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Financial services, according to this report:

Left to right shows what we’re good at (i.e. financial services) and top to bottom shows what the next-big-thing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China want to buy from us (i.e. financial services). In one sense, therefore, this could be taken as support for the argument that if we’re going to compete in the future we need to carry on doing what we’re good at and accept what goes along with that (i.e. financial services), whether that’s bonuses or income inequality or whatever.

But as John Lanchester points out in his brilliant book Whoops!, we didn’t get where we are by magic:

There are four sectors in which Britain is world-class: finance, arms manufacturing, the creative arts and higher education. Of these, the first receives strong government support, the second lavish investment and strong support, the third is largely left to mind its own business and the fourth has been gradually run down, with three decades of consistent discouragement and underfunding.

If we’re not going to do anything differently this time we need a better reason than, “We can’t, because if we could, we would have, and anyway it’s too late.”

More on the report – including a breakdown of the best-performing British companies by sector – at Motley Fool.

Tonight on BBC2, the last in the series of Putin, Russia and the West, the brilliant documentary on Russia under Putin.

Series producer Norma Percy is known for getting incredible access: here she’s got top Kremlin insiders, as well as a very relaxed Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, to speak frankly on the record. Not everyone would talk, however, as this excellent piece describes. Missing is Putin, that human snake, with his triangular, chinless head, hairless skin and beady unblinking eyes – he remains scarily inscrutable.

By far the most stunning revelation so far has been the news that the spy rock – remember that? – was real. I’d assumed the idea of MI6 using a fake rock (above) to collect secret data was simply too ridiculous to be true – but no. As Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell put it, They had us bang to rights.

I also enjoyed this ancedote, from an official American visit to Moscow, when the delegations were taken to watch the Nutcracker.

Former defence minister Sergei Ivanov: I have seen the Nutcracker two or three times. My parents kept dragging me off to expose me to culture. I said to Condoleezza: ‘Do you really want to watch this?’ She said: ‘What do you have in mind?’

At this point I was sure they were going to leave and make the love in a KGB-rented apartment complete with spy-camera lampshades. In fact, they snuck off to see some contemporary ballet, which unimaginably enough they share a passion for. As well as being amusing in itself, the episode shows just how closely American and Russian officials were working at this time. They got on, but they also shared interests, particularly in dealing with what they saw as a common threat from terrorists trained in Afghanistan. As the documentary reveals, Putin met with George W. Bush the year before 9/11 and warned him there would be trouble from that area.

The period of the early 2000s increasingly appears as a historic opportunity, one of those rare moments when it is possible to create a coalition across traditional lines of conflict. As international politics gets harder, I find myself regretting those missed opportunities ever more fervently. George Bush: you have a lot to answer for.

Alain de Botton has new book out and I’ve reviewed it for the Sunday Telegraph. Here’s the ever-so-catchy first paragraph:

This book should carry a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-style warning: DON’T PANIC. Don’t panic, this is not another contribution to the “debate” about God, the Eton wall game of contemporary discourse, where no one can see the ball, no one knows what the rules are, and there hasn’t been a goal in more than 100 years. Alain de Botton is an atheist, but he has no time for the “boring and unproductive question” of whether or not religion is true. His concern is the ways in which religions can be useful, even to non-believers.

It’s well worth checking out. De Botton – a friend of this blog – sums up the principal arguments in this comment piece from 2008.

The best way to think of Nietzsche is as a blogger.

Most of his books are made up of bite-sized sections which are not obviously tied to each other, and which offer no general argument. Sometimes he’s talking about something he saw the other day, sometimes he’s giving his opinion on the world in general, sometimes he’s just ranting. (Like I say, a blogger.) Topics range from the nature of truth to the unattractiveness of small women, and the style is free and personal, full of rhetorical questions and idiosyncratic punctuation. Of all great philosophers, he is surely the king of exclamation marks.

While I write my first novel I often find myself thinking about my second one, a mad habit but one I can’t break (it makes me feel there’s life after number one). I was reading The Gay Spirit and saw this “blogpost”:

I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best because they are too vain and have set their minds on something prouder. Here is a musician who is master at the very small. But he doesn’t want to be! His character likes great walls and bold frescoes! It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and disposition and likes best of all to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses – there, hidden, hidden from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, which are all very short, often only a bar long – only there does he become wholly good, great, and perfect, perhaps only there – But he doesn’t know it! He is too vain to know it.

For me, this describes Ian McEwan perfectly.

The Artist is a film on this topic.

But how do you know what you do best? How can you see yourself except through you character?

ps. While we’re on the subject, here’s a good Nietzsche blog.

That way!

The situation in Iran is one of a number of issues that I’m vaguely ignoring in the hope it will go away. A new article in Prospect suggests that this might actually be the best strategy for the West as a whole.

According to Ali Ansari, one of the world’s leading experts on Iran, the Ahmadinejad regime’s entire foreign policy is based on a single question: will this annoy the Americans? If it will, they reason, it must be right. That’s why they do things like threaten to ban oil exports to the European Union (as they did today), even though experts agree it will probably make no difference to Europe and will almost certainly be counter-productive.

If Iran keeps on this way, Ansari says, they may end up bankrupting themselves, and all they’ll have to show for it is a lot of rocks that glow in the dark.

The best thing for us to do is to sit back and watch it happen:

The regime is doing an excellent job of isolating itself. The best thing the west can do at the moment is to recognise this, monitor it, contain it, and let it run its course.

Read the whole thing. As comment pieces go, it’s actually quite uplifting.

In an increasingly distracting world, it’s plausibly argued that the ability to concentrate is the factor that makes the difference between success and failure. The career of Warren Buffett, whose standing as the sanest man in finance received another boost in Tuesday’s State of the Union, shows that this has always been the case.

In her biography of Buffett Alice Schroeder quotes him describing his first meeting with that other hugely-respected billionaire, Bill Gates:

Then, at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. posed the question to the table: What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And I said, “Focus”. And Bill said the same thing.

Schroder had incredible access, and her book is the best biography of a living figure I’ve ever read. Read more about it here.

When one of their number peeps above the parapet to talk about their emotions and vulnerabilities, sporting folk like to call it “brave”. There was plenty of bravery on show in Freddie Flintoff’s documentary on depression in sport, The Hidden Side of Sport, last night on BBC1. It takes extreme courage for anyone to expose themselves to Flintoff’s interview technique:

Graeme Dott: I think I’ll be on them [anti-depression] pills forever. I’ve tried to come off them, and I’ll gradually fall into a horrible …
Flintoff: Are you enjoying your snooker now more than ever?

Man on an Arsenal scheme to tackle depression: I was diagnosed properly when I was ten or eleven, with depression. I’ve always been pressed with suicidal thoughts.
Flintoff: How did it feel?

The rest of the programme was similarly frustrating. Flintoff spoke to various sports names – Ricky Hatton, Vinnie Jones, Barry McGuigan, Shane Warne – who all agreed that feeling bad was bad. Some, like Jones, had personal experience of depression, but their views were never placed in a wider context, and the whole thing quickly devolved into Comic Relief-ish meaninglessness. I found myself more interested in Ricky Hatton’s loft conversion than in his lows after defeats.  Maybe Flintoff was too, as he troubled Hatton with the tester:

When you got your gloves in your first professional fight, did you think you’d have all this?

When things did get edgy, the programme was anything but brave. Flintoff claimed throughout that he was “doing it for Steve”, his friend Steve Harmison, who spoke very movingly about his own depression at the start of the programme. But when he was asked (by Piers Morgan – yes, it was that sort of programme) about his own culpability in Harmison’s difficulties – he was England captain when Harmison was struggling with depression; why did he pick him to play? – Flintoff was shocked. Nothing wrong with that – a bit more shock, a bit less cosy banter, and we would have had a better programme. But why was there no follow-up? Did Flintoff regret his actions? What would he have done differently? What did Harmison think about it? We never got to find out. It was anecdotes only, Match of the Day meets Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.

The express point of these programmes is to promote understanding. What they actually promote is toleration, superficial acceptance. I suspect that in five years time, Steve Harmison will be thinking: “I told the nation about my depression, because I thought it would make a difference. And everyone was very nice and told me how brave I was. Then they went back to ignoring me, or treating me like I was a bit strange.”

Link to programme on iPlayer (available until 18 Jan)

Spot the difference

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, Manchester United appointed a new manager. Less than a year later, a young MP by the name of Tony Blair was given his first post in Labour’s shadow cabinet. One went on to be the Red’s most successful leader, returning them to heights of power they hadn’t seen since the 1960s. The other was Sir Alex Ferguson.

But what if their situations had been reversed? What if Ferguson had been the politician? (If only, you might say.) Here’s what I think would have happened:

Ferguson would have got rid of Brown
Fergie would never have tolerated Brown’s insubordination. In his time at United, anyone who challenged him – Beckham, Keane, Stam – was given the boot, in Beckham’s case quite literally. It made Ferguson unpopular, but he did it anyway. Blair never quite had the balls, and it was arguably the biggest mistake of his premiership.

We still would have gone to war in Iraq
Ferguson loves conflict, both necessary and unnecessary, so whatever you think of Iraq, you have to believe that he would have gone in. Like Blair, he would have found the chance to wield real power impossible to turn down.

There still would have been a financial crisis
In his own mind, Ferguson is Old Labour through and through. (“Arthur Scargill with boots on,” according to the Telegraph.) But in fact, like New Labour, he’s adapted fully to the demands of capitalism. He may not like being ruled by the Glazers. He may not like United being loaded up with their debt. But he doesn’t speak out against them – because doing so would jeopardise his project. He’s made the same deal with the Glazers that Blair and Brown made with the City.

Not that different after all. And that’s the funny thing about Fergie: he’s done incredible things, but his legacy is mainly his succcess. He’s led one of the biggest teams around to an incredible spell of domination. He hasn’t changed football – not like a Michels or a Cruyff, a Thatcher or a Reagan. In that sense, too, he resembles Blair.

And if Tony had been managing Man U? He would have done all right. Then, in 2003, he would have been ousted by a committe of players led by the Gordon Brown of football, Roy Keane. Keane would have taken over for a short, dismal spell at the helm. And United would now be managed by … Sven Goran Cameron.

Tony Parsons thinks so:

Shakespeare would have loved Twitter. So would Groucho Marx. So would Karl Marx. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

All under 140 characters – all will be burned into the human heart for as long as mankind loves, laughs and dreams of change.

And Moses would have loved iPads. So handy for divine notations!

It’s often asserted that writers must love Twitter. But in my experience this – from a Paris Review interview with the American novelist E. L. Doctorow – is much more typical:

INTERVIEWER: You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.

E. L. DOCTOROW: What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off. I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Oh yeah. Read the whole thing here.

I reviewed this about two months ago for the Literary Review and have been “getting round” to posting it up ever since. Productivity reaches a new high.

Robert Rowland Smith is a consultant,writer and teacher with a great middle name. His book seems to be being received well, although it did get an enjoyably vicious review in the Observer, from Theodore Dalrymple:

No thought is too banal for Rowland Smith; unfortunately, his banality is perfectly compatible with error. He rarely loses an opportunity to suppress what is true and suggest what is false.

Funny, but harsh. I thought this was a case of “wrong reviewer, wrong book.” Dalrymple – a bit of a gun – seemed almost offended to be asked to review a work of popular philosophy. He attacked the form and genre, rather than the content, and gave little impression that he had actually read beyond the table of contents.

Reviewing is an immanent art. It works best when it adapts to the goals and conventions of its subject (while bearing in mind the genre, of course). Smith’s book is far from perfect. But Dalrymple’s review was the equivalent of criticising Woolf for failing to develop minor characters or Powell for lacking gripping plots.

You can read my effort (the original, not the cruelly cut Literary Review version) after the jump.

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