Our PUP Europe week ended with attending a wonderful celebration of Clutag Press, a small independent publisher of poetry established by our Advisory Board member Andrew McNeillie. Clutag has published Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill; and at t the Bodleian Library in Oxford a group of celebrated poets, including Tom Paulin and the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, read from work which had originally appeared in Clutag in honour of its tenth anniversary.

On Day 3 of his London tour, Robert Frank, author of The Darwin Economy, recorded an episode of the BBC Radio 4 Analysis program before a live audience of more than 400 at the London School of Economics.

Hosted by Paul Mason, BBC Economics editor, Analysis has an audience of more than 1 million, and the live crowd was filled with luminaries of the London political scene, including “Blue Labour” architect Maurice Glassman and FT commentator Samuel Brittan. The program will air on Monday (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r4vz).

Day 2 of his London tour saw Robert Frank record a podcast at the Guardian with Economics editor Larry Elliott and leader writer Tom Clark, and deliver a talk on The Darwin Economy at NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, the UK’s leader in studying and funding innovation. Frank was also interviewed for the BBC World Service program, The Forum, with environmental scientist Peter Liss (pictured) and singer Claron McFadden. The interview which will air on Saturday.

Read about Day 1 here.

Robert Frank began his London tour today with an appearance on CNBC Europe’s Squawk Box and lunch at the Financial Times with a group of senior journalists, including columnist Martin Wolf and Economics leader writer, Martin Sandbu. At the FT, Frank discussed the recent Congressional Budget Office report which showed that the US now has one of the lowest rates of social mobility on the world and an alarming level of inequality. Frank argued for progressive measures to reduce this inequality, including a new consumption tax to redirect income toward savings and investment.

Source: Congressional Budget Office, http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf.

(hat tip to Take the 5th)

Ian Goldin, author of Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, will be speaking at Blackwell Bookshop on Thursday 13th October at 7pm.

Exceptional People: How Migration Defined our World and Will Define Our Future offers a history of migration, from man’s earliest wanderings in Africa to the present day. Goldin points out that it is odd that there is no global body to oversee the movement of people, as there is with finance and trade. More surprisingly, he also argues that a ‘tipping point’ will be reached soon, which could shift the political debate. Future policies, for good or ill, will dramatically determine whether societies can effectively reap migration’s opportunities while managing the risks of the twenty-first century.

For more information please contact Blackwell’s on +44 (0)1865 792792

It’s summer holiday time in England, where the reading habits of the political class are making headlines. British photographers caught a clearly dressed-to-decompress Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, loading up the family sedan with books for a vacation in Devon, and to judge from his choices the opposition leader is a man of serious tastes. Near the top of his stack, visible thanks to this handy enlargement courtesy of the Daily Mail, is Fault Lines, by Raghuram Rajan, the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award-winning book published last year by Princeton University Press:

According to another article, from the Guardian, one of Miliband’s aides joked, “The picture only caught the light reading. You should have seen the heavy stuff.”

(By way of comparison, on top of Prime Minister David Cameron’s summer reading list is the novel Skippy Dies, described as “a comic account of life at a Dublin Catholic public school.”)

No doubt Fault Lines’ central theme—that inequality, both domestically and internationally, is at the root of our ongoing financial crisis—will resonate with the Labour Party leader. But had he waited another month, Miliband could have picked up the paperback of Rajan’s book, with a new afterword by the author, and lightened his load a little!

It’s easy to forget that much of the work publishers do continues after a book is “published” and hits the bookstores. This is particularly true of licensing foreign language rights to books. The sale of foreign rights- crucial for an author’s ideas to reach the largest possible audience- begins well before publication but continues for months and even years after original publication. It’s gratifying to see a book, when well received in the Anglophine world, continue to build an international audience and flourish. This past week saw two significant rights sales. Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust will be published in Korean by the Humanist Publishing Company (with previous deals for this book in Italian and Japanese), while Victor Davis Hanson’s Makers of Ancient Strategy will be published in Arabic.

PUP books also continued to get attention in Europe this week. Emma Rothschild’s book The Inner Life of Empires received warm reviews in The Scotsman and The Spectator.

In addition, on July 11th, I represented PUP at the Oxford University Humanities Research Showcase. David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science, opened this event with a presentation on the central importance of the humanities. A number of Oxford academics then described their world leading research, while a distinguished group of scholars, including our European Advisory Board member Jonathan Bate, debated the value of the humanities. It was a very interesting afternoon, and an important reminder that a thriving humanities program is central to the mission of the university – and the university press.

By Al Bertrand

Publishing Director, Europe

Another week, another party.

Last Wednesday Caroline Priday and I represented Princeton University Press at a celebration in honour of Emma Rothschild’s new book, The Inner Life of Empires, at Spencer House in London. Prof. Rothschild gave a wonderful speech, describing her chance discovery of the Johnstone family – the subject of her book – while tracking down the details of an obscure court case involving Adam Smith.

It was also a busy week for PUP authors in the press, with Frederico Varese’s Mafias on the MoveE garnering not one but two high profile reviews, in the London Review of Books and the TLS. The Guardian marked the imminent publication of the paperback of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age with a substantial profile.

The week ended with the first license for translation of Roman Frydman & Michael D. Goldberg’s important recent book, Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State. Wiley VCH will publish the book in German.

Best wishes from PUP Europe
Al

[Blog ed note: In what we hope will become a semi-regular feature, Al Bertrand, Publishing Director of our UK headquarters, will share news from abroad. Here is his first installment.]

On Thursday night, Caroline Priday and I attended the TLS Summer Party in London. Rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of the London literary scene, we bumped into PUP authors Simon Goldhill, John Fuller and Katherine Bucknell, as well as European Advisory Board member Andrew McNeillie. If that were not enough excitement for the evening, I got home just in time to hear Emma Rothschild on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves talking about The Inner Life of Empires.

This capped a good week, which began on Monday with a terrific foreign rights deal as Korean Economics Daily and Business Publications acquired the Korean rights for Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s A Cooperative Species. Monday also saw PUP Board of Trustees member Josh Katz give a wonderful overview of his field of historical linguistics at All Souls College in Oxford.

Other highlights this week were glowing reviews of Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry Lesson and David Mattingly’s Imperialism, Power and Identity in the TLS, a thoughtful and engaging review of Yan Xuetong’s Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power in the Economist, and the posting of a video of David Marquand’s appearance at the Policy Network in London.

Best wishes from PUP Europe
Al

David Runciman, in delivering the first annual Princeton University Press in Europe lecture in London on Wednesday night (http://www.goodenough.ac.uk/fileadmin/docs/Alumni/PUP_lecture.pdf), posed an extraordinarily timely question with the title of his lecture “Can Democracy Cope?”. The lecture was an intellectual tour de force, with Runciman distinguishing two prominent schools of thought on democracy, the “confidence trick” view that democracy is essentially a sham, and the “confidence trap” view that democracy is actually too successful and therefore becomes complacent. In Runciman’s memorable paradox, the “trick” is that democracy is too good to be true, while the “trap” is that democracy is too true to be good.

Runciman explored the “trap” view in detail, arguing that this view originates in Tocqueville’s highly prophetic view of democracy, as destiny but also as complacency. In this melancholy view, it will be difficult for democracies to escape the confidence trap.

David will explore this theme in more detail in his forthcoming PUP book, The Confidence Trap (2012).

If you missed the lecture, there is a terrific overview of the arguments in David Runciman’s interview on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, a review on the Enlightenment Economics blog, and an article “In Praise of David Runciman” in the Guardian.

David is Reader in Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and the author of two PUP books, Political Hypocrisy and The Politics of Good Intentions.

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture series provides an international platform for discussion of ideas that enrich scholarly communities and inform public discussion of important issues. Future speakers include economist Paul Seabright of the University of Toulouse (2012), biologist Sunetra Gupta (2013) and religious historian Diarmaid MacCulloch (2014).

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture marked the inauguration of the Press’ European Advisory Board, a distinguished group of scholars, journalists and writers who will work with us to publish the most exciting and intellectually ambitious work possible (see the PUP European Advisory Board PDF for a list of our collaborators).

In a tribute to Albert Einstein’s birthday, this week’s Facebook book giveaway is The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (collected and edited by Alice Calaprice).

In The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, readers will also find quotes by others about Einstein along with quotes attributed to him. Every quotation in this informative and entertaining collection is fully documented, and Calaprice has carefully selected new photographs and cartoons to introduce each section.

• Features 400 additional quotations
• Contains roughly 1,600 quotations in all
• Includes new sections on children, race and prejudice, and Einstein’s poetry
• Provides new commentary
• Beautifully illustrated
• The most comprehensive collection of Einstein quotes ever published

Can’t wait for the book, and need your Einstein quote of the day? Then, here it is:

“I believe that a simple and unassuming life is best for the body and mind.”–1930, p. 13.

Need more? Then check out this facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Ultimate-Quotable-Einstein/131377483560655

While you’re celebrating Albert Einstein’s birthday today, remember it’s Pi Day as well. Why celebrate Pi Day on March 14th, you ask? Because 3, 1 and 4 are the three most significant figures of pi, of course. Today is also Canberra Day in Australia and Commonwealth Day in the United Kingdom.

Here’s an Einstein quote to A. Chapple, Australia, February 23, 1954: “I consider the Society of Friends the religious community that has the highest moral standards. As far as I know, they have never made evil compromises and are always guided by their conscience. In international life, especially, their influence seems to me very beneficial and effective.–Quoted in Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, 511. Einstein Archives, 59-405.

And here’s a quote for the Brits celebrating Commonwealth Day today, “The wonderful experiences in England are still fresh in my mind and like a dream. The impression that this land and its wonderful intellectual and political traditions has made on me was even deeper, longer lasting, and greater than I had anticipated.”– To Lord Richard B. S. Haldane, June 21, 1921. CPAE, Vol. 12, Doc. 155

Each week’s book giveaway winner is chosen from the list of people who have LIKED us on Facebook. Haven’t LIKED us yet? Then go to the top of our Facebook page and click on the LIKE button. Be part of the drawing, it takes place this Friday.

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, collected and edited by Alice Calaprice.

There are many interesting things we can still learn about Elizabeth I, according to our author, Helen Hackett. For example, despite never mentioning her mother, Anne Boleyn, in public, Elizabeth kept a locket ring containing images of herself and her mother, indicating that she liked to remember her mother in private. Here, the author of [...]