Profile of Mary Rice, head of the Environmental Investigation Agency published in the Sunday Times September 14th.
Profile Mary Rice
A week in the life
John Kelleher September 11 2008
When it comes to confronting the Goliaths of government, globalised crime and multinational corporations, the Environmental Investigation Agency, based in a tiny suite of offices above an Islington cafe is something of a giant killer.
The NGO, with just 22 UK staff runs as many operations as it can manage globally – exposing environmental crime, tracking, often covertly, trade in endangered species, gathering evidence and generally working to highlight and combat crimes against nature.
Mary Rice, its new chief executive, says present key campaigns include protecting forests and combating illegal logging, tracking the trade in Asian big cats, protecting whales and dolphins, fighting unlawful ivory exports and controls on ozone depleting chemicals.
Its notable past successes include stopping a massive ivory smuggling operation to Asia by a Zambia based crime syndicate.
Rice says: “We don’t have the resources to be a World Wildlife Fund or Friends Of The Earth, but we do regularly punch way above our weight. We have a documented history of campaign successes, but they’re not always recognised as ours. We find a problem and publicise it, but can’t always carry it forward so a bigger and better resourced group will come in and takeover.”
Rice, 50, trained as a journalist and spent 15 years teaching before she joined the EIA as a volunteer in 1995, 11 years after its creation as what she calls “a small sitting room outfit.”
It has evolved since then and Rice, who earns £43,000 annually, has spent much of the past week looking at how to continue its growth through restructuring to bring in more funding and to identify patrons or ambassadors. “We are looking strategically at where we are going and how we brand ourselves.”
She also had briefings with campaign teams and a full staff meeting “We’re rarely all in the office at the same time.”
The EIA is forced to target its work as it has just a trickle of regular funding from dedicated supporters. All major grants from bodies such as the EU and the Department For International Development are pegged to specific initiatives. One such three-year project is about to begin in Zambia, training local people to monitor illegal logging.
But compactness can be beneficial. Partnerships with larger bodies are frequent and the EIA can be somewhat maverick – taking direct action where larger organisations with offices and locally employed staff might be compromised. “ We can go in and come out and we won’t lose our offices and our people wont be bullied.”
She is not deterred by the EIA’s modest scale. “I think every single individual can make a difference. There is no failure in trying, only in not bothering. Working for a charity means sacrificing a lot. There are long hours, the remuneration is pretty dismal and you are faced with depressing things, but you meet the most inspirational people and each small success makes you realise that is how you build. It’s not an overnight thing.”
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, August 04, 2008
Profile - chief constable of Nottinghamshire
This profile is due to be published in the Sunday Times sometime in September/
A week in the life
Julia Hodson
Nottinghamshire’s first female chief constable Julia Hodson got a sobering reminder of the ultimate price a police officer can pay shortly after taking up her job in June. She attended a memorial service.
“I spent some time with Tracy, the widow of PC Ged Walker who was killed trying to stop a criminal escaping in a car. That was in 2003 and feelings are still raw here. He would have retired last weekend after 30 years service “
Hodson, 51, says everyone congratulated her when she took the £131,000 a year job. “ But some were quite dismissive about the area. There is still a phase ‘gun city’ and the notion that Nottingham is a violent place. For all the evidence I see I genuinely feel this is undeserved now.”
Her predecessor Steve Green had presided over four successive years of dropping crime statistics. When he left crime was at its lowest for eight years. She says one of his achievements was: “to have taken out most of the significant organised crime groups in the county – the cause of much of the very violent crime a few years ago.”
Only burglaries have nudged upwards and Hodson says this is a high priority.
She says one key is prevention both in developing greater public awareness and devising interventions to cut re-offending.
She is also worried the economic downturn might result in rising crime. “When people are under financial challenges it creates stress which can lead to domestic violence and if people have less money they’ll maybe move towards acquisitive crime.”
Hodson, a Derbyshire miner’s daughter, followed a conventional path from patrol officer to Chief Constable – though she also has two university degrees and joined the police accelerated promotion programme.
She was still on the beat in Merseyside during the miners strike. “Women weren’t involved in policing civil disorder so male officers went from Merseyside and across the country and women officers - there weren’t very many then - were left to police the streets. Perhaps that was part of the change towards accepting that women officers could play a full role in police duties.”
Right now Hodson is still getting to know Nottinghamshire where she oversees four divisions – with 2,500 officers and more than 2,000 other staff and support.
She meets the police authority fortnightly and her chief officers three mornings a week. She’s trying to meet as many ordinary people and civic and business leaders as possible. She has also joined patrol officers and met the victims of crime.
“When I joined I don’t think I ever envisaged being in a management position. I do miss the contact with the public and the best bits of the job are when I can steer towards meeting them.”
She says once her five-year contract is done, she may retire. “I’ll have spent 30 years as a police officer. University beckons. Maybe I’ll do an art history degree. Something completely different.”
A week in the life
Julia Hodson
Nottinghamshire’s first female chief constable Julia Hodson got a sobering reminder of the ultimate price a police officer can pay shortly after taking up her job in June. She attended a memorial service.
“I spent some time with Tracy, the widow of PC Ged Walker who was killed trying to stop a criminal escaping in a car. That was in 2003 and feelings are still raw here. He would have retired last weekend after 30 years service “
Hodson, 51, says everyone congratulated her when she took the £131,000 a year job. “ But some were quite dismissive about the area. There is still a phase ‘gun city’ and the notion that Nottingham is a violent place. For all the evidence I see I genuinely feel this is undeserved now.”
Her predecessor Steve Green had presided over four successive years of dropping crime statistics. When he left crime was at its lowest for eight years. She says one of his achievements was: “to have taken out most of the significant organised crime groups in the county – the cause of much of the very violent crime a few years ago.”
Only burglaries have nudged upwards and Hodson says this is a high priority.
She says one key is prevention both in developing greater public awareness and devising interventions to cut re-offending.
She is also worried the economic downturn might result in rising crime. “When people are under financial challenges it creates stress which can lead to domestic violence and if people have less money they’ll maybe move towards acquisitive crime.”
Hodson, a Derbyshire miner’s daughter, followed a conventional path from patrol officer to Chief Constable – though she also has two university degrees and joined the police accelerated promotion programme.
She was still on the beat in Merseyside during the miners strike. “Women weren’t involved in policing civil disorder so male officers went from Merseyside and across the country and women officers - there weren’t very many then - were left to police the streets. Perhaps that was part of the change towards accepting that women officers could play a full role in police duties.”
Right now Hodson is still getting to know Nottinghamshire where she oversees four divisions – with 2,500 officers and more than 2,000 other staff and support.
She meets the police authority fortnightly and her chief officers three mornings a week. She’s trying to meet as many ordinary people and civic and business leaders as possible. She has also joined patrol officers and met the victims of crime.
“When I joined I don’t think I ever envisaged being in a management position. I do miss the contact with the public and the best bits of the job are when I can steer towards meeting them.”
She says once her five-year contract is done, she may retire. “I’ll have spent 30 years as a police officer. University beckons. Maybe I’ll do an art history degree. Something completely different.”
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Profile Rehayn King
Rehayn King
A week in the life
Sunday Times July 27
Tall ships in the docks, ex-Beatles on stage and scores of other cultural highs. Liverpool is halfway through its party year as European Capital of Culture and making it all work is surely challenging for those behind the scenes.
For Rehayn King it’s an especially busy time. She became director of art galleries at the National Museums Liverpool just over a year ago. King, 43, who manages the flagship Walker Art Gallery together with Sudley House and the Lady Lever Gallery, is also overseeing judging for the 25th John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize this September and helping steer the Liverpool Biennial.
“I suspect this year’s John Moores’ may prove quite controversial” she says. It’s had a record entry but the jurors – including the art provocateurs Jake and Dinos Chapman – have selected fewer works for the shortlist.
King took up her £50,000 a year post after a decade curating in Birmingham with previous experience in Coventry and Boston. Born in Edinburgh, she lived in Tanzania and Surrey before studying art history at Oxford.
“Gallery going wasn’t in my family background, but I was dropped off for a morning at the National Gallery of Scotland when I was 16 and thought – ‘this is a whole new world’. It made a big impact. I wanted to share the pleasure I get from art.”
Merseyside seems to mirror her passion. “Liverpool is very special. It has a very strong creative culture. It is a city that grabs you by the throat - a very emotional place. It makes you want to do something for the city. I found myself very quickly a proponent of how wonderful Liverpool is and how strong it is for the visual arts. “
Now she has bolder visions for the Walker that occupy much of her time away from management work.
In the last week she had meetings with the head of Liverpool’s library that should result in an expansion of the Walkers’ exhibition space. She prepared and delivered a paper on “The Value of Art” for the annual conference of art librarians.
And she attended a fund raising dinner at which the new chairman of National Museums Liverpool, the high profile TV Producer Phil Redmond, was guest of honour.
Much of the week was about developing her vision for the Walker. She wants it to embrace a wider range of art, to increase visual literacy among the young and to increase visitor levels. “It used to get 600,000 a year in the 19th century. Last year we had 300,000.”
“Outside Liverpool it is thought of primarily as about Victorian art, but it is about so much more. I would like to get to the point where it is seen as the best place to see any European painting, from the Renaissance to the modern day, north of Oxford and south of Edinburgh.”
A week in the life
Sunday Times July 27
Tall ships in the docks, ex-Beatles on stage and scores of other cultural highs. Liverpool is halfway through its party year as European Capital of Culture and making it all work is surely challenging for those behind the scenes.
For Rehayn King it’s an especially busy time. She became director of art galleries at the National Museums Liverpool just over a year ago. King, 43, who manages the flagship Walker Art Gallery together with Sudley House and the Lady Lever Gallery, is also overseeing judging for the 25th John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize this September and helping steer the Liverpool Biennial.
“I suspect this year’s John Moores’ may prove quite controversial” she says. It’s had a record entry but the jurors – including the art provocateurs Jake and Dinos Chapman – have selected fewer works for the shortlist.
King took up her £50,000 a year post after a decade curating in Birmingham with previous experience in Coventry and Boston. Born in Edinburgh, she lived in Tanzania and Surrey before studying art history at Oxford.
“Gallery going wasn’t in my family background, but I was dropped off for a morning at the National Gallery of Scotland when I was 16 and thought – ‘this is a whole new world’. It made a big impact. I wanted to share the pleasure I get from art.”
Merseyside seems to mirror her passion. “Liverpool is very special. It has a very strong creative culture. It is a city that grabs you by the throat - a very emotional place. It makes you want to do something for the city. I found myself very quickly a proponent of how wonderful Liverpool is and how strong it is for the visual arts. “
Now she has bolder visions for the Walker that occupy much of her time away from management work.
In the last week she had meetings with the head of Liverpool’s library that should result in an expansion of the Walkers’ exhibition space. She prepared and delivered a paper on “The Value of Art” for the annual conference of art librarians.
And she attended a fund raising dinner at which the new chairman of National Museums Liverpool, the high profile TV Producer Phil Redmond, was guest of honour.
Much of the week was about developing her vision for the Walker. She wants it to embrace a wider range of art, to increase visual literacy among the young and to increase visitor levels. “It used to get 600,000 a year in the 19th century. Last year we had 300,000.”
“Outside Liverpool it is thought of primarily as about Victorian art, but it is about so much more. I would like to get to the point where it is seen as the best place to see any European painting, from the Renaissance to the modern day, north of Oxford and south of Edinburgh.”
Sunday, July 20, 2008
A WEEK IN LIFE – MARTIN DAVIDSON
Published in the Sunday Times July 20th 2008
The sun never sets on the British Council. Britain’s vehicle for promoting the UK through cultural relations has 7,400 staff in 110 countries including troubled places where Government diplomats sometimes fear to tread.
In Zimbabwe and Burma, British Council people remain resolutely at their desks, despite official hostility to the UK. It also operates in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.
Martin Davidson, its chief executive says: “I’m enormously proud that our offices in Mandalay and Rangoon are probably the only public spaces in that country where you can read a foreign newspaper, look at the internet or see foreign television. We get about 350,000 people pass through our offices just to get that contact. I don’t think there is any doubt that they are identified and their names are taken.”
“In Zimbabwe we are providing a link to the outside world hugely valued by the young professional Zimbabwean for giving an understanding of what the outside world is thinking about Zimbabwe, contact with colleagues outside and helping to persuade them to stay in the country.”
Davidson, 52, says the Council’s role has changed little since its creation 75 years ago in response to Nazi propaganda. “Then we sought to demonstrate through education, culture and science that there was an alternative narrative about how people live with one another and across international boundaries. That is still what we are for. We use different language now and talk in terms of our role being to build engagement and trust for the UK through the exchange of knowledge and ideas.”
He is paid £160,000 a year to oversee a hugely complex operation with a shifting set of priorities. The Council’s independence of government, “rather like the BBC” gives it credibility. It gets £190 million from Westminster, but makes £375 million from a range of commercial enterprises, especially education. Millions learn English through the British Council’s work.
Davidson’s week reflects the Council’s international nature. Recently he returned from trip consolidating educational links with Arab nations. Improving relations in the Islamic world is currently high priority.
So is climate change. Hours after returning from Beirut, he flew to Switzerland for a forum at which young people from around the world - recruited by the Council - presented their personal encounters with climate change.
Back in London he delivered an evening briefing at Chatham House followed by breakfast with Margaret Hodge, the Arts Minister. Then he briefed a Foreign Office forum on cultural diplomacy.
The key office event was an internal public accounts meeting. A report concluded the Council delivered significant value for money – promoting the present key idea of Britain as: “an open, diverse, interested and engaged society.” Our values are respect for the rule of law, the individual, diversity and for people who come from different places. “That is the narrative we are trying to present about the UK.”
Published in the Sunday Times July 20th 2008
The sun never sets on the British Council. Britain’s vehicle for promoting the UK through cultural relations has 7,400 staff in 110 countries including troubled places where Government diplomats sometimes fear to tread.
In Zimbabwe and Burma, British Council people remain resolutely at their desks, despite official hostility to the UK. It also operates in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.
Martin Davidson, its chief executive says: “I’m enormously proud that our offices in Mandalay and Rangoon are probably the only public spaces in that country where you can read a foreign newspaper, look at the internet or see foreign television. We get about 350,000 people pass through our offices just to get that contact. I don’t think there is any doubt that they are identified and their names are taken.”
“In Zimbabwe we are providing a link to the outside world hugely valued by the young professional Zimbabwean for giving an understanding of what the outside world is thinking about Zimbabwe, contact with colleagues outside and helping to persuade them to stay in the country.”
Davidson, 52, says the Council’s role has changed little since its creation 75 years ago in response to Nazi propaganda. “Then we sought to demonstrate through education, culture and science that there was an alternative narrative about how people live with one another and across international boundaries. That is still what we are for. We use different language now and talk in terms of our role being to build engagement and trust for the UK through the exchange of knowledge and ideas.”
He is paid £160,000 a year to oversee a hugely complex operation with a shifting set of priorities. The Council’s independence of government, “rather like the BBC” gives it credibility. It gets £190 million from Westminster, but makes £375 million from a range of commercial enterprises, especially education. Millions learn English through the British Council’s work.
Davidson’s week reflects the Council’s international nature. Recently he returned from trip consolidating educational links with Arab nations. Improving relations in the Islamic world is currently high priority.
So is climate change. Hours after returning from Beirut, he flew to Switzerland for a forum at which young people from around the world - recruited by the Council - presented their personal encounters with climate change.
Back in London he delivered an evening briefing at Chatham House followed by breakfast with Margaret Hodge, the Arts Minister. Then he briefed a Foreign Office forum on cultural diplomacy.
The key office event was an internal public accounts meeting. A report concluded the Council delivered significant value for money – promoting the present key idea of Britain as: “an open, diverse, interested and engaged society.” Our values are respect for the rule of law, the individual, diversity and for people who come from different places. “That is the narrative we are trying to present about the UK.”
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Profile - Nick Partridge
Profile - Nick Partridge - Published in The Sunday Times July 13th 2008
When rumours that a frightening new disease was killing gay men in America first surfaced in the early 1980s, Nick Partridge - now director of the Terrence Higgins Trust - was working in Amsterdam.
“I was fearful and horrified by the prospect of something that was completely unknown, but was killing people very quickly.” These early intimations spurred him back to London where he soon began working with the newly founded Trust, named after the first known British victim.
Twenty-five years later Terrence Higgins is Europe’s largest HIV and Aids charity and works in a very different landscape.
Aids has killed 25 million people around the world and there are 2.5 million new cases of HIV each year. But in developed countries HIV is now largely a chronic condition controlled by powerful antiretroviral drugs.
Partridge, 52, who earns £85,000 annually, has been director since 1991. This week he returned from a UN gathering in New York about the global Aids situation.
Terrence Higgins is now part of Britain’s health establishment and Partridge divides his time between the Trust and working as deputy chair of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, as a member of the Healthcare Commission and chairing INVOLVE which promotes public involvement in public health, NHS and social care research.
Meetings in London and Manchester with these organisations form key parts of his week together with the enjoyable business of attending the Trust’s annual fundraising gala dinner.
Partridge says he once believed the Trust would disappear when a cure and vaccine for Aids were found. “But research on this has stalled. I don’t now believe we will see either in our lifetime.”
The work of the Trust has changed after two watershed dates. In 1991 Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury died from AIDS. A million pounds in royalties from the re-released “Bohemian Rhapsody”, donated to the Trust gave it financial security.
More importantly Mercury’s death – and the Princess of Wales’s involvement in Aids issues - broadened public understanding.
But Partridge says by then he was close to emotional burn-out and would have quit had it not been for the development of effective antiretroviral drugs treatments in 1996.
“This was extraordinary. The numbers of people dying dropped by over 70 per cent in just 18 months. To see that dawning realization that people were going to live and not die was absolutely fabulous.”
But it also meant the Trust completely re-thinking its purpose. “Our services now reflect a very different relationship. They’re tailored around moments of crisis – such as the initial diagnosis or going on to treatment.”
A new challenge is sustaining awareness. A third of people with HIV in Britain don’t know they have the infection.
“There is a worryingly low level of HIV knowledge and that is where having proper and effective sex education in schools is vital. We have failed to do this and to equip each new generation to understand the risk around HIV and to better enjoy their journey into sex and relationships.”
When rumours that a frightening new disease was killing gay men in America first surfaced in the early 1980s, Nick Partridge - now director of the Terrence Higgins Trust - was working in Amsterdam.
“I was fearful and horrified by the prospect of something that was completely unknown, but was killing people very quickly.” These early intimations spurred him back to London where he soon began working with the newly founded Trust, named after the first known British victim.
Twenty-five years later Terrence Higgins is Europe’s largest HIV and Aids charity and works in a very different landscape.
Aids has killed 25 million people around the world and there are 2.5 million new cases of HIV each year. But in developed countries HIV is now largely a chronic condition controlled by powerful antiretroviral drugs.
Partridge, 52, who earns £85,000 annually, has been director since 1991. This week he returned from a UN gathering in New York about the global Aids situation.
Terrence Higgins is now part of Britain’s health establishment and Partridge divides his time between the Trust and working as deputy chair of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, as a member of the Healthcare Commission and chairing INVOLVE which promotes public involvement in public health, NHS and social care research.
Meetings in London and Manchester with these organisations form key parts of his week together with the enjoyable business of attending the Trust’s annual fundraising gala dinner.
Partridge says he once believed the Trust would disappear when a cure and vaccine for Aids were found. “But research on this has stalled. I don’t now believe we will see either in our lifetime.”
The work of the Trust has changed after two watershed dates. In 1991 Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury died from AIDS. A million pounds in royalties from the re-released “Bohemian Rhapsody”, donated to the Trust gave it financial security.
More importantly Mercury’s death – and the Princess of Wales’s involvement in Aids issues - broadened public understanding.
But Partridge says by then he was close to emotional burn-out and would have quit had it not been for the development of effective antiretroviral drugs treatments in 1996.
“This was extraordinary. The numbers of people dying dropped by over 70 per cent in just 18 months. To see that dawning realization that people were going to live and not die was absolutely fabulous.”
But it also meant the Trust completely re-thinking its purpose. “Our services now reflect a very different relationship. They’re tailored around moments of crisis – such as the initial diagnosis or going on to treatment.”
A new challenge is sustaining awareness. A third of people with HIV in Britain don’t know they have the infection.
“There is a worryingly low level of HIV knowledge and that is where having proper and effective sex education in schools is vital. We have failed to do this and to equip each new generation to understand the risk around HIV and to better enjoy their journey into sex and relationships.”
Monday, June 30, 2008
Profile - Anthony Mayer
Profile - Anthony Mayer
Published in The Sunday Times June 29th 2008
A manifesto pledge by London’s new Mayor Boris Johnson to downsize staffing at the Greater London Authority is being fulfilled. Five senior posts held by women are being axed in the Mayor’s office including the job held by the former Mayor Ken Livingstone’s long term partner Emma Beal who is mother of two of his children.
Another departure will have a different impact. Anthony Mayer, GLA Chief Executive since late 2000, leaves this autumn to become chairman of the Government’s new Social Housing Regulator, the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords.
“Did I jump or was I pushed? Neither,“ he says. “I’ve known about this since March,” before he presided over the Mayoral elections in his role as London’s chief electoral returning officer.
Mayer, who earns £183,000 a year, was CEO throughout the Ken Livingstone era. “It will be a wrench to leave. I’ve loved it and had good and cordial relationships with assembly members and both mayors. But I’m 62 and it is time to go if I want a post fulltime employment role. “
He oversees an Authority staff of 650 and an £11 billion budget for the wider GLA group which includes the police, Transport for London and the London Development Agency. He says his job is more like being a Permanent Secretary, but adds:” I’ve been a bit of a maitre’ d/bouncer in a rather rowdy nightclub. Whenever there’s been any conflict that needed resolving. I nearly always got involved.”
“Call me old fashioned, but I see myself and my successor as bureaucrats who facilitate. My successor’s biggest challenge will be getting things up and running and then facilitating the Mayor’s agendas – addressing transport problems, the Olympics and making the organisation more cost effective.”
Mayer’s mondays have been reserved for catch up meetings with directors. his management team and then with the Mayor. The rest of the week? “Anything and everything as it comes up.”
One of the GLA’s highest profile weeks was in July 2005 when winning the 2012 Olympics was followed by the 7/7 bombings.
“On the Thursday I had the massive adrenalin rush of the win, hearing about it on my way to fly to Shanghai for a conference. I heard of the bombings at 9.00 in the morning in Shanghai. I had this sense of horrible shock and then this huge difficulty of using the mobile phone system to enact all the trusted and well-tried systems of response. I was very proud of all those colleagues who did so well to get the recovery system going so quickly.”
How Boris Johnson differ from his predecessor?
“There is more than one style of Mayoralty. One of the things about Mr Livingstone was he was a great managerial politician. He knew how to operate all the levers. What Mr Johnson has made clear is that he is going to want to be absolutely at the forefront of leading London, but wants to have a have a first deputy mayor to implement his policies. So it’s much more a Whitehall model with a Secretary of State and ministers working for you. It would be presumptuous of me to say how that is going to shake down.“
Published in The Sunday Times June 29th 2008
A manifesto pledge by London’s new Mayor Boris Johnson to downsize staffing at the Greater London Authority is being fulfilled. Five senior posts held by women are being axed in the Mayor’s office including the job held by the former Mayor Ken Livingstone’s long term partner Emma Beal who is mother of two of his children.
Another departure will have a different impact. Anthony Mayer, GLA Chief Executive since late 2000, leaves this autumn to become chairman of the Government’s new Social Housing Regulator, the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords.
“Did I jump or was I pushed? Neither,“ he says. “I’ve known about this since March,” before he presided over the Mayoral elections in his role as London’s chief electoral returning officer.
Mayer, who earns £183,000 a year, was CEO throughout the Ken Livingstone era. “It will be a wrench to leave. I’ve loved it and had good and cordial relationships with assembly members and both mayors. But I’m 62 and it is time to go if I want a post fulltime employment role. “
He oversees an Authority staff of 650 and an £11 billion budget for the wider GLA group which includes the police, Transport for London and the London Development Agency. He says his job is more like being a Permanent Secretary, but adds:” I’ve been a bit of a maitre’ d/bouncer in a rather rowdy nightclub. Whenever there’s been any conflict that needed resolving. I nearly always got involved.”
“Call me old fashioned, but I see myself and my successor as bureaucrats who facilitate. My successor’s biggest challenge will be getting things up and running and then facilitating the Mayor’s agendas – addressing transport problems, the Olympics and making the organisation more cost effective.”
Mayer’s mondays have been reserved for catch up meetings with directors. his management team and then with the Mayor. The rest of the week? “Anything and everything as it comes up.”
One of the GLA’s highest profile weeks was in July 2005 when winning the 2012 Olympics was followed by the 7/7 bombings.
“On the Thursday I had the massive adrenalin rush of the win, hearing about it on my way to fly to Shanghai for a conference. I heard of the bombings at 9.00 in the morning in Shanghai. I had this sense of horrible shock and then this huge difficulty of using the mobile phone system to enact all the trusted and well-tried systems of response. I was very proud of all those colleagues who did so well to get the recovery system going so quickly.”
How Boris Johnson differ from his predecessor?
“There is more than one style of Mayoralty. One of the things about Mr Livingstone was he was a great managerial politician. He knew how to operate all the levers. What Mr Johnson has made clear is that he is going to want to be absolutely at the forefront of leading London, but wants to have a have a first deputy mayor to implement his policies. So it’s much more a Whitehall model with a Secretary of State and ministers working for you. It would be presumptuous of me to say how that is going to shake down.“
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Profile Dame Fiona Reynolds
A WEEK IN THE LIFE
DAME FIONA REYNOLDS
sunday times June 22
When Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust, appeared on Desert Island Discs her luxury was a set of Ordnance Survey maps of Britain and her book The Making Of The English Landscape.
Dame Fiona, 50, says she has always had a passionate love of the countryside. “It is in my blood.”
So in 2001, when she learned the Trust’s top job was being advertised, she turned her back on two and a half years heading up the Cabinet Office Women’s Unit.
“It was fascinating and I had learned a lot, but this was my dream job. I never expected to get it,” she says, “and I just love it in so many ways.”
Dame Fiona, the Trust’s first female head since its foundation in 1895 by the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill, earns more than £130,000. She studied geography and land management at Cambridge and has worked on green issues throughout her career apart from the interlude in Whitehall.
She now runs one of the world’s largest non-governmental organisations. With 3.5 million members, the charity looks after more than 620,000 acres of land of outstanding natural beauty across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 705 miles of coastline and hundreds of historic sites including houses, castles, villages and lighthouses.
A permanent staff of around 500 is helped by some 50,000 volunteers.
“There’s no such thing as an average week. I love the variety and am out as much as I can be. One or two days a week are spent at properties. Last week I was in the South East. Tomorrow I am in Wessex and next week in Devon and Cornwall.
She is based at the new Trust HQ in Swindon and attends board meetings and looks after management tasks there, but visits London most weeks.
“My role as leader is to set a strategic direction and champion it. It is definitely not about telling individual properties or people what do.”
Her travels enable her to gather ideas from the experiences of staff and volunteers that can feed into the Trust’s new strategy.
“It is a move from encouraging people to join the Trust, to encouraging them to join in. It’s a simple proposition – for people to not just visit but to get involved.”
She cites a successful venture at Cothele in Cornwall where families now help to create the annual Christmas garlands that decorate the house.
But though the Trust remains the custodian of places of beauty and historical importance – “we need them for our spiritual and emotional and physical refreshment” - it is also confronting the challenge of climate change.
“I often call us the nation’s canary. Because of the scale of our property ownership we can see the bigger picture and spot trends that individuals might not always see. We’ve done a lot of work on the impact of climate change on gardens and on its likely impacts on coastline – more than government departments have done.”
DAME FIONA REYNOLDS
sunday times June 22
When Dame Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust, appeared on Desert Island Discs her luxury was a set of Ordnance Survey maps of Britain and her book The Making Of The English Landscape.
Dame Fiona, 50, says she has always had a passionate love of the countryside. “It is in my blood.”
So in 2001, when she learned the Trust’s top job was being advertised, she turned her back on two and a half years heading up the Cabinet Office Women’s Unit.
“It was fascinating and I had learned a lot, but this was my dream job. I never expected to get it,” she says, “and I just love it in so many ways.”
Dame Fiona, the Trust’s first female head since its foundation in 1895 by the Victorian social reformer Octavia Hill, earns more than £130,000. She studied geography and land management at Cambridge and has worked on green issues throughout her career apart from the interlude in Whitehall.
She now runs one of the world’s largest non-governmental organisations. With 3.5 million members, the charity looks after more than 620,000 acres of land of outstanding natural beauty across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 705 miles of coastline and hundreds of historic sites including houses, castles, villages and lighthouses.
A permanent staff of around 500 is helped by some 50,000 volunteers.
“There’s no such thing as an average week. I love the variety and am out as much as I can be. One or two days a week are spent at properties. Last week I was in the South East. Tomorrow I am in Wessex and next week in Devon and Cornwall.
She is based at the new Trust HQ in Swindon and attends board meetings and looks after management tasks there, but visits London most weeks.
“My role as leader is to set a strategic direction and champion it. It is definitely not about telling individual properties or people what do.”
Her travels enable her to gather ideas from the experiences of staff and volunteers that can feed into the Trust’s new strategy.
“It is a move from encouraging people to join the Trust, to encouraging them to join in. It’s a simple proposition – for people to not just visit but to get involved.”
She cites a successful venture at Cothele in Cornwall where families now help to create the annual Christmas garlands that decorate the house.
But though the Trust remains the custodian of places of beauty and historical importance – “we need them for our spiritual and emotional and physical refreshment” - it is also confronting the challenge of climate change.
“I often call us the nation’s canary. Because of the scale of our property ownership we can see the bigger picture and spot trends that individuals might not always see. We’ve done a lot of work on the impact of climate change on gardens and on its likely impacts on coastline – more than government departments have done.”
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Profile - Director of RUSI
Profile of the Director of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies
Published in The Sunday Times June 8th 2008
Professor Michael Clarke is the first non-military man to be director of Britain’s top defence think tank - the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies - since its creation by the Duke of Wellington in 1831.
“In the UK we’ve long since got over the military/civil distinction, but in many countries, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, if you’re not a military officer they wonder why you’re doing this job. I have to prove I know about defence.”
“RUSI’s Council was interested in me because they want it to become a more internationally recognised think tank. So as well as CEO I’m also a research entrepreneur.”
Clarke, 57, has impeccable credentials. He founded The Centre For Defence Studies at Kings College, London and ran it for 17 years.
“RUSI occupies a unique space in British defence and security, but the whole field is getting wider with terrorism, international crime, civil disruption and more. Our challenge is to fill this space.”
This means finding new funding sources. RUSI, a charity based on Whitehall near Downing Street and the MoD, works intimately with them, but gets no state funding – even though its patron is The Queen.
“I always tell people in Government that we’re of most use when the outside world sees how independent we are. If we are seen as an adjunct of Government people won’t take us seriously.”
The core of RUSI’s work is researching current trends in defence and security and their implications for Britain.
But RUSI’s independence means it can offer controversial views – a recent report argued the world should spend 10 times more on fighting climate change than on defence - and trenchant criticism. For example, Clarke says: “The invasion of Iraq remains a blunder from which Iran has gained most” and Britain and the West have a worse understanding of Middle Eastern politics than for generations.
But he also offers praise. “In terms of dealing with terrorism in the UK, the security forces have done really well. It was hopeless a few years ago, but they’ve made really good progress.”
After returning from a conference in Johannesburg on conflict resolution Clarke’s working week combined his duties as CEO with a whirlwind of sessions meeting politicians, senior defence figures, business leaders and visiting academics.
All feed back into RUSI’s work. Its fastest growing research area is homeland security with continuing studies on UK terrorism, radicalisation and protection of critical national infrastructure. So this week he also attended a Whitehall forum on policing London, spent a day at a terrorism trial as an expert witness, attended a reception for the departing Pakistan High Commissioner and recorded his fortnightly Forces Radio show.
Clarke’s personal academic focus is British defence policy making and nuclear issues – he is an advisor to the UN Secretary General on Disarmament - and this sprawls into his personal time. ”I have to keep up my professorial profile. In an institute like this it is important that we are all seen as big hitters.”
Published in The Sunday Times June 8th 2008
Professor Michael Clarke is the first non-military man to be director of Britain’s top defence think tank - the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies - since its creation by the Duke of Wellington in 1831.
“In the UK we’ve long since got over the military/civil distinction, but in many countries, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, if you’re not a military officer they wonder why you’re doing this job. I have to prove I know about defence.”
“RUSI’s Council was interested in me because they want it to become a more internationally recognised think tank. So as well as CEO I’m also a research entrepreneur.”
Clarke, 57, has impeccable credentials. He founded The Centre For Defence Studies at Kings College, London and ran it for 17 years.
“RUSI occupies a unique space in British defence and security, but the whole field is getting wider with terrorism, international crime, civil disruption and more. Our challenge is to fill this space.”
This means finding new funding sources. RUSI, a charity based on Whitehall near Downing Street and the MoD, works intimately with them, but gets no state funding – even though its patron is The Queen.
“I always tell people in Government that we’re of most use when the outside world sees how independent we are. If we are seen as an adjunct of Government people won’t take us seriously.”
The core of RUSI’s work is researching current trends in defence and security and their implications for Britain.
But RUSI’s independence means it can offer controversial views – a recent report argued the world should spend 10 times more on fighting climate change than on defence - and trenchant criticism. For example, Clarke says: “The invasion of Iraq remains a blunder from which Iran has gained most” and Britain and the West have a worse understanding of Middle Eastern politics than for generations.
But he also offers praise. “In terms of dealing with terrorism in the UK, the security forces have done really well. It was hopeless a few years ago, but they’ve made really good progress.”
After returning from a conference in Johannesburg on conflict resolution Clarke’s working week combined his duties as CEO with a whirlwind of sessions meeting politicians, senior defence figures, business leaders and visiting academics.
All feed back into RUSI’s work. Its fastest growing research area is homeland security with continuing studies on UK terrorism, radicalisation and protection of critical national infrastructure. So this week he also attended a Whitehall forum on policing London, spent a day at a terrorism trial as an expert witness, attended a reception for the departing Pakistan High Commissioner and recorded his fortnightly Forces Radio show.
Clarke’s personal academic focus is British defence policy making and nuclear issues – he is an advisor to the UN Secretary General on Disarmament - and this sprawls into his personal time. ”I have to keep up my professorial profile. In an institute like this it is important that we are all seen as big hitters.”
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Profile - Imperial War Museum Director
PROFILE SIR ROBERT CRAWFORD
A WEEK IN THE LIFE
John Kelleher
The Imperial War Museum, headquartered in South London was conceived in 1917 in the final stages of the conflict briefly known as the “war to end all wars.”
Across the century since it has chronicled innumerable conflicts around the world involving Britain and the Commonwealth.
Sir Robert Crawford, its Director General, who retires this autumn after 40 years, has spent his career gazing into the heart of this darkness - the museum’s account of the impacts of war on the lives of ordinary people.
“I think war is part of our human condition. I don’t think it will go away, but I think it is important to remain optimistic about humanity’s ability to manage this challenge. Institutions like this have a role in equipping people with an understanding of the history of war and of the historical antecedents to current conflicts that should enable them to address the challenges of war more responsibly and effectively in the future.”
Crawford, who earns £129,000 annually, joined the Museum in 1966 as a junior researcher straight from Oxford. His first job was cataloguing part of its immense film archive of the build-up to D Day and ensuing battle for Normandy.
“I told the director it would take thirty-five of me the rest of the century to complete cataloguing this material in the amount of detail that was required! We now do it in a somewhat speedier manner.”
Crawford, 63 now has others among the Museum’s 645 fulltime staff who maintain the still growing archive. Although Museum overlord, he praises his team for such achievements as creating the Holocaust exhibition, the dramatic Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, HMS Belfast, the air museums at Duxford and the Cabinet War Rooms.
But at the Museum’s core is an unswerving vision – overseen by Crawford since he became Director General in 1995. Education is its enduring raison d’etre and, despite regular debates about widening its remit, he says The Great War – the first “total war” - is still the best starting point for the collection. Suggestions it might drop Imperial from its name have also been examined frequently and rejected.
With mere months before retirement Crawford shows no sign of flagging.
Recently he was in Washington for a fund raising dinner for the American Air Museum at Duxford. “Uniquely we managed to close Reagan Airport for a flyover of three second world war aircraft.” He also attended a Downing Street reception marking the cultural world’s contribution to the economy, opened the “For Your Eyes Only” exhibition on James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming and chaired meetings about funding and the museum’s future.
From October that future will be the responsibility of the Museum’s first female director, Diane Lees, presently running London’s Museum of Childhood.
“My retirement will be a clean break. Rather like headmasters and vicars, one doesn’t offer a ghost like tread in the patch of one’s successor. I do hope though they might invite me back for an exhibition opening or two.”
A WEEK IN THE LIFE
John Kelleher
The Imperial War Museum, headquartered in South London was conceived in 1917 in the final stages of the conflict briefly known as the “war to end all wars.”
Across the century since it has chronicled innumerable conflicts around the world involving Britain and the Commonwealth.
Sir Robert Crawford, its Director General, who retires this autumn after 40 years, has spent his career gazing into the heart of this darkness - the museum’s account of the impacts of war on the lives of ordinary people.
“I think war is part of our human condition. I don’t think it will go away, but I think it is important to remain optimistic about humanity’s ability to manage this challenge. Institutions like this have a role in equipping people with an understanding of the history of war and of the historical antecedents to current conflicts that should enable them to address the challenges of war more responsibly and effectively in the future.”
Crawford, who earns £129,000 annually, joined the Museum in 1966 as a junior researcher straight from Oxford. His first job was cataloguing part of its immense film archive of the build-up to D Day and ensuing battle for Normandy.
“I told the director it would take thirty-five of me the rest of the century to complete cataloguing this material in the amount of detail that was required! We now do it in a somewhat speedier manner.”
Crawford, 63 now has others among the Museum’s 645 fulltime staff who maintain the still growing archive. Although Museum overlord, he praises his team for such achievements as creating the Holocaust exhibition, the dramatic Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, HMS Belfast, the air museums at Duxford and the Cabinet War Rooms.
But at the Museum’s core is an unswerving vision – overseen by Crawford since he became Director General in 1995. Education is its enduring raison d’etre and, despite regular debates about widening its remit, he says The Great War – the first “total war” - is still the best starting point for the collection. Suggestions it might drop Imperial from its name have also been examined frequently and rejected.
With mere months before retirement Crawford shows no sign of flagging.
Recently he was in Washington for a fund raising dinner for the American Air Museum at Duxford. “Uniquely we managed to close Reagan Airport for a flyover of three second world war aircraft.” He also attended a Downing Street reception marking the cultural world’s contribution to the economy, opened the “For Your Eyes Only” exhibition on James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming and chaired meetings about funding and the museum’s future.
From October that future will be the responsibility of the Museum’s first female director, Diane Lees, presently running London’s Museum of Childhood.
“My retirement will be a clean break. Rather like headmasters and vicars, one doesn’t offer a ghost like tread in the patch of one’s successor. I do hope though they might invite me back for an exhibition opening or two.”
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
CHINA DESIGN NOW - A REVIEW
CHINA DESIGN NOW
THE V+A
A short distance from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington there is a shop full of cool Scandinavian design. Elegant and curvaceous modernist creations by Marimekko and the like.
It offers a stark contrast to (and perhaps a ordered and restorative balm after) the cacophony of the current featured show at the V+A – “China Design Now” which runs until the middle of July.
The exhibition offers a reminder of Napoleon’s famous words: “Let China sleep for when she wakes the world will tremble.”
Indeed it could be sub-titled:” whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
The show is all about design in modern China – graphic and architectural ideas in particular.
Three cities are featured from the east coast of this continent of cultures -Shenzhen, Shanghai and the Olympic capital Beijing. Little is revealed about the vaster hinterland.
There is also little to put any of this in any historical context. Instead we are offered a welter of sensation. The overwhelming feeling is of bewildering confusion – of the Western notion of the fragile beauty of Chinese design and art confounded by a dam burst of youthful ideas – borrowed, stolen, pasted or smashed together from a thousand and one primarily Western youth culture sources to into an exotic hybrid.
One young visitor said she was appalled by the thought that millions of young Chinese children were growing up with this mishmash as their visual backdrop.
It is hard to find coherence or what we’ve come to think of as traditional elements of Chinese beauty here.
There are some fine modern variations on Chinese calligraphy, but primarily one can admire the sheer vitality and energy on show, of ideas going in a thousand different directions.
This is a world being endlessly born – something that parallels the nature of China since its entrance into the modern world. It’s a new cultural revolution and, rather akin to Mao’s political event, it grows by despoiling the past.
The section about the transformation of Beijing for the Olympics is revealing. When I visited nearly a decade ago the vast avenues were already becoming lined with modernist creations.
But behind them were still a maze of old streets – the hutongs or neighbourhoods.
Since then Beijing has gone into overdrive – exorcising the old and creating whole neighbourhoods of dramatic post-modernism. Just as with the smaller Canary Wharf area in London this blooming of a thousand new buildings offers a dazzling display.
But it is being done at a price - the seeming carnage enacted on a culture that has been swept away. It is easy for the Western mind, often fixated on the romantic to bemoan this.
After the visit to Beijing one feature I wrote talked of the willow-pattern prettiness of Behei Park in the early morning – its lake around a white Dagoba fringed with trees and people practicing t’ai chi. I was criticised for this by a Chinese friend - and for some elements of our film - for conjuring a romantic and backwards looking image of contemporary China.
Perhaps the criticsm was valid from the perspective of a young Chinese who saw change and modernisation in a wholly positive light. Quite correct from the perspective of creating a new nation where everyone benefits from its growing economy.
For them much of the past serves a commercial purpose – luring tourists – but in other respects signifies oppression by a now defunct ruling class and poverty.
The new China emerging now is getting wealthier and offering its citizens opportunities we in the West take for granted.
But such reservations about these changes also highlight the different things that are valued now in a West that went through many convulsions as it moved into the modern age.
In the UK we walk through the gutted hearts of many an old town or city and see fragments of our “heritage” poling through the soulless malls of multinational shopping outlets. We feel regret for a history now lost beneath the concrete and wish such a fate could be avoided elsewhere.
Now we seek to create a balance carefully between the benefits of continuing modernisation and a desire to preserve the best of the past. This is in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant idea in previously impoverished parts of the world which are modernising as fast as they can.
Such concern about the careful preservation of the past can be seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded.
We in the West seek to see our dreams of cultural continuity and of places in a finer harmony with their past in cultures that have trailed behind our embrace of the modern world. And we resent the sort of idea of progress that rocks that dreamboat.
In the Arabian Gulf for instance, the nomads of the desert have forsaken their tents and impoverished lifestyle for the vast gallop to modernism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
It is a shame, we feel, as we perceive something of what we see as the romantic Bedouin soul being lost among the concrete and glass. Such a perspective might be the folly of what Edward Said defined as orientalism.
For would we have accepted living in wattle and daub as serfs if a parallel world of wealth, comfort and improvement were on offer?
It’s a complicated question. The China being born today seems alien and challenging – but perhaps it embodies what western liberals once praised about Maoism - the challenge of constant revolution made solid.
THE V+A
A short distance from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington there is a shop full of cool Scandinavian design. Elegant and curvaceous modernist creations by Marimekko and the like.
It offers a stark contrast to (and perhaps a ordered and restorative balm after) the cacophony of the current featured show at the V+A – “China Design Now” which runs until the middle of July.
The exhibition offers a reminder of Napoleon’s famous words: “Let China sleep for when she wakes the world will tremble.”
Indeed it could be sub-titled:” whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
The show is all about design in modern China – graphic and architectural ideas in particular.
Three cities are featured from the east coast of this continent of cultures -Shenzhen, Shanghai and the Olympic capital Beijing. Little is revealed about the vaster hinterland.
There is also little to put any of this in any historical context. Instead we are offered a welter of sensation. The overwhelming feeling is of bewildering confusion – of the Western notion of the fragile beauty of Chinese design and art confounded by a dam burst of youthful ideas – borrowed, stolen, pasted or smashed together from a thousand and one primarily Western youth culture sources to into an exotic hybrid.
One young visitor said she was appalled by the thought that millions of young Chinese children were growing up with this mishmash as their visual backdrop.
It is hard to find coherence or what we’ve come to think of as traditional elements of Chinese beauty here.
There are some fine modern variations on Chinese calligraphy, but primarily one can admire the sheer vitality and energy on show, of ideas going in a thousand different directions.
This is a world being endlessly born – something that parallels the nature of China since its entrance into the modern world. It’s a new cultural revolution and, rather akin to Mao’s political event, it grows by despoiling the past.
The section about the transformation of Beijing for the Olympics is revealing. When I visited nearly a decade ago the vast avenues were already becoming lined with modernist creations.
But behind them were still a maze of old streets – the hutongs or neighbourhoods.
Since then Beijing has gone into overdrive – exorcising the old and creating whole neighbourhoods of dramatic post-modernism. Just as with the smaller Canary Wharf area in London this blooming of a thousand new buildings offers a dazzling display.
But it is being done at a price - the seeming carnage enacted on a culture that has been swept away. It is easy for the Western mind, often fixated on the romantic to bemoan this.
After the visit to Beijing one feature I wrote talked of the willow-pattern prettiness of Behei Park in the early morning – its lake around a white Dagoba fringed with trees and people practicing t’ai chi. I was criticised for this by a Chinese friend - and for some elements of our film - for conjuring a romantic and backwards looking image of contemporary China.
Perhaps the criticsm was valid from the perspective of a young Chinese who saw change and modernisation in a wholly positive light. Quite correct from the perspective of creating a new nation where everyone benefits from its growing economy.
For them much of the past serves a commercial purpose – luring tourists – but in other respects signifies oppression by a now defunct ruling class and poverty.
The new China emerging now is getting wealthier and offering its citizens opportunities we in the West take for granted.
But such reservations about these changes also highlight the different things that are valued now in a West that went through many convulsions as it moved into the modern age.
In the UK we walk through the gutted hearts of many an old town or city and see fragments of our “heritage” poling through the soulless malls of multinational shopping outlets. We feel regret for a history now lost beneath the concrete and wish such a fate could be avoided elsewhere.
Now we seek to create a balance carefully between the benefits of continuing modernisation and a desire to preserve the best of the past. This is in stark contrast to the increasingly dominant idea in previously impoverished parts of the world which are modernising as fast as they can.
Such concern about the careful preservation of the past can be seen as a luxury that cannot be afforded.
We in the West seek to see our dreams of cultural continuity and of places in a finer harmony with their past in cultures that have trailed behind our embrace of the modern world. And we resent the sort of idea of progress that rocks that dreamboat.
In the Arabian Gulf for instance, the nomads of the desert have forsaken their tents and impoverished lifestyle for the vast gallop to modernism of Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
It is a shame, we feel, as we perceive something of what we see as the romantic Bedouin soul being lost among the concrete and glass. Such a perspective might be the folly of what Edward Said defined as orientalism.
For would we have accepted living in wattle and daub as serfs if a parallel world of wealth, comfort and improvement were on offer?
It’s a complicated question. The China being born today seems alien and challenging – but perhaps it embodies what western liberals once praised about Maoism - the challenge of constant revolution made solid.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Profile of Rear Admiral jeremy de Halpert
A week in the life
Sunday Times
May 4 2008
This summer a sunken German U-Boat that has lain undisturbed for 90 years will be shifted from a busy section of the English Channel – to clear a passage for giant supertankers carrying Russian oil.
“The English Channel and the Dover Straits are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. On a single day, there are more shipping movements there than air traffic movements at Heathrow,” says Rear Admiral Jeremy de Halpert CB, Executive Chairman of Trinity House.
Trinity House has overall responsibility for the safety of shipping here and around the coast of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. It works closely with matching organisations for Scotland and Ireland.
“I always call us the highways agency of the sea. We mark the roads and clear the wrecks,” says de Halpert, 60, who took over the £95,000 a year job in 2002 - together with the pro-bono role of Deputy Master, running its charity.
The Rear Admiral’s 40 years in the Royal Navy included action in the Falklands. More recently he has held such high-ranking jobs on dry land as Director of Overseas Military Activity at the Ministry of Defence.
“I still try to spend about four weeks a year at sea. For the past two days I’ve been at sea about our new vessel The Galatea.”
In the same week he visited retirement homes near Dover run by the charity which, as one of the largest endowed maritime charities in the UK, has £3 million annually to spend.
As Executive Chairman he saw the naming of a new cruise liner in Southampton, attended meetings in London, Harwich, Edinburgh and Paris and had a formal dinner with deep-sea fishermen.
Trinity House spends £30 million a year on a wide range of safety responsibilities – running lighthouses and maintaining buoys, and ensuring safe navigation in coastal waters. It has 300 people – 100 at sea in its three vessels. The funding comes from levies on vessels using ports.
Henry VIII founded Trinity House in 1514 and his portrait gazes down on business at its’ HQ near Tower Hill. But today Trinity House uses technology undreamt of in Tudor days. Things have evolved radically even over de Halpert’s career. His office displays a sextant, a chronometer and a star globe. “When I started in 1966 this is what you navigated with out of sight of land. They’re museum pieces now.”
Marine Satnav using GPS is standard, with Britain’s now fully automated lighthouses and buoys becoming primarily visual aids for mariners.
Trinity House and its French counterpart are now testing something called eLoran – a high-powered landbased navigation transmission system. de Halpert says it performed very well in recent trials investigating how easily GPS signals could be disrupted or jammed by atmospherics or terrorism. “eLoran was rock steady wheras GPS was all over the place.”
In the still precarious world of marine navigation a secure new aid is welcome indeed and bad news for terrorists, or anyone else, hoping to cause chaos at sea.
Sunday Times
May 4 2008
This summer a sunken German U-Boat that has lain undisturbed for 90 years will be shifted from a busy section of the English Channel – to clear a passage for giant supertankers carrying Russian oil.
“The English Channel and the Dover Straits are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. On a single day, there are more shipping movements there than air traffic movements at Heathrow,” says Rear Admiral Jeremy de Halpert CB, Executive Chairman of Trinity House.
Trinity House has overall responsibility for the safety of shipping here and around the coast of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. It works closely with matching organisations for Scotland and Ireland.
“I always call us the highways agency of the sea. We mark the roads and clear the wrecks,” says de Halpert, 60, who took over the £95,000 a year job in 2002 - together with the pro-bono role of Deputy Master, running its charity.
The Rear Admiral’s 40 years in the Royal Navy included action in the Falklands. More recently he has held such high-ranking jobs on dry land as Director of Overseas Military Activity at the Ministry of Defence.
“I still try to spend about four weeks a year at sea. For the past two days I’ve been at sea about our new vessel The Galatea.”
In the same week he visited retirement homes near Dover run by the charity which, as one of the largest endowed maritime charities in the UK, has £3 million annually to spend.
As Executive Chairman he saw the naming of a new cruise liner in Southampton, attended meetings in London, Harwich, Edinburgh and Paris and had a formal dinner with deep-sea fishermen.
Trinity House spends £30 million a year on a wide range of safety responsibilities – running lighthouses and maintaining buoys, and ensuring safe navigation in coastal waters. It has 300 people – 100 at sea in its three vessels. The funding comes from levies on vessels using ports.
Henry VIII founded Trinity House in 1514 and his portrait gazes down on business at its’ HQ near Tower Hill. But today Trinity House uses technology undreamt of in Tudor days. Things have evolved radically even over de Halpert’s career. His office displays a sextant, a chronometer and a star globe. “When I started in 1966 this is what you navigated with out of sight of land. They’re museum pieces now.”
Marine Satnav using GPS is standard, with Britain’s now fully automated lighthouses and buoys becoming primarily visual aids for mariners.
Trinity House and its French counterpart are now testing something called eLoran – a high-powered landbased navigation transmission system. de Halpert says it performed very well in recent trials investigating how easily GPS signals could be disrupted or jammed by atmospherics or terrorism. “eLoran was rock steady wheras GPS was all over the place.”
In the still precarious world of marine navigation a secure new aid is welcome indeed and bad news for terrorists, or anyone else, hoping to cause chaos at sea.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Profile - Amanda Neville
Profile of Amanda Neville - BFI - published in Sunday Times April 20th
The boundary between profession and passion is blurred for Amanda Nevill, director of the British Film Institute.
Her working hours are full of the challenges of running an institution in the throes of radical re-invention. It is 75 this year and waiting for Government approval to create an ambitious £200 million National Film Centre on the South Bank in London.
But after hours and at weekends she can often be found – along with many other BFI staffers - at the present BFI Southbank centre, watching films or mingling with people from the business.
“I don’t know how many films I’ve seen, but I still get excited every time that curtain opens. I want other people to have the opportunity to get as excited and to be nourished in the same way that I do.”
Nevill, 51 who earns around £120,000 annually was appointed in 2003 by the then new chairman of the BFI, film director Anthony Minghella. He died this March.
“His loss numbed me. The BFI that exists now is very much his vision. He and I shared the same values. We wanted the BFI to be loved by a lot of people.”
His successor is former BBC Director General Greg Dyke. Nevill has just taken him to see the BFI’s film archive – the world’s largest - housed over 34 acres underground near Birmingham and in Hertfordshire.
During the week Nevill moves between meetings with colleagues to discuss things like the London Film Festival, conservation issues, the proposed National Film Centre and how to make the BFI’s vast collection increasingly accessible.
“We are like the British Museum for film – one of the great planks of UK culture. Our job is interpret this stuff in a way that is relevant and exciting for lots of different audiences.
The BFI is multi-faceted. As well as running the BFI Southbank and Mediatheque, it has the IMAX, a vast library and immense film archive, a distribution wing, Sight and Sound magazine, publications and more.
Nevill says there are many challenges for the BFI – all interconnected. These include protecting the archive and ensuring that everyone has access to the widest diversity of cinema and to knowledge about it in the digital age.
“Our distribution of films is spectacular now. We serve over 800 venues across the UK with around 12,000 prints in an average year.”
Then there are the Mediatheques in London and touring the UK and co-productions utilising forgotten archive film. But the single biggest vision is the proposed National Film Centre.
“Anthony used to say that BFI Southbank is a rehearsal run for this. It will be a collision of facets which have never sat together before.
We are in the throes of negotiating a very exciting formal partnership with higher education which will breathe the next level of scholarly engagement with our collections.”
“We want to create a destination where anybody who loves anything about film can come, a place to capture the hearts and minds of the public, for people from the industry and for everyone else.”
The boundary between profession and passion is blurred for Amanda Nevill, director of the British Film Institute.
Her working hours are full of the challenges of running an institution in the throes of radical re-invention. It is 75 this year and waiting for Government approval to create an ambitious £200 million National Film Centre on the South Bank in London.
But after hours and at weekends she can often be found – along with many other BFI staffers - at the present BFI Southbank centre, watching films or mingling with people from the business.
“I don’t know how many films I’ve seen, but I still get excited every time that curtain opens. I want other people to have the opportunity to get as excited and to be nourished in the same way that I do.”
Nevill, 51 who earns around £120,000 annually was appointed in 2003 by the then new chairman of the BFI, film director Anthony Minghella. He died this March.
“His loss numbed me. The BFI that exists now is very much his vision. He and I shared the same values. We wanted the BFI to be loved by a lot of people.”
His successor is former BBC Director General Greg Dyke. Nevill has just taken him to see the BFI’s film archive – the world’s largest - housed over 34 acres underground near Birmingham and in Hertfordshire.
During the week Nevill moves between meetings with colleagues to discuss things like the London Film Festival, conservation issues, the proposed National Film Centre and how to make the BFI’s vast collection increasingly accessible.
“We are like the British Museum for film – one of the great planks of UK culture. Our job is interpret this stuff in a way that is relevant and exciting for lots of different audiences.
The BFI is multi-faceted. As well as running the BFI Southbank and Mediatheque, it has the IMAX, a vast library and immense film archive, a distribution wing, Sight and Sound magazine, publications and more.
Nevill says there are many challenges for the BFI – all interconnected. These include protecting the archive and ensuring that everyone has access to the widest diversity of cinema and to knowledge about it in the digital age.
“Our distribution of films is spectacular now. We serve over 800 venues across the UK with around 12,000 prints in an average year.”
Then there are the Mediatheques in London and touring the UK and co-productions utilising forgotten archive film. But the single biggest vision is the proposed National Film Centre.
“Anthony used to say that BFI Southbank is a rehearsal run for this. It will be a collision of facets which have never sat together before.
We are in the throes of negotiating a very exciting formal partnership with higher education which will breathe the next level of scholarly engagement with our collections.”
“We want to create a destination where anybody who loves anything about film can come, a place to capture the hearts and minds of the public, for people from the industry and for everyone else.”
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Kew Gardens Profile - Sunday Times - April 2008
Most mornings before breakfast, Professor Stephen Hopper and his wife walk in the gardens around the West London house which comes with his job.
But these are no ordinary gardens. The 56-year-old Australian botanist became Director of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in 2006 and his stroll can take him anywhere in its 300 acres.
Kew is the popular public showcase for a vast root system of lesser-known but vital scientific work there and at Wakehurst Place in Sussex – home to the Millennium Seed Bank. Kew’s scientists work globally and it also has a small outpost in Mozambique manned by six local people. “It is one of the world’s richest but least explored places for plant species.”
When Hopper started the £129,000 a year job he says: “I had a sense of awe and found it humbling to be involved in a place so rich in history and global reach. There are around 700 staff - about a third involved in science, so it is one of the plant science powerhouses of the world.
The scientific work is focused at the Jodrell laboratories in Kew and at the Seed Bank where it is aimed to have seeds from 25 percent of the world’s plants in storage by 2020.
“The challenges for Kew are to help improve the quality of life by focusing on what plants can do for people in general and what they can do in terms of some of the environmental challenges we all face. That involves some organisational changes and new partnerships and ways of doing things.”
Attending to those partnerships meant meeting a senior BBC executive this week to explore ways of increasing public awareness of environmental issues. Hopper also travelled to Cambridge for a scientific conference. His weekend was spent reading about Darwin whose 200th anniversary coincides with Kew’s 250th birthday. Big events are planned.
Hopper grew up in the semi desert landscape of Western Australia and a school trip into the wild made him realise he wanted to work outdoors. He trained first as a marine biologist but switched over to botany. He still spends a month a year in the field.
Scientific and management skills must now be matched by political canniness. “We have an active role in exploring the world of plants and funghi, demonstrating clearly their value and importance and engaging in the political process to get the world to turn the corner and stop this crazy behaviour of ever more destruction of wild vegetation.”
“Kew’s role is not blatantly political. It is about ensuring that the underpinning science is conducted to really help policy makers take informed decisions.”
“I have to be optimistic. I went to a conference on sustainability and indigenous people and an elder from an Native American nation said the most important thing we can give to young people is hope. We really need to think of what can be done and engage people. All good things start with individuals.”
But these are no ordinary gardens. The 56-year-old Australian botanist became Director of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in 2006 and his stroll can take him anywhere in its 300 acres.
Kew is the popular public showcase for a vast root system of lesser-known but vital scientific work there and at Wakehurst Place in Sussex – home to the Millennium Seed Bank. Kew’s scientists work globally and it also has a small outpost in Mozambique manned by six local people. “It is one of the world’s richest but least explored places for plant species.”
When Hopper started the £129,000 a year job he says: “I had a sense of awe and found it humbling to be involved in a place so rich in history and global reach. There are around 700 staff - about a third involved in science, so it is one of the plant science powerhouses of the world.
The scientific work is focused at the Jodrell laboratories in Kew and at the Seed Bank where it is aimed to have seeds from 25 percent of the world’s plants in storage by 2020.
“The challenges for Kew are to help improve the quality of life by focusing on what plants can do for people in general and what they can do in terms of some of the environmental challenges we all face. That involves some organisational changes and new partnerships and ways of doing things.”
Attending to those partnerships meant meeting a senior BBC executive this week to explore ways of increasing public awareness of environmental issues. Hopper also travelled to Cambridge for a scientific conference. His weekend was spent reading about Darwin whose 200th anniversary coincides with Kew’s 250th birthday. Big events are planned.
Hopper grew up in the semi desert landscape of Western Australia and a school trip into the wild made him realise he wanted to work outdoors. He trained first as a marine biologist but switched over to botany. He still spends a month a year in the field.
Scientific and management skills must now be matched by political canniness. “We have an active role in exploring the world of plants and funghi, demonstrating clearly their value and importance and engaging in the political process to get the world to turn the corner and stop this crazy behaviour of ever more destruction of wild vegetation.”
“Kew’s role is not blatantly political. It is about ensuring that the underpinning science is conducted to really help policy makers take informed decisions.”
“I have to be optimistic. I went to a conference on sustainability and indigenous people and an elder from an Native American nation said the most important thing we can give to young people is hope. We really need to think of what can be done and engage people. All good things start with individuals.”
Zoo profile - Sunday Times - april
It was on his second day as a teenage volunteer at Dudley Zoo that David Field had a life-changing encounter.
Field, 41, is now Zoological Director of the two establishments run by the Zoological Society of London – ZSL London Zoo and ZSL Whipsnade.
“I’d like to say my inspiration was David Attenborough or Sir Stamford Raffles who started this zoo, but it was probably Joe the Orang Utan. He was a remarkable animal.
“Joe loved Horlicks and the first time I went to feed him he gently manoeuvred the feeding can aside and, for ten minutes, we just looked at each other. I felt such a sense of responsibility for him and began to understand the responsibility we as humans have for the care of nature, whether it be in zoos or the environment.”
Field has 20,845 animals in his care together with 240 staff. He has been with ZSL five years, first as Whipsnade’s curator and as Zoological Director since 2006. His week now involves so much business planning that, last year, he completed an MBA.
“ It is quite an eclectic job. I am responsible for the animals but also for keepers and the veterinary department, development of new exhibits, future plans for the zoo and also education. It’s not just children, but finding ways to inspire all our million and a half visitors.”
Alongside weekly management meetings and one-to-ones with key workers, another priority is visiting all staff and animals at both sites.
“I like to know exactly what is going on with all the animals. Today I joined a briefing for the bird team and I visited our new gorilla who arrived yesterday – a gorgeous female called Mijuku.
“It is incredibly exciting. Today she met our male gorilla Bobby for the first time and, to quote my head keeper of gorillas: ‘love is in the air.’ “
Other highlights of his week were the opening in London of the Blackburn Pavilion for birds, and in Whipsnade, Cheetah Rock with extensive facilities for captive breeding of the big cat.
Those who disapprove of zoos may not have visited one lately. Field says: “Discovery and learning is one of the pillars of our work alongside research and conservation.”
“”Society is becoming so divorced from nature that places like zoos can really reconnect them with nature. It for their own well being.”
Zoos are now in the environmental frontline. Among many conservation projects, ZSL is pioneering the fight against a fungal infection called the Chytrid Fungus that is killing amphibians globally.
“It is an extinction crisis worse than the dinosaurs. The only survival hope for many amphibians is to set up captive breeding habitats.“
In an era when the challenges of climate change and global extinction seem overwhelming, Field remains optimistic. “ We cannot win all the battles, but I always remember a quotation from the anthropologist Margaret Mead. ‘Never doubt that a group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.’”
Field, 41, is now Zoological Director of the two establishments run by the Zoological Society of London – ZSL London Zoo and ZSL Whipsnade.
“I’d like to say my inspiration was David Attenborough or Sir Stamford Raffles who started this zoo, but it was probably Joe the Orang Utan. He was a remarkable animal.
“Joe loved Horlicks and the first time I went to feed him he gently manoeuvred the feeding can aside and, for ten minutes, we just looked at each other. I felt such a sense of responsibility for him and began to understand the responsibility we as humans have for the care of nature, whether it be in zoos or the environment.”
Field has 20,845 animals in his care together with 240 staff. He has been with ZSL five years, first as Whipsnade’s curator and as Zoological Director since 2006. His week now involves so much business planning that, last year, he completed an MBA.
“ It is quite an eclectic job. I am responsible for the animals but also for keepers and the veterinary department, development of new exhibits, future plans for the zoo and also education. It’s not just children, but finding ways to inspire all our million and a half visitors.”
Alongside weekly management meetings and one-to-ones with key workers, another priority is visiting all staff and animals at both sites.
“I like to know exactly what is going on with all the animals. Today I joined a briefing for the bird team and I visited our new gorilla who arrived yesterday – a gorgeous female called Mijuku.
“It is incredibly exciting. Today she met our male gorilla Bobby for the first time and, to quote my head keeper of gorillas: ‘love is in the air.’ “
Other highlights of his week were the opening in London of the Blackburn Pavilion for birds, and in Whipsnade, Cheetah Rock with extensive facilities for captive breeding of the big cat.
Those who disapprove of zoos may not have visited one lately. Field says: “Discovery and learning is one of the pillars of our work alongside research and conservation.”
“”Society is becoming so divorced from nature that places like zoos can really reconnect them with nature. It for their own well being.”
Zoos are now in the environmental frontline. Among many conservation projects, ZSL is pioneering the fight against a fungal infection called the Chytrid Fungus that is killing amphibians globally.
“It is an extinction crisis worse than the dinosaurs. The only survival hope for many amphibians is to set up captive breeding habitats.“
In an era when the challenges of climate change and global extinction seem overwhelming, Field remains optimistic. “ We cannot win all the battles, but I always remember a quotation from the anthropologist Margaret Mead. ‘Never doubt that a group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.’”
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Pocket film reviews 2007
I'M NOT THERE:
It is said that "I'm Not There" is the first fictional treatment of the
life of Bob Dylan that has been approved by the artist. It is not
surprising. It is a long winded exercise in mythmaking - packaging some
incredibly imaginative sequences and performances with long sequences
of great tedium. This is clearly not intended as a literal treatment of
the Dylan life story but as an exploration of the multi-levelled nature
of the man, his elusiveness, his own tendency to obscure and cloud and
offer variable versions of his own biography. (The first volume of his
so-called autobiography did something similar with its absurd razor
sharp recollections of events in Greenwich village 40 years ago -
descriptions of people's facial expressions, of the light on snow etc.
Good writing etc... but unreliable). Well this film plays in the heart
of unreliability - and aspires to reflect this genius through versions
of his life, cutting back and forward in time, but not really reaching
into the present beyond the use of a few relatively recent songs. The
latest Dylan we encounter here is the born-again man. The Neverending
Tour of the past fifteen years is not alluded to. The most powerful
central core of this film is the mid-sixties Dylan, shot in stark black
and white, with Cate Blanchett offers a dynamic performnance as the
electric muse - probably for most Dylan fans the moment of his greatest
achievement. The evocation of this era is offered in a crackling and
sharply scripted series of pssages - though even here a degree of
cliché is included (The Philip Jacobson style BBC cultural pundit is a
cartoon and the cues to "Ballad Of A Thin Man" are so predictable!)
There are plenty of cute references to other films, photography,
quotations etyc - Jonathan Miller's Alice, The Beatles, Dick Lester,
Robert Frank etc. which are fun. ) However this is a film that is
really rather unlikely to reach out beyond those already intrigued by
the whole Dylan phenomenon. As a narrative it is as meandering as his
own "Renaldo And Clara" venture and at times seems genuinely
interminable. The passages featuring the Richard gere version of Dylan
are the weakest - evoking the Big Pink/Band/Back to American roots era
of Dylan after the "motorcycle crash". Some of the lines given to the
"ghosts of Dylan in this film point to that core elusive self that Dylan
protects - particularly when the Sixties electric Dylan starts talking
about the music being "traditional" in a way wholly other than the idea
of folk as popularised in the early sixties. I believe few who pay attention would asrgue with the idea of Dylan as a creative genius. I'm not sure this film offers much illumination on the nature of thast genius.
Again one can quibble with certain details - the sequence where Pete Seeger is seen going for an axe at the Newport folk festival for instance (read White Bicycles by
Joe Boyd to see this as another cloud of myth) but that may not be the
point since the film is layer upon layer of myths and half truths and
rumours. All in all though a long and not especially profound ride.
Listen to the music instead. It could have been an hour longer with no
gain or loss. There is sadly a sort of smug hipper than thou quality
about the whole exercise.
THE VALLEY OF ELAH
"IN €œThe Valley Of Elah€" directed by Paul Haggis is the most impressive and moving film I have seen in a very long time. It is redeems one'€™s faith in the possibility of film’s offer a profound experience - moral, emotionally intense, subtle and unflinching in seeking to discover and present difficult truths. It also includes a performance that is truly magnificent - €“ Tommy Lee Jones as the father of a young solider in Iraq. This is an austere film without sensational violence or overt simplistic moralizing. Instead its story about the fate of a young man returned from Iraq unfolds in a dry but compelling fashion to show how this conflict has wounded the West in unexpected ways – and to finally lay bare the latent brutality at the heart of the male condition. It isn'€™t going to win awards or huge audiences because it is is too uncompromising and its message at once too subtle and too challenging. Haggis who made €œCrash†has moved upwards and onwards with this and though it is not without faults - the use of an Annie Lennox song at the end for instance - €“ its tone is otherwise assured. We see a decent patriotic American have his illusions stripped from him - €“ a rite of passage that can be seen to embody the growing pain of a nation whose hubris is perhaps also disintegrating. Stunning.
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
This is a terrific film about myth and psychology. It's long (over two hours) and slow, but also posssed of an elegaic beauty for which, terrific credit to the director of photography Roger Deakins who deserves an Oscar for his work. The evocation of an America on the cusp of the modern is superb but at the heart of this is a set of wonderful acting performances by Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck and Sam Shepard. As a stidy of a socipath its superb, and as a dstidy in the disintegration and dissipation of mythic status is has an almost Shakespearian elementalism. Terrific.
It is said that "I'm Not There" is the first fictional treatment of the
life of Bob Dylan that has been approved by the artist. It is not
surprising. It is a long winded exercise in mythmaking - packaging some
incredibly imaginative sequences and performances with long sequences
of great tedium. This is clearly not intended as a literal treatment of
the Dylan life story but as an exploration of the multi-levelled nature
of the man, his elusiveness, his own tendency to obscure and cloud and
offer variable versions of his own biography. (The first volume of his
so-called autobiography did something similar with its absurd razor
sharp recollections of events in Greenwich village 40 years ago -
descriptions of people's facial expressions, of the light on snow etc.
Good writing etc... but unreliable). Well this film plays in the heart
of unreliability - and aspires to reflect this genius through versions
of his life, cutting back and forward in time, but not really reaching
into the present beyond the use of a few relatively recent songs. The
latest Dylan we encounter here is the born-again man. The Neverending
Tour of the past fifteen years is not alluded to. The most powerful
central core of this film is the mid-sixties Dylan, shot in stark black
and white, with Cate Blanchett offers a dynamic performnance as the
electric muse - probably for most Dylan fans the moment of his greatest
achievement. The evocation of this era is offered in a crackling and
sharply scripted series of pssages - though even here a degree of
cliché is included (The Philip Jacobson style BBC cultural pundit is a
cartoon and the cues to "Ballad Of A Thin Man" are so predictable!)
There are plenty of cute references to other films, photography,
quotations etyc - Jonathan Miller's Alice, The Beatles, Dick Lester,
Robert Frank etc. which are fun. ) However this is a film that is
really rather unlikely to reach out beyond those already intrigued by
the whole Dylan phenomenon. As a narrative it is as meandering as his
own "Renaldo And Clara" venture and at times seems genuinely
interminable. The passages featuring the Richard gere version of Dylan
are the weakest - evoking the Big Pink/Band/Back to American roots era
of Dylan after the "motorcycle crash". Some of the lines given to the
"ghosts of Dylan in this film point to that core elusive self that Dylan
protects - particularly when the Sixties electric Dylan starts talking
about the music being "traditional" in a way wholly other than the idea
of folk as popularised in the early sixties. I believe few who pay attention would asrgue with the idea of Dylan as a creative genius. I'm not sure this film offers much illumination on the nature of thast genius.
Again one can quibble with certain details - the sequence where Pete Seeger is seen going for an axe at the Newport folk festival for instance (read White Bicycles by
Joe Boyd to see this as another cloud of myth) but that may not be the
point since the film is layer upon layer of myths and half truths and
rumours. All in all though a long and not especially profound ride.
Listen to the music instead. It could have been an hour longer with no
gain or loss. There is sadly a sort of smug hipper than thou quality
about the whole exercise.
THE VALLEY OF ELAH
"IN €œThe Valley Of Elah€" directed by Paul Haggis is the most impressive and moving film I have seen in a very long time. It is redeems one'€™s faith in the possibility of film’s offer a profound experience - moral, emotionally intense, subtle and unflinching in seeking to discover and present difficult truths. It also includes a performance that is truly magnificent - €“ Tommy Lee Jones as the father of a young solider in Iraq. This is an austere film without sensational violence or overt simplistic moralizing. Instead its story about the fate of a young man returned from Iraq unfolds in a dry but compelling fashion to show how this conflict has wounded the West in unexpected ways – and to finally lay bare the latent brutality at the heart of the male condition. It isn'€™t going to win awards or huge audiences because it is is too uncompromising and its message at once too subtle and too challenging. Haggis who made €œCrash†has moved upwards and onwards with this and though it is not without faults - the use of an Annie Lennox song at the end for instance - €“ its tone is otherwise assured. We see a decent patriotic American have his illusions stripped from him - €“ a rite of passage that can be seen to embody the growing pain of a nation whose hubris is perhaps also disintegrating. Stunning.
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
This is a terrific film about myth and psychology. It's long (over two hours) and slow, but also posssed of an elegaic beauty for which, terrific credit to the director of photography Roger Deakins who deserves an Oscar for his work. The evocation of an America on the cusp of the modern is superb but at the heart of this is a set of wonderful acting performances by Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck and Sam Shepard. As a stidy of a socipath its superb, and as a dstidy in the disintegration and dissipation of mythic status is has an almost Shakespearian elementalism. Terrific.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
LIVERPOOL AND CULTURE
A feature on Liverpool written about 18 months ago
When the American pop singer Bruce Chanel performed in Liverpool in 1962 he says that he found it: " biblically bleak with the waves hitting up against the sea wall. It was a melancholy and lonely place."
Yet just five years later another visiting American, the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, described it as: "The centre of consciousness of the human universe."
Clearly a lot changed in the interim and one key were Chanel's supporting act … a local band called The Beatles.
John, Paul George and Ringo delivered their hometown to the world … and the world has been coming back ever since. The Beatles are written into the legend of the city and the cultural history of the 20th century. The city's airport is named after John Lennon and he is in the National Curriculum, their childhood homes are National Trust properties and McCartney is a Knight of the realm.
But Liverpool 2004 has a lorra lorra other stuff happening and is very different from the place that nurtured the group. It is profoundly changed from the town described by the earliest English antiquary John Leland who, when he toured Britain in the 1530s. wrote: "Lyrpole or Lyverpoole… a pavid towne." Even in the 19th century it was described as being : "Deficient in essentials to embellish the historic page."
Fast forward to 2004 when it has just been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and is a month into its third Biennial arts festival - now the UK's largest event showcasing contemporary visual artists.
In 2007 it will celebrate the 800th anniversary of its founding charter and, the following year it will be European City of Culture, likely to create thousands of jobs and draw billions in investment. One leading estate recently dubbed it "the new Barcelona".
And the Year of Culture decision prompted Liverpool City Council leader Mike Storey to proclaim: "This is like Liverpool winning the Champion's league, Everton winning the double and The Beatles reforming all on the same day - and Stephen Spielberg coming to the city to make a Hollywood blockbuster about it."
Such a film would be an epic and at its heart would be the sea. It would trace Liverpool's modest origins as Hather-polr - a Norse settlement in the 8th century through the granting of its royal charter by King John in 1207 when he foresaw its potential as a port.
The short sea journey to Ireland made it a staging post for St Patrick and saw hundreds of thousands of Irish settle in the city fleeing famine. Thousands of hopeful emigrants departed here for America. And later it was the conduit that brought American R'n'B records into the country - via the crew of Cunard Line ships - to help fuel the Mersey Sound.
But crucially maritime business also made the city wealthy, most disgracefully through slavery. By 1795 Liverpool controlled more than 80 percent of Brtain's slave trade.
It is a dark history now acknowledged in the city's museums and schools, but it also helps ensure Liverpool should never become a mere colourful northern outcrop of theme-park Britain. It's got too many shadows , too much pride and and its traditionally brutal humour.
Liverpool was never a gentle city and it still makes self deprecating jokes about its once notorious reputation. "Why does the Mersey run through Liverpool?", goes one. "Because if it walked it'd get robbed."
However visitors arriving by train now see a sign proclaiming it the safest city in Britain. So how did it change?
The starting point was the 1960s. Liverpool's music put it in the vanguard of a cultural revolution that, over succeeding decades, has widely levelled categories of high and low culture in place of today's pervasive popular culture. It helped challenge the cultural dominance of London with a decentralisation and democratisation of culture that is now global.
The Liverpool poet Roger McGough said of his hometown then that it was: "like the cowboy frontier " and fellow scouse versifier Adrian Henri added that: "The Beatles were the first cultural phenomenon of any kind who made it outside London first."
But other Liverpool creative figures also played a key role in this process of cultural change. It has always bred talent but perhaps most importantly after music, are its humorists and writers - the Liverpool poets, for instance who helped empower a whole generation to venture into verse, and dramatists such as Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale.
Its no accident perhaps that the first and defining British cop series Z Cars, was set in the mean streets of Merseyside. Alan Bleasdale's offered grittiness and wit a'plenty in drama such as The Boys from The Black Stuff and GBH and three of the most successful long running soaps, Brookside, Hollyoaks and Grange Hill, were created by Phil Redmond's Mersey TV.
All counterpoint Northernness - in all its varieties - as a badge of "authenticity" in contrast to "effete" southern values. This raw working class past is still refracted through Liverpool's pride and acerbic wit.
But while booming tourism boosts its economy this a revolution has also benefited native Liverpudlians. Their comspolitan city offers more to enjoy than almost any other comparable conurbation: Britain's second oldest symphony orchestra, nightclubs, art collections like the Walker or Tate Liverpool, theatres and a seemingly endless season of festivals. 2004 has events celebrating art, comedy, Arabic culture, the sea and the long established Beatles Week.
The German born director of Tate Liverpool Christoph Grunenberg says: "Five years ago someone like me might not have come to Liverpool, but its an indication of how swift the change has been in terms of cultural provision."
Last word to city poet Sir Roger McGough. He recently produced a poem with a litany of definitions of Liverpool; "Lippy, Irreverent, Vibrant, Edgy, Racy, Pacy,Obsessive, Off-the-wall, Legendary."
A feature on Liverpool written about 18 months ago
When the American pop singer Bruce Chanel performed in Liverpool in 1962 he says that he found it: " biblically bleak with the waves hitting up against the sea wall. It was a melancholy and lonely place."
Yet just five years later another visiting American, the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, described it as: "The centre of consciousness of the human universe."
Clearly a lot changed in the interim and one key were Chanel's supporting act … a local band called The Beatles.
John, Paul George and Ringo delivered their hometown to the world … and the world has been coming back ever since. The Beatles are written into the legend of the city and the cultural history of the 20th century. The city's airport is named after John Lennon and he is in the National Curriculum, their childhood homes are National Trust properties and McCartney is a Knight of the realm.
But Liverpool 2004 has a lorra lorra other stuff happening and is very different from the place that nurtured the group. It is profoundly changed from the town described by the earliest English antiquary John Leland who, when he toured Britain in the 1530s. wrote: "Lyrpole or Lyverpoole… a pavid towne." Even in the 19th century it was described as being : "Deficient in essentials to embellish the historic page."
Fast forward to 2004 when it has just been named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and is a month into its third Biennial arts festival - now the UK's largest event showcasing contemporary visual artists.
In 2007 it will celebrate the 800th anniversary of its founding charter and, the following year it will be European City of Culture, likely to create thousands of jobs and draw billions in investment. One leading estate recently dubbed it "the new Barcelona".
And the Year of Culture decision prompted Liverpool City Council leader Mike Storey to proclaim: "This is like Liverpool winning the Champion's league, Everton winning the double and The Beatles reforming all on the same day - and Stephen Spielberg coming to the city to make a Hollywood blockbuster about it."
Such a film would be an epic and at its heart would be the sea. It would trace Liverpool's modest origins as Hather-polr - a Norse settlement in the 8th century through the granting of its royal charter by King John in 1207 when he foresaw its potential as a port.
The short sea journey to Ireland made it a staging post for St Patrick and saw hundreds of thousands of Irish settle in the city fleeing famine. Thousands of hopeful emigrants departed here for America. And later it was the conduit that brought American R'n'B records into the country - via the crew of Cunard Line ships - to help fuel the Mersey Sound.
But crucially maritime business also made the city wealthy, most disgracefully through slavery. By 1795 Liverpool controlled more than 80 percent of Brtain's slave trade.
It is a dark history now acknowledged in the city's museums and schools, but it also helps ensure Liverpool should never become a mere colourful northern outcrop of theme-park Britain. It's got too many shadows , too much pride and and its traditionally brutal humour.
Liverpool was never a gentle city and it still makes self deprecating jokes about its once notorious reputation. "Why does the Mersey run through Liverpool?", goes one. "Because if it walked it'd get robbed."
However visitors arriving by train now see a sign proclaiming it the safest city in Britain. So how did it change?
The starting point was the 1960s. Liverpool's music put it in the vanguard of a cultural revolution that, over succeeding decades, has widely levelled categories of high and low culture in place of today's pervasive popular culture. It helped challenge the cultural dominance of London with a decentralisation and democratisation of culture that is now global.
The Liverpool poet Roger McGough said of his hometown then that it was: "like the cowboy frontier " and fellow scouse versifier Adrian Henri added that: "The Beatles were the first cultural phenomenon of any kind who made it outside London first."
But other Liverpool creative figures also played a key role in this process of cultural change. It has always bred talent but perhaps most importantly after music, are its humorists and writers - the Liverpool poets, for instance who helped empower a whole generation to venture into verse, and dramatists such as Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale.
Its no accident perhaps that the first and defining British cop series Z Cars, was set in the mean streets of Merseyside. Alan Bleasdale's offered grittiness and wit a'plenty in drama such as The Boys from The Black Stuff and GBH and three of the most successful long running soaps, Brookside, Hollyoaks and Grange Hill, were created by Phil Redmond's Mersey TV.
All counterpoint Northernness - in all its varieties - as a badge of "authenticity" in contrast to "effete" southern values. This raw working class past is still refracted through Liverpool's pride and acerbic wit.
But while booming tourism boosts its economy this a revolution has also benefited native Liverpudlians. Their comspolitan city offers more to enjoy than almost any other comparable conurbation: Britain's second oldest symphony orchestra, nightclubs, art collections like the Walker or Tate Liverpool, theatres and a seemingly endless season of festivals. 2004 has events celebrating art, comedy, Arabic culture, the sea and the long established Beatles Week.
The German born director of Tate Liverpool Christoph Grunenberg says: "Five years ago someone like me might not have come to Liverpool, but its an indication of how swift the change has been in terms of cultural provision."
Last word to city poet Sir Roger McGough. He recently produced a poem with a litany of definitions of Liverpool; "Lippy, Irreverent, Vibrant, Edgy, Racy, Pacy,Obsessive, Off-the-wall, Legendary."
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Science and Religion - Templeton Essay
http://www.templeton-cambridge.org/fellows/2006
ESSAY FOR TEMPLETON CAMBRIDGE JOURNALISM FELLOWSHIP
Thirteen years ago Pope John Paul II expressed optimism for science and religion's happy co-existence. Speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences he said that although they formed two realms of knowledge they: "Are not foreign to each other. They have points of contact."
His optimism was echoed in a book published in 1999 from the other side of the divide. In "Rocks Of Ages - Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life" scientist Stephen Jay Gould argued for the co-existence of what he termed the two non-overlapping magistera of science and faith.
"People of good will wish to see science and religion at peace," he said, "I do not see how they can be unified, or even synthesised under any common scheme of explanation or analysis, but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict."
Nevertheless, in 2005, things look less rosy. Science and religion seem to be in growing confrontation. And this is seen most sharply in the world's most developed nation.
Last year the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists issued two reports accusing the Bush administration of distorting scientific fact in pursuit of policies on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weapons.
His re-election prompted the scientific community to forecast increasing difficulties in this relationship. Likely areas of conflict are science education, climate change, stem-cell research, and renewable resources.
Why should this be? After all, US funding for the sciences grew significantly during the first Bush administration.
In part it is politics as usual. But a deeper cause is a more fundamental conflict about the constitutional principle of separation of church and state in an increasingly religious nation.
Many in the wider intellectual community see the deepening right-wing social revolution in the US as symptomatic of the growing influence of the religious right which challenges values which have shaped the intellectual landscape of the West since the Enlightenment.
These challenges find parallels in the developing fundamentalist impulse among other world religions and are further strengthened by post-modernist arguments presenting science and religion as belief systems of equal value.
At the heart of all this is a challenge to the scientific world view and its philosophical corollaries.
In the "Critique of Pure Reason" Kant offered seemingly conclusive refutations to both the ontological and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Darwin meanwhile seemed to have nailed the lid on the "woefully anthropomorphic nature" of intelligent design in the natural realm.
In the 19th century the poet Matthew Arnold wrote in "Dover Beach" of the "melancholy long withdrawing roar …of the sea of faith". But where Nietszche once heralded the death of God and 20th century neuroscientists expected advancing brain science to bring about the parallel demise of the notion of the soul, that sea of faith is now in full flood again.
The post-Enlightenment world proved that, where faith and science can co-exist, the gains to humanity are immense. It led to a modern world shaped by a constantly evolving technology with, in the West, an intellectual climate where human inquiry could move forward within a moral and ethical framework increasingly unhampered by the constricts of religious power.
This decline of faith left a vacuum filled to some extent by the utopian visions of socialism which, in its fullest efflorescence, enslaved or perverted intellectual enquiry for political ends.
Where faith had offered moral structures and meaning and, especially, answers to eschatological questions, the new ideas of scientific socialist focused on the apparent realities of living in "this world". The absence of a deity was increasingly taken as a given.
Now the collapse of these 20th century utopian ambitions has seen the resurgence of values thought anachronistic - fervent nationalism and the reassertion of religious ideas as a way of explaining our lives.
But some things are irreversible. Technology has both created and revealed a world of increasing interconnectedness. The tsunami at Christmas symbolised this with tragic force. It revealed both the strengths and shortcomings of science, faith and politics.
Scientists can explain the mechanics of the Tsunami and explore ways of limiting the future impact of such events. And politicians know how to react in practical terms.
But it was left to spiritual leaders to help us all to make sense of the tragedy. But, with scientists and politicians, they too failed to answer the question asked by so many: Why?
When human agencies are the catalysts of the unspeakable - the Holocaust, 9/11 or Beslan - notions of evil are evoked. But religions fall mute in explaining natural catastrophes.
Most united in calls to look forward. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said that terrible events like this will shake faith, but Christians must focus on a passionate engagement with the lives that are left.
Britain's Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, said asking why was pointless and that Judaism's priority was to inquire: "What should I do? How can I help?" He added: " We must put our efforts into saving life. We believe God needs our help to help those who suffer."
A leading British Hindu said it was a reminder that we exist to serve the world, not vice versa. "To blame God is infantile. It is about accepting personal responsibility and the truth which is that you are not the centre of the universe."
So how are the fundamental questions about who we are, why we exist and what things mean to be answered? Take for instance this question of almost childish simplicity. "Why is there something instead of nothing?"
The follow-up question is probably: "What is the purpose and meaning of creation?" The scientific community has no answers. Religion, in marked contrast, offers a seemingly simple explanation. "Because of God."
The argument flows into the realm of philosophy. The German thinker Friedrich Schelling asked: " Has creation a final purpose at all and if so why is it not attained immediately? Why does perfection not exist from the very beginning."
It reveals the deep gulf between those who seek to understand the nature and workings of our universe via scientific method and in humanist philosophical terms and those who believe the truth stands revealed already through the major religions.
Science abounds in theories about how our universe came to exist. But not why. Although the Big Bang is evidentially established, what preceded it? Science is seeking answers - a theory of everything with no loose ends. But it is an elusive and some say unattainable goal.
The cosmologist Stephen Hawking concluded in his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time" that if we succeed: "We shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would the ultimate triumph of human science - for then we would know the mind of God."
Since he wrote that 18 years ago, theoretical physics has moved into increasingly speculative areas with such ideas as string theory, dark matter and parallel universes. All require leaps of faith as large as that required by those who see the truth is revealed in holy text.
Novelist Salman Rushdie recently defined us as meaning-seeking organisms with a "God shaped hole" yearning to be filled. It is little wonder in the face of such bewildering scientific theories and a world of increasingly intractable difficulty that much of humanity has returned to the affirmations of faith.
But since disengagement with science is no longer an option, the troops of faith have entered a new redoubt of explanation - armed with ideas about intelligent design and the anthropic principle.
So can there then be a harmonious co-existence between resurgent faith and science as scientists enter the 'sacred realm" of experimenting with life itself. Stem cell research, cloning, genetic manipulation and chemical modification of behaviour bring religious and scientific imperatives into confrontation.
But there is another area where it is perhaps more crucial that such conflict be resolved. In a forthcoming book scientist Jared Diamond explores why societies collapse. He concludes that it is usually where tradition and ritual, cultural or religious, are allowed precedence over intelligent application of scientific knowledge.
Clear parallels can be drawn between the fate of vanished peoples like the Anasazi or the inhabitants of Easter Island with our now globalised culture. Are we the crown of creation, made in God's image, or a part of nature, a contingent species, that could be snuffed out by our own ignorance if we turn away from the accumulating evidence about the fragility of our sustaining ecosystem.
The Tsunami was not a man-made disaster but the mounting evidence suggests we are moving towards one that could be irreversibly catastrophic . The arguments now forming are between continuing our odyssey of seeking to understand via scientific inquiry or turning back to the comfort of faith. The challenge is achieving a compromise for our crowded and perilous times.
Ideas that can change the world - brochure
“If scientists could prove we are all related,
would that stop wars? “
Katie aged nine
Original ideas can come from all kinds of places.
Young people often have the best ideas of all.
They see solutions where others see only problems and imagine ways to make our troubled world a better place.
They might be ideas about confronting environmental problems, of making businesses benefit everyone or ways of making their homes, schools, neighbourhoods and the wider world a better place.
In short, ideas that might change the way we all live.
But most have no way to see if their ideas can really make a difference.
Until now.
IDEAS THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD is a project in schools across England that will tap into the fresh and exciting ideas of young people and help the best of them become reality.
It will give the young people access to the knowledge and tools that can make their ideas happen.
Its aim is to connect these bright young people with the industries, policy makers and planners that can turn their ideas into reality.
It is being run by Creative Partnerships and will launch in schools across Britain in 2007. The young people taking part will come from areas of significant economic deprivation. Young people have chosen five key themes for the programme:
• Compassion
• Environment
• Money
• Technology
• The Impossible Dream (blue sky thinking)
How will it work?
Businesses, policy makers and planners have the expertise and knowledge that young people in schools need to help them develop their ideas.
Young people in Creative Partnership areas will work with their teachers to submit ideas.
Then a panel of young people and experts will then choose the ideas that can be developed into projects. Businesses and experts will be identified to help.
The experts will come many different fields: artists, scientists, designers, engineers, industry experts, philosophers, writers and more. They’ll engage in dialogue with the young innovators to discuss the ideas and develop them.
Organisations who take part will give the young people access to the most cutting edge thinking, processes, and materials.
By creating these forums for the discussion and development of ideas, IDEAS THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD will support schools to embrace innovation and enterprise.
Who will benefit
Business and organisations will be associated with a dynamic nationwide creative project. Their partnership may produce ideas that will benefit them and the world. They’ll be nurturing the future and working with schools in a collaborative and unique way. Scientists, designers and engineers will gain a fresh perspective by working with young people.
Teachers will work creatively and strategically with local, national and global businesses. By working in partnership with entrepreneurs, businesses, designer and scientists, teachers will have the opportunity to develop new and exciting content for their lessons. New partnerships between business and schools will give teachers from different disciplines opportunities to collaborate across the curriculum.
Young people will have a unique opportunity to work alongside forward thinking external partners and experts. They will develop their thinking and increase their understanding of current developments in science, technology and engineering. They will learn about finance and intellectual property. Young people will work in teams and understand the processes required to turn ideas into reality. Ideas that can change the world will promote global awareness amongst young people and give them the knowledge they need to better understand global issues
Happiness
Happiness – Times Education Supplement June 2006
Adults have an annoying habit of telling young people that childhood was the happiest time of their lives - and enjoining them to take advantage of this fleeting era of well-being. We can forget the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that childhood and adolescence are heir to - the sheer awfulness of bullying, adolescent relationships, rivalries and acne, and the misery that some can feel at school.
The more realistic among us do recognise the challenges of childhood and the new difficulties faced by today's young. As Sue Palmer puts it in her new book Toxic Childhood: "In a global culture whose citizens are wealthier, healthier and more privileged than ever before, children grow unhappier each year."
So do the grown-ups. A BBC poll found that the proportion saying they are "very happy" has fallen from 52 per cent in 1957 to just 36 per cent today.
There is a growing revival of interest in the idea that adulthood could be made easier if we can find ways of making schooldays genuinely happier - by educating young people to be happy.
Nel Noddings, the influential American educationist, has this to say:
"Happiness and education are, properly, intimately connected. Happiness should be an aim of education,and a good education should contribute significantly to personal and collective happiness."
Everyone is surfing the happiness zeitgeist. David Cameron has announced that promoting happiness will be part of Conservative party policy. He said: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - General Well-being."
Labour shares the vision. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell says progressive politics has to make room for "fun, laughter and play".
Both were perhaps influenced by the arguments of such academics as Richard Layard, founder-director of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, who called for a "happiness-based public policy" in his recent book Happiness: Lessons from a new science.
And so educationists are thinking harder about how to make schools happier places and to educate young people in ways to achieve this most elusive emotion.
One leading independent school has put happiness on the curriculum. Anthony Seldon, new head of Wellington college, says: "Helping to produce happy young adults when they leave the school at 18 is my highest priority as head. I have been saying this for 10 years, but only in the past year have I begun to realise this isn't just an airy-fairy aspiration, but that one can in fact learn happiness in classes."
The Wellington lessons are devised by a former forensic psychologist, Nick Baylis, founder of Cambridge university's Well-being Institute, and are aimed at improving their pupils' chances of leading a fulfilling life. At first there will be one 40-minute lesson per week for pupils aged 14 to 16, teaching the skills of how to manage relationships, physical and mental health, negative emotions and how to achieve one's ambitions. A-level students at the boarding school in Crowthorne, Berkshire, will also attend happiness seminars.
Professor Noddings says one reason she wrote her book Happiness and Education "is to counteract a narrow emphasis on test scores - we have really made schools quite grim places.
"We put such a tremendous emphasis on academic achievement for economic success and children take this to be the meaning of happiness and there is no discussion of all these other wonderful sources of happiness.
"What I'm talking about really is quite a strong intellectual programme that helps kids to understand there are many strong sources of happiness - home is a source, so is love of place, relationships, parenting, character, spirituality and finding congenial work."
But the idea of putting happiness on the curriculum also attracts criticism. Katie Ivens, vice chair of the Campaign for Real Education, says: "The duty of a school is to enable children to achieve. That is the contribution that schools are going to make to the children's happiness as children, and also to happiness in their future lives, and if schools don't focus on this, children will become aimless and lack self respect."
Can we actually teach happiness anyway? Understanding it is challenging enough. It has been a theme of philosophical inquiry for millennia.
As one sage reflected: "The search for happiness is one of the main sources of unhappiness in the world."
Most parents when asked what they want from school, say they want their children to be happy. And all around us our culture proclaims short cuts to that end.
Spiritual gurus beguile and neuroscience has found it a subject fit for study. Positive Psychology, a class whose content resembles that of many a self-help book but is grounded in serious psychological research, is now the most popular subject at Harvard university.
The godfather of such studies is American psychologist Martin Seligman, who found that one key to happiness is good friendships. Some London 10-year-olds interviewed recently by the BBC confirmed this, agreeing that they were at their happiest when "with their friends".
They said that schools could help them understand the meaning of happiness - though they could not create it.
However the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had ideas about how happiness could be fostered in the young. This is the advice he offered the daughter of a friend:
"Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul."
Adults have an annoying habit of telling young people that childhood was the happiest time of their lives - and enjoining them to take advantage of this fleeting era of well-being. We can forget the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that childhood and adolescence are heir to - the sheer awfulness of bullying, adolescent relationships, rivalries and acne, and the misery that some can feel at school.
The more realistic among us do recognise the challenges of childhood and the new difficulties faced by today's young. As Sue Palmer puts it in her new book Toxic Childhood: "In a global culture whose citizens are wealthier, healthier and more privileged than ever before, children grow unhappier each year."
So do the grown-ups. A BBC poll found that the proportion saying they are "very happy" has fallen from 52 per cent in 1957 to just 36 per cent today.
There is a growing revival of interest in the idea that adulthood could be made easier if we can find ways of making schooldays genuinely happier - by educating young people to be happy.
Nel Noddings, the influential American educationist, has this to say:
"Happiness and education are, properly, intimately connected. Happiness should be an aim of education,and a good education should contribute significantly to personal and collective happiness."
Everyone is surfing the happiness zeitgeist. David Cameron has announced that promoting happiness will be part of Conservative party policy. He said: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - General Well-being."
Labour shares the vision. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell says progressive politics has to make room for "fun, laughter and play".
Both were perhaps influenced by the arguments of such academics as Richard Layard, founder-director of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, who called for a "happiness-based public policy" in his recent book Happiness: Lessons from a new science.
And so educationists are thinking harder about how to make schools happier places and to educate young people in ways to achieve this most elusive emotion.
One leading independent school has put happiness on the curriculum. Anthony Seldon, new head of Wellington college, says: "Helping to produce happy young adults when they leave the school at 18 is my highest priority as head. I have been saying this for 10 years, but only in the past year have I begun to realise this isn't just an airy-fairy aspiration, but that one can in fact learn happiness in classes."
The Wellington lessons are devised by a former forensic psychologist, Nick Baylis, founder of Cambridge university's Well-being Institute, and are aimed at improving their pupils' chances of leading a fulfilling life. At first there will be one 40-minute lesson per week for pupils aged 14 to 16, teaching the skills of how to manage relationships, physical and mental health, negative emotions and how to achieve one's ambitions. A-level students at the boarding school in Crowthorne, Berkshire, will also attend happiness seminars.
Professor Noddings says one reason she wrote her book Happiness and Education "is to counteract a narrow emphasis on test scores - we have really made schools quite grim places.
"We put such a tremendous emphasis on academic achievement for economic success and children take this to be the meaning of happiness and there is no discussion of all these other wonderful sources of happiness.
"What I'm talking about really is quite a strong intellectual programme that helps kids to understand there are many strong sources of happiness - home is a source, so is love of place, relationships, parenting, character, spirituality and finding congenial work."
But the idea of putting happiness on the curriculum also attracts criticism. Katie Ivens, vice chair of the Campaign for Real Education, says: "The duty of a school is to enable children to achieve. That is the contribution that schools are going to make to the children's happiness as children, and also to happiness in their future lives, and if schools don't focus on this, children will become aimless and lack self respect."
Can we actually teach happiness anyway? Understanding it is challenging enough. It has been a theme of philosophical inquiry for millennia.
As one sage reflected: "The search for happiness is one of the main sources of unhappiness in the world."
Most parents when asked what they want from school, say they want their children to be happy. And all around us our culture proclaims short cuts to that end.
Spiritual gurus beguile and neuroscience has found it a subject fit for study. Positive Psychology, a class whose content resembles that of many a self-help book but is grounded in serious psychological research, is now the most popular subject at Harvard university.
The godfather of such studies is American psychologist Martin Seligman, who found that one key to happiness is good friendships. Some London 10-year-olds interviewed recently by the BBC confirmed this, agreeing that they were at their happiest when "with their friends".
They said that schools could help them understand the meaning of happiness - though they could not create it.
However the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had ideas about how happiness could be fostered in the young. This is the advice he offered the daughter of a friend:
"Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul."
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Book review - The Miracles of Exodus
Book Review - The Miracles of Exodus
Among scientists, physicists have a peculiar propensity for finding God. Perhaps it is because many deal with the most fundamental things of all that they find room – down there beyond the quarks, strangeness and charm - for a deity whose existence is otherwise looking increasingly improbable in our age of science and reason.
Colin J. Humphreys is one such scientist – a renowned Cambridge physicist who has devoted much of his non-professional energy in recent years to probing the Bible in the light of science.
His magnum opus in this area, "The Miracles of Exodus", takes on a foundation narrative of the West to discover how much can be verified as history rather than myth and then to find a scientific basis for the miracles of this journey.
Books which uncover the historical facts behind figures such as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Cleopatra often make cracking yarns and can also offer valuable contributions to scholarship.
But Humphreys is playing a bigger game. If the events of Exodus – from the flight from Egypt to the handing down of the 10 commandments – can be given a hard historical and scientific foundation then some profound questions are raised.
Humphreys, who is also the Chairman of Christians in Science for the United Kingdom, sets out to answer five key questions about the Exodus narrative: Is the story coherent and consistent; Is it factually accurate; Can we understand the miracles; Has the text been misinterpreted and can we reconstruct the Exodus route and find the true Mount Sinai?
His journey to a resoundingly positive answer to all of these questions is lengthy and argued with close attention to the Biblical text. Yet it is also curiously idiosyncratic and rather folksy. We wander adrift at times in the desert of irrelevancy.
Much of what he offers is still built on shifting sand – secondary sources and leaps of faith - but his key conclusions include a revised date for the events and the conclusion that Mount Bedr in the north of the present state of Saudi Arabia is the real Mount Sinai.
The pillar of cloud (by day) and fire (by night) that led the Israelites on was – he argues – a distant volcanic plume. The ten plagues of Egypt are also quite plausibly explained but he offers an extraordinary argument to explain the crossing of the Red Sea and the inundation of the pursuing Egyptian Army. This was a remarkable combination of wind set down and a bore wave.
How important is it to verify the accuracy of the Exodus story – the escape of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt and the miraculous events that help them to overcome all barriers? On the political level a reliable roadmap for those ancient events would have some obvious contemporary ramifications.
Humphreys believes he has established the historical truth of Exodus, that its miracles can be scientifically explained and that we can therefore take this part of the Bible as literal truth. But what of the divine cause? He concludes: "When a whole sequence of events happens at just the right moment, then it is either incredibly lucky chance or is there is a God who works in, with and through natural events to guide the affairs of destinies and nations…Chance or God? I'm not going to answer that question for you."
But his own answer is pretty clear… that this congeries of miracles is evidence of God as an intelligent designer – working through science.
Why is it necessary to try to find scientific explanations for the behaviour of a God who elsewhere acts in ways that can only be understood if we simply swallow his omnipotence? Believers "know" the Exodus story is true anyway… but I suspect others will remain unpersuaded. Are we meant now to pick and mix history from metaphor, science from myth.There is surely no scientific way to verify Noah's flood, the Adam and Eve story or the transformation of water to wine by Jesus at a wedding feast.
For his next act perhaps Professor Humphreys will present us with scientific evidence for the reality of angels?
"The Miracles of Exodus" by Colin J. Humphreys (Continuum Press ISBN 0-8264-6952-3 (HB)
Among scientists, physicists have a peculiar propensity for finding God. Perhaps it is because many deal with the most fundamental things of all that they find room – down there beyond the quarks, strangeness and charm - for a deity whose existence is otherwise looking increasingly improbable in our age of science and reason.
Colin J. Humphreys is one such scientist – a renowned Cambridge physicist who has devoted much of his non-professional energy in recent years to probing the Bible in the light of science.
His magnum opus in this area, "The Miracles of Exodus", takes on a foundation narrative of the West to discover how much can be verified as history rather than myth and then to find a scientific basis for the miracles of this journey.
Books which uncover the historical facts behind figures such as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Cleopatra often make cracking yarns and can also offer valuable contributions to scholarship.
But Humphreys is playing a bigger game. If the events of Exodus – from the flight from Egypt to the handing down of the 10 commandments – can be given a hard historical and scientific foundation then some profound questions are raised.
Humphreys, who is also the Chairman of Christians in Science for the United Kingdom, sets out to answer five key questions about the Exodus narrative: Is the story coherent and consistent; Is it factually accurate; Can we understand the miracles; Has the text been misinterpreted and can we reconstruct the Exodus route and find the true Mount Sinai?
His journey to a resoundingly positive answer to all of these questions is lengthy and argued with close attention to the Biblical text. Yet it is also curiously idiosyncratic and rather folksy. We wander adrift at times in the desert of irrelevancy.
Much of what he offers is still built on shifting sand – secondary sources and leaps of faith - but his key conclusions include a revised date for the events and the conclusion that Mount Bedr in the north of the present state of Saudi Arabia is the real Mount Sinai.
The pillar of cloud (by day) and fire (by night) that led the Israelites on was – he argues – a distant volcanic plume. The ten plagues of Egypt are also quite plausibly explained but he offers an extraordinary argument to explain the crossing of the Red Sea and the inundation of the pursuing Egyptian Army. This was a remarkable combination of wind set down and a bore wave.
How important is it to verify the accuracy of the Exodus story – the escape of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt and the miraculous events that help them to overcome all barriers? On the political level a reliable roadmap for those ancient events would have some obvious contemporary ramifications.
Humphreys believes he has established the historical truth of Exodus, that its miracles can be scientifically explained and that we can therefore take this part of the Bible as literal truth. But what of the divine cause? He concludes: "When a whole sequence of events happens at just the right moment, then it is either incredibly lucky chance or is there is a God who works in, with and through natural events to guide the affairs of destinies and nations…Chance or God? I'm not going to answer that question for you."
But his own answer is pretty clear… that this congeries of miracles is evidence of God as an intelligent designer – working through science.
Why is it necessary to try to find scientific explanations for the behaviour of a God who elsewhere acts in ways that can only be understood if we simply swallow his omnipotence? Believers "know" the Exodus story is true anyway… but I suspect others will remain unpersuaded. Are we meant now to pick and mix history from metaphor, science from myth.There is surely no scientific way to verify Noah's flood, the Adam and Eve story or the transformation of water to wine by Jesus at a wedding feast.
For his next act perhaps Professor Humphreys will present us with scientific evidence for the reality of angels?
"The Miracles of Exodus" by Colin J. Humphreys (Continuum Press ISBN 0-8264-6952-3 (HB)
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