Faulks as Fleming

My review for Bloomberg of Sebastian Faulks's James Bond book has been collated along with a lot of the American reviews of the book on one of the Bond fan websites. Reading through them, it's interesting that the American reviews were a lot more hostile than than the British ones. I suspect that the American thriller audience is a lot more demanding than the British one - and Faulk's glib effort won't satisfy that market.

British vs American Journalism

There's a good piece in the FT today by Gideon Rachman dicussing the difference between British and American journalism. His conclusion is that although a lot of American journalism may be boring and stuffy, its worthiness is still preferable to the sloppiness of much British journalism. I tend to agree. I worked at The Sunday Times for ten years, and then started writing a column for Bloomberg. The insistance on fact-checking at Bloomberg is a drag sometimes, but the net result is surely better. American journalism is, in the end, more satisfying for being accurate. Meanwhile, the British press would do better to ponder its declining circulations, and wonder if it is really doing everything right.

Simon Mann

There's a great piece in the Independent today about the Simon Mann coup plot. A must-read.

Crisis What Crisis says Jim Brown

Probably the end of the last Labour Goverment came when Jin Callagahan was reported as saying 'Crisis? What crisis?' . Even though he was apparently misquoted, it showed how out of touch he'd become. I wonder if Gordon Brown telling us to watch what we spend on food will mark a similar point - a final nail in the coffin of a collapsing regime. After all, most of us know that the reason we have less money is because of his mis-management of the economy. Telling us its our fault, and we should just econmise, is only going to make things worse. Yet again, his ability to completely mis-read the public mood is breathtaking.

Mercenaries

There's a nice review in The Guardian by Peter Beaumont of a new book on mercenaries called War Plc. He makes the point that warfare has been extensively privatised, with PMCs carrying out many of the tasks that used to be performed by conventional soldiers. The Independent makes a similar point, with a story about how British bases in Afghanistan and Iraq could be protected by private firms. I suspect this trend is going to continue - a theme I'm exploring in my fictional series Death Force which kicks off in January. The 20th century very much belonged to big public armies, but before that warfare often belonged to small, private armies (or at least private-public partnerships). Many people seem to think there is somehting odd about the return of the mercenaries, but you could just as well view it as warfare getting back to normal.

The UK Faces Recession

Every set of numbers released right now suggests the UK is slipping into a serious recession.The housing market is collapsing, retail sales are falling, and now both manufacturing and and services are slowing down sharply. This could well get nasty. The UK should have had a sharp correction in 2001/2002 but Gordon Brown unleashed a tidal wave of government spending, the first that Britain had seen for thirty years or more. That created an illusion of prosperity that has been unsustainable. People are drwing comparisons with the last recession of 1990/91, but that was mainly caused by currency problems. Once those were cured - fairly simply by pulling out of the ERM - the underlying economy was pretty sound. That isn't true today. The underlying economy is over-taxed and over-borrowed. In fact, this could well be the worst recession since 1980/81.

Bond - Craig vs Faulks

For everything that is wrong about Sabastian Faulks's new Bond book 'Devil May Care' take a look at the trailer of the new Bond movie Quantum of Solace. At least the film makers understand what Bond is all about - modern, edgy, cool - even if the 19th-hole bores that re-created a 1960s's Bond don't.