Listism - the compulsive desire to raise interest in media events by compiling league tables of films, books, paintings, sporting highlights, embarrassing moments on TV and much else - is rapidly becoming the British obsession. Hardly have we had time to digest the significance of Turner's The Fighting Temeraire winning the vote for the best painting in Britain before the indomitable Melvyn Bragg pops up with Twelve (British) Books That Changed The World.
Launching the new season of ITV's The South Bank Show, Lord Bragg could not resist the opportunity to get one back at Lord Birt after the latter's criticism of ITV's alleged neglect of public sector broadcasting in his recent lecture in Edinburgh. Lord Bragg said his former LWT colleague had joined "the club of beached grandees", a phrase that is bound to make it to someone's top 100 best revenge remarks about Lord Birt.
The Bragg list of books that changed the world is in a class of its own. This is because it is quite possible that no one in the world, maybe not even Lord Bragg himself, has completely read all of a list that ranges from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (a book that has achieved the extraordinary feat of being quoted equally by right- and left-wingers) to the King James Bible of 1611, written in a beautiful vernacular English that is admired by believers and unbelievers alike. Also included are Darwin's The Origin of Species, William Shakespeare's First Folio, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women -not to mention the first rule book of the Football Association, a book which paved the way for the global expansion of a game formerly played between two village "crews".
People can, and will, challenge most of these and other choices. But that is not really the point. It is a thoughtful, unexpected, provocative list that is bound to lead to an interesting debate and, above all, to more copies of the books being printed and more people actually reading them. That can only be good. It is almost enough to give listism a good name.
