Forever Changes

MY PARENTS’ friends Elsie and Gerard lived around the corner. I used to go to their flat overlooking the estuary and watch Tintin cartoons on the TV with the children who were called Matthew and Laura.

And then they were gone. They didn’t exactly disappear but they did suddenly move to Belgium which seemed like the same thing.

About a year later my mother announced that it would be a good idea if I went to Brussels to live with them for a while.

“You will have to speak French,” she had warned. “Nobody will understand you if you don’t speak French.”

Saleroom Confidential: How To See A Photograph

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The only reason I was at Clarke & Simpson’s country auction in Suffolk was to buy a desk for my office. The Art Deco and Design auction in Campsea Ash is a good place to find handsome furniture that is not Victorian and not brown, and last Monday there was just such a desk in the auction catalogue. True, I also had an eye for one or two other lots that looked like they might go cheap, like the cast iron Christmas tree stand and perhaps the green enamel angle-poise lamp – open an auction catalogue and you are already sliding down a slippery slope with an invoice at the bottom. But the desk was top of my list. I certainly had no intention of buying a print by one of the acknowledged masters of twentieth century American photography.

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First Catch Your Lobster

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It is May. The North Sea temperature has just crept over 10 degrees centigrade. The sand on the beach is almost warm. In short the lobster season is here. Time for me to push that boat out and catch some of these ineffably strange and ancient crustaceans (they’ve been around for 360 million years), these creatures of mysterious and fugitive habit (the lobster may have  limitations in the brains department but will never be domesticated – she’s a wild one). Although when I say ‘catch’ I am being optimistic. Your life as a lobster hunter is likely to be marked by expense, frustration, disappointment and blind chance. They are in their element, you are not. At some point – assuming you have not drowned – you will certainly think of giving up the trade.

But no, you won’t give up. The magic is too powerful. And because one day, perhaps today, you will haul up that lobster pot and there it will be, that speckled flash of deep blue-black rising from the sea …

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The Chatbot’s Tale

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I’ve spent much of the last year in my day job investigating the applicability of artificial intelligence. The question I’m always being asked is, ‘but does it work? The answer is…‘sort of’. It really depends on who you are …

Published on CapX – read more here

South Sudan: a lesson to the world in how not to build a nation

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There is no standard definition of what makes a country viable as a country. What are the materials, the history, the culture, the institutions that allow a territory to grow into a something more than just a geography of resources? What are the building blocks of an accountable and democratic state?

Whatever these ingredients are, we know what happens when they are not present. And nowhere is this lesson clearer than in the case of South Sudan.

Only five years ago, South Sudan was the newest and most optimistic member of the community of nations, a state-building project backed by the goodwill and expertise and cash of well-intentioned supporters around the world.

Today, the country has imploded into a fireball of violence and suffering, an off-the-radar disaster comparable in its scale to Syria (the number of refugees recently passed the one million mark). In other words, the outcome of the project has been as disastrous as its ambition was great. But why?

First published on CapX: read more here

A Picture Of Cape Verde

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In the islands of Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa there is an institution called the aluguer. Perhaps ‘institution’ is too weak a word. The aluguer – from the Portuguese verb ‘to rent’ – may at first sight seem nothing more than a shared taxi in the form of a Toyota van or a flatbed pickup truck. In reality the aluguer is the backbone of society and economy: not just a bus but also an informal courier and messaging service, a small-scale cash-banking network, an ambulance, a limousine, and a theatre on wheels. Take an aluguer through the cobbled streets of Mindelo or the mountain roads of Santo Antao and you will see more than the view.

First published on CapX: read more here

The Descent Of Egypt

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In January this year an Italian graduate student from Cambridge University disappeared in Cairo. Giulio Regeni had been researching independent trade unions in Egypt; on the evening of January 25 he was on his way to meet an academic colleague from the British University in Cairo. According to the Associated Press news agency Regeni got as far as a security check in a metro station close to his apartment. Then he disappeared.

First published on CapX: read more here

Chinese Money On Sunset Boulevard

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Wang Jianlin is China’s richest man. With a personal fortune of over $30 billion, he owns businesses that range from department stores to commercial property, from e-commerce to media to tourism. But that is not enough for Wang Jianlin: in the past he has made no secret of the fact he also wants to be a Hollywood film mogul. And this year his dream has been fulfilled.

First published on CapX: read more here

The True Cost Of Surveillance

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The Conservative government recently published proposals for new legislation to regulate spying in the UK. The draft Investigatory Powers Bill seeks to do many things, particularly gathering up powers already contained in a lot of different existing laws and subjecting them all to a coherent oversight procedure. Most of the discussion generated by these proposals has been about the implications for liberty. But there is another and related dimension that should be considered, and that is the potential for the Bill to harm the economy.

First published on CapX: read more here

We Are The New Georgians

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Sometimes it seems as if Britain is surrounded by existential threat. Armed extremism, financial  upheaval, cultural confusion – all can feel like they could break a brittle, uncertain society. But these are only the headline concerns of the day. Deep beneath the headlines there is another country where real change happens, sometimes slowly, and sometimes not. At this level Britain really is in a state of transformation. It is nothing to do with terrorism, or politics, or religion. It is a lot to do with new machines, new materials, new algorithms, and new patterns of behaviour. These are things that are changing the shape of minds as well as environment, and what is really striking is just how relaxed Britain is about it. To find a historical parallel for this era of peaceful redrafting of the fundamentals one has to go back at least two and a half centuries. It is Georgian Britain that offers the best guide to what is happening today, and some clues to what might happen next.

First published on CapX: read more here

The World’s Most Pointless War

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Africa has had a good press this last few years. It deserves it. In most countries life is getting better, and people have more power to work, to spend, to choose. But not everywhere. And particularly not in one country that few know, that fewer have visited, and that today is on fire.

First published on CapX: read more here

Russia’s World of Digital Control

red-web-1400x788In the English language the words ‘spy’ and ‘Russia’ are fellow travellers. The Russian state is secretive by nature and the methods of the secret state are the methods of the spy services: surveillance, interception, and information control. All of these techniques are part of the political management system of Putin’s Russia, and they have all been greatly enhanced in the last fifteen years. Thanks to two outstanding Russian journalists, Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, we now know much more about how Russia uses and co-opts the worlds of digital communication and information flow to monitor its citizens at home, and shape their world view. On a recent visit to London, Borogan and Soldatov joined CapX for a conversation about their recent book The Red Web on Russia’s domestic programme of surveillance and censorship.

First published on CapX: read more here.

Egypt’s New Pharoah

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Last week a suicide bomber killed himself in a failed attack at the Temple of Karnak in the Egyptian city of Luxor. A day later the attack was claimed by a group claiming to be part of the Islamic State movement, the same group that claimed responsibility for a rocket attack the previous week in Egyptian-controlled North Sinai. In the same week there was a gun attack at the Pyramids of Giza to the south of Cairo.Is Egypt slipping back to the dark days of the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s?

Read more here

The Real Free Lunch

SO there I was one rainy Sunday doing some admin tasks when my phone rang. The man on the line wanted to know if I would be interested in riding a motorbike through Death Valley in the company of a couple of the people who ran the Italian Ducati motorcycle company. I conceded that I would be interested. “Can you be in Los Angeles tomorrow?” he added, as a kind of afterthought. I thought no, but I said yes … yes, I might be able to do that.

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Death Warmed Up

From Sunday Business Magazine

THE NAMES roll off the map like scene settings in some classic western: Furnace Creek, and Desolation Canyon; Badwater, Wildrose, and Stove Pipe Wells; Zabriskie Point, and the Funeral Mountains. This is Death Valley: the hottest, highest, lowest, fiercest place in the contiguous United States, the great natural barrier that separates the body of the American southwest from the Pacific Ocean, a national park the size of Connecticut where daytime temperatures can climb above 130 degrees. A century and a half ago when pioneering European emigrants took a wrong turn and stumbled into Death Valley on their way to the California gold fields, they were lucky anyone survived to tell the story. Today you can drive across the national park in the air-conditioned space of an afternoon – if you want. But that’s no way to tour Death Valley. To experience the dimensions and the desolation and awesome grandeur of the Valley – to travel fast and yet to experience the scene physically – for that you need a motorcycle.

by Richard Walker

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Meeting Mr VerMeulen

IN its early days the UK edition of GQ Magazine had an outstandingly successful editor called Michael VerMeulen. He was from Chicago, where he had been a close associate of the playwright David Mamet – so, by no means the typical London fashion editor. He was also pretty much the exact opposite of me in every way – thick-set, confrontational, and completely at home in the sexy, spiteful, intrigue-rich world of glossy magazine publishing. Anyway, having nothing better to do I phoned him out of the blue and pitched a couple of feature ideas which he turned down flat. But he added “Come on over, we’ll have a drink and see if we can make sense of you”.

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