing the boundaries of physics… over a 3-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion”

p. 116 China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil … import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the global trade in aircraft.”

p. 128 Steve Sherlock, 6,000 years ago in Britain, Street House “the late Stone Age … the saltern – salt factory – here was up and running, churning out salt and cheese and possibly other products too, a thousand years before Stonehenge’s standing stones were even erected. .. the people who worked here – who are thought to have come across from mainland Europe, possibly from France – had brought with them knowledge about how to turn natural resources into a product before selling or trading it onwards.”

p. 133 “As early as AD 523 when the Ostrogoths ruled what was once the Western Roman Empire, their administrator Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians that: “All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt”

p. 174 Today it is estimated that around half the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber-Bosch process…. But in these earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.”

p. 203 “there is about 32 billion tonnes of steel out there in the world … you could build seven high-speed rail tracks between the earth and the sub. Or, were you to divide it between every person on the planet, you would end up with about 4 tonnes per person. Given you already know there are around 15 tonnes per person in the developed world, that underlines another important point: the stocks of iron around the world are very unequally distributed. .. the average person in China today has roughly 7 tonnes of steel. The average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a tonne of steel per capita.”

p. 216 “The ore is rock rich in iron oxide, essentially granulated rust, and turning that into a metal means ripping the oxygen atoms away from the iron atoms. And that, ultimately, is what this enormous furnace is here for: to provide an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal.”

p. 217 “Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes … into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 percent of the global total.”

p. 221 “In 1800, 95% of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90% – still came from burning wood.”

p. 225 “Around 70% of the world’s niobium = a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil. During the Second World War, the Germans and British vies for the affections of neutral Turkey, in part because it produced nearly all of the chromium the Nazis used in their weapons and machinery.”

p. 230 “low-background steel … completely uncontaminated with radionucleotides … essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices… the only way … is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. .. there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.”

p. 287 “The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual cooper production by 2.6%. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75% ,,, the numbers … show up in no environmental accounts of material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measure of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.”

p. 340 “Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, GM began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgeley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history … everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. .. rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name, they called it ‘Ethyl”. There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead … some states banned the use of leaded gasoline … but then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he wasted his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes … unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning itself. GM and its lawyers suggested the men who died must have fallen victim to their own negligence .. This was the Roaring Twenties where anything went, and state by state the bans were revoked and the age of leaded petrol began.”

p. 352 polyethylene … “by the late 1930s, ICI came up with a system for mass prodicing the plastic… When war broke out shortly afterwards, this wonder substance was rapidly co-opted for the national effort. After Japan took control of Malaysia and all its rubber plantations, suddenly polyethylene was of critical importance . Production went into overdrive … the Royal Air Force could use it to cut the weight of its radar systems just enough to fit them inside its planes … pretty much every ton of polyethylene produced up to 1945 went into those radar cables, but once the war ended ICI was left with a sudden glut of the plastic, so it went looking for buyers. This would soon become a recurrent theme. Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply”.

p. 385 “Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China …. It means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Certain Trumpets by Garry Wills

August 18, 2023 – 10:54 am

p. 16 Lincoln “GK Chesterton perfectly captured the delicacy of his operation: “He loved to repeat that slavery was intolery while he tolerated it; and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it… But, for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their own game … and this abstracted logic proved most practical after all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven.”

p. 90 “Armies of the ancient regime were precious items in themselves. An able officer corp of nobles was literally irreplaceable; it could not be expended recklessly. The officers were professionals with expensive training, and they led expensive mercenaries. The aim of such an army was not only to protect valuable territory but to protect its valuable self… All this was changed by the Revoltion. The new force was the People in Arms, raised by conscription for mass resistance to encirclement by the combined regents of Europe. The aim was no longer to maneuver for position but to destroy attacking armies, at whatever cost to one’s own troops. This is the “political fanaticism” Calusewitz attributes to the French of the period. Their officers were not the scions of noble houses, but talented men from the bourgeoiuse or the intelligentsia. Carnot himself was a poet-engineer, born of a notary. Armies were thrown into war with a new recklessness, once it was clear that officers’ positions could be rapidly filled again.”

p. 96 “After Napoleon became first consul for life – and then emperor – he merged the highest military and political authority in himself, and his military talent and appetite outran their real usefulness to the French nation. … Napoleon could not, in his civil capacity, control war because war controlled him. He was imprisoned by his own skills, a slave to them.”

p. 160 The young David Hume withdrew from society while he worked out his lasting contribution to philosophical method, the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). After he published that work, Hume did want followers, but he found none – the book’s influence would be exerted only over a long time and at some distance (initially in Germany). Hume then changed his whole mode of life and did become an intellectually leader – through his enormously popular History of England and his moral and political essays. He exemplified in his own life the two tendencies of intellectual excellence: (a) towards a more severe and lonely quest for the truth and (b) towards a less exacting but more accessible truth, one more to be disseminated than discovered. The best intellectual route is done by the first route, but leadership is made possibly only by the second.”

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