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!

This post is slightly off topic but it is about social mobility. I just devoured Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, having been a total devotee of her bestselling Neapolitan quartet. Like all the best fiction, the novels are all crunchily specific about their context and yet also universal. The new one is also terrific.

One common reaction to her work is that it’s about the lives of girls and women, which of course it is. The new one is the best I’ve read about the relationships between adolescent girls and women, certainly since Margaret Atwood’s Cats Eye not to mention their interior lives. Yet to me – and perhaps the reason I find them so absorbing – is that they are just about the best fiction I’ve ever read about social class. Ferrante captures the textures of working class life, the imperative some young people feel to escape their roots (usually by education), how big a challenge that is (soft skills galore needed as well as intellect) and the price they pay for that deracination in feeling alienated from both old and new cultures.

Anyway, if you liked Ferrante’s previous work, you’ll like The Lying Life of Adults too.