Mention the word policy and many scientists instinctively reach for their gun. The reality is that science needs policymakers as much as policymakers need science. The obvious reason is financial. Modern science is generally accepted as a public good — an activity that benefits all members of society, rather than selective groups — and, as a result, something that should be supported from the public purse.
Robert Zoellick is the archetypal United States government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front. Sliding effortlessly between Ivy League academia, the US Treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the State Department.
Spain declared an amnesty on Sunday for about 700 000 illegal immigrants, bucking a Europe-wide trend of cracking down on economic migrants, while striking at exploitation of those working secretly and fearfully in the black economy.
If you dedicated your waking life to books, forsaking your spouse for Lady Chatterly, ingesting the affairs of bishops and actresses with your meals, and saving particularly satisfying soliloquies for outhouse meditations, you would read about 5,7-trillion words before your bloodshot eyes shut for good. This figure translates, very roughly, into around 48 000 books.
Living in the information age is a marvellous thing. Our questions are answered at the click of a mouse. Or they would be if we had any questions. Fortunately, we have corporations and governments that have our best interests at heart — and that provide us not only with the relevant questions, but with the answers too. It’s a good time to be alive.
There is an episode of The Sopranos in which the wives decide they need some culture, and a film club is established. The gilt chandeliers are dimmed, the ladies settle on pink couches and kick off puce pumps into pastel shag-pile carpet, the television is turned on, and the bootleg DVD inserted. That evening’s offering is Citizen Kane, and it is clear that Orson Welles’s classic has left them floundering like a snitch in concrete slippers.
West Virginia is coal- mining country. Its hills are steep and identical, smothered in that species of tree, eternally half-dead and fraying, that Hollywood uses as a backdrop whenever an act of cannibalism or chainsaw-accompanied incest is taking place. In summer everything drips with condensation, and the faded pink asbestos flamingos outside the rows of mobile homes have a greasy look to them.
By the fourth paragraph it was clear that the novel had been produced by one of those writers who believe it is detrimental to their craft to read. It was prose that compelled you to move your lips, as the turgid, cringingly obvious lines plodded past like steel-mill workers heading out for the night shift. At once I knew who this book had been written for, who would buy it and spend half an hour explaining it to each other.
The other day, while curing hides in the parking bay I rent, a fat woman in a purple dress suit approached me with a clipboard under her arm. She kept licking her lips, and her eyes had the slightly bulging aspect of someone from Johannesburg who is not yet accustomed to breathing genuine air, albeit air tinged with the saucy bouquet of the Sasol refinery.
Stephen Fry has perfected the persona of walking anachronism. In his enormous frame, the Englishman combines the ponderous authority and formally cavalier erudition that Anglophile myth insists formed the unshakeable foundations of the Empire; and so it seemed that if anyone had the pedigree to make a decent film of an Evelyn Waugh novel, it was he.