Relic of a different literary age 
During the Second World War, my alma mater, Princeton, wrote to all of its students serving in the armed forces, offering to send them three books, gratis, from a list of 70. I love lists like this for what it reveals about taste.
I reckon this 70 stand up pretty well. Only a handful are out of print, and the few that I didn’t know sound, on investigation, worth pursuing. I knew Anatole France had won the Nobel prize for literature, but I didn’t know Penguin Island was considered his masterwork a satire of the history of France. And the Ambrose Bierce stories, In the Midst of Life, arose from the Civil War years. In fact, the list is permeated with works about war, some ee cummings’ The Enormous Room profoundly anti-establishment.
I wonder if Princeton, or any other grand institution, would produce such a heterodox, enduring list today?
As an Italophile, I despair at the current government in Rome. But there are endearing aspects to even unattractive Italians.
In what other country would a finance minister say, “Wars end when consumerism triumphs over romanticism”?
Giulio Tremonti (see above) may favour consumerism, but Sam Brittan makes the case for the opposition in, of all places, the Financial Times.
He quotes Keynes writing in 1930: “[Eventually we would realise] that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” (Isn’t it a pity that no one writes like that anymore?)
Brittan, known for his sometimes too-dense economic analysis, is hardly a starry-eyed idealist. And he emphasises that a market economy is the best way to achieve a less materialistic society. He concludes: “A century before [Keynes], John Stuart Mill had written that ‘elbowing and treading on each other’s heels’ were a passing stage in human development. The transition will not be an easy one. But it may help our sanity if we see in it the silver lining that Keynes and Mill so long ago discerned.”
Although I’ve lived in Europe for over 23 years, I still consider Chicago my home town. So I’m pleased Boeing has settled well in its new headquarters town. But what was interesting about the Phil Condit interview in the Financial Times was his stress on the importance of the old virtue of being with one’s peers: “Mr Condit relishes Chicago because it has a diversity of information and opinion that can be gathered from regular contact with fellow chief executives in the area. Motorola’s Chris Galvin, James Farrell of Illinois Tool Works, and Tellabs’ Richard Notebaert are on his list.”
Further proof, if any were needed, that the notion that technology renders location immaterial is nonsensical.
The Guardian helpfully provides the full list of Argentina’s five presidents in less than two weeks: Fernando de la Rua, Ramon Puerta, Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, Ramon Puerta (again!), Eduardo Camano, Eduardo Duhalde.