My plan to go and see Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln on 12th February, Lincoln’s birthday, has been overturned by the landing in my diary of a flock of meetings that day. At least I can now find an earlier date. I’m a bit of a Lincoln groupie and the film has had fantastic reviews. If there’s anybody out there who hasn’t yet read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s [amazon_link id=”0141043725″ target=”_blank” ]Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln[/amazon_link], an important inspiration for Tony Kushner’s screenplay, now you really have no excuse. It’s a fascinating book – and there is a [amazon_link id=”0241966086″ target=”_blank” ]film tie-in edition[/amazon_link]. The main lesson I took from it concerns Lincoln’s ability to think strategically, by which I really mean keeping focused on the ultimate outcome and having the patience to stitch together meanwhile the many actions and conversations it takes to achieve a difficult goal. That ability to be strategic, to be anything other than ultra-short term, has vanished from modern public life and I suppose was rare in the 19th century too.

[amazon_image id=”0241966086″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Team of Rivals: Lincoln Film Tie-in Edition: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln[/amazon_image]

It has been one of my life’s missions to try to communicate economics clearly, by writing accessible books. George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language was an early influence on my writing. This wonderful essay is also available as a [amazon_link id=”0141393068″ target=”_blank” ]Penguin pamphlet[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0141393068″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Politics and the English Language[/amazon_image]

Every writer, especially one “translating” jargon-based work like economics into English should follow his rules:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I wholeheartedly agree as well with the claim in this essay that: “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” I’m always highly suspicious of books written so impenetrably that they’re hard to understand, including academic books.

Anyway, if you happen not to have read the essay, do – bearing in mind the irony that (because of [amazon_link id=”014118776X” target=”_blank” ]1984[/amazon_link]) ‘Orwellian’ has come to mean the opposite of the kind of writing Orwell champions here.

[amazon_image id=”0141393041″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Nineteen Eighty-Four[/amazon_image]

Update: I just found this Steve Poole column describing the Orwell essay as ‘wildly over-rated’. He underestimates how hard it is to follow the rules above, even if following them slavishly might be too extreme. Have a go yourself….

I couldn’t resist another description of one of the first British parties to explore Everest in 1922, from the brilliant [amazon_link id=”0099563835″ target=”_blank” ]Into The Silence[/amazon_link] by Wade Davis. This time it’s Lieutenant F.M.Bailey:

“A brilliant naturalist, he discovered scores of new species, including the legendary Himalayan blue poppy that bears his name. He once saved his own life by using a butterfly net to self-arrest and thus escape a snow slide as it grew into an avalanche. Seriously wounded three times during the war, in France and at Gallipoli, he became a British spy, a master of a dozen disguises, traveling as a Buddhist priest, an Austrian soldier, and an Armenian prisoner of war, and causing the Bolsheviks in Tashkent and Samarkand such grief that he would live with a Soviet bounty on his head for the rest of his days.”

The intrepid explorer and spy later wrote some books himself including [amazon_link id=”0192803875″ target=”_blank” ]Mission to Tashkent[/amazon_link]. All of the characters on the early Everest missions are extraordinary.

[amazon_image id=”0099563835″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0192803875″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Mission to Tashkent[/amazon_image]

Wade Davis has an enviable job title, although one that is a bit of a contradiction in terms – an Explorer in Residence at the National Geographical Society. He has written a wonderful book: [amazon_link id=”0099563835″ target=”_blank” ]Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0099563835″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest[/amazon_image]

I’m half way through it. But already I’ve come across a sentence that is a candidate to be one of the best ever. It is in a paragraph about Eddie Marsh, the private secretary to Winston Churchill, who became friends with the pioneering mountaineer George Mallory. It captures both the man and the times, the confident heyday of the British Empire on the eve of World War I, run by perfect Edwardian gentlemen:

“Fourteen years older than Mallory, Marsh had traveled on foot to the source of the Nile and had once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face. But he was better known as a patron of poetry.”

This is one to read in preparation for the 1914 anniversary, along with Paul Fussell’s classic [amazon_link id=”0195133323″ target=”_blank” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_link]. Davis writes with brilliance about the horrors of war.

[amazon_image id=”0195133323″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_image]