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 Mystery Of Haile Selassie

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In late January 1941 a party of soldiers and civilians crossed the border from Sudan into Italian-occupied Ethiopia. The men in uniform included British political advisors, some peculiar soldiers of fortune, and the shambling, eccentric and driven figure of Major Orde Wingate. There were priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in their robes, and a group of aloof Ethiopians who looked very far from home as they assembled for a ceremony in the dried-up riverbed. Among them there was a very small, black-bearded man of bearing, a man who the British had been referring to as ‘Mr Smith.’ This was Haile Selassie the First, The King of Kings, Emperor of Ethiopia. A few months earlier he had been living in straitened circumstances in a cold villa just outside Bath. Now, thanks to the machinations of war, he was on his way to Addis Ababa to reclaim the throne of the 225th monarch in the House of David, in one of the greatest comebacks of all time.

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

Junk Bond

james-bond-1400x788You approach a new James Bond film with finely blended expectations of excitement and concern and dread. Excitement at the prospect of the second most expensive action film ever produced, concern at the health of a venerated British institution, and dread at the prospect of yet another prime turkey in the turkey-infested realm of the Bond franchise. So before we go any further let us address the turkey in the room: Spectre, the twenty-fourth film in the sequence, is a turkey. It is not an enormous great clucking monster turkey. It is just an ordinary medium turkey, the kind of turkey a middle-aged couple might order for a quiet Christmas at home without the children. How it managed to cost $300 million is anyone’s guess, but at that price it is certainly the most disappointing dinner for two in history.

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.

White Is The New Amber

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Edmund de Waal, a celebrated potter and ceramicist who had one of the literary hits of 2010 with his biographical memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes has now written a study of the remarkable history and nature of porcelain. De Waal has devoted much of his working life to porcelain, and this is not a mere history of the white ceramic that helped shape the wealth of nations from its discovery in China more than two thousand years ago. It is an attempt to capture the inner nature of porcelain, its power to mesmerise and to bankrupt its addicts.

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Calcutta: The City of Questions

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People say a lot of things about Calcutta, but one thing they never say is that Calcutta is a pleasant place. Intense, chaotic, corrupt, and confusing, yes. Unremitting discomfort and infinite inconvenience, yes. Pleasant, no. Calcutta (or Kolkata if you insist on following the endless name-changes inflicted by the government of West Bengal) is never going to be your ideal destination for a quiet relaxing break. But it is unforgettable: addictive, insistent, and amazingly friendly (for a place that is so violent). Calcutta is India in highly concentrated form. Use with caution.

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The Spook In The Machine

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Book Review: Intercept by Gordon Corera

Keeping secrets, sending secrets, stealing secrets: it’s a very ancient trade. The business of intercepting and deciphering communications has been going on for as long as people have had brains enough to profit from knowing more than their enemies. And today, as this bleakly entertaining new book from Gordon Corera reminds us, the branch of intelligence known as signals intelligence is now conducted on an industrial scale. The dream of the East German Stasi – that everyone should be spied on, all of the time – is close to becoming a nightmarish and universal reality.

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Meet the Baboons Who Broke the Banks

Llloyds-1-1400x788Book Review: Black Horse Ride by Ivan Fallon

On the Sunday of the ninth of September 2007 a meeting was called in the Treasury. It was, as they say, fateful – although none of the participants realised it at the time. That afternoon the course of the UK economy and political life was altered for years to come. If things had been decided differently there might have been no collapse of Northern Rock, no bank bailout, the Labour government might have emerged from the financial crisis with its reputation enhanced instead of ruined, and Gordon Brown might still be Prime Minister.

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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?

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The Mystery Of Marco Polo

Book Review: The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps by Benjamin B. Olshin, published by the University of Chicago Press

From The Spectator

AS a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless enterprise involved things like staining paper with tea or vinegar, together with plenty of burning, and creasing, and copying of random texts with a scratchy old inkwell pen. Typical silly small boy stuff. Reading this book on a collection of maps supposedly derived from Marco Polo suddenly brought it all back – especially the silliness.   

by Richard Walker

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Remembering Jane Howard

From Economist.com

ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD who died on January 2—‘Jane’ to all who knew her—was an English writer of great originality and honesty. Only at the end of her long life did she receive the recognition she deserved. “I feel like I’ve been playing second fiddle my whole life,” she told me a few weeks before her death. “Now I’m playing first violin and I quite like it.”

by Richard Walker

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Pirates On Parade

From The Spectator

Book Review: Treasure Neverland by Neil Rennie, Oxford University Press

HEAR the word ‘pirate’ and what picture springs into your mind? I see a richly-bearded geezer in a tricorne hat and a frock coat, with a notched cutlass and bandolier stuffed with pistols. Never mind the real-life pirates of our day, the maritime robbery-and-kidnap specialists of Somalia and West Africa – they are all too recent to have generated sufficient fiction for us to draw on. Our common pirate is like the zombie, the vampire, the robot – a creature of the imagination, coming to us via Robert Louis Stevenson, J M Barrie and Johnny Depp. But where did he come from, really?

by Richard Walker

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Ocean Blue

ON THE HARBOUR wall in the port of Funchal, Madeira, there is a remarkable collection of paintings. Nobody commissioned these works, the artists are anonymous, and the medium is industrial primary colour on cement. The subject is the Atlantic Ocean. With photographer Nick Sinclair, I recently published a short photo essay celebrating these unofficial, unbidden images.

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The Orwell Influence

Book Review: George Orwell: English Rebel by Robert Colls

IN EARLY 1928 a former colonial policeman called Eric Blair decided that he wanted to become a writer. He moved to Paris, took a cheap room at number 6, rue du Pot de Fer in the Fifth Arrondissement, and worked at odd jobs in hotels and bars. His attempts to write fiction were failures, but he did manage to get a few essays published in literary journals. The first was A Day in the Life of a Tramp. It begins like this …

by Richard Walker

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The Mysterious Mr Collins

Book Review: Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation by Andrew Lycett

WILKIE COLLINS was an immensely successful Victorian novelist. Like his close friend Charles Dickens he pioneered new forms of storytelling and publishing, wrote extensively for the stage, toured America, and made a fortune.

by Richard Walker

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What Is Money?

WHEN I worked in £50Africa as a schoolteacher I found that I spent quite a lot of time thinking about money. Not because I was short of money – on the contrary I had what seemed like a lot, the pink Sudanese fifty-pound notes piling up uselessly in my desk drawer. We were not paid very much, but in our village there was very little to buy. But for many others around me money was a monster that ruled their lives. 

By Richard Walker

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The Case of Raymond Chandler

Book Review: A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler by Tom Williams

IT WASN’T the plot, and it wasn’t the characters. It was the blend of idealism and cynicism that made Raymond Chandler’s writing so compelling. His world was a chiaroscuro of crime shot through with California sunlight. And if that world were strange and ambiguous, Raymond Chandler the man, as drawn in this new biography by Tom Williams, was even stranger.

by Richard Walker

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He Was Cool

Elmore Leonard: 1925 – 2013

 From Economist.com

AS A boy Elmore Leonard was not a loner. He was not bookish. He and his friends played sports. One summer a group of them hitchhiked up to the Michigan Thumb – the part of the state that looks like the thumb of a baseball pitcher’s mitt. The boys picked strawberries for pocket money, alongside the migrant workers. Another summer Leonard stole a real pitcher’s mitt from a sports shop – he later said it was the one and only crime he ever committed. But he was baseball mad. For a long spell while his easy-going middle-manager father travelled on business he went to live with the family of his baseball coach – Leonard was fascinated by the coach, who “didn’t say many funny things. He was pretty much all business”.

by Richard Walker

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