With queues for petrol, inflation and Abba on the radio, it’s easy to compare the two decades. But you wouldn’t if you were there, says Polly Toynbee, as she revisits the styles of her youth
objective truth, you will like Charles Murray s new book, pub date June 15:
Murray writes two distinctly different kinds of book, long and short. In the long books (most recently
Real Education, are more journalistic and less challenging for a reader not well-acquainted with statistics.
(And I just noticed, looking up
Real Education for the link, that its full title includes the word reality, just as this new book s title does. Charles Murray, like your genial diarist, clings to a fusty, absurdly old-fashioned belief in objective reality quite independent of our feelings, wo wo wo feelings.)
This latest Murray book is one of the shorts: 125 pages of main text, with three pages of introduction, twenty pages of endnotes, four pages of maps, and a five-page index. There are several tables and a small handful of graphs (this one my favorite);