In the Critics this week

Robert Skidelsky on British industry, Richard J Evans on Norman Stone, Olivia Laing on Sheila Heti, Megan Abbott on Detroit and Ryan Gilbey on Quentin Tarantino.

By New Statesman

In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, the economic historian and biographer of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky, reviews The Slow Death of British Industry by Nicholas Comfort. “In the early 1950s,” Skidelsky writes, “Britain was an industrial giant. Today, it is an industrial pygmy.” The reasons for this sorry decline are various, Skidelsky suggests. But “running through this history is a lack of continuity: government policy towards taxation and incentives continually changed, long-term aims were repeatedly sacrificed to short-term financial exigencies, projects were taken up and abandoned when they became too costly …” But it needn’t have been like that. It was a historic mistake, Skidelsky argues, for Britain to rely so heavily in recent decades on financial services. “Like individuals, governments should hold balanced portfolios … Governments … need to promote a balanced economy.”

Also in Books: historian Richard J Evans reviews World War Two: A Short History by Norman Stone (“Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this book is its unremitting dullness”); Olivia Laing reviews How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti and Wild by Cheryl Strayed (“Though Strayed’s book is both touching and instructive it’s Heti’s …that will stay with me”); Lesley Chamberlain on Roberto Calasso’s La Folie Baudelaire (“a kind of self-parodying continentalism for the coffee table”); Catherine Taylor enjoys Deborah Levy’s short story collection Black Vodka (“There is a sexy hauteur in Deborah Levy’s prose reminiscent of the voice of Marianne Faithfull”); American novelist Megan Abbott reviews Mark Binelli’s The last Days of Detroit (“the metaphorical distance between the city and its hostile suburbs is immense, treacherous”). In the Books Interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Jared Diamond about his new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? “Life in Africa,” Diamond tells Derbyshire, “is socially rich but materially poor, whereas life in the west is materially rich but socially poor.”

Elsewhere in the Critics: Ryan Gilbey on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (“Portraying the perpetrators of slavery as merely monstrous, and their victims as holy, does a disservice to the oppressed …”); Rachel Cooke wishes the BBC hadn’t tried to adapt PG Wodehouse’s Blandings stories (“[Some] funny books … have never and will never work on television”); Antonia Quirke is baffled by Smooth Radio’s Osmonds obsession; and Alexandra Coghlan pays tribute to Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski, whose centenary is celebrated this year. PLUS Will Self’s Real Meals.