If there’s one thing that the anti-religious in Britain agree about it is how evil faith schools are. It is commonplace of both liberal atheists and right-wing Islamophobes to attribute almost every problem in British society to them, from unsuitable attitudes to women to suicide bombers. (One of the reasons for this emphasis is that there are so few other areas in which religion is formally given any status. It’s hard to work up that much indignation about the presence of a few bishops in the House of Lords, although Polly Toynbee will always try.)

Amid all this emphasis on faith schools, it might be worth bringing such actual facts to bear on the case. (This an area where the facts are often not considered: see for example, http://education.guardian.co.uk/faithschools/story/0,,1714762,00.html, where the key statistic used by the Guardian's leader writer on social affairs to describe church schools as ‘villains’ in school segregation proved to be wrong). I want to concentrate on England (since there are different issues for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and on the argument that faith schools should be removed from the state system. (I don’t want to go into the argument this time as to whether more faith schools should be encouraged, since this gets into wider issues about how decisions should be made on new schools and in whose interests).

A bit of a trawl on the DfES website gives you the figures for numbers of faith schools in England.
Table 8 of Schools and Pupils in England 2005 (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000606/SFR42-2005.pdf) includes the following statistics. There are 17,642 state primary/middle schools. 64% of these have no religious character, 25% are Church of England, 10% are Catholic. 0.2% (34 schools out of over 17,000) are non-Christian faith schools. There are 3,385 state secondary schools. 82% of these have no religious character, 6% are Church of England, 10% Catholic, 0.3% (11 schools) are non-Christian faith schools.

In other words, almost two-thirds of state primary schools are secular and over 80% of state secondary schools are. Having been to both Church of England primary and secondary schools, I’d also say that their attempts at religious indoctrination were pretty minimal; moreover it is now official Church of England policy that a proportion of pupils should be from non-believing backgrounds, so these statistics may still over-emphasise the religious effect. As for non-Christian faith schools, they are almost non-existent in the state sector: the entire hype over funding for Islamic schools concerns 3 primary schools and 2 secondary schools.

All this suggests that even if you did get rid of faith schools in the state sector it would have relatively little effect on social segregation. There would still be a lot of separation in some areas due both to ethnic minorities tending to be concentrated in particular areas of towns (only soluble by bussing), and by the fact that the middle classes (largely white) tend to be more adept at working the system to get their children into ‘nice’ schools. (If they weren’t pretending to be religious, they’d still find another way).

The evidence from abroad also suggests that the removal of faith schools from the state system wouldn’t have the two other impacts that the anti-religious imply it might have: reducing ethnic/racial tensions and removing religion from public life. France and the US are the obvious examples of determinedly secular state systems and yet neither of them have resulted in the peaceful integrated society of non-believers that is the desired outcome of the anti-religious. There seem, instead, to be two paradoxical effects of secular state schools. One is that parents who insist that their children have a religious education go into the private sector, where schools are generally less regulated. The other is (at least in the US) that there is no teaching of religion in state schools (to avoid any suspicion of sectarianism) and so children know less about all religions, and are more open to other less balanced sources of information. State faith schools, by encouraging a more regulated teaching of religion, may be a better prospect than these options. (For an interesting Jewish take on faith schools, see http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/comment/story/0,,1769081,00.html).

Finally, the would-be secularists fail to provide any detail on how faith schools should be ‘abolished’. In both voluntary aided and voluntary controlled schools (by far the most frequent forms of state faith schools) the school land and buildings are owned by the church/religious body; in voluntary aided schools, (the majority), the church/religious body also contributes funding. We’re no longer in the days of Henry VIII, where church assets could be plundered at will. It would cost a fortune and cause massive disruption either to buy out the schools from the voluntary organisations or to set up new ones.

All this suggests that the abolition of state faith schools is a handy slogan for bashing religion more than a coherent policy. If the anti-religionists really want to get faith schools to crumble away, they should be concentrating on creating and supporting community (secular) schools so attractive that fewer parents feel the need for faith schools.

…as is the rest of me, staying with relatives in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of Loch Ness. My mind, however, is also on the thought that I’ve going to be teaching a course on later medieval history in a month, which I need to bone up on. The course is on Britain and Europe, 1250-1500 and though in two terms you can’t get into much depth, Scotland does at least get a mention (as one of the objects of English conquest/colonialism/domination).

So surely being in Scotland is a good opportunity to get an increased feel for Scottish history? Unfortunately, that’s not really the case, at least not where we are based. Maybe in Edinburgh or Jedborough or Stirling or Aberdeen you can connect to Scottish history; in the Highlands what you largely get is Highland history. There are a number of histories of the Highlands in the bookshops which span centuries. For just about any other region of the British Isles, such a regional history would be an artificial construct for most periods. Anglo-Saxon Wessex, for example, may have its own distinctive history, but Tudor Wessex makes little sense. There’s no real continuity from medieval Northumbria to Tyneside in the Industrial Revolution.

For the Highlands, however, such a regional history makes a lot of sense. There are relatively few periods in which Highland history connects strongly even to the history of the rest of Scotland. There are a lot of early intersections, of course, like St Columba meeting Nessie or the Viking period, when the coastal regions as a whole are just as historically significant places as those inland. After that, however, the wider significance of the Highlands is minimal. The English and the Scots fought for Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness in the 1290s, but the real action wasn’t there. It wasn’t until the Jacobites that the Highlands again had a significant political role. And after that bloody interlude it was back to a history where the influence was mainly from the outside onto the Highlands, from the clearances to the fishing towns established in the late eighteenth century (like Ullapool and Plockton) and including the struggle for land rights, the Highlands being turned into sporting estates and various fishing and tourism booms and busts. The Highland influence on the outside world was largely from the exiles and ex-pats, from Nova Scotia to the Seaforth Highlanders.

The Highlands and Islands have provided many of the great symbols of Scotland: mountains, isles and lochs, whisky, clans and tartans, Celtic spirituality and Gaelic, caber tossing and the Loch Ness monster. Yet such symbolic importance is relatively recent and never been reflected in political or economic importance. It remains a marginal region, economically subsidised, often in danger of becoming merely a playground for visitors. However much I love visiting here, I suspect I have to look elsewhere to find the real heart of Scotland.

Part of becoming a historian is learning the historiography of your particular specialism: how and why did studies of a particular topic develop as they did? The early historiography of particular subjects tends to be written down in review articles: discussion of modern historians and in particular the link between their political and historical views is mainly imparted by oral tradition instead. (One of the reasons that Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (Harper, 1993) was so controversial was that it made such informal discussion/gossip (sometimes scurrilous) available to a wider audience).

Linking views on history to contemporary politics in this way is an interesting and sometimes enlightening experience, provided it isn’t used at the expense of actually engaging with the historical argument being made. If you automatically dismiss Marxist historians or those in Catholic orders, for example, you’d miss some very important studies. It also encourages you to think of how underlying political assumptions and recent events shapes your own work…

The study of the Carolingian period has had a boom after the Second World War. Not just a number of French and German scholars, who were interested, but also Dutch and British ones. And in many cases this was linked to positive view of the European (Economic) Community/EU. At some level Charlemagne’s empire becomes a prefiguration of a multiethnic, united Europe that goes beyond nineteenth and early twentieth century nationalism. (This relationship is also seen beyond medievalists: there is an annually awarded ‘Charlemagne Prize’ for the person who has done most to promote European unification (http://www.aachen.de/EN/sb/pr_az/karls_pr/index.html)).

There are obvious problems with the analogy, since Charlemagne’s empire was achieved by conquest, sometimes marked by considerable violence. But it’s still a more inspiring model than Napoleonic Europe, let alone the Third Reich. (I’m not sure to what extent there was a postwar revival in interest in the Roman empire, another possible precursor model for the EU). And even now I suspect you wouldn’t find a British scholar of Carolingian Europe (or early medieval Europe as a whole) who is anti-EU.

I subscribe to this same combination of a positive view of the EU and a fascination with Carolingian Europe and yet mine is a slightly different take, from someone who entered medieval scholarship fifty years after the war. In particular, I am a post-Yugoslavian historian of the early Middle Ages.

I think it is because of the break up of Yugoslavia that I look at the early medieval state from a more sympathetic view than many previous scholars. There has been a tendency to stress the Carolingian state’s inadequacy on many fronts – the many problems with its system of justice, the limited ability of the centre to control the regions, Francia’s relatively rapid disintegration into smaller units. (A lot of this seems to be based implicitly either on comparisons with late nineteenth century bureaucratic states or an idealised Roman Empire). But the lesson I take from Yugoslavia is that a relatively ‘successful’ and ‘modern’ state can collapse into chaos remarkably quickly. And conversely, thinking about both former Yugoslavia and other ‘failed states’, that it is very difficult to rebuild a collapsed state. There are several specific problems. One is that to regain a state’s monopoly on the legitimate authorisation of violence is extremely hard once private militias or a ‘self-help’ tradition of revenge attacks have developed. Secondly once sectarian/factional/religious/ethnic hatreds have either been developed deliberately or at least not been countered effectively, they become self-perpetuating. Thirdly, it is very hard to tackle widespread governmental corruption: you can hardly dismiss the corrupt from office if the majority of officials are corrupt. And fourthly (and linked to this): to get non-corrupt officials, you need them relatively well-paid by the government, which means you need an effective tax system, which means you need non-corrupt officials collecting the tax in the first place, which is a virtuous circle it’s hard to get started on.

All this means that even if you know what it takes to create a successful state it’s hard actually to achieve it starting from unfavourable conditions, as both Bosnia and Afghanistan have shown, along with numerous African examples. In which case the Carolingian attempt at governing an empire shouldn’t be judged too harshly: large-scale order is hard to maintain, and it’s even harder to create. And it also raises a more worrying thought about our own countries. How resilient are they in reality? To what extent are modern nations just confidence tricks, only sustainable as long as most people are prepared to buy into their illusions?

September’s History Today magazine has a very bad article by someone called Deirdre McCloskey ‘The Discreet Virtue of the Bourgeoisie’ (http://www.historytoday.com/dt_main_allatonce.asp?gid=31807&aid=&tgid=&amid=30233439&g31807=x&g31800=x&g30026=x&g20991=x&g21010=x&g19965=x&g19963=x) (not free). Bad not so much because it was a right-wing view of the wonders of capitalism and the wrongheadness of the ‘clerisy’ in opposing it, as because it is incoherent. For one thing, it keeps on blurring capitalism, liberalism and the bourgeoisie, as if those concepts are interchangeable. For another, it doesn’t distinguish who the bourgeoisie are and whether this group has changed over the last 400 years. Are these people independent entrepreneurs or are they white collar employees? Finally, she doesn’t even make entirely clear what she thinks the bourgeois virtues are. On the other hand, based on her article and some of the other stuff I know on early modern Europe, here’s a brief list of what I would say the ‘Protestant’ capitalist virtues involved:

1) A positive valuation of the activities of trade, commerce and other money making activities
2) Respect for private property and the rule of law more generally
3) Hard work seen as a positive virtue
4) Prudent stewardship of wealth and thrift more generally (not wasting money, but reinvesting it or using it for charitable purposes)
5) Honest behaviour in commercial transactions and elsewhere in life
6) A good reputation. (This is something that went far beyond what we would now consider commercial virtues. A good bourgeois should be well-behaved himself and have a well-behaved family and wider household. The women should be chaste, modest and thrifty, the men should be polite and not prone to disorderly conduct (violence, abuse, drunkenness, gambling, deviant sexual behaviour). These became commercial virtues because decisions about credit-worthiness, for example, were significantly affected by a more general evaluation of a man’s moral standing.

The interesting question for me is to what extent this historic set of virtues is still significant in modern capitalism. If you had to draw up a list of the desirable character attributes for a modern businessperson or entrepreneur, for example, I think you would probably come up with a very different list, that would start like this:

1) Boldness
2) Innovative or flexible outlook
3) Skills of persuasion/salesmanship
4) Customer-focused
(There are probably more things to add, but this gives a flavour).

Most of the older virtues are if not completely irrelevant, at least of far lesser importance (The exception being hard work). For example, positive views of trade (at least in the Protestant tradition) always involved it being the right kind of trade. You couldn’t rightly invest in enterprises intended to undermine the moral status of others (see e.g. the Quakers not getting involved in the arms trade, restrictions on involvement in industries such as the drinks trade). Even in more recent times, bourgeois societies have been very disapproving of commercial sectors such as pornography or gambling. Capitalism in its modern form, however, sees those prohibitions as stifling. If you can make money from porn, tobacco, people drinking until they’re sick etc, that is perfectly acceptable.

Modern forms of capitalism also have a limited respect for the rule of law and private property. If there is sufficient commercial value to breaching the law even ‘legitimate’ companies will either do so or at least lobby hard to get the law changed. For example, British companies undermined the Sunday trading laws, in the grounds that that was what their customers wanted. Recent eminent domain (compulsory purchase) decisions in the US have put the interests of property developers before private householders.

Prudent stewardship has also been downgraded in two ways. One is that the most admired entrepreneurs are those who have taken considerable risks with both their firm’s assets and their own. To go into bankruptcy is no longer an extreme social stigma. Cautiousness in a firm, a desire to expand slowly so as to avoid potential problems, is regarded with hostility by investors. Those managing businesses expect to take large salaries from them, almost regardless of the profits the company is making. Similarly, thrift is no longer a virtue. Much of the modern economy is sustained by conspicuous consumption and consumer spending booms and a genuinely thrifty population would probably wreck a nations’ economy.

There is probably still more of a role for honest behaviour in modern business, although accounting and tax dodges have become widespread. A reputation for dishonesty is a handicap (although not an insuperable one) for a company or a business leader. But those who are successful are no longer lauded primarily for their honesty.

Capitalism nowadays has also largely removed the significance of wider social reputation. If it came out that Bill Gates (or Melinda Gates) was partial to bestiality, would it undermine Microsoft? Business practice (as in many other spheres) increasingly decouples public and private virtue: a bad man may still be doing a good job.

All this suggests that capitalism is doing a far better job of undermining bourgeois values than socialism ever did. I think one of the key ethical questions for today is how the essentially amoral (but economically effective) force of capitalism can be harnessed within an externally provided ethical framework. Simply bleating that capitalism is wonderful and blaming the intellectuals, as McCloskey does, is no help.

There was a vaguely depressing article in the Guardian yesterday (http://society.guardian.co.uk/interview/story/0,,1855782,00.html) which had John Hutton, the minister in charge of work and pensions discussing ideas for tackling child poverty. The depressing part was less the existence of child poverty (which is hardly news), than the government’s suggestions for tackling it. John Hutton made the right noises about child poverty being a moral issue, but his solution is pretty simplistic. Everybody should be in paid work. Take this, for example:

Hutton, his deputy, Jim Murphy, and their new chief adviser, Lisa Harker, have alighted on two distinct priority groups that badly need to be helped if poverty is to be tackled: first, lone parents; and second, the unemployed non-benefit-claiming partner in a family where the other member of the couple is in work. Hutton points out that 40% of the children living in poverty are in such households. He says: "People assume poverty is confined to lone parents. It is absolutely not."

Hutton admits these unemployed individuals in couples - often parents with children - are a new frontier for the employment service since, as they are not claiming benefit, they are not in contact with Jobcentre Plus, the government's employment service.

"It is a challenge for us," he says..."If such households are to be lifted out of poverty, they need someone in a full-time job, and the other partner working part-time. It is perfectly fair if they don't want to work for whatever reason, but we need to extend the help, advice and support we make available to them. They can make whatever decisions they want. It is a free country. I would not want to force them to work, but at the very least we need to better signpost to childcare services such as Sure Start.”

Surely the real moral issue here is that it is no longer possible to maintain a family on one full-time wage. (The poverty being measured is relative, rather than absolute, but even relative poverty is unpleasant). The government ought to be thinking about whether the minimum wage is too low, not how to get more people into inadequately paid jobs. Similarly, the government’s solution to the problem of lone parents in poverty is to get them into work and Hutton implies that there needs to be more attempts to get even those with relatively young children (under 11) into work.

Some mothers (and it’s overwhelmingly mothers we’re talking about in both cases) even of small children would prefer to be in paid work if it was available. (I do myself). And the government has done a lot to help working mothers in terms of childcare provision and subsidies. But the implication of their policies seems to be that full time motherhood is now to be regarded as a luxury item, only suitable for the relatively small percentage of families where one partner has a well paid full-time job. Yet other parts of the government are insisting that parenting must be more intensive, more care must be taken to raise well-behaved children and to support their educational progress. (There is also a separate pressure point in that grandparents, who in many cases would traditionally provide additional childcare and support, are themselves expected to be in paid employment, even beyond the retirement age).

Why does the government not value full time parenting? Because, I suppose, its economic benefits cannot be measured directly. What worries me is that the recent political debate seems to make motherhood a zero-sum game. Either parties aim to benefit working mothers or non-working mothers, but not both. David Cameron’s ideas about transferable tax allowances aren’t much help for stay at home mothers because they don’t much benefit those only just above the tax threshold. Maybe it’s time for feminists to revisit an old campaign. Rather than wages for housework, how about wages for parenting?

I just saw a headline on the BBC website: 'Greek fire hits holiday Britons'. I immediately thought: what swine has started using Greek fire as a weapon again? (For non-specialists, it's something a bit like napalm, that burns on contact with water). Yet another example of man's inhumanity to man and the increasing barbarity of the twenty-first century, I thought. Then it dawned on me it was just headline speak for a fire near a Greek tourist resort. Oh well, back to ninth century abduction theology...

There was a very good documentary on Channel 4 last night, called Pram Face, which had a reporter following the lives of two young single mothers in Exeter for six months. One of the women, in particular, called Ala, made a very big impression, because she was obviously trying so hard to be a good mother in very difficult circumstances. Her story was not only sad, but made me feel vaguely uneasy, because it was undermining two of the basic tenets of the middle class. One is that middle class children do better than working-class children primarily because of their parents’ attitudes rather than because of money. And the more general version of that: that the reason we in the middle classes have a better life is because we deserve it.

It’s often a temptation to blame young working class mothers for their difficult situations: they spend their money rashly, or they drink too much or they have chaotic personal lives. This was a rather different story. Ala didn’t come across as simply a victim: she was trying to make something of her life, but it was an uphill struggle. Her mother was an alcoholic and she’d never known her father. She was in her early twenties, had two small children in a damp council flat and was trying to survive on social security. Her main support was her friend, also a single mum. Ala had to borrow money because one of her children had been hospitalised and that had caused her extra expense. She didn’t want to get involved with social services because she’d been in care herself as a child and was concerned her children might be taken away if she admitted she needed help.

Maybe Ala shouldn’t have chosen to continue with her pregnancies, but as she said herself, all she’d really wanted to do in life was be a mother. She didn’t have any other particular career ambitions. Other than that, it’s difficult to see where she’s gone wrong. And yet she’s ended up in a situation where it’s very hard for her to give her children the kind of upbringing she wants for them. She and her friend talked about how they’d like to take the children for trips somewhere different, just to get on the train and go somewhere, but they can’t afford it. She saved up for most of the year so that her children could have nice presents for Christmas, the sort of toys that many children would take for granted.

I’ve tended to feel sometimes that money isn’t really important, that it’s perfectly possible to give children a stimulating environment on not much money. Seeing this documentary makes clear the limits of that theory. There are a lot of choices you can’t make when your budget is so low. And I knew that I would not be doing as well in that situation as Ala is; I would not cope in the way that she does at the moment. Ala is, almost certainly, a better mother in many ways than I am, and yet L is probably going to have a better, easier, more fulfilling life than Ala’s children are. Not because of my personal virtues (or indeed L's), but because L (and myself before her) has been lucky in her socio-economic background.

I am left hoping that Ala can cope and her children will thrive, but aware of how fragile her advance is. Perhaps if Ala can give her children the good parenting she never had, they will be able to have a happier, less difficult life than she has, but the odds will still be stacked against them. Meanwhile L’s path has been smoothed for her in ways that she might find hard to appreciate when she grows up. I’ll just have to try and remind her (and myself) periodically.

The disaster in Iraq is getting so obvious that even previous supporters of the war are now growing cold about it. One of the more prominent liberal hawks, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times started a recent column (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html, not free):

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

Friedman has been enthusiastic both about the war and about creating “one good example in the heart of the Arab world of a decent, progressive state, where the politics of fear and tribalism do not reign”. But now he feels disillusioned about the whole thing and wants to pull US troops out. For those of us who have always opposed the Iraq war, it is positive that even some of its supporters are starting to see the mess created, instead of just denying it. But when you read Friedman’s column, you see that’s he still committed to the principle of the war in Iraq, the Platonic ideal of the perfect war and aftermath, that should have happened and somehow didn’t. He says himself:

Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it [the creation of a progressive state] is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

The blame then, is due to Bush or the ‘Arabs’. Taking the Bush half, first, was it plausible before the war that Bush would deal with the situation well? I think even then it was clear that Bush and his administration were lying about the reasons for the war, were not capable of sustained attention to a foreign policy initiative (as in Afghanistan), had poor intelligence but grandiose ideas about the Middle East, had little idea on how to fight guerilla warfare/carry out counter-terrorism and were willing to play fast and loose with the Geneva conventions. In the last few years we have learnt something of the fresh depths of the US government’s incompetence and untrustworthiness, but the outline were already clear before the war. And the US and UK armies were always going to be placed in one of the most difficult military situations going, occupying a country and fighting guerillas without alienating the surrounding population.

The more pernicious bit is Friedman’s reference to ‘Arab reasons’. I think we can already see here the outline of the revisionist view of the war. The US behaved and performed superbly: the resultant mess was all the Iraqis’ fault (though Friedman presumably wants to cast the blame wider as well to include other Arab nations).

There is one obvious problem with blaming the Iraqis (or the Arabs) for what happened: they didn’t get asked if they wanted the war. What else did the ‘Arabs’ do that they shouldn’t have done? The Iraqis took a long time to form a Cabinet, because (the shame of it), some political groups were trying to take partisan advantage of the war (Americans would never do that). Some Iraqis have resisted the occupying force. Some Iraqis have put loyalty to their ethnic group or religion before their commitment to Iraq. Some Iraqis have become terrorists. A ‘militia culture’ has developed, as Friedman puts it. Outside states, such as Iran, have supported particular factions. (It is only because Bush and Blair are complete irony-free zones that they could tell Iran that outside forces shouldn’t get involved in Iraq with a straight face).

All this has very little to do with being Arab: there are parallels from the aftermath of the French Revolution, Northern Ireland and former Yugoslavia, just to name a few of the most obvious. If you are in a dangerous situation, tribalism and sectarianism, the resort to violence and militias are commonplace reactions. An immediate transition to a decent progressive state would have required a level of self-sacrificing saintliness from large numbers of Iraqis far beyond what is normal for any country undergoing violent changes. Friedman’s comments, by ignoring this, contribute another small intellectual part to the demonization of Arabs/Muslims as intrinsically bad/irrational/fanatical/incapable of democracy.

I’ve just read for the first time (and enjoyed) one of the Stephanie Plum series of novels by Janet Evanovitch. I was slightly surprised because although I used to be a big fan of crime fiction, I never got into the subgenre of female private eyes (Plum is technically a bounty hunter, not a detective, but the effect is similar). In particular, I never warmed to the template of the tough woman P.I., Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski. I’ve tried reading Paretsky’s novels several times (which my husband likes) and always get turned off.

This distaste has always bugged me, since stories about strong heroines ought to appeal to my feminist tastes. But I know specifically what my trigger is about Warshawski. It’s when she goes jogging or refers to her being good at sports at school that I mentally say ‘Not my sort of woman’ and she loses my sense of identification and solidarity with her.

I’ve been trying to work out the mechanics of this reaction. I’ve read lots of books over the years about tough-guy male protagonists, and the fact that I’m unfit and deeply unsporty doesn’t stop me enjoying the novels. (Some of these, such as the works of Raymond Chandler and Dick Francis, are written in the first person, like Paretsky’s books, so it’s not that stylistic reason why I enjoy reading about Philip Marlowe, not Vic Warshawski). Similarly, I can read books about beautiful, talented actresses/singers etc, without necessarily being turned off, despite being plain myself.

I think it must have something to do both with the pseudo-realistic style of the Paretsky books and the omni-competence of Warshawski. Paretsky shows you the dedication with which a female detective gets physically tough, whereas we are expected to assume that Marlowe naturally remains able to slug a guy, however much liquor and hard living he’s had. Unlike the heroines of more conventional blockbusters, meanwhile, Warshawski is self-reliant AND brave AND smart. Paretsky’s books, I feel, are at some level telling me: ‘You could be like this if you really put enough effort in, but since you don’t you’re just an unsuccessful wimp.’ I feel more comfortable with other, more vulnerable or just slightly less gritty heroines, from Harriet Vane and Amelia Peabody to Stephanie Plum.