What’s in a Number? Donald MacKenzie: The $300 Trillion Question Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world. Libor anchors contracts amounting to some $300 trillion, the equivalent of $45,000 for every human being on the p***t. It’s a critical part of the infrastructure of financial markets but, like plumbing, doesn’t usually get noticed. Only a handful of economists, and no other academics, have ever looked in any detail at Libor, and even the financial press didn’t show much interest in how Libor is calculated until this spring, when there was sharp controversy over whether these crucial numbers could be trusted. Read more

After Kemal
Perry Anderson

In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge – a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation – told his contemporaries on the Turkish left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country in a quite fundamental way. They had thought it a Third World society among others, ready for liberation by guerrilla uprisings, in the towns or in the mountains. The paradox they had failed to grasp was that although the Turkey of the time was indeed ‘a relatively backward country economically . . . and socially’ – with a per capita GNP similar to that of Algeria and Mexico, and adult literacy at a mere 60 per cent – it was ‘relatively advanced politically’, having known ‘a two-party system in which opposing leaders have changed office a number of times after a popular mandate, something which has never happened in Japan for example’. In short, Turkey was unusual in being a poor and ill-educated society that had yet remained a democracy as generally understood, if with violent intermissions – Belge was writing in the aftermath of the military putsch of 1980. Read more

Making Do and Mending
Rosemary Hill reads Penelope Fitzgerald’s Letters

• So I Have Thought of You by Penelope Fitzgerald
  edited by Terence Dooley

In 1997, three years before her death, Penelope Fitzgerald asked her American publisher, Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently died. Fitzgerald wanted it, however, for the sake of his co-author, who had been her cousin. ‘I’ve so often driven about with him,’ she told Carduff, ‘with the zoo’s first Chinese panda in the back of his car, together with a supply of bamboo shoots.’ (Fisher, she explained, was working at London Zoo.) After five hundred pages of her letters the reader is, if not exactly used to this sort of thing, then perfectly prepared for it. The eruption of the startling, the comic and the inexplicable, into a life that Fitzgerald was often at pains to portray as humdrum, gives her correspondence its character and makes these letters, written mostly to family and friends on small occasion or none and with no eye on posterity, completely compelling. Read more

Also in this issue

Short Cuts
R.W. Johnson: Robbie Gets His Gun
At the Wallace Collection
Peter Campbell: Osbert Lancaster’s Promontory

Subscribers can also read:
Ellen Meiksins Wood: Quentin Skinner’s Detachment
David Craig: Two Poems
Terry Eagleton: The Reality Effect
Andrew O’Hagan: Norman Lewis’s Inventions
Richard J. Evans: The Nazi Empire
Mark Ford on James Fenimore Cooper
Frank Kermode: E.M. Forster as Critic
Samuel Thompson on Howard Jacobson
Thomas Jones: The Novel as Computer Game
Owen Bennett-Jones in the North-West Frontier Province