miscellaneous factZ - The online home of Rufus Pollock

Here we’re going to look at using library catalogue data as a source for estimating information production (over time) and the size of the public domain.

Library Catalogues

Cultural institutions, primarily libraries, have long compiled records of the material they hold in the form of catalogues. Furthermore, most countries have had one or more libraries (usually the national library) whose task included an archival component and, hence, whose collections should be relatively comprehensive, at least as regards published material.

The catalogues of those libraries then provide an invaluable resource for charting, in the form of publications, levels of information production over time (subject, of course, to the obvious caveats about coverage and the relationship of general “information production” to publications).

Furthermore, library catalogue entries record (almost) the right sort of information for computing public domain status, in particular a given record usually has a) a publication date b) unambiguously identified author(s) with birth date(s) (though unfortunately not death date). Thus, we can also use this catalogue data to estimate the size of the public domain — size being equated here to the total number of items currently in the public domain.

Results

To illustrate, here are some results based on the catalogue of Cambridge University Library which is one of the UK’s “copyright libraries” (i.e. they have a right to obtain, though not an obligation to hold, one copy of every book published in the UK). This first plot shows the numbers of publications per year (as determined by their publication date) up until 1960 (when the dataset ends) based on the publication date recorded in the catalogue.

A major concern when basing an analysis on these kinds of trends is is that fluctuations over time derive not from changes in underlying production and publication rates but changes in acquisition policies of the library concerned. To check for this, we present a second plot which shows the same information but derived from the British Library’s catalogue. Reassuringly, though there are differences, the basic patterns look remarkably similar.

Number of items (books etc) Per Year in the Cambridge University Library Catalogue (1600-1960).

Number of items (books etc) Per Year in the British Library Catalogue (1600-1960).

What do we learn from these graphs?

• In total there were over a million “Items” in this dataset (and parsing, cleaning, loading and analyzing this data took on the order of days — while the preparation work to develop and perfect these algorithms took weeks if not months)
• The main trend is a fairly consistent, and approximately exponential, increase in the number of publications (items) per year. At the start of our time period in 1600 we have around 400 items a year in the catalogue while by 1960 the number is over 16000.
• This is a forty-fold increase and corresponds to an annual growth rate of approx 0.8%. Assuming “growth” began only around the time of the industrial revolution (~ 1750) when output was around 1000 (10-year moving average) gives a fairly similar growth rate of around 0.89%.
• There are some fairly noticeable fluctuations around this basic trend:
  1. There appears to be a burst in publications in the decade or decade and a half before 1800. One can conjecture several, more or less intriguing, reasons for this: the cultural impact of the French revolution (esp. on radicalism), the effect of loosening copyright laws after Donaldson v. Beckett, etc. However, without substantial additional work, for example to examine the content of the publications in that period these must remain little more than conjectures.
  2. The two world wars appear dramatically in our dataset as sharp dips: the pre-1914 level of around 7k+ falls by over a third during the war to around 4.5k and then rises rapidly again to reach, and pass, 7k per year in the early 20s. Similarly, the late 1930s level of around 9.5k per year drops sharply upon the outbreak of war reaching a low of 5350 in 1942 (a drop of 45%), and then rebounding rapidly at the war’s end: from 5.9k in 1945 to 8k in 1946, 9k in 1947 and 11k in 1948!

To do next (but in separate entries — this post is already rather long!):

• Estimates for the the size of the public domain: how many of those catalogue items are in the public domain
• Distinguishing Publications (”Items”) from “Works” — i.e. production of new material versus the reissuance of old (see previous post for more on this).

Colophon: Background to this Research

I’m working on a EU funded project on the Public Domain in Europe, with particular focus on the size and value of the public domain. This involves getting large datasets about cultural material and trying to answer questions like: How many of these items are in the public domain? What’s the difference in price and availability of public domain versus non public domain items?

I’ve also been involved for several years in Public Domain Works, a project to create a database of works which were in the public domain.

Colophon: Data and Code

All the code used in parsing, loading and analysis is open and available from the Public Domain Works mercurial repository. Unfortunately, the library catalogue data is not: library catalogue data, at least in the UK, appears to be largely proprietary and the raw data kindly made available to us for the purposes of this research by the British Library and Cambridge University Library was provided only on a strictly confidential basis.

The BBC ran a story yesterday headlined “Seven million ‘use illegal files’”. Its bolded first paragraph stated:

Around seven million people in the UK are involved in illegal downloads, costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, government advisers say. [emphasis added]

7 million people involved in unauthorised file-sharing is possible, but costs of tens of billions of pounds? It’s not unusual to see such figures bandied around by the rightsholders derived from wild guesstimates of download figures and ludicrously unsound assumptions such as equating every download with a lost sale.

Here, however, it is according to “government advisers” — surely a much more reliable source! A quick read and we discover this isn’t the case at all and these figures are directly recycled from rightsholder sources — with an additional uplift from the BBC: a possible £10 billion or more a year has becomes tens (notice that extra “s”) of billions a year.

First off, the story is based on a report entitled “Copycats? Digital Consumers in an Online Age” commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board in Intellectual Property (SABIP) from UCL’s Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research. So this is CIBER’s report not SABIP’s — SABIP need not even have endorsed the report. That said, one can see how the BBC’s confusion came about, and this is a minor point (after all CIBER is part of a university).

More important is a check of the actual evidence underlying these very large claimed costs to the economy. Let’s take a look at the report. Page 6, at the start of the Exec Summary states (this is where I guess the BBC got its material from):

Industry reports [3] suggest that at least seven million British citizens have downloaded unauthorised content, many on a regular basis, and many also without ethical consideration. Estimates as to the overall lost revenues [4] if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10 billion (IP Rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs. This is in the context of the “Creative Industries” providing around 8% of British GDP. And the situation is not solely a British problem, but a global one. …

But wait a moment: their only source here seems to be (IP Rights, 2004) and that turns out to be a single page press release from an IP (law) firm which simply states:

“Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10 billion and 4,000 jobs.”

So these are just the standard (and utterly unreliable) rightsholders-claimed figures (and not even first-hand!). To be fair in footnote 4 the authors acknowledge that the phrase “lost revenues” is complex and that not all downloaded content would have been purchased. However, they then seem to backtrack on this by saying (rightsholders provided figures again!):

Nevertheless, industries such as music and film do frequently publish estimated lost revenues, or “value gaps’. The BPI recently claimed that between 2008 and 2012 the music industry was looking at a ‘value gap’ of £1.2 billion. (Music Ally, 2008)

Furthermore, that claim that things are “complex” worries me, as things are, in fact, pretty simple: lost revenues mean lost revenues, i.e. the revenues the industry would have got if no unauthorised downloading had occurred. This will clearly be much, much lower than a figure based on assuming every unauthorised download is a lost sale.

Furthermore, looking at revenues in a single industry is dangerous here: we’ve got to look at the overall impact on the economy (and that’s still ignoring the welfare/income distinction). For example, if someone makes an unauthorised download rather than buying a CD they spend the money they would have spent on the CD on something else, be that a haircut, a meal, or going to a concert. If we want to count that as a loss to the music industry we need to count the gain it generates elsewhere.

Good evidence doesn’t get any thicker on the ground later on either as far as I can tell. For example, in the first key finding section (entitled “The scale of the ‘problem’ is huge and growing”):

• The only empirical study they cite on the impact of filesharing is that Zentner with no mention of some other major studies such as that of Oberholzer and Strumpf.
• The only figure on the film industry they quote is a claim of a $6 billion annual loss put forward by the UK film industry in interview and “some research (Henning-Thurau et al., 2007) [which] appears to demonstrate evidence that consumers’ intention to pirate movies “cause them to forego theatre visits and legal DVD rentals and/or purchases.”. Looking up that citation one finds (seems there was a typo in the date!): Henning-Thurau, T, Gwinner, K, Walsh, G, Gremler, D (2004) Electronic Word of Mouth via Consumer-Opinion Platforms: What Motivates Consumers to Articulate Themselves on the Internet? Journal of Interactive Marketing. 18 (1) pp.38-52. While I haven’t actually read this article, the title (and journal) don’t suggest this as the most reliable source as to the actual effect of unauthorised downloads on film industry income.

To sum up: it turns out the BBC’s line that illegal downloads are “costing the economy tens of billions of pounds” is based on nothing more than the usual, and completely unreliable, rightsholders claims, recycled via CIBER’s report. This is a worrying example of how industry PR, via repetition in other, more “respected” and supposedly independent sources, can gain legitimacy.

Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on the issue of copyright term extension for sound recordings, known in Parliamentese as “the Crowley Report (A6-0070/2009) on the Term of protection of copyright and related rights” (Mr Brian Crowley is the rapporteur for this report and a strong supporter of the extension).

Extending term would be a tragic mistake and a blatant example of special-interest lobbying winning out of the interests of society as a whole.

Let us therefore hope that the proposal is rejected.

That’s the line being by some right-thinking MEPs including Eva Lichtenberger, Greens, Sharon Bowles, ALDE, Andrew Duff, ALDE, Zuzana Roithova, EPP, Christofer Fjellner, EPP, Guy Bono, PSE who have put forward a rejection amendment (see their excellent justification below). But they need all the support they can get and remember: it is never too late to act.

Rejection Amendment Justification

The draft Directive is poorly conceived and disproportionate. The Commission claims that the measure is needed in order to benefit poor performers. However, the proposed regulation and procedure is complicated and over-bureaucratic. The biggest beneficiaries will be the four largest record companies. Individual performers will only receive very small amounts each.

Performers could be helped much more effectively by regulating copyright contracts and collecting societies, by setting up appropriate social security and insurance schemes, and by reconsidering remuneration rights and license tariffs.

The draft Directive leaves a large number of questions unanswered. Additional impact assessments are needed to see which measures are best suited to help those performers really in need, to limit the negative impact on consumers and jobs, and to establish if regulation is best done at state or EU level. In these circumstances, it is not wise to proceed to make the long-term permanent changes proposed.

Some of the particular problems are:

The extension of copyright to 95 or even 70 years will increase the revenue of trust funds of deceased performers instead of living performers.

Many performers cannot produce proof for the performances they participated in during the past decades. It then becomes difficult to assess their rights to payments.

The proposed regulation could cause legal uncertainty for all existing audiovisual productions as it will be unclear if the material used is subject to sound copyright.

There is a risk that all material that is not commercially viable will not be marketed by the copyright owners and will become inaccessible for public use.

Small record companies currently publishing copyright-free material risk going bankrupt.

7/10. Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise by A Simpson, University of Chicago Press, 1984. More history than legal analysis. Interesting throughout but meandering slightly towards the end. One quote I wish to memorialize, which though rather apart from the main thrust of my book, made me wonder once again about the general tension between ‘definiteness’ (assertiveness/simplicity) and ‘correctness’, especially in the arena of public policy and democratic politics. Is it always necessary, as the quote suggests, for successful campaigns to simplify and exaggerate in order to obtain an effect?

In the period immediately before the case of the Mignonette [1884], controversies over the protection of sailors and passengers had been inflamed by the activities of the radical MP for Derby (1868-80), Samuel Plimsoll, ‘the sailor’s friend’, whose approach to the problem favoured prior intervention [i.e. regulation] … He [Plimsoll] concentrated first simply on unseaworth ships as a cause fo mortality and started a campaign to amend the law with a resolution in the House of Commons in July 1870. His most effective appeal was to public opinion through the publication of Our Seamen in 1872, attacking the ship-owners of the over-insured, overloaded “coffin ships”, which caught the public imagination. Plimsoll was no doubt careless with his facts, ill-informed, and sometimes violent in his language; but perhaps successful campaigns require devils, conspiracies and simple solutions. [emph added] In reality ships were lost for a variety of reasons, and unseaworthiness was only one of them.

From, Sexuality: A Biopsychosocial Approach by Chess Denman, p. 54:

Politicians and the press have created an image of a tidal wave of teen parenthood, caused by young women’s unregulated sexual behaviour and poor women sponging off the state, even though this is unwarranted. In America, for example, teen motherhood cannot be said to have grown as a consequence of welfare because the value of welfare has reduced (Schwartz and Rutter 1998). Interviews with teens who are pregnant do not indicate the kind of planning and forethought necessary for their pregnancy to be a thought-out monetary strategy. Indeed, being able to see a future for oneself is actually associated with abstaining from sex or using contraception (Pipher 1994, in Schwartz and Rutter 1998). In fact, teen pregnancy themselves have not increased at all. Instead they have declined along with the general decline in pregnancy rates but, because they have not declined as much as pregnancy rates in other age ranges, they form a rising proportion of the figures.

However, this may not be all the story, as shown by the following quote taken from the this article on Teenage pregnancy on the UK’s Department for Education and Skills website:

In the 1970s, Britain had similar teenage pregnancy rates to the rest of Europe. But while other countries got theirs down in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain’s rate stayed high. The latest available figures show that Britain’s teenage birth rate is five times that in Holland, three times higher than in France and double the rate in Germany. Other English-speaking countries such as Canada and New Zealand have teenage birth rates higher than ours. In the United States the rate is more than double that in the UK.

In 1999 the Government published a Teenage Pregnancy Report from its Social Exclusion Unit. It acknowledged there was no single cause, but pointed out three major factors: first, that many young people think they will end up on benefit anyway so they see no reason not to get pregnant. Second, that teenagers don’t know enough about contraception and about what becoming a parent will involve. Third, that young people are bombarded with sexual images in the media but feel they can’t talk about sex to their parents and teachers. [emphasis added]

From Robert E. Lane’s essay, The Joyless Market Economy p. 484:

Durkheim asks: “Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, what is the use of increasing abundance, if it does not succeed in calming the desires of the greatest number, but, on the contrary, only serves to increase their impatience. [emphasis added] It is forgotten that economic functions are not their own justification. … Society has no raison d’etre if it does not bring men a little peace, peace in their hearts and peace in their mutual relations”[^63] Deprived of its original utilitarian raison d’etre, does the market society now reflect something like Kroeber’s exhaustion of a cultural configuration in which the old, material civilization has exhausted the possibilities of that particular pattern? The offerings of the market no longer satisfy, not because the payoff is not large enough but because it is denominated in the wrong currency.

[^63]: Durkheim’s quote is cited as: Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Trans. C. Brookfield. Routledge and Kegan Paul (1957) p.16 (via Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, Allen Lane/Penguin (1973) p. 267).

8/10. I have just finished the final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental trilogy America in the King Years. A fitting end to an incredible effort — though to my mind the first volume remains the best. This work covers the more difficult years faced by King following the major successes of the Civil Rights movement culminating in the Selma March and the passage of the1965 Voting Rights Act (which occurs at the start of this volume). Venturing in to the more rocky waters of poverty and the Vietnam War, and caught between the increasing radicalisation and its corresponding conservative backlash, King stuck tenaciously to his non-violent principles only to be shot down outside his Memphis motel room on April 4 1968. It is perhaps for the very reason that these years were more troubled, with success more elusive and direction less sure, that it is this book which most increased for admiration for King as a man. Though contending with endless difficulties, self-doubt, persecution and perpetual internal dissension he struggled endlessly to retain his humility, his conscience and his commitment to nonviolent discipline. And it is his very humanity, evidenced, for example, by his incessant extra-marital affairs, that compels us to see in him some kind of latter-day saint.

Today I attended the the Clare Hall Ashby Lecture which was given by Richard Layard on the subject of Happiness and Values.

Notes

Four main explanatory variables for level of happiness:

• Perceived trustworthiness of individuals
• Perceived trustworthiness of governments
• … [one i missed]
• Divorce rate

“Tsunnami of individualism washing across the Atlantic and hitting Britain first.”

Thesis: Individualism is the problem because the statement “You should do the best you can” becomes “You should do better than others” (otherwise you cannot be doing your best). This gives us a zero-sum game. To get to away from a zero sum game want to have increased caring for others (compassion).

Mentions an unnamed famous French Monk who pointed out you need to do a lot of practice to be good at anything — and this applies to being happy too.

Main way we can get this kind of practice is through the school system (”Main institution under social control”).

Seligmann “positive psychology” thinking. 11 studies, one unsuccessful, average reduction in depression of a half, reduction in delinquency by 1/3.

Got to get education onto the same scientific basis as other areas including psychological therary (now have proper double-blind evaluations etc). [ed: a little sceptical here as the data I’ve seen is still pretty inconclusive].

Silent reflection: “What am I like when I most like myself”. “What makes me happy and what makes other happy”.

4 principles:

1. Moral education in schools. Should be in schools and should not be abstract. Train up emotional reactions more than intellectual evaluation.
2. Should be taught in secondary schools by experts. Need a single dedicated member of staff to deal with this.
3. “Will not succeed unless grounded in scientifically grounded truths. Values education has been thought of as ‘woolly’, even as ‘hot air’.” Science is a powerful instrument for persuading people, especially young people, that this is important.
4. Curriculum. Managing your feelings. Loving and servings others. (Service is not common nowadays but need to reinvent). Work and Money. Sex and Parenting. …

Questions

Various. In response to one Layard mentions recent survey which shows people are less likely to say something if they are given too much change.

My question:

• Most interactions are more anonymous because of increasing social and technological complexity of society.
• We generally trust strangers less than those we know well and have more social and empathetic connection with those in our immediate community than a large multinational.
• But then many of these changes in trust (and happiness) may not be a result of changing values but indirect results of the changing systems of production and exchange.
• That is values are changed by these systems not the other way round.
• Won’t these changes involve some fairly radical reorientation of the economics and social systems of the modern world — more localized production and interaction.

This is Skidelsky’s first volume (1983) in his monumental trilogy charting the life and times of the economist-statesman John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). It is an excellent work, not overlong, willing to state judgements but always judicious in doing so, full of surrounding detail but never wandering far from its central theme and, perhaps most importantly, with a fine suppleness of prose that becomes, on occasion, almost aphoristic. While I, personally, would have liked greater detail on, and discussion of, the economics this is, after all, a biography for the general reader so this can hardly be a criticism.

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Skidelsky summarizes:

As we have seen the Apostles were looking for an ethic which could direct attention to ends other than the duties set before the Victorian gentleman. This Moore provided for them. He unshackled contemporary ethics from its connection with social utility and conventional morality by locating its ultimate ends in goods which stood apart from the Victorian scheme of life, and by making ‘ought’ correlative with these goods. By dropping Hedonism and by proclaiming as intrinsically valuable dispositions and states of mind which Mill and Sidgwick had been forced to treat instrumentally he had evaded the problems which wrecked their attempt at coherence. No one serious about achieving Moore’s goods could take Victorian morality entirely seriously again. What Moore had not solved was the problem of how to relate his goods to the practical business of life, most of which had no connection with them. It turned out that Sidgwick’s difficulty of effecting a harmony between the private and public sphere, between the good life and the useful life, had not been overcome by Moore: it had merely been restated in a new way. [pp. 140-141. Emphasis added]

And then returns to the theme:

Leavis’s remarks draw attention to a point already made — that Moore’s philosophy was very much a product of time and place. Two things helped to produce it. The first was the change in circumstances. By the 1890s the Victorian reform movement had run out of steam without making political reaction any more reputable. At the same time recovery from the economic depression of the 1880s and early 1890s had taken the edge of social stress without relieving the emotional stress of Victorian life. The times, as Harrod observed, seemed ripe for new experiments in living rather than new experiments in social order. The second impulse arose out of the dilemmas of moral philosophy itself; specifically from Sidgwick’s failure to reconcile public and private ends, my own good with the world’s. Moore abolished the problem by abolishing the set of ethical goods connected with public life. But anyone whose temperament and upbring was such as to make him take both Moore’s ends (good states of mind) and Sidgwick’s end (general happiness) seriously was bound, sooner or later, to discover that Mooore had not solved Sidgwick’s problem; that the problem of bring them into a logical relation was, in fact, insoluble with the intellectual tools available. Moore’s philosophy was imply a temporary halting-post on the road to the complete disintegration of a unified world view. [Emphasis added]

Keynes’ Early Beliefs

p. 157

He was as timid about his expectations of realising good states of mind on a large scale as he was bold in his expectations about the amount of happiness or utility a government could deliver. In both sides of his moral thinking he gave priority to immediate goals over future ones, reinforced in this by his theory of probability: rational actions were the best possible in the circumstances. The duty of the state was to realise happiness and not ultimate goods, though the latter might follow as an indirect consequence of the former. He was thus both an aesthete and a manager. But he rejected the role of therapist, believing that truth took priority over expediency.

Keynes on Starting Economics

Keynes to Lytton Strachey on 15 November 1905, quoted p. 165:

I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organise a Trust or at least swindle the investing public. It is so easy and fascinating to master the principle of these things.

One imagines this still provides a fairly accurate summary of the reasons for studying economics — at least for the majority of students. This quote also provides a fine example of Harrod’s bowdlerisation as, according to Skidelsky, he cut out the statement on ’swindling the investing public’.

Marshall on mathematics

From a letter to statistician A. L. Bowley (27 Nov 1906) quoted in a fn p. 223 with source A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925), p.427.

I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics; and I went more and more on the rules — (1) Use mathematics to be a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I often did.

Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury was particular expression of, and gave direction to, the ‘revolt against the Victorians’. The rejection of conventional sexual morality was one facet, but only one, of the revolt against ‘false values’ in the name of which Victorians had sacrificed the possibility of leading a good life. … They [the members of the Bloomsbury group] were not sexual anarchists but rather creators of anew kind of sexual order inherent in a proper concept of the good life. That is why Bloomsbury was able to undertake the frequent rearrangement of its emotional affairs while remaining so (comparatively) free from sexual jealously.

In these ways, Bloomsberries were cultural and sexual revolutionaries. In other ways they remained rooted in the assumptions of their times. Indeed, the particular form of their ‘revolt against the Victorians’ depended on other aspects of Victorian life remaining in place. Culture was not regarded as a force to reshape social relations, but to reorient the elite to ‘what is good’. … Bloomsbury’s cultural artefacts were highbrow; its propaganda aimed entirely at the (highly) educated middle classes. There was a clearly tension between its cultural ideals and democratic sentiment: civilisation, as Clive Bell put it, always rested on having someone to do the dirty work. Maynard Keynes, as we shall see, attempted to go beyond this contradiction; but it cannot be claimed he got very far. And he, like the rest of the Bloomsberries, depended completely on domestic servants to sustain their own lives [cf. Peter Clarke’s comments in Liberals and Social Democrats]. Bloomsbury was rooted in the class assumptions of the Victorians. Their revision of the Victorian scheme of life tended to take them back to the eighteenth century idea of a cultured aristocracy [1] rather than towards the ideal of a civilized democracy; … [pp. 248-250]

[1] This suggests an interesting parallel with Tietjens inclinations towards a similar vision of the Eighteenth century in Ford Maddox’s Ford Parade’s End.

Reasons for the influence of Bloomsbury and Keynes’ role:

The cultural influence which Bloomsbury eventually acquired was based on the clarity of its vision of its publicists and the mutually supporting achievements of its members. But two further ingredients must be added: its relative financial independence and its power of patronage. Bloomsberries were not rich. But they were never forced into dependence on institutions alien to their spirit. There was just enough inherited wealth to go round to enable them to lead their preferred lives until their own talents could give them an earned independence. … But it [these various factors some of which I have omitted] were not enough [to make Bloomsbury have the influence it did]. Financial backing was needed. Here the role of Maynard Keynes became crucial. He came to give Bloomsbury financial muscle, not just by making money a great deal of money himself, which he spent lavishly on Bloomsbury causes, but by his ability to organise financial backing for their enterprises. [p. 250]

Keynes and Food Rationing

The proximate cause for this gloomy epistle [JMK to his mother at Christmas 1917] was the government’s announcement of food rationing. Like other less reflective members of the middle classess Keynes tended to equate social order with the continuance of his own customary standard of comfort, and take an exaggerated view of the consequences of any diminution of it. To Florence his Christmas visions suggested communal kitchens and the drying of the supply of domestic servants. Maynard’s incipient bolshevism [a reference to a joke in his letter] stopped well short of food rationing, which filled him with horror. … In fact, [contrary to Keynes prognostications] food rationing worked perfectly well in both world wars, and posed no permanent threat to the social order. [p. 346]

The Long Littleness’ of life

[following a dispute over rooms in 46 Gordon Square between Keynes and Bell] But there was still friction. Maynard had commandeered Clive’s bed, substituting one that felt ‘more like the seat of a third-class railway carriage’. As the war’s end approached, Clive wrote to Maynard, ‘I must have my bed back … Nothing could be more easy for you than to get a new one for yourself.’ [Maynard by this point was on 1000 pounds a year] Since Maynard proved in no hurry to oblige, Clive had his own bed moved upstairs. ‘Dear Maynard,’ he wrote from Garsington, ‘I had no notion of leaving you to sleep on the floor.’ He was sending down his third-class railway carriage. ‘As you appear to fuck less than I do it may serve well enough.’ [Maynard had long been without any kind of permanent lover since his separate from Duncan Grant years earlier]

Skidelsky inserts a fascinating footnote here which reads:

Maynard’s was not the only character to wilt under the strain of war. Clive Bell withheld from his parents the knowledge that he was a conscientious objector, preferring them to believe that he was medically unfit, in order, as he put it to Vanessa, ‘to preserve our lien on the Bell millions.’ Vanessa tried to hush up the fact that the daughter she had in 1919 was by Duncan and not Clive, probably for the same reason. Honesty had its limitations for everyone.

I was struck by this comment of Charles Simic in a review of Pablo Neruda’s poems [NYR Sept 25 2003 p.43]: Rebellion may be one of poetry’s traditions, but so is eulogizing the goodwill and godlike wisdom of some murderer.

The context for this comment was Simic’s discussion of Neruda’s devout Communism which resulted in the penning of lines such as:

In three rooms of the old Kremlin
lives a man named Joseph Stalin
His bedroom light is turned off late.
The world and his country allow him no rest