Why non-fiction books need their indexes

I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.

Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.

I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.

Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.

Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.

The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.

My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:

The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.

But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil;
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris.

The Joy of Six 1487

"On this occasion Starmer has taken both the correct and popular position and stuck to it despite relentless attacks from the right. The result is that it is now his opponents, rather than him, who is having to embark on a humiliating U-turn." Adam Bienkov argues that the government should learn from Farage and Badenoch's reversal on Iran.

The Lancet dissects Robert F. Kennedy Jr's year of failure.

Michael Webb and Rebecca Flook say the choices universities and colleges make about AI are political: "The systems now being woven into education are shaped by a remarkably small group of people. Not 'the internet' as the source of training material. Not 'society' influencing the way we use these tools. It’s shaped by a small leadership class in a handful of companies, operating within specific political and economic pressures."

"I lived in a suburb on the very edge of London, far away from Soho’s Piano Bar or the Waterloo WHSmith glimpsed in the video to ‘West End Girls’. I was a lonely boy at the back of the garden. There weren’t out gay people or role models in my white working class neighbourhood, just an expectation that you would be the same as everyone else, and fit in – or else." John Grindrod reveals how Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids.

Parker Henry on Iris Murdoch as a philosopher. It seems to me she is being discovered in this role as her reputation as a novelist fades.

"Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair." Was Yuri Gagarin really the first Soviet cosmonaut? David Crookes considers the theory that the USSR launched earlier, unsuccessful manned missions.

The Joy of Six 1459

"For all their youthful modishness, this group is actually more conservative than their older counterparts. Many TheoBros, for example, don’t think women belong in the pulpit or the voting booth – and even want to repeal the 19th Amendment. For some, prison reform would involve replacing incarceration with public flogging. Unlike more mainstream Christian nationalists ... many TheoBros believe that the Constitution is dead and that we should be governed by the Ten Commandments." To understand JD Vance, you need to meet the TheoBros, says Kiera Butler.

Martin Barrow finds that Labour's reforms of the care system are an admission that privatisation of children's homes and foster care is here to stay: "Now responsibility for where children in care live is to be removed from local councils altogether and handed to a regional body with tenuous local roots tasked with negotiating the best financial terms with private providers."

"We talk endlessly about 'local pride', yet whenever regions like Cornwall, the north east, or Yorkshire try to express that pride politically or administratively, someone in Westminster clears their throat and steers the conversation back to something safer: 'Englishness'. As if being Cornish, Geordie, or Yorkshire were a distraction rather than part of the story." Regional identity still matters, argues John Hall, but without power and respect risks being reduced to a souvenir.

Eleanor Grant reports that lawfare is stifling student politics at Oxford: "One scandal after another, each matched by an internal, quasi-legal tribunal, has now threatened to sink the Oxford Union and a series of student articles chronicling these escapades have mysteriously vanished after short-lived publication."

Casmilus watches Rock Follies, the Seventies television series about an all-woman band that starred Charlotte Cornwell, Rula Lenska and Julie Covington.

"It’s got one of the most famous opening lines of any Murdoch novel, which takes a lot from Austen: 'Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.'" Miles Leeson chooses Iris Murdoch's five best novels.

BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's series The Great Philosophers

Good news. BBC4 is repeating Bryan Magee's 1987 television series The Great Philosophers. The first three programmes – on Plato, Aristotle and medieval philosophy – are being broadcast late on Monday evening, prefaced at 22:30 by a new introduction to the series by Professor Angie Hobbs.

This is just the sort of television that they don't make any more - there's now a strong aversion to "talking heads". But if the heads are interesting enough, there is nothing more riveting. And what are podcasts but talking heads? 

They've even proved that two is the ideal number for the format. A podcast with one person is ultimately just a guy reading something out, and if there are three people (certainly if there are three men) they get excited and interrupt each other too much.

I remember watching Magee's earlier, similar series Men of Ideas – and they were men: the only woman guest in the 15 programmes was Iris Murdoch – while I waited to go up to York to being my philosophy degree. It was the best possible preparation.

What I didn't know then was that Magee had been evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and had lived literally round the corner from our house. I only worked out after my mother died that the "poor old Kath" she used to talk to was the daughter of the family Magee stayed with.

The Joy of Six 1344

"At the turn of the 20th century, British protectionists waged a long and unsuccessful crusade against free trade. Like President Trump’s policies, their campaign for tariff reform expressed the anxieties of a global power in decline." Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri draws an enticing historical parallel.

Will Hutton talks to Yvonne Wancke at North East Bylines: "Capitalism ... does produce wealth, it does produce innovation…but it has a propensity to inequality, a propensity to monopoly, a propensity to oppress and exclude, it has phenomenal inbuilt instabilities that have to be pro-actively managed by public agencies, and that is elected governments."

"HS2's so-called bat tunnel has become a political scapegoat, used to justify rolling back environmental protections. But the real story is very different. The tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife laws - it was a consequence of poor decisions made by HS2 Ltd and approved by parliament." Holy correction! It's the Bat Conversation Trust.

Mapping the Quartet follows the careers of four eminent women philosophers who began their careers at Oxford during the second world war: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley.

Andrew Miller argues that the appointment of Harry Brook betrays the shocking tangle that England's once-formidable white-ball set-up has got itself into.

"What captivated Kubrick about Thackeray was his ability to expose the cruelty beneath the polished facade of aristocratic life. The rigid etiquette of the 18th century – a period described variously as an age of gentility, sensibility and enlightenment – demanded an emotional detachment that fascinated the director." Nathan Abrams believes that Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon deserves another viewing.

The Easter service by the grave of William Hubbard at St Mary in Arden, Market Harborough

Every Easter Saturday, a short service is held at the grave of William Hubbard in the churchyard of St Mary in Arden. The small disused church stands near Market Harborough railway station.

Hubbard died in 1786 and this ceremony has been held since 1807, so the old boy has got good vale for the guinea he left to pay for it.

I suddenly remembered this service yesterday afternoon, so I went along to see it. There was a vicar, half a dozen women to sing, a man with a cross and I found myself one of a congregation of getting on for 20.

Not long after proceedings had begun, there was a loud bang behind us. It turned out one car and run into the back of another and closed Great Bowden Road. An ambulance was called for one lady, and I hope she is all right.

I was reminded a little of the christening of the new bell that went wrong in the BBC's 1982 adaptation of Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell.

St Mary in Arden was a place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, perhaps because it was close to the site of a holy well, and looked after a parish on both sides of the Welland. By the 17th century it had become somewhat disreputable. One day I shall find out more about it. 

Anyway here are some photos I took yesterday. The gravestone is William Hubbard's.