David Goldberg QC recommends
David Goldberg QC is a hugely well-respected figure at the Tax Bar and joins us as our third MTG Recommends guest. As a lawyer, his primary interests are planning transactions in the most efficient manner, helping in what Mrs. Thatcher once described in a letter to him as “the battle against the Inland Revenue”, the control of executive action and litigation, both on technical tax issues and at the interface of revenue and administrative law.
Read on to find out which six books David recommends, and why…
“It was summer, long ago. I had a pupil from Scotland sitting with me. As usual then, I went to a bookshop to buy reading for my holiday and struggled back to Chambers with 5 or 6 carrier bags full of physical books. My pupil asked if she could see what I had bought and I answered that of course she could.
She examined each book with a degree of diligence and divided them into two piles. Then, pointing at the first of them, she said “Och well, this is what you’re going to read” and, turning to the other pile, “this is the aspirational reading.”
And I thought that she was right and that, if I took the what I was going to read pile away with me, I would not touch the aspirational reading and I would waste my time on what was really very light and not very revealing, on books which were not holding mirrors up to life and that I would miss out on learning new things which might tell me more than I knew about how the world works and about how the way it works interacts with the things I do in earning my living.
So I gave up reading what I was going to read and the selection which follows comes mostly, though not entirely, from my aspirational reading. I sometimes wonder whether I am grateful to my Scottish pupil of long ago. I remember occasionally being transported into a made up world, typically of derring do, from which one returned to the reality of every day, surprised to find that there was honey still for tea. But there is yet more surprise, which brings delight, in learning, so I think I am grateful to her. Here are my books.”
The Language of Judges
Lawrence M. Solan
I first heard of this book while reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct: it was mentioned in a footnote and* I thought it might be interesting. Somewhere I learnt (it might have been in The Language Instinct itself) that, when an English sentence reaches its 20th word (which the first sentence did at the asterisk), there are more possibilities for developing it than there are particles in the universe. How do we link the beginning of a sentence to the middle and the end so that we can understand it? The answer is that we construct a mental word tree which links the various parts of a sentence in a way which enables us to comprehend what is being said.
What Mr Solan does in this book is take some phrases from a statute or a contract and show us, by drawing word trees, what the phrase means. He then tells us what a judge has said the phrase means and demonstrates that that is very often different from what it actually means. Finally, he considers why the judge has departed from the true meaning.
Mr Solan is a practising lawyer in New York and I envy him his ability to write this book. I found it illuminating. For a time, when I had a case about the meaning of a phrase, I would get in touch with an academic who taught linguistics and ask him to draw me a word tree. But, with one exception, I found that judges didn’t like word trees: they didn’t like being told that words had only one meaning; in the end, to adapt Alice in Wonderland, words mean what the judge says they mean. So I gave it up. But I still value Mr Solan’s book.
The Fire of Joy
Clive James
This is a collection of (as the long title says) roughly 80 poems to get by heart and say aloud. It’s a good anthology; and poetic descriptions of things inspire arresting ways of expressing thoughts, which is why it is always a good idea for an advocate to have a decent anthology to hand.
But what makes this book really special are the essays on each poem written by Clive James as he neared death. They show the extraordinary depth of knowledge that he had: he is able to create unexpected links; he was and, in these essays, is, funny and wise.
All the neurons in his brain were firing even though he was near death and that’s inspiring. Never mind the poems: the essays here are a fire of joy.
Proust was a Neuroscientist
Jonah Lehrer
Are there two cultures? Perhaps, but this author lives in both of them and what a wealth of learning there is here. What imaginative links the writer finds between art and science. As the introduction describes it, “this book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience”. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered things about the human mind that science is only now discovering.
Cezanne for example worked out how the visual cortex turns the impulses of light into an image. Walt Whitman discovered that the body was the source of feelings: he wrote “the body is electric, our nerves singing with minor voltages” and modern science shows he was right.
George Eliot wrote of the plasticity of the mind long before the theory of the fixed brain was falsified: Gertrude Stern was discovering linguistics long before Noam Chomsky thought of word trees and Escoffier was discovering how we taste and so on. This book is an exciting mix of the artistic and the scientific, in a way poetic. It’s an easy read: it could almost be on the what I am going to read pile, but I learnt an awful lot I didn’t know from reading it.
In Churchill’s Shadow
David Cannadine
Every British male of a certain age is trying to be Mr Churchill: some (our Prime Minister for example) who are not of the certain age, are trying to do that. Why? What was it about this man which means that he cast a shadow 80 and more years forward?
This book will help answer those questions. He wasn’t always right, but he had an instinct for geo politics and an ability to see in to the future which is astonishing; he was very often right. There are, of course, many books about Mr Churchill and I could have chosen any one of a dozen or more. In a short biography the military historian John Keegan wrote of how, when, after the War, he originally heard Mr Churchill’s “I speak to you, for the first time as Prime Minister”, speech on a gramophone record in a New York apartment, he found himself standing unavoidably more upright, spine straighter and stiffer. If you haven’t done it, listen to those speeches: I bet they will do that to you too and, while you are listening, spare a moment to admire their structure. This book helps to explain how and why Mr Churchill casts his shadow so far forward, a good read.
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
Roger Penrose
This is the sort of book which, if I had been keeping two piles, would have gone on the aspirational reading pile and would not have been read. One advantage of abandoning the what I am going to read pile is that it forces me to read this sort of thing (so long as I don’t cheat and electronically download a bit of trash).
The universe functions differently at the macro and micro levels: at the macro level, everything works predictably and busses don’t suddenly drop in front of your from nowhere; at the micro level, it seems that things are less predictable, things can be in two places at once and even in two contradictory states at the same time! Unusual hey? Einstein didn’t believe in things like spooky interaction at a distance. Bohr (who for good luck had a horseshoe over his front door which had the open end at the top) did. When he was asked why the open end of the horseshoe was at the top he replied that, obviously, if it was at the bottom, the good luck would fall out. Roger Penrose is a reliable guide to the complexities of the universe, to the contradictions between the macro and the micro states, and a safe pair of hands helping his readers to keep away from the barmier ideas of modern physics.
Why am I interested in this sort of thing? Well two reasons. First, it is all rather interesting and, secondly, because one of the aspects of quantum theory is that things behave differently according to whether there is an observer. If you draw up a tax plan which depends, for example, on a transaction being a share for share exchange, you very often find that it is a share for share exchange until a judge looks at it when (blow me down) it becomes a disregardable step in a preconceived plan. In other words, the existence of an observer changes the nature of what you thought you were doing. I try, when structuring the transaction, to avoid the need to look at any particular bit.
Or, more shortly I am interested in the quantum universe because I find that, like particles, Judges behave unpredictably.
Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
AA Milne
I am treating these two books as one. Now that I come to think about it, there are three reasons for choosing them. The first is that I once met Christopher Robin and so they bring with them memories of several aspects of my life. The second is that they are a wonderful evocation of a contented childhood and so bring even more memories with them and the third is that they illuminate and describe human nature in a way that not many books do. They are books originally written for children but you will find most of the secrets of life in them (honestly).
They do hold a mirror up to life:
“So they went off together. But wherever they go and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”