My friend Nicci has a lovely blog post with this title. It begins:

Every summer we travel to Sweden. Luckily, we go by ferry and car – luckily, because then we can take as many books as we want. And we take lots of them, dozens and dozens: books we know we’re going to read and books we think we're going to read and books we might possibly read or dip into and a few reference books, who knows why?, and some poetry books so we can learn poetry by heart, and then there are the books we want other people to read because we love them so much and the just-in-case books which we are pretty certain we won't have time to read, but what if a day suddenly has more hours in it, or if we break a leg and spend all our time lying in bed…. In fact, I blame it on Sean [Sean French, her husband and co-author of the Nicci French books]: usually only six or so of the books are my choice, and the rest are his. He is tremendously ambitious: he always takes several classics that are hundreds of densely-typed pages long. I remember that the first holiday we ever went on together was a walking week in the Provence, and he carried the new, heavy (unopened) translation of War and Peace in his rucksack, from hotel to hotel.

As it happens, the weight of books was much on my mind when we were heading for Provence this year. As usual, we agonised about whether this would be the year that we drove down to the South of France rather than enduring the indignities of RyanAir, but in the end decided that we had to fly because of various external deadlines and exigencies. Which meant that we were immediately faced with the fierce weight restrictions — 10 kg — imposed on cabin baggage by the world’s least-favourite but most-used airline.

Believe me, 10 kg doesn’t leave much leeway if you have to take a serious camera and a laptop, so I spent the week before we left avoiding bookshops. But one recently-published volume really intrigued me — Peter Mandelson’s memoirs. The problem was: it was big and heavy.

In the end, I hit on a solution: I have an iPod Touch for which there’s a Kindle App, so I bought the eBook version of the book from the Amazon Kindle store. This was a first for me, in that although I use eBooks a lot (I always carry an electronic copy of Ulysses with me, for example), they’re DRM-free, and in general I’m pretty hostile to the intellectual-property regimes implicit in the eBook business. But I thought that, in this particular case, the experiment was worth trying.

Mandelson’s memoirs are a revelation. Firstly, they’re surprisingly readable. Most politicians can’t write (which was one of the reasons Obama’s memoir came as such a lovely surprise). But Mandelson’s memoirs have an engaging, candid style in which he comes over as an interesting and rather engaging man: a political obsessive, of course, but an intriguing character — the kind who would make an excellent dinner-guest. The book also suggests a more sensitive and insecure person than his public carapace might indicate — which reminded me of a general principle that all journalists should have engraved on their hearts: whenever you encounter a media stereotype, it’s likely to be completely misleading.

Secondly, although — like all political memoirs — they are self-serving to a degree, my conclusion is the same as that reached by my former Observer colleague, Robert Harris, namely that Mandelson was very shabbily treated by Blair and Campbell. But the most striking thing of all is the picture that emerges of Gordon Brown as an emotionally crippled, obsessive, almost psychotic personality. People have always said that Brown should never have been Prime Minister. I’ve come away from Mandelson’s book thinking that he should never have been Chancellor either. All of which makes the final act of the story — in which the Brown who has for a decade been attacking and undermining Mandelson begs him to come back to help out — truly extraordinary.

The Kindle App is very neat btw. Once you buy a book, it becomes available on any Apple iDevice that you happen to own. And if you’re on a WiFi network, it checks to see if you’ve been reading the book on another device and, if you have, whether you want to jump to where you left off on the other machine.

When talking to Bill Thompson about this last Saturday, he made an interesting point, namely that the reading experience provided by the Kindle App is better than that provided by the actual Kindle device marketed by Amazon. The reason? With the device, you turn the page by pressing a button, whereas on the App you just stroke the page — so, as Bill put it, “you engage with the text and not with the device”. Not possessing a Kindle, I can’t attest to this, but it’s an intriguing thought.

This is lovely.

A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country’s military networks from attack.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom’s official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group’s mission statement.* MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. “Mr. Correll is correct…it’s a MD5 hash,” said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

* Footnote: According to Wikipedia, the aforementioned ‘mission’ statement reads: “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London”, said Samuel Johnson. “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Much the same might be said about the Web. Here, for example, is a brief list of remarkable things I encountered on it today.

Liquidator by Neal Ascherson. Also in the LRB. Lovely review of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Having earlier read (and been repelled by) T-R’s Letters from Oxford, I had assumed I could give the biography a miss. But Ascherson’s extensive and balanced review makes me want to revise that decision. Sigh: no rest for the wicked.

And it’s not even the weekend yet.

In one of those delicious juxtapositions that happen only once or twice in a decade, today’s Guardian carries an affectionate obit by Ian Aitken of Andrew Roth, the Jewish refugee from McCarthyism whose volumes of Parliamentary Profiles became the undisputed authority on the careers, lives and foibles of British MPs, alongside an obituary of one of those former MPs — Andrew Gorst — written by… you guessed it… Andrew Roth.

Nice column in today’s NYTimes by Andy Martin. He’s fascinated by the question that puzzled so many people in the decades between 1940 and 1970, namely why was Jean-Paul Sartre so attractive to women? Sadly, he doesn’t really have an answer. Here’s his take on it:

I think it has to be said that a haircut can have significant philosophical consequences. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, had a particularly traumatic tonsorial experience when he was only seven. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel.” His mother had carefully cultivated a luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till his mother has gone out, then tells the boy they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realizes that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

“The fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). The novelist Michel Houellebecq says somewhere that, when he met Sartre, he thought he was “practically disabled.” It is fair comment. He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness…

It’s difficult to know where to start with the Wikileaks stash of documents reported on today by the Guardian, NYT and Der Spiegel.

1. Maybe we should begin with what we can learn from the continued existence of Wikileaks, despite all the best efforts of dozens of powerful companies and governments to exterminate it. There’s a thoughtlessness about journalistic acceptance of the proposition that Wikileaks confirms the truth of John Gilmore’s celebrated aphorism that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. The implication is that all one has to do is publish something on a website somewhere and then the truth is out. Sadly, that’s often not the case: one of the hard lessons we libertarians have learned over the last two decades is that it’s all too easy to censor the Web: all you need is a take-down letter from a lawyer in most cases, and nine out of ten ISPs or hosting services will take down a site, no questions asked. (That’s been the chilling effect of the ‘Demon Internet’ case.)

The indestructibility of Wikileaks, despite the best efforts of the cream of the world’s corporate and national security goons to muzzle it, stems from the amazing commitment, determination and technical know-how of the group of activists behind it. To get a feeling for what’s involved, it’s worth having a look at Raffi Khatchadourian’s remarkable New Yorker profile of Julian Assange, the prime mover behind the service. Most of the technical detail behind Wikileaks’s operations are hidden, but here’s what Khatchadourian found out:

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

And the moral of this? Using the Internet to further ‘disruptive transparency’ takes a lot more than simply posting stuff to a website.

2. Then there’s the question of what the Wikileaks stash tells us about the war. Amy Davidson went digging and pulled up this interesting snippet. Dated November 22nd, 2009, it was submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus and describes how a US convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.”

These weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two or three thousand dollar bribe; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.” (He denied it.)

That is good to know, says Ms Davidson, and she’s right.

The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay at WikiLeaks for publicizing the documents, but a leak that informs us that our tax dollars may be being put to use as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004 to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up.

3. Finally, there’s the grotesque absurdity of the war itself. To someone of my age who lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels are very striking. What really takes my breath away now, though, is the intellectual and evidential poverty of the justifications for it — especially the threadbare mantra of the Labour and Coalition administrations that British soldiers are dying in Helmand in order to protect the good citizens of Bradford. In that context, George Packer had a good piece in the New Yorker on July 5, which said, in part:

With allies like Canada and Holland heading for the exits, American troops are dying in larger numbers than at any point of the war—on bad days, ten or more. The number of Afghan civilian deaths remains high, despite the tightened constraints of McChrystal’s rules of engagement. The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai. Since last fall, when he stole reëlection, Karzai has accused Western governments and media of trying to bring him down, fired the two most competent members of his cabinet, and reportedly threatened to join the Taliban and voiced a suspicion that the Americans were behind an attack on a peace conference he recently hosted in Kabul. In the face of his wild performance, the current American approach is to tiptoe around him, as if he would start behaving better if he could just be settled down. Meanwhile, aid efforts are in a bind: working with the government nourishes corruption; circumventing it further undermines its legitimacy.

The Wikileaks stash shows how badly “protection of the population” is going. So,

Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.

Maybe there was a chance after 9/11 of doing what no foreign power in history had ever managed to do — create a semblance of a unified nation-state from the chaotic patchwork of fiefdoms that is Afghanistan. But that was blown by the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, which drained away the colossal effort that would have been needed to re-model Afghanistan. So now there’s no option except to accept the inevitable. The game’s over, and the West blew it. And, as far as I can see, there’s no Plan B.

From designboom:

“‘365’ is a knitting clock created by german designer siren elise wilhelmsen. according to wilhelmsen, time is a concept which unites us all, making it the lowest common denominator. on the one hand, time appears to be a as physical phenomenon, logical and easily divided into the past, present and future. on the other hand, time can be viewed very subjectively. how long a minute, an hour or a year takes can depend on how time is experienced in different situations. however, this does not alter the fact that a day has 24 hours, one hour
has 60 minutes and one minute has 60 seconds.”

Today is the opening round of the 2010 British Open. It’s being played at St Andrews, site of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and tiresomely billed by the media with mock-reverence as “the home of golf”. Until this morning, their commentary was dominated by speculation about whether Tiger Woods’s swing has recovered from his various extra-marital flings. But now we have a new hero — Maurice Flitcroft, the worst golfer ever to compete in the championship.

I have to confess that I’d never heard of him until Radio 4’s Today programme had an item pegged to a newly-published biography with the lovely title The Phantom of the Open. Naturally, I went straight to Wikipedia, which has an interesting entry on him.

It describes him as a “chain-smoking crane driver” from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire who also claimed to be a stunt diver. “I toured with a revue, and I used to jump into a tank on the stage, I was a stuntcomedy high diver. The revue used to tour all the country and I would dive into this tank. It wasn’t all glass, just the front so the spectators could see what was going on under the water.” His golfing fame stems from conning his way into the qualifying round for the 1976 Open by pretending to be a professional golfer. He wrote off to the R&A for an application form. This required the applicant to state whether he was an amateur or professional golfer. If the former, then he would be required to state his club handicap. But of course Flitcroft wasn’t a member of any club, and so he ticked the ‘Professional’ box and sent it off.

He went round in 121 — 49 over par and the worst score in the history of the tournament. One reporter memorably described it as “a blizzard of double and triple bogeys marred only by a solitary par”. He was christened “The Royal & Ancient Rabbit” (a ‘Rabbit’, in golfing parlance, is an incompetent player who hacks his way around the course, rarely if ever getting even close to a par).

Predictably, the R&A — as reactionary an assembly of Establishment boobies as ever wore blazers, and an institution that makes White’s look like the Bauhaus — was Not Amused, and so tried to ban him from further championships. But according to Wikipedia he entered several more times under pseudonyms: Gene Paceky (as in paycheque), Gerald Hoppy and James Beau Jolley.