Five books to put on your Christmas list

Father Christmas with his feet up reading a book

(Image credit: © Getty Images/EyeEm)

published 7 December 2020

Fed up with the seemingly endless cycle of lockdown and release in the UK at the moment? Spare a thought for residents of Newark during the first English Civil War.

The Royalist town found itself besieged three times between 1642 and 1646, once for a month, once for four and once for five. While in the last period of what we might see as a super extreme lockdown, the residents of Newark did some of the same things we’ve been doing for the past 12 months. Most interestingly, they got creative with money: having lost access to the country’s currency, they minted their own. Local nobles were persuaded to give up their silver plates, cups and cutlery, which were minted into rough, diamond-shaped coins that were then declared to be of various values and used to pay soldiers and the like.

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Both cases – Newark and now – tell you the same story: if everyone agrees a thing is money – be it bits of someone else’s old forks or some numbers on a screen – it is money. For more on how this psychological trick works, the first book in the pile you will be giving to someone else at Christmas in order to take back and read later, should be Jacob Goldstein’s Money: The True Story of A Made-Up Thing.

On the subject of the coming inflation, I’d like to point to an older book that celebrates how, in part, we are going to get there. I had been considering Kate Humble’s A Year of Living Simply for this column. There’s something very worthy about trying to live without stuff – and something very charming about the idea that the pandemic has taught us all the joys of buying fewer complicating possessions. It’s just that I suspect lockdown has actually taught us something else – that money burns holes in our pockets fast.

We love to consume. Why else would retail sales in the UK have risen 5.8% year-on-year in October? Quite. So no Humble. Instead, to help you feel good about what you are about to do (spend, spend, spend) turn to James Livingston’s 2011 book, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul. His argument boils down to the basic point that it is consumption that drives economies.

While we are celebrating things we have temporarily lost, it is time to look for the marvellous in our great cities, something else we keep being told, wrongly, that we have fallen out of love with. So get The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt. You’ll immediately be in a rush to get to New York to notice for yourself the various coloured markings on the sidewalks: blue tells you there is potable water below; orange that there is network infrastructure. Not just the history of design, but the history of progress too.

If you are anything in the City, you will think you have read it. Mostly, you probably have not. You may have skimmed the chapters on The South Sea Bubble and Tulipmania for nice quotes for your research notes. This time, ignore those and read about the mass hysterias behind the Crusades, when it was said that “a grove of 100 oaks would not have furnished all the wood sold in little morsels as remnants of the true cross”. Or delve into the witch-hunting manias of the 1600s – the horse shoes you sometimes see above English doors are the remnants of protection from witches – and the regular recycling of end-of-the-world terrors.

You may particularly enjoy the apocalypticism of 1630s plague-ridden Milan in which “everything was believed to have been poisoned by the devil . . . all objects of touch were poisoned, the walls of the houses. and the very handles of the doors”. This should give you plenty of lunchtime ammunition for a three-household row about the efficacy or not of government lockdown policy over Christmas lunch.

Fundsmith is up well over 400% since its launch, against under 200% for the MSCI World Index. I could dispute something on around half of Smith’s pages – we’ve been bickering about fees for at least a decade. But I hugely admire his concentrated conviction-led, growth-focused approach, and, oh yes, his fund has done wonders for my self-invested personal pension. So I’m still reading every page.

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Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.