Posts Tagged ‘style’
“Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world”*…
We live in a time when a certain kind of status– expertise– is under attack. Dan Williams suggests that by celebrating “common sense” over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them…
… As Will Storr argues in The Status Game, humiliation is the “nuclear bomb of the emotions”. When ignited, it can fuel everything from genocide to suicide, mass atrocities to self-immolation. There are few parts of human nature more chaotic, dangerous, or self-destructive. And yet, there is often a rationale underlying these reactions rooted in the strange nature of human sociality.
If humans were solitary animals, we would have evolved to approximate the behaviour of Homo economicus, the idealised rational agent imagined in much of twentieth century economics. We would act in ways that are predictable, sensible, and consistent. The characters depicted in Dostoevsky’s novels would be unintelligible to such a creature, except as victims of mental illness.
But we are not. We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.
For one thing, we rely on complex networks of cooperation to achieve almost all our goals. Given this, much of human behaviour is rooted not in ordinary material self-interest but in the need to gain access to such networks—to win approval, cultivate a good reputation, and attract partners, friends, and allies. Human decision-making occurs within the confines of this social scrutiny. We evaluate almost every action, habit, and preference not just by its immediate effects but by its reputational impact.
At the same time, much of human competition is driven by the desire for prestige. In well-functioning human societies, individuals advance their interests not by bullying and dominating others but by impressing them. These high-status individuals are admired, respected, and deferred to. They win esteem and all its benefits. Their lives feel meaningful and purposeful.
In contrast, those who fail at the status game—who stack up at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy—experience shame and humiliation. If their position feels unfair, they become resentful and angry. In extreme cases, they might take vengeance on those who look down on them. Or they might take their own life. In some cases, such as mass killings by young men who “lose face” and run “amok” (a Malay word, illustrating the behaviour’s cross-cultural nature), they do both…
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… The name of this newsletter, “Conspicuous Cognition”, is inspired by Veblen’s ideas about economics. Just as he sought to correct a misguided tendency to treat economics through a narrowly economic lens, my work and writings seek to correct a similarly misguided tendency to treat cognition—how we think, form beliefs, generate ideas, evaluate evidence, communicate, and so on—through a narrowly cognitive lens.
Much cognition is competitive and conspicuous. People strive to show off their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. They compete to win attention and recognition for making novel discoveries or producing rationalisations of what others want to believe. They often reason not to figure out the truth but to persuade and manage their reputation. They often form beliefs not to acquire knowledge but to signal their impressive qualities and loyalties.
Placed in this context of social competition and impression management, what might be called “epistemic charity”—the free offer of knowledge and expertise—takes on a different appearance. Although this charity can be driven by disinterested altruism (think of parents educating their children), it can also result from status competition and a desire to show off.
In some cases, people are happy to receive such epistemic charity and heap praise and admiration on those who provide it. The wonders of modern science emerge from a status game that celebrates those who make discoveries. However, we sometimes recoil at the thought of admitting someone has discovered something new, or—even worse—that they know better than we do. When that happens, we are not sceptical of the truth of their ideas, although we might choose to frame things that way. Rather, their offer of knowledge carries a symbolic significance we want to reject. It hurts our pride. It feels humiliating.
On a small scale, this feeling is an everyday occurrence. Few people like to be corrected, to admit they are wrong, or to acknowledge another’s superior knowledge, wisdom, or intelligence. On a larger scale, it might be implicated in some of the most significant and dangerous trends in modern politics.
Many of our most profound political problems appear to be entangled with epistemic issues. Think of our alleged crises of “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “post-truth”, and conspiracy theories. Think of the spread of viral lies and falsehoods on social media. Think of intense ideological polarisation, vicious political debates, and heated culture wars, disagreements and conflicts that ultimately concern what is true.
A critical aspect of these problems is the so-called “crisis of expertise”, the widespread populist rejection of claims advanced in institutions like science, universities, public health organisations, and mainstream media. Famously, many populists have “had enough of experts.” As Trump once put it, “The experts are terrible.”
This rejection of expertise goes beyond mere scepticism. It is actively hostile. The Trump administration’s recent attacks on Harvard and other elite universities provide one illustration of this hostility, but there are many others. Most obviously, there is the proud willingness among many populists to spread and accept falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and quack science in the face of an exasperated barrage of “fact-checks” from establishment institutions. Why are these corrections so politically impotent? Why do so many voters refuse to “follow the science” or “trust the experts”?
Experts have produced many theories. Some point to ignorance and stupidity. Some point to disinformation and mass manipulation. Some point to partisan media, echo chambers, and algorithms. And some suggest that the crisis might be related to objective failures by experts themselves.
There is likely some truth in all these explanations. Nevertheless, they share a common assumption: that the “crisis of expertise” is best understood in epistemic terms. They assume that populist hostility to the expert class reflects scepticism that their expertise is genuine—that they really know what they claim to know.
Perhaps this assumption is mistaken. Perhaps at least in some cases, the crisis of expertise is less about doubting expert knowledge than about rejecting the social hierarchy that “trust the experts” implies… some populists might sooner accept ignorance than epistemic charity from those they refuse to acknowledge as superior…
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… If this analysis is correct, the populist rejection of expertise is not merely an intellectual disagreement over truth or evidence, even if it is typically presented that way. It is, in part, a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity from those who present themselves as social superiors.
In the case of populist elites and conspiracy theorists, this refusal is often driven by objectionable feelings of grandiosity and narcissism. However, for many ordinary voters, it may serve as a more understandable dignity-defence mechanism, a refusal to accept the social meanings implied by one-way deference to elites with alien values. It is less “post-truth” than anti-humiliation.
This would help to explain several features of the populist rejection of expertise.
First, there is its emotional signature. In many cases, the populist refusal to defer to experts appears to be wrapped up in intense emotions of resentment, indignation, and defiant pride, rather than simple scepticism.
Second, the rejection of expert authority often has a performative character. Experts are not merely ignored. They are actively, angrily, and proudly rejected. Like Captain Snegiryov, the populist publicly tramples on the expert’s offer of knowledge.
Third, there is the destructive aspect of many populist sentiments. If the issue were merely scepticism of experts and establishment institutions, the solution would presumably involve targeted reforms designed to make them more reliable. As recent Republican attacks on elite universities make clear, many populists prefer to take a sledgehammer to these institutions. The explosive hostility towards public health experts during the pandemic provides another telling example.
Finally, there is the fact that populists often embrace anti-intellectualism as an identity marker, a badge of pride. The valorisation of gut instincts, the proposed “revolution of common sense”, and the embrace of slogans like “do your own research” affirm the status of those who prioritise intuition over experts. The demonisation of “ivory tower academics”, “blue-haired”, “woke” professors, and the “chattering classes” are crafted to have a similar effect. This all looks more like status-inverting propaganda than intellectual disagreements over truth and trustworthiness.
To understand is not to forgive. Just as we can empathise with Snegiryov’s refusal of much-needed money whilst condemning it as short-sighted and self-destructive, we can try to understand the populist rejection of expertise without endorsing or justifying it.
To be clear, there are profound problems with our expert class and elite institutions. They routinely make errors, sometimes catastrophic ones, and often wield their social authority in ways that advance their own interests over the public good. The Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the many failures of policy and communication throughout the pandemic provide powerful illustrations of these expert failures, but there are many others.
Moreover, the social and political uniformity of experts today creates legitimate concerns about their trustworthiness. When scientific journals, public health authorities, and fact-checking organisations are obviously shaped by the values, partisan allegiances, and sensibilities of highly educated, progressive professionals, it is reasonable for those with very different values and identities to become mistrustful of them.
Nevertheless, there is no alternative to credentialed experts in complex, modern societies. To address the political challenges we confront today, we need specialised training, rigorous standards of evidence, and coordinated activity within institutions carefully engineered to produce knowledge. Although these institutions must be reformed in countless ways, they are indispensable.
Given this, the populists’ rejection of expertise does not liberate them from bias and error. It guarantees bias and error. Gut instincts, intuition, and “common sense” are fundamentally unreliable ways of producing knowledge. As we see with the MAGA media ecosystem today, the valorisation of such methods means returning to a pre-scientific, medieval worldview dominated by baseless conspiracy theories, snake oil medicine, economic illiteracy, and know-nothing punditry.
And yet, the dangers associated with this style of politics underscore the importance of understanding its causes. If the crisis of expertise is partly rooted in feelings of status threat, resentment, and humiliation, this has significant implications for how we should think about—and address—this crisis.
Most obviously, it suggests that purely epistemic solutions will have limited efficacy. You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. And as long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.
Moreover, it suggests that rebuilding trust in experts means more than improving their reliability, as crucial as that is. Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence.
We do not just need better ways of producing knowledge. We need to rethink how knowledge is offered: in ways that respect people’s pride and minimise the humiliations of one-sided epistemic charity…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Status, class, and the crisis of expertise,” from @danwphilosophy.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Buddha (Ittha Sutta, AN 5.43)
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As we dig dignity, we might send classy birthday greetings to George Bryan “Beau” Brummell; he was born on this date in 1778. An important figure in Regency England (a close pal of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV), he became the the arbiter of men’s fashion in London and in the territories under its cultural sway.
Brummell was remembered afterwards as the preeminent example of the dandy; a whole literature was founded on his manner and witty sayings, e.g. “Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless.”
“I believe, you know, I actually, naturally think, in long, sad, singing lines”*…
Matthew Zipf on how– in the hands of a true literay stylist– the humble comma is a matter of precision, logic, individuality, and music…
… The most conspicuous mark of Renata Adler’s style is its abundance of commas. In her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), there are a few sentences that edge on the absurd: “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life.” A critic tallied it up, counting “40 words and ten commas—Guinness Book of World Records?” Each of those commas had its grammatical defense, but Adler’s style did not comply with the usual standards of fluent prose. She cordoned off phrases, such as “on the phone,” that other writers would just run through. One reader, responding to a 1983 New York magazine profile of Adler, wrote in a letter to the editor, “If the examples of Renata Adler’s writing … are typical, Miss Adler will never make it to the road. The way is ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption’ blocked by commas.” The reader was quoting one of Adler’s own comma-laden critical phrases against her. The editors titled the letter “Comma Wealth.”
Adler’s comma usage differs from the balanced rhythms of 18th-century essayists, as well as from the breathless lines common among American writers after Hemingway. Her punctuation jars, and turns abruptly, like a skater’s blade stopping and sending up shards of ice. She likes to leave out conjunctions in chains of adjectives, as in her film review of “a leering, uncertain, embarrassing, protracted little comedy.” Certain lines of hers work almost entirely by carefully placed commas, which tighten the style, each one a rivet on the page: “But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.” A hesitation, a stutter, and then a swing into the qualification (“unless they sleep a lot”). Interestingly, no comma in “bored and bored people”: grammar sacrificed for rhythm and speed.
Not everyone saw the elegant precision in how she pointed her sentences. After one of her books came out, a critic wrote that “virtually every sentence is peppered with enough commas to make the prose read like a series of hiccups.” Another letter writer complained of her “muddled syntax and wandering, endless sentences.”
But Adler’s style had its admirers, too. “Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler’s,” a critic wrote in a Harper’s review of her first novel. New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman recently said that she could not think of a living stylist she admired more. But the most insightful comment might have come from a man splitting the difference. At The New York Times, where in 1968 Adler had become the daily film critic, editor Abe Rosenthal addressed a concerned colleague by first conceding that Adler was no great stylist, and then suggesting a metaphor: She’s olives. The readers will grow to like her…
… Adler sang of punctuation. In Pitch Dark, there is an associative run, typical of her novels, that reads: “And this matter of the commas. And this matter of the paragraphs. The true comma. The pause comma. The afterthought comma. The hesitation comma. The rhythm comma. The blues.” I wonder if everyone hears the music in that “riff,” as she calls it, with the rhythm of the short fragments and the satisfaction of the last monosyllable. There is also, within the musical list, a legitimate sorting of functions. The afterthought comma, Adler said, was when you wanted to add something, and there was no obvious way to do it. The true comma was the grammatical one, separating phrases or clauses. When spoken, it could function differently from other commas. To read out loud, “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman …” you should not rest at each phrase. The true comma does not always require a pause.
Punctuation controls two things: logical separation and breath. In Adler’s words, “part of it is meaning, and part of it is cadence.” Writers weigh each role differently. Didion wrote that grammar was a piano she learned to play by ear, and she seems to have given priority to breath. Adler learned grammar in school, where she diagrammed sentences, and then at The New Yorker, which gave far more weight to logic. The magazine, where she began working at age 24, was alternately beloved and deplored for its commas. If a phrase was not essential to the sentence, the editors wanted it enveloped: thus “on the phone,” a wrapped-up appositive. (“May I offer you a comma?” the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, used to say to Adler in editing sessions.) Punctuation grew into a dogmatic inheritance, a passion, and a trademark of the magazine. E. B. White wrote that “commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
Knives are an apt metaphor. The first systematic survey of English punctuation, published in 1785, recorded that the Greek komma means “a segment, or a part cut off [from] a complete sentence.” The word comes from koptein, to cut. Precision, too, is a kind of cutting, a drawing of lines. It has a coincident etymology in Latin: praecidere means “to cut off.” Adding commas does not necessarily make your work precise, and you can write clearly without much punctuation. Precision might come, for example, in short declarative sentences. It relies on other things, too, such as diction, the mot juste. But the wish to separate accurately, to put different things into different cells, connects, at least in Adler’s case, to an actual grammatical usage. When she launches into one of her riffs, when she begins listing, or when she describes a phone call, her work suggests the old definition of thought as collecting and dividing: cutting between concepts as a good butcher slides his knife along the natural joints…
… In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes described the “loneliness of style.” It is “the writer’s ‘thing,’ ” he wrote, “his glory and his prison, it is his solitude.” Adler is meticulous about her style. During her time as a film critic, she lost days to dealing with New York Times editors, who kept changing her prose, making edits that she had already thought of and decided against (“there was rarely the conception that in doing sentences a writer chooses among options,” she wrote about the experience). Her pieces for the Times sometimes appeared without her having seen the final version. She was happier at The New Yorker, where, though they might propose significant changes, the magazine’s editors made sure “not to attribute to the writer a single word, or a single cut, or a single mark of punctuation, which the writer had not seen and, in some sense, approved.” She has always cared about those things. For without the grand plot of a detective novel, without the large, vivid characters of Austen or Dickens, what Adler has is style. It is her solitude, her glory, her thing…
Eminently worth reading in full: “In the Matter of the Commas” (in The American Scholar).
* Renata Adler, Pitch Dark
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As we punctuate with passion, we might send farsighted birthday greetings to (a somehat more parsimonious, but still deft, user of commas) Alexander Herzen (Aleksándr Ivánovich Gértsen); he was born on this date in 1812. A Russian thinker and writer he was a key inspiration for agrarian populism and Russian socialism. With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Perhaps most notably, he published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (in 1845–46) and his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts (written 1852–1870), is considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.
“To achieve style, begin by affecting none”*…
From Roger’s Bacon, in New Science, a brief history of scientific writing…
Since the founding of the first scientific journal in 1665, there have been calls to do away with stylistic elements in favor of clarity, concision, and precision.
In 1667, Thomas Sprat urged members of the Royal Society to “reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words.” Some 200 years later, Charles Darwin said much the same: “I think too much pains cannot be taken in making the style transparently clear and throwing eloquence to the dogs” (Aaronson, 1977).
Darwin and Sprat eventually got their way. Modern scientific writing is homogenous, cookie-cutter, devoid of style. But scientific papers weren’t always like this.
Writing in The Last Word On Nothing blog, science journalist Roberta Kwok explains how old articles differ from their modern counterparts:
Scientists used to admit when they don’t know what the hell is going on.
When philosopher Pierre Gassendi tried to capture observations of Mercury passing in front of the Sun in 1631, he was beset by doubts:
“[T]hrown into confusion, I began to think that an ordinary spot would hardly pass over that full distance in an entire day. And I was undecided indeed… I wondered if perhaps I could not have been wrong in some way about the distance measured earlier.”
They get excited and use italics.
In 1892, a gentleman named William Brewster observed a bird called a northern shrike attacking a meadow mouse in Massachusetts. After tussling with its prey, he wrote, “[t]he Shrike now looked up and seeing me jumped on the mouse with both feet and flew off bearing it in its claws.”
They write charming descriptions.
Here’s French scientist Jean-Henri Fabre rhapsodizing about the emperor moth in his book, The Life of the Caterpillar (1916):
Who does not know the magnificent Moth, the largest in Europe, clad in maroon velvet with a necktie of white fur? The wings, with their sprinkling of grey and brown, crossed by a faint zig-zag and edged with smoky white, have in the centre a round patch, a great eye with a black pupil and a variegated iris containing successive black, white, chestnut and purple arcs.
All this to say: Scientists in the pre-modern era wrote freely, despite calls to do away with that freedom. At some point, narrative and literary styles vanished and were replaced with rigid formats and impoverished prose. The question now is: Have we gone too far in removing artistry from scientific writing?…
For a well-argued case that we have– “the way that we write is inseparable from the way that we think, and restrictions in one necessarily lead to restrictions in the other”– read on: “Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened?,” from @RogersBacon1 and @newscienceorg.
* E. B. White, The Elements of Style
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As we ponder purposive prose, we might spare a thought for Johann Adam Schall von Bell; he died on this date in 1666. An expressive writer in both German and Chinese, he was an astronomer and Jesuit missionary to China who revised the Chinese calendar, translated Western astronomical books, and was head of Imperial Board of Astronomy (1644-64). Given the Chinese name “Tang Ruowang,” he became a trusted adviser (1644-61) to Emperor Shun-chih, first emperor of the Ch’ing dynasty (1644-1911/12), who made him a mandarin.
“Trees and people used to be good friends”*…
What’s old is new again… yet again…
If there’s a style that defines 2020, it has to be “cottagecore.” In March 2020, the New York Times defined it as a “budding aesthetic movement… where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.” In August, consumer-culture publication The Goods by Vox heralded cottagecore as “the aesthetic where quarantine is romantic instead of terrifying.”
Baking, one of the activities the quarantined population favored at the height of the pandemic, is a staple of cottagecore, whose Instagram hashtag features detailed depictions of home-baked goods. Moreover, the designer Lirika Matoshi’s Strawberry Dress, defined as The Dress of 2020, fully fits into the cottagecore aesthetic. A movement rooted in self-soothing through exposure to nature and land, it proved to be the antidote to the stress of the 2020 pandemic for many.
Despite its invocations of rural and pastoral landscapes, the cottagecore aesthetic is, ultimately, aspirational. While publications covering trends do point out that cottagecore is not new—some locate its origins in 2019, others in 2017—in truth, people have sought to create an escapist and aspirational paradise in the woods or fields for 2,300 years.
Ancient Greece had an enduring fascination with the region of Arcadia, located in the Peloponnesus, which many ancient Greeks first dismissed as a primitive place. After all, Arcadia was far from the refined civilization of Athens. Arcadians were portrayed as hunters, gatherers, and sensualists living in an inclement landscape. In the Hellenistic age, however, Arcadia became an idea in the popular consciousness more than a geographical place…
And the pastoral ideal resurfaced regularly therafter. Theocritus, Virgil, Longus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, even Marie-Antoinette– keeping cozy in a countryside escape, through the ages: “Cottagecore Debuted 2,300 Years Ago,” from Angelica Frey (@angelica_frey) in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Hayao Miyazaki, My Neighbor Totoro
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As we pursue the pastoral, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865, after four years of Civil War, approximately 630,000 deaths, and over 1 million casualties, that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to the commander of the Union Army, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia… a one-time pastoral setting.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”*…
Bulwer-Lytton had nothing on Indian jurists…
The English language arrived in India with the British colonists of the 17th century, giving rise to unique genres and variants, including some that characterize formal communications on the subcontinent to this day. Among these, the derogatory term “Babu English” was originally used by the British to describe the overwrought officialese of “babus” or Indian bureaucrats—a style described at the British Library as “aspiring to poetic heights in vocabulary and learning, despite being full of errors.”
“Babu English is the much caricatured flowery language of… moderately educated clerks and others who are less proficient in formal English than they realise,” wrote Rajend Mesthrie in English in Language Shift (1993). His examples include the clerk who asked his employers for leave because ‘the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket’; the job applicant “bubbling with zeal and enthusiasm to serve as a research assistant”; and a baroque acknowledgement from a PhD thesis: “I consider it to be my primordial obligation to humbly offer my deepest sense of gratitude to my most revered Garuji and untiring and illustrious guide professor . . . for the magnitude of his benevolence and eternal guidance.”
The modern form of Babu English turns up most frequently in the language of India’s legal system.
Take for example the 2008 case of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar, who was killed, together with a housekeeper, Hemraj, in the Talwar family home in Delhi; the murder rocked the nation. In 2013, a trial court ruled that the victims had been murdered by the girl’s parents:“
The cynosure of judicial determination is the fluctuating fortunes of the dentist couple who have been arraigned for committing and secreting as also deracinating the evidence of commission of the murder of their own adolescent daughter—a beaut damsel and sole heiress Ms Aarushi and hapless domestic aide Hemraj who had migrated to India from neighbouring Nepal to eke out living and attended routinely to the chores of domestic drudgery at the house of their masters.”
Had the judge accidentally inhaled a thesaurus? With its tormented syntax and glut of polysyllabic words, the judgment is a clear descendant and example of today’s Babu prose. In May 2016, a landmark judgment on criminal defamation written by a future Chief Justice pushed into new stylistic directions with phrases such as “proponements in oppugnation” and “made paraplegic on the mercurial stance.”
“It seems that some judges have unrealised literary dreams,” one former judge told me. “Maybe it’s a colonial hangover, or the feeling that obfuscation is a sign of merit… It can then become a 300-page judgment, just pontificating.”
Judges also retain a tendency to also quote scripture, allude to legends and myths, and throw in a dash of Plato, Shakespeare or Dickens. Some trace the legacy of flowery judgments to Justice Krishna Iyer, a pioneering and influential Supreme Court judge who served a seven-year term in the seventies. (“You had to perhaps sit with a dictionary to understand some [of his] judgments,” one lawyer remarked.)
But the former judge pointed out that this isn’t just a problem bedevilling judgments written in English. Even lower court judgments written in Hindi, he said, often deploy “words that were in vogue in Mughal times… It’s a problem of formalism.”
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“Wherefore, qua, bonum: decrypting Indian legalese“: a colonial hangover, or unrealized literary dreams? Mumbai-based @BhavyaDore explores.
* George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
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As we choose our words carefully, we might send passionate birthday greetings to Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland; she was born on this date in 1901. A paragon of prolixity, Barbara Cartland wrote biographies, plays, music, verse, drama, and operetta, as well as several health and cook books, and many magazine articles; but she is best remembered as a romance novelist, one of the most commercially successful authors worldwide of the 20th century.
Her 723 novels were translated into 38 languages. and she continues to be referenced in the Guinness World Records for the most novels published in a single year (1977). Estimates of her sales range from 750 million copies to over 2 billion.
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