Couple of Preachers and one Nemesis the Warlock (books I and II, Titan reprint); Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier (started) and some collected essays; Jeffrey Meyers’ Orwell biography; one mathematics textbook (barely started); The essential Turing (browsing, skipping the hard bits) and Neil Stephenson’s most excellent Cryptonomicon (halfway through); von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Douglas Oliver’s Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (rereading). Also Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming, by Peter van Roy and Seif Haridi, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

Funnily enough I started the Turing reader before I started on Cryptonomicon, which my sister just happened to let me borrow after she finished it. Turing is one of my all-time heroes; Alan Hodges’ superb biography is full of reasons why.

Hayek is a tremendously interesting read if you want to understand where Thatcher’s Tory party was coming from and where it thought it was taking us. In particular, it goes a long way towards explaining the (not altogether unjustified) Tory characterisation of the socialist left as a bunch of sinister would-be totalitarian control freaks who needed to be utterly defeated and wiped out if anything vital and wholesome were ever to thrive. I say “not altogether unjustified” rather as if there had never existed a pragmatic, pluralist, democratic left in this country. Douglas Oliver’s political dream-poem The Infant and the Pearl stands as a reminder that such a thing was once possible, and even desirable.

It is also instructive to read Hayek next to Orwell’s essays, and to observe that Orwell thought and said, during WWII, that a socialist revolution was necessary in order to make the UK sufficiently economically efficient to oppose the Nazis successfully. Centralised planning and economic direction was, in Orwell’s view, something the Nazis had got right - if not necessarily in a moral sense, then at least in the sense that it made them better at manufacturing huge quantities of armaments and fighting wars with them. It is difficult to imagine anybody now attempting to argue that the deficiencies of capitalism are clearly illustrated by its blatant inability to wage wars effectively.

A possible alternative title for The Road to Serfdom might be The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.