Ed Smith's Reading List

"I discovered it when I was in the US and was a visiting writer at Harvard in 2003. I think I was one of the only English writers to talk about this book when I came back to Britain at the end of that year. I wrote a review of it and I tried to use it practically when I was captain of Middlesex – we used some Moneyball -like statistical methods to inform our selection of our Twenty20 teams. So my interest in it started off as intellectual, but then became practical. Of course, the idea of using statistics to gain an edge is anti -luck if you like; it’s about using numbers to gain an advantage. But it’s more complicated than that I think. Moneyball is a superb book and credit should go to Michael Lewis for turning a book about baseball statistics into a bestseller and for attracting readers who do not like or have any interest in baseball. He makes the strongest possible case for using thinking to help win more games and using statistics to work out how a baseball match is won. And it’s not won in the way that we all think it’s won – by just scoring runs in the obvious sense. He breaks down how those runs are scored, who it is who is scoring, in much the same way as a financial analyst would do it. Since then, every baseball team, including the very richest, have tried to adopt this method. For some it has worked, for others it hasn’t. What I take from the book now is that we would be crazy not to use the latest mathematical tools to help understand how games are won and lost, but I think the book takes to an extreme the idea that human judgements are absolutely obsolete in the face of scientific data. That idea has been shown to be a little dated. It’s almost as if Moneyball was the high watermark of enlightenment self-confidence – the idea that the numbers will tell the truth and human beings, with their gut instincts and judgements, will inevitably make mistakes. “We would be crazy not to use the latest mathematical tools to help understand how games are won and lost.” A lot of baseball teams haven’t benefited from the Moneyball methods. The Oakland Athletics team did, but that was assisted by their business model. I think success in sport will always be a mixture of statistical based analysis and human judgement. One without the other will never be enough. I think what Michael Lewis did brilliantly was expose the clubbability of professional sport. There is a tendency to be very suspicious of new thinking and I experienced this too. So he’s saying: “Hang on a minute, these guys are just recycling conventional wisdom and are closing themselves off to new and better ways of doing this.” I completely agree with him on that. But what I wouldn’t agree with him about is the idea that a computer can make all the right decisions about selecting players. That does not fit with my experience nor indeed of the evidence of today’s sport. So I don’t think that statistical modelling, whether in sport or financial risk, will ever supplant a shrewd combination of modelling and human judgement."

"My father, who’s a novelist and was a teacher for many years, taught Vikram when he came to England to study for his A-levels in the 1970s. I can remember my dad telling me later on, in the late 1980s, that one of his ex-pupils was going to be the greatest writer of his generation. When I was in my teens Vikram came to talk at his old school, where I was studying, and he stayed with us. That was when I got to know him and when my father got to know him again. Then, independently, we became friends in the adult world. I bumped into him when I was playing cricket in Australia and he was giving a talk. We now live around the corner from each other in west London. So he’s a very good friend. He gave me a hilarious piece of advice once: “The best bit of advice for a young writer is don’t listen to any advice.” What’s interesting about the book from my point of view is that once you get to know the characters, which does take a while, it becomes a book that you just can’t wait to get back to. It’s funny to think that a 1,400-page Victorian-type novel is something you can’t wait to get back to, but that’s exactly my experience of reading it. It takes a while to get a sense of who everyone is and to feel comfortable with the various characters and families. It’s a big cast and it’s like going up a hill to get to know them, and then there is this enormous downhill, this freewheeling period, when you’re enjoying yourself. It’s a fantastically entertaining book. Yes. It’s set around the time of independence. Funnily enough I interviewed Vikram in India at a cricket match, and cricket is one small thread in the book. Some of the crucial scenes happen at cricket matches. The daughter’s three suitors are all very different. One is a businessman and is more practical and wants to do his own thing in the world. One is a poet who’s shy and intelligent and ironic. And the other is a cricket player and was the daughter’s first love. So you get three different types of men competing for the girl’s hand in marriage and the story revolves around this with the backdrop of events in the aftermath of Indian independence. So getting to know a writer who you admire very much is a stroke of luck, especially when you’re starting on your own career. I hadn’t written my first book then. I could have chosen any of Vikram’s books because I love all of them, but A Suitable Boy you just live with for the rest of your life because you get to know the characters so well."

"The Wagner question is very interesting. It used to be said – although I’m sure it’s not true – that more books have been written about Wagner than about Jesus. Grappling with Wagner’s success and how he had such an absolute hold over his fans is quite odd. I’m a Wagnerian, not nearly as crazy as some Wagnerians, but I have travelled far and wide to see Wagner’s operas and I probably know more about Wagner than I do about every other composer put together. What Brian Magee has done brilliantly is to write a book that just explains what is going on – how do we make sense of this phenomenal person who has influenced so many intellectuals, so many creative talents and even history to some degree? He does it in a way that is both chatty and deep. And it’s all the better for not being too detailed. It really taught me a lesson very early on, as I first read it when I was studying Wagner in my final year at Cambridge. It taught me that a very short book that is a distillation of many years thought can be much more powerful than something that is much more extensive. My whole introduction to Wagner was through a massive stroke of luck. I didn’t know what I was going to study in my final year at Cambridge because you had to specialise in something. A friend of mine said: “Look, you’ve got to do this Wagner course. It’s something you’ve just got to do.” He was very insistent, so I did. I can remember the first lecture by Professor Tim Blanning – who would later become a friend of mine – who closed the blinds, turned off the lights and played Lohengrin . I can remember thinking: “This has got to be a good way to spend my last year studying history.” There was the luck of a friend’s recommendation and the luck of a brilliant teacher and the good fortune of being in the right room at the right time and listening to this extraordinary music. Wagner seems to reach parts of your personality that other music doesn’t. Of course, some people challenge whether that’s a pretence, or that it’s an intellectual trick that we imagine ourselves to be touched, which of course was Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner. He was a devotee of Wagner before he turned against him and became very critical. I probably listen now to more Schubert and Bach, but I still say that Wagner does something nobody else does. I can’t really explain why that is. “Wagner seems to reach parts of your personality that other music doesn’t.” The personal story is also interesting. He had many weaknesses and flaws, and unforgivable opinions at times, but Wagner’s determination to forge his own path and his complete refusal to follow existing tracks for a creative talent is very inspiring. So whatever you think about him personally and morally, he makes the rules and that’s very inspiring for anyone, and might be why so many writers and creative talents respond to him."

"I think the interesting thing about sport in literature is that nearly all great books about sport aren’t really about sport. This applies to Moneyball – it’s ostensibly about baseball but it’s not really about baseball, it’s about scientific method. It’s the same with A Season in Sinji – it’s a cricket novel, but it’s not about cricket. It’s about life. The form of life it explores is a cricketing life to some degree, or a group of people fighting a war who are seeking solace, or an escape, by playing cricket. So that’s a lesson in itself for a writer. If you want to write really well about sport, then you need to be doing more than just writing about sport. “I think the interesting thing about sport in literature is that nearly all great books about sport aren’t really about sport.” JL Carr knew a huge amount about cricket. Often sports writing in novels strikes the wrong note – it’s not quite convincing and is sort of shoehorned in there for a bit of colour. But in this book it’s excellent. It’s set on a British air force base in West Africa during World War II. It’s hell on earth – it’s terribly hot, the food’s awful, they get ill all the time. They’re bored rigid, and Tom Flanders, who is the central character, sets up a cricket team to keep himself and everyone around him alive and engaged. His biggest worry is how he’s going to retain control of this team and make sure that the toffs – the officer class – won’t co-opt it and wrestle it away from him. It ends up being a struggle between Flanders and his arch enemy the officer Turton, who isn’t much of a cricketer and is generally a poor human being. They get locked into this struggle for this cricket team. So it’s a novel about class, it’s a novel about cricket and it’s a novel about war. It’s also a novel about Englishness. That’s right. The backdrop is how people deal with the underlying uncertainty and fear that goes with warfare. There’s the randomness of whether your number will come up and you will have to fly an air reconnaissance mission. This actually happens at the end of the novel and the mood of those that are picked changes from being bored, restless and ill-tempered to being suddenly focused, fearful and engaged. One of the interesting things is that the pilot chosen on that mission is particularly bad. So you have not only been drawn to do a reconnaissance mission, but you have also been drawn with the worst pilot. So it’s a double stroke of bad luck at the end. Anyone who experienced World War II must have been constantly aware of the power of good luck – where you got sent, whether you survived it, and the brutal probabilities of life as a soldier."

"I’ll tell about how I came to John Kay’s work. I actually read Nassim Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness first, which is a different book but with some connections to Obliquity . Then I read John Kay’s review of it in the Financial Times , which was very interesting, and I began to follow John Kay’s work. What Kay writes about business and finance often applies to other spheres as well. Like Taleb’s work, it has a universal quality. You can substitute business for sport and the model holds up very well. I’ve certainly found there are often parallels between what John Kay writes about in the financial world and what I’ve experienced in the world of professional sport. The central argument in Obliquity is a brilliant insight that many of the greatest achievements of the business world come about not exactly by accident, but the outcomes evolved from people who weren’t thinking about outcomes. They’re actually trying to do something else, and the fantastic outcome evolved by obliquity. In other words, things are best achieved quite often by not focusing on them. It’s wonderfully counterintuitive, particularly in an era of ultra-professionalism, of constant planning and strategising. Kay says that if you try to expose yourself to different things, and are open to different experiences, then many of your best ideas will evolve by obliquity. This is absolutely the case. The classic example being in business – don’t try for profits, try to have a good business. If you have a good business, the profits will happen. But it’s much broader than that. The best way to seek happiness is not to try to be happy, but to absorb yourself in an activity which is fulfilling. Happiness will then follow. It’s quite a profound insight, which he explores deeply, both psychologically and in life. Yes, that’s right. It’s a lovely story. The money may follow. One of the things you must always allow for is the fact that even if you do the right things there are no guarantees. The correct analogy is: You definitely don’t want to be a second tier banker with reasonably good financial rewards but no fulfilment, when you could be the best artist you could be with a shot – probably no more than a shot – of getting big returns financially. It’s actually a version of “control the controllables”. If you do what you enjoy and do what you’re good at, as long as you can pay the bills no one can interfere with your fulfilment and you might also be giving yourself a chance of serious success. . Yes, some luck. One of the insights that Kay explores is the metaphor of evolution. In life, it’s impossible to say what percentage of success is luck and what percentage is design or agency. If you look how evolution has developed, you’ll see that it’s the interplay of chance and adaptation that leads to progress. It’s almost as though the influence of chance or luck creates a new thing. Going back to the metaphor of the stream and the boulder, when chance enters the equation you create a new thing. It’s not a mixture, it’s a compound. Talent and effort plus chance create a compound, an entirely new thing. “In life, it’s impossible to say what percentage of success is luck and what percentage is design or agency.” I think that the implication of Kay’s work is that you have to be open. Openness is as important as effort, strategy or planning. You have to be open to chance. You have to be open to good things happening to you. That’s something that is often undervalued in the corporate and sporting worlds. They want to wrap everything up. They want to feel that it can’t go wrong because they have done all the planning and the strategy. But it isn’t like that. Success isn’t like that. You have to be open to the influence of chance."