Chacun à Son Goût

Usually readers here are, more or less, on the same wave length as me. At lunch yesterday a friend said that she doesn’t read if my daily dose is about money and another said that she gets incredibly annoyed if it’s about politics.  That’s absolutely OK but what about this?

I appreciate that others have a deeper cultural hinterland than me – mine is pretty small and shallow. I had never heard of John Rawls who wrote A Theory of Justice. My friend/reader takes it as a given that I’m familiar with JR and directs me to Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical. If you are not going to delve into this let me say that JR is thought-provoking. To be truthful I’ve not delved as deeply as I should but I just want to draw him to your attention. I cannot do justice to his output in a few trite words. But Wiki can:

In his 1990 introduction to the field, Will Kymlicka wrote that “it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971.”Rawls has often been described as the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. He has the unusual distinction among contemporary political philosophers of being frequently cited by the courts of law in the United States and Canada and referred to by practising politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” recommends equal basic rights, equality of opportunity, and promoting the interests of the least advantaged members of society. Rawls’s argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the “original position”, in which people select what kind of society they would choose to live under if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life. (Wiki)

Then there’s The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. I sat next to somebody at lunch yesterday who said it’s the sort of book he enjoys. Yet again a huge, deep, dark lake of ignorance submerged my mini Cheddar brain. Wiki tells it best:

The Music of the Primes (British subtitle: Why an Unsolved Problem in Mathematics Matters; American subtitle: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics) is a 2003 book by Marcus du Sautoy, a professor in mathematics at the University of Oxford, on the history of prime number theory. In particular he examines the Riemann hypothesis, the proof of which would revolutionize our understanding of prime numbers. He traces the prime number theorem back through history, highlighting the work of some of the greatest mathematical minds along the way.

The cover design for the hardback version of the book contains several pictorial depictions of prime numbers, such as the number 73 bus. It also has an image of a clock, referring to clock arithmetic, which is a significant theme in the text. (Wiki)

I was attempting to steer the conversation towards Len Deighton, whose Mexico Set I have just read. It’s a cracking good story and the retro food is delicious. Bernard scrapes the stale airline caviare off the toast and eats the toast. He has a cylinder of frozen orange juice in the freezer compartment of his fridge …

And, as you know, Len Deighton was interested in food. If you don’t know read this. But I reckon there’s more meat on the bone in the writing of Rawls and du Sautoy.