Battle of the texts: which books changed the world?

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1:05The Economist.

1:13Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. And today we're discussing my very favourite thing, books.

1:31Every Christmas, we ask our correspondents to talk about books that fit a particular theme. Last year, we talked about books that predict the future. And this year, we thought we're going to go one bigger. We want to talk about books that have changed the world. To help me leaf through the pages, I'm joined in the studio by Catherine Nixie, who wrote A Darkening Age and is our culture correspondent and also writes for the Britain section. Hi, Catherine. Hi, Rosie. And I'm also joined by Oliver Morton, who wrote The Moon, A History for the Future, and is also a senior editor at The Economist. Nice to have you, Olly.

2:07Nice to be here, Rosie.

2:12Catherine, Olly, my first question is, can a book change the world? I think almost nothing other than books change the world. I mean, the obvious one is the Bible, of course. It's impossible to run a counterfactual on what the world would have been like had that a book. Books, it's really a library rather than a book. Not happened. But I mean, you go through history and again and again, the great turning points will come from books, from the rediscovery of Aristotle, from the rediscovery of Lucretius in the Renaissance to more obvious modern books that have changed the world, like On the Origin of Species.

2:41Do you think that the Bible would have changed the world without the operation of divine grace? A curveball right at the beginning. well i don't believe in god so for me yes okay but the interesting thing is that for most of the people for whom the bible has changed the world or to change their world it's changed that because they do believe in god no yeah well no i think it's changed it because christians took control of the roman empire but that they did that because they believed in god okay i'm gonna pass in here because funnily enough although i think we would all agree that the bible the quran and lots of important books there that we could spend our entire time discussing.

3:22I wanted to have a think about some more surprising titles that we might think have changed the world. Olly, I believe you're not recommending the Bible. Tell us what your chosen book is. The book that I would say changed the world, and it's partly, I think we may find this in many of these discussions, partly because it changed my world, is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It's a book that changed the world in part because it is a book about how the world is changing, about a turning away from the old knowledge of Paracelsus and the alchemist towards the new knowledge of science, a turning away from God as a creator to humans as creators, a turning away from the individual to the dyad as one of the ways in which we understand society and human nature, the idea of a shadow double.

4:09And for all that, as well as that, it's, according to the great British science fiction author and literary figure Brian Aldiss, it's the foundation of modern science fiction, and it's certainly as good a call as any as you would have for that. And science fiction has subsequently gone on to change how people think about the future and, indeed, how people make the future. Definitely some biblical elements there. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, you know, this is a woman who's writing a book while her husband is reading Paradise Lost aloud to her, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Catherine, what do you think of that choice?

4:45Well, look, I have to say science fiction is water off a duck's back to me. I read almost none of it. And what I'd be interested in asking Ollie is how does science fiction change the world by changing science? To some extent. the definition of science fiction given by Darko Suvin, a literary critic, that it's about the introduction of the novum. The novum is a novelty in science fiction that has to be understood through science and which changes the world of the book. And that makes it a very powerful way of thinking about change in general. So sometimes you can say, yes, it so happens that all three of the people who independently worked out how rockets could be made to go into space and orbit the earth.

5:24All three of them are influenced by Jules Verne. But there's also a broader sense that the future becomes a knowable and yet at the same time strange place, which I think is really not present in 18th century, almost 19th century literature, which you can find not just in genre science fiction, but in all sorts of fiction in the 20th century. Okay, I think we should go from science fiction to actual science. One of our colleagues, Matt Kaplan, had two recommendations. Let's listen to them. The two books that I want to recommend are Il Sagittarii by Galileo Galilei and Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

6:04So, Galileo first. Published in 1623, Il Sagittarii followed a fierce dispute between Galileo and Orazio Grassi. The two of them were going back and forth about whether or not these bright comets were in fact going around the Earth or whether they weren't and that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, which was a rather hot topic with the church at the time. Galileo made the extraordinary move to fight back against Grassi by pointing out that his methods sucked. And he eviscerated him politically by saying, look, you're just basing this on belief and faith as opposed to actually measuring anything with a telescope.

6:41And it transformed everything we did in science from that point forward. Darwin did some very similar stuff. He shook up science in a big way by pointing out that life evolved over time and explaining that that occurred because of natural selection. He also did a lot of the same stuff by backing himself up by getting a lot of expert advice from other scientists who were going to protect him when he came out with his pretty revolutionary ideas. There was a huge cultural element to what Charles Darwin was writing about, too. And that's because Charles Darwin's ideas were taken by human cultures to mean, oh, wait a minute.

7:17So it's not that one species is dominant over another and therefore it evolves and dominates an ecosystem. What if human societies are the same way? So for better or for worse, his book really changed the world in some pretty substantial ways. Oli, I can see a thought brewing. Oh, many thoughts. Go on, what do you think of that suggestion? Well, I think Sagittarius, it's a very interesting book, but it's not about the earth not being the centre of the universe. It's explicitly not about that. You can see this by the fact that the book is dedicated to the Pope. And it's also not that novel in its notion of the scientific method, because, you know, there's lots in there that Bacon or Gostet would be absolutely happy with about the mathematical book of nature, as well as the book of Revelation, the Bible.

8:03But it is interesting, given the way we're talking today, though, that the way to make nature seem like the word of God was to analogize it to a book. So that's a very interesting point, but it's not original to Galileo. On The Origin of Species, Matt's, of course, completely right. It is a world-changing book in that it says something new and true about the world that hasn't been said before. And I think that it's actually more important in some ways for what it says about the world than for what is then done with it by Herb Spencer, who indeed worked at The Economist and others, with notions such as survival of the fittest.

8:37So I think there's no doubt that of the 19th century books which aren't Frankenstein, I would say on The Origin of Species and, you know, either Capital or The Communist Manifesto would definitely be high up on the list. But isn't Galileo a perfect example of the fact that you can change the world even if no one reads your book or indeed doesn't necessarily interpret it correctly? Because Galileo is such a figure in our lives because we know that he challenged the received wisdom on how the world worked and also challenged the religious order. So at the time, that was very striking. And that's what he, for me anyway, represents.

9:15I've definitely never read the book, and I'm never going to. I still think you could make the case that that book changed the world. But you can't because it's not that book. It's the dialogue on the two new sciences, which changes the world in the respect that you're talking about. Isn't it written in the form of a play? No, it's written in the form of a three-corner, whatever a three-corner dialogue is. It's 19th century people go around bigging up the whole idea that these were people like Galileo or even more Giordani Bruno were heroes of science persecuted by the church? Really not so much.

9:47I mean, Bruno was bitterly burnt at the stake, but it was for saying, but it was for saying, I salute your revisionist attempts. But it was for saying not that the earth goes around the sun, it was for saying that the earth goes around the sun and we should worship the sun. You see, that's the difficult thing. That is a rather difficult position. I feel you're slightly angels on pinheads. If you spend the rest of your life... No, 19th century people, there's a huge thing we can come into this about Darwin. There's an urge by 19th century scientists to show themselves as vanquishing religion, which is sort of like self-serving.

10:23Catherine, you write about religion. I'm interested in how the religious authorities responded to Darwin's work. Well, religious authorities were quite... dispersed by that point. I mean, there is the index of prohibited books, which was still going, which if you were brought up as a Catholic in the first half of this century, you would have gone to school and your library books would have been stamped with the imprimatur sign of the Catholic Church. My father had this at his Catholic boarding school, meaning let it be printed. This book is acceptable reading for Catholics. So the religious authorities in some senses had a huge impact on what was printed in Europe and America until relatively recently.

10:59But I think the way that religion changes things is much more subtle than that. I think one of the things with Darwin, as I understand it, is that he hesitated and havered and was worried about publishing it. His wife was very Christian. He himself had been Christian and he has a huge internal wrestle. He doesn't see himself as the sort of flaming sword of truth that's going to kind of decapitate the church. He begins life religious and it's not an easy thing for him to be removed from his religiosity. There's a wonderful account of him finding out about this wasp which reproduces by laying its eggs in the stomach of another animal and then it eats the animal but it eats the animal from the inside out which is no fun for that other animal and he said I cannot believe that a divine all-powerful creator would have created this wasp but that I think is how religious it doesn't work almost always oppression of any kind people think it comes from being burnt at the stake and obviously that's a bit off-putting if you are.

11:59But mostly it comes through the modern equivalent is being flamed on Twitter. It's through feeling socially excluded from your peers. It's through feeling you might hurt people that you love. You put the barriers on your own mind in anticipation of what the other barriers are going to be. So I think that's how religion changes it. And also that with every book that opens a world, another world is closed. So that the Christianity in the Victorian era responded to Darwin, of course, and there's the famous debate with Wilberforce. But if you read books of this era, there's a sense of loss too. People are really sad to have the thing, the comfort, the sucker of religion removed from their lives.

12:41You know, Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, the long withdrawing rule. Ruskin writes of saying that he wants to believe, but he keeps hearing the damn hammers of the geologists every time he opens the Bible. There are victors in this great game of books and we're talking about them and there are losers and we all lose a little every time with the losers too.

13:05Catherine I feel like you've given us the perfect segue there you talked about barriers in one's own mind and of course they're not always in our mind tell us about your recommendation what book changed the world? So I've chosen Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own which changed my life definitely. It was like a thunderbolt when I read it and it has changed women's literature, it has changed women's fiction without a doubt. I mean, Woolf would have done anyway. For those who haven't read her, she was a great modernist of the 20th century, arguably the greatest modernist of the 20th century. Oliver is raising his eyebrows.

13:43I object to having my eyebrows brought into this. I will speak from my diaphragm, not from my forehead. But what's interesting about the book is that we're going to talk, we are talking, we have been talking in quite highfalutin ideals, and her book, A Room of One's Own, is very concrete. And this is one of the things I love about Wolfe. Today, when people talk about feminism, they will use words like patriarchy and structural this and nonsense that, words that I can never, I don't really like writing about things that I can't touch. And I feel that this is what Wolfe absolutely nails in this book.

14:17She is asked to write on women and fiction, and it's a very grand thing. And she says, well, maybe I should offer some thoughts on Jane Austen, or maybe I should say a little bit about Charlotte Bronte. And in fact, what she says is, to write fiction, a woman needs a room of one's own and some money. And that's the really interesting thing, because literary people don't talk about money. Money is sort of beneath literary concerns. I was reading a history of literature, and it had, in the index, it had everything. It had women in literature, dragons in literature, ogres in literature. But money, you would assume that books had just been made by goodwill and brimming hearts that were just eager to take words off the page.

14:55But money matters and it matters to women. And this book is nitty gritty and always concrete all the way through. And it has these wonderful vignettes. It opens with her in Cambridge and she wants to go to a library. And she's walking along the banks of the river and she's thinking about what she's going to write. and just at the moment when she thinks she's sort of a fish of thought has swung through her stream of consciousness she realizes a man is approaching at her and shouting at her and he comes up to her because she's walking on the grass now if any of you have visited Oxford and Cambridge you know it's peppered with signs saying keep off the grass in capitals and she's flustered and she gets off the grass and he says only scholars and fellows can go on the grass and so she says the gravel is the place for me and it goes on like that she goes to the library she's barred from the library she goes to a lunch at a man's college there's drink there's port there's lamb and there's great conversation she goes to a woman's lunch and there's prunes and custard and she says what what do we learn from this about women and fiction and and in fact these are these are nothings being told to get off the grass being not allowed into a library is a bit bigger but eating prunes for lunch why does this matter and she in the course of six chapters tells you exactly why it matters and it's everything.

16:09And she's good on discouragement. We mentioned discouragement earlier. But how small things have big impacts on your life, like discouragement, like not being able to do anything because a little child is coming up to you. And this is the one where she famously talks about Shakespeare's sister. What if Shakespeare had had a sister? And I think that's how many people will remember this essay, but it's full of these wonderful, tiny, yet huge details. It is undoubtedly, from the way you portray it, which is wonderful, one of the great examples of the modern tendency to check your privilege. But she absolutely knows that she does have a room of her own.

16:47Yes, yes. And she's saying, you know, I can't just think my grand thoughts. I have to think about the material circumstances which allow me to have these thoughts. I think that's wonderful. Yeah, and she's very open about how she gets it as well. And she also writes about how much she has paid, which writers don't usually, like often because they're not. But she talks about how much she gets for her first review from the Times Literary Supplement, which I think is probably about the same as you get for a review now from the Times Literary Supplement. But this matters and it matters to writers.

17:15And you can't think if you're not fed. You can't think if you're worried about bills. You can't think if a child is tugging at your apron strings. And I think it meant a lot to me. I mean, I've written a couple of books and both of them I wrote while also looking after small children. and I remember there's an illustration in some books of Gulliver's travels of a picture of Gulliver lying down in the Lilliputian land and he's tied over by a thousand tiny tiny ropes and each rope is tiny yet the overall effect is that he can't get up and I think for those who are struggling this can be what it's like and you need to be free to write.

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19:30Catherine, you've brought us beautifully to fiction. And when we asked colleagues for recommendations of what books they thought had changed the world, one name came up a lot. So to discuss that, I think we're joined on the line by Josie DeLapp, our Middle East editor. Josie, hi. Hi, Rose. You've been listening in, I think. I have, yes, with great enjoyment. I'm amazed you didn't butt in. Tell us about your choice, Josie. Well, as you said, I think Catherine brings us perfectly. It is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It's the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth this year. So I think there is a lot of attention on it but it is just truly a great book and I think actually a lot of what Catherine was talking about in relation to Virginia Woolf ties in with Jane Austen.

20:19Pride and Prejudice is the story of the Bennet sisters and their romantic and marital adventures and the effect that all of this has on their fortunes. And I think what's so striking about Pride and Prejudice is the way that it takes seriously, although always with a very light touch, the domestic concerns of people, but predominantly women. She sets women up not just as trophies to be exchanged by men, to be won on the battlefield or between rulers, but as actors whose choices have consequences and for whom marriage was understandably the most important thing in their life. That the impact of this choice, which wasn't all about romance, though that was clearly a part of it, but was this incredibly important social and economic institution.

21:21And I think she took that seriously in a way that changed how people think about marriage as an institution and how people think about women's place in society and the significance of their concerns. And of course, it's beautifully written. It's gorgeous. Which is actually surprisingly something that hasn't come up in our discussion about books is that you've got to want to read them. And I'm sure that aside, as you say, from the social commentary and the sort of intimacy of the book. It's also just still a fantastic read. Right. She's funny and she's witty and, you know, she can make your toes curl when Mr.

22:03Collins proposes to Lizzie. You just sit there with, you know, feeling like you just can't wait for it to be over. And she does it with such brilliant dialogue. You know, I think that's one of the reasons why, I mean, Pride and Prejudice in particular, but so many of her books have translated very well to the screen. This is what I was amazed at when I read them. I think I saw Pride and Prejudice before I read it. Yeah. And I thought Andrew Davis, the famous Andrew Davis, Colin Firth, Jennifer Ely adaptation. And I had thought that Andrew Davis was a master of dialogue and then I read it. No, exactly.

22:38He's a master of crossing out the narration. I mean, it must have been like the world's easiest adaptation to do. Her books are more or less plays, aren't they? and they're very, very, very dialogue heavy. Totally, totally. And they're sort of so different from the work of somebody like Thomas Hardy where you have those long descriptions of bleak fields and misery. They just sparkle. I think, though, you've got to speak also to Rose's point, which is that in terms of changing the world, the sheer amount of delight that has been afforded to people for 200 years by Pride and Prejudice should not be set at naught.

23:13No, no, no, it's true. Joy is a much underrated. I remember rereading it in a hotel room in Tokyo and just being absolutely delighted. Josie, stay with us for a minute because I'm interested to know whether you've read another book that a colleague suggested, which begins with a wedding. So it slightly recalls Pride and Prejudice, but very different setting. Here's Shalas Chitnis, who's our global business writer. The book I've picked is called A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. I read this as a young student in college for the first time. And on surface, it's a pretty simple story. It's about an Indian mother who wants to find a suitable boy, as the title suggests, for her daughter.

23:55It paints a very vivid picture of India at a time when the country had just gotten independence. And I think it does in a very beautiful way. I think before suitable boy, at least from my perspective, whenever I read English Indian literature, a lot of it was with reference to the West or how the West perceived it. So even though India is probably one of the largest English speaking countries in the world, For a long time in terms of English literature, it took its cues either from Britain or America in terms of how things need to be written. I think two books really broke that mold. One is A God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and the other is A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, the book we are talking about right now.

24:32And I think the reason it was important is because it had a very distinctive Indian voice. And it was set in India that a lot of Indians themselves could identify with, not really an outsider in perspective. So that's the reason I thought it was really interesting. It was also, as I remember, an absolutely giant book. I think it's one of the longest books ever published. It's nearly 1 ,500 pages. I remember it's a whopper, isn't it? That's the thing. I have not read it. That is the sad thing. I have not read it for exactly the same reasons. But Shalesh makes it sound like maybe I really should read it.