Tim Worstall

Nee Naw is coming out in Pengiun.
From what I remember (sorry, couple of years since I read the blog) that Sun piece doesn’t do it justice. She’s a much better writer than that precis shows (and purely by the by, when I was reading it I had no idea that it was written by a [...]

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Now we know that Matt Ridley reads this at least sometimes. And we’ve found out that he has a new book out.
In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls “bubble-up” [...]

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Supermarket giants Tesco and Asda dramatically increased prices on key items in the runup to Christmas in what an independent expert has called “a systematic, cynical and aggressive attempt to exploit demand”, a Guardian investigation can reveal. Batteries, lightbulbs, medicines, Christmas drinks and must-have children’s toys were among essentials whose prices were increased.
No, tell me [...]

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I believe it is mandatory for a blog to post about this.
So, interesting question. Books for it.
What’s the possibility of taking Project Gutenburg texts , encoding them correctly, then selling them on the Tablet? Doing what Wordsworth Publishing did with paperbacks a decade or more ago?
Is this already being done? Or is there a possible [...]

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I’ve seen this around a bit but would love to be able to actually source it.
Robert Conquest talking about the Soviet Union, the Gulags and the economy. After the rubble had been sorted through he said:
“I told you so, you fucking fools”.
So, anyone got the source?

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I am all for most of the alternatives that Lawson sets out in his final chapter about the taxing of luxury goods, rationing….
Rationing?
De we need to know any more about this nonsense?

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Philip Stone, charts editor of The Bookseller, rejects much of this kind of criticism as coming from snobs “disgusted by the reality of the world we live in”. He recently pointed out that sales of Martin Amis’s books totalled £200,000 last year, compared with the £1.7 million generated by Alan Titchmarsh. “So, shock, horror, publishers [...]

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Or rather, the reissue of her old one.
Madeleine Bunting is author of Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
That’s the one where she complains bitterly about how we’re all working much harder than we used to. Entirely failing to note that as we all have more leisure time than we used to [...]

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Fifth, Lincoln never wrote a book.

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A profusion of books on his life has poured from the world’s publishing houses. The first, Moonwalk in Paradise, was written in 36 hours by Jiang Xiaoyu and Xing Han, two Chinese students, and had sold a million copies before Jackson was buried.

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Decent enough writer but no great logician.
“Publishers, stop spending your millions on this tripe,” she implored the book trade’s movers and shakers at The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards, at the Grosvenor House Hotel, in Mayfair, where she was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
“The publishing industry [...]

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So, finally getting around to reading Atlas Shrugged. It’s a novel, right, and novels are about human relationships?
So, this Dagny bird, who does she end up with? Francisco? Eddie? Hank? I realise there won’t be any shagging as such, it being from the 50s, but I am right in assuming it proceeds like Jane Austen, [...]

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New book, just published.
The Bloomington School has become one of the most dynamic, well recognized and productive centers of the New Institutional Theory movement. Its ascendancy is considered to be the result of a unique and extremely successful combination of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and hard-nosed empiricism. This book demonstrates that the well-known interdisciplinary and empirical [...]

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And get Madsen Pirie’s new book 101 Great Philosophers.
It’s something of a follow up to his book “How to Win Every Argument” which of course has a hallowed place on every bloggers bookshelf. Essential for divining which logical fallacies are being committed by which Guardian column.
Find out more about Great Philosophers here.
101 Great Philosophers is [...]

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There’s an old little jokette that of Edward Heath’s book, “Sailing, a course of my life” that it is the unsigned first editions which are worth more than the signed. For he spent so much time tramping the bookshops of the country that there are many fewer without his scribble.
On seeing a copy this afternoon [...]

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Try here or here.
Great sounding author (similar to Pterry or Tom Holt) is selling his new book online, chapter by chapter.
He comes very strongly recommended.

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Dan Brown tops Oxfam’s chart of most-donated books…
Think this through a moment: more Dan Brown books are sold new than of any other (well, damn nearly any other). Thus we would expect to see more Dan Brown books in second hand shops than any other, more donated to charity shops than any other.
Yes?
There’s simply millions [...]

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I’d known he was a journo in Russia during the revolution but not about the allegations that he was a spy for the Russians as well. He did a very good collection in English of Russian folk tales which is worth looking out.
This is excellent:
In 1919, he was arrested as he alighted the train at [...]

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Jon Cruddas:
Along with a belief that the market has self-evident limits, equality is surely Labour’s most fundamental idea – to return to Tawney, its creed. Moreover, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett prove in their much-acclaimed book The Spirit Level, a society as unequal as ours is simply dysfunctional. Purnell says he thinks “we need [...]

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(Yes, The Guardian does still have subs and yes, they write headlines and intro straps.)
Black Lace had a reputation for producing edgy, well-written erotica for women. The demand is there, so why is it closing?
It’s closing because sales are falling: proof perfect that the demand isn’t in fact there.

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