As any university teacher (and administrator) knows, binge drinking by undergraduates is one of the curses of university life — which is why the decision by University College Cork to offer students the option of alcohol-free accommodation is such a good idea.

But then I was reading Parson Woodforde’s diary and found this entry for November 4, 1761 (when he was a Scholar at New College, Oxford):

“Dyer laid Williams 2s 6d that he drank 3 pints of wine in 3 Hours, and that he wrote 5 verses out of the Bible right, but he lost. He did it in the B.C.R. [Bachelor’s Common Room], he drank all the Wine, but could not write right for his Life. He was immensely drunk about 5 Minutes afterwards.

Plus ca change…

Seamus Heaney was my idea of what a great Irishman should be: deeply conscious and proud of his ancestry, yet alive to the vicious contradictions of our history. Alert to his eminence, yet never trading on it — a sensible move in a society famous for its “begrudgers”, the folks who are forever seeking to cut down any tall poppy that dares to raise its head. They called him “Famous Seamus”, but the epithet never did him any damage.

One of the few things that made me proud of my country in recent years was the discovery that, at the state banquet to mark Queen Elizabeth’s landmark visit to Ireland, Heaney was seated at the top table, opposite the Queen. It was such a lovely change to see that a country which for so many years vilified and ignored its writers (“the old sow that eats her farrow”, as Joyce put it) finally had the grace to recognise a native genius.

I’ve always loved his poetry, especially the way he captured the tactility of things — the smell of sodden flax, the heft of a spade or the weight of a sod of turf. Here he is writing about helping his mother fold the bedlinen:

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

He evoked wonderful responses in people. After he’d had his stroke he was rushed to hospital in Letterkenny in Donegal. Bill Clinton was in Northern Ireland at the time on peace process business, and when he heard about Heaney, he secretly changed his schedule and raced to Letterkenny, astonishing the hospital staff, and no doubt the poet himself. At that moment Clinton went up a mile in my estimation. I cannot imagine a contemporary politician who has that kind of sensibility.

Seamus will have one hell of a funeral. And, who knows, maybe Clinton will come.

A key ingredient of a democratic society is the existence of free media that can hold power to account. One essential requirement for free media is the ability of journalists to protect the identity of their sources – a contemporary equivalent of the sanctity of the confessional in earlier times, but with a public interest dimension. The existence of comprehensive surveillance – plus the legal intimidation that goes with it (a la Miranda) – makes it impossible to protect confidential sources. That’s why WikiLeaks’s development of a secure, anonymous drop-box was such a significant innovation. But, given what we now know about the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ, I don’t think any journalist could now, in good faith, give an undertaking of confidentiality to any source with whom s/he communicated electronically.

One big puzzle for me is why so many journalists – at least in Britain – don’t seem to appreciate how radical the threat to journalism has become. After all – as Peter Preston pointed out in a terrific column yesterday – the next David Miranda might be working for the Daily Mail.

In the British case, there are probably local factors at work – in particular the visceral hatred that the tabloid press has for the Guardian. [Full disclosure: I write for the Observer, which is a sister paper of the Guardian.]

You think I jest? A few years ago, one of the people who worked most closely with Tony Blair when he was prime minister observed to one of my academic colleagues that during the Blair premiership one rule-of-thumb for news management in Downing Street was that “the best way to bury a story was to have it published on the front page of the Guardian“. When my colleague expressed puzzlement, he explained: “because then the Daily Mail wouldn’t touch it”.

I’ve always been amused by the term “management science” which seems to me as absurd as the term “yoga science”. This hasn’t stopped universities and their business schools using the term, though (see this Google search result for UK universities). I’ve been similarly amused by the big-selling business books that one finds in airport bookstalls — so amused, in fact, that I once proposed that people should be able to trade air-miles for an MBA degree. So it was refreshing to find this admirably acerbic post by Freek Vermeulen in – guess where? – the Harvard Business Review!

Management is not an exact science, they say. And I guess most things that involve the study of human behavior cannot be. But I sometimes wonder if that is the reason — or the excuse — that the business sections at airport bookshops are so full of nonsense.

Quite often these books are written with panache. And the authors — aspiring “management thinkers” and “gurus” (never scientists) — have an excellent sense of the pulse of the business public. They are neither crooks nor charlatans; they write what they believe. But that doesn’t make their beliefs right. People can believe vigorously in voodooism, homeopathy, and creationism.

A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using “objective, quantitative data.” Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let’s write a book about that and become rich.

In Search of Excellence and Built to Last, to name a few classic examples, followed that formula — including the getting rich bit. One piece of advice to come out of such tomes, for instance, has been to create a strong, coherent organizational culture, like most of high-performing firms studied. However, we now know from academic research that a strong culture is often the result of a period of high performance, rather than its cause. In fact, a very coherent culture can even be a precursor of what is called a competency trap, where firms get stuck in their old beliefs and ways of doing things. Not coincidentally, the list of superior companies frequently starts unravelling when the book is still at the printer’s.

Right on! Worth reading in full.

I’m writing something about online anonymity and came across this intriguing talk by the founder of 4Chan.

“The reason there are conspiracy theories”, runs an old adage, “is because sometimes people conspire”. They do, which is one reason why the sneering condescension with which people talk about conspiracy theories is, well, unwise. It may make statistical sense (because the majority of conspiracy theories are unfounded), but it’s not good epistemology, because sometimes conspiracy theories are well-founded.

The critical difference is between theories we believe to be well-founded and those we believe to be unfounded or mistaken. To take just one obvious example, the official US explanation of the 9/11 attacks is, in a literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it says that a certain group of Al-Qaeda operatives conspired to launch a daring attack on the United States, an attack that could have been foiled if key government agencies had been more perceptive and acted more decisively. My guess is that most people prefer this explanation to the alternative conspiracy theories for various reasons — the scale of the investigation, the membership of the Presidential Commission, etc. But in the end it comes down to preferring one theory over another.

An example is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be correct was the theory that the British, French and Israeli governments had colluded to invade Egypt in order to overthrow Colonel Nasser and seize back control of the Suez Canal (which Nasser had nationalised).

And this week, another conspiracy theory focussed on the Middle East has turned out to be well-founded. Malcolm Byrne, the director of research at the US National Security Archive has confirmed that the August 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s populist prime minister, and reinstated the Shah of Persia — an obnoxious puppet of the US and the UK who was to remain in power for another twenty-six years, before fleeing the country in January 1979.

As John Cassidy reported in a recent issue of the New Yorker, “Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran”.

Theories about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup (which served as a template for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries), have been around for decades, and were often ridiculed by establishment figures. But an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, now confirms that the conspiracy theorists were right all along. “The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet”, the report states, “was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government”.

The moral? The fact that a particular explanation of an event or a phenomenon is a conspiracy theory doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong. It may turn out to be the best explanation in the long run.

I’ve just learned that Russell Twisk, an old friend and my first editor, has died. He’d had a stroke a while back, and was struggling, so maybe his death came as a merciful release.

I have nothing but fond memories of him. I knew him first when he became Editor of The Listener, a sadly-defunct weekly owned and published by the BBC, on which I was a fiction reviewer and, later, its TV Critic. (Following in the footsteps of more eminent writers like Raymond Williams and Clive James, I might add.)

Russell was an unexpected choice for Editor, possibly because some people suspected that he hadn’t been the BBC’s first choice for the post. At any rate, it was claimed that the supposed favourite, Richard Gott, had been rejected at the last minute because MI5 complained to the BBC Governors that Gott was, er, very left-wing and therefore not the kind of chap one wanted running a major weekly magazine. I have no idea whether this was true, but the Fleet Street crowd believed it and so Russell’s appointment was viewed by them with a degree of patronising disdain.

If he was dismayed or irritated by this he never showed it. And in fact it may have played to his advantage, because he came to the Editorship with low external expectations. In person he was astonishingly modest and understated. But he turned out to be a brilliant editor, possibly because — unlike many editors — he did not believe that he could write better than any of the half-wits he employed (though actually he was a rather good writer, as he showed during his time as the Radio Critic of the Observer). He saw his role as part-conductor and part-impresario, and he was terrific at coaxing the best out of his contributors.

I loved his company. He and I shared an interest in slow horses, and went to many a race meeting together — at which, almost without exception, we lost money and drank champagne to console ourselves. When he eventually retired, he moved to Petersfield in West Sussex, a location he extolled on account of its proximity to Goodwood. I left the Listener to become the Observer‘s TV Critic in 1987, and Russell was headhunted to become Editor-in-Chief of the Reader’s Digest, then still in its heyday. As a grandee of the magazine publishing world (the Digest had a huge circulation then) he often used to invite me to the monthly dinners of the Magazine Publishers Association in Claridges or the Savoy (where I once asked a very rude question of the then US Ambassador). Being his guest gave me a fascinating insight into the world of fashion magazines and the glossy end of the print media.

Apart from his generosity, what I remember most about Russell is his wry, understated humour. Once, when we were standing in Claridges drinking champagne and watching the great and the good of the magazine business roll up for lunch, he suddenly leaned over and whispered into my ear. “This is weird”, he said. “Chaps are beginning to take their own wives to lunch.”

May he rest in peace. There’s a memorial service for him on September 10. And the National Portrait gallery has a lovely portrait of him by Michael Bennett.

While making breakfast this morning I listened to the latest episode of Nigel Warburton’s and David Edmond’s wonderful Philosophy Bites podcast — a discussion of Montaigne with Sarah Bakewell, whose lovely book on the essayist I have read and enjoyed. Like most all of the Philosophy Bites podcasts, this one was thought-provoking and accessible (and I heartily recommend it), but the one thing I missed was any discussion of the similarity between Montaigne’s essays and the writing of good bloggers.

This comparison is not an original idea btw — I got it originally from Andrew Sullivan when I was working on my most recent book. But, as is the case with the Web, Andrew probably got it from Rob Goodman’s beautiful essay on the “Tyranny of Timeliness”, which says, in part:

As these digressions through literature, science, history, anecdote, and memory pile up, we sense that we are dealing not with a narrative, but with a network: no fact is an island; every point is linked to every other point in Montaigne’s mind by an endless array of invisible threads.

Of course, that’s how we all think. But it is not how we all write. Montaigne was unique in finding a written expression for the way conversations evolve organically, the way thought has a shadowy logic of its own; it’s why his essays are such a different animal from the essays we’re assigned in school, so different that they shouldn’t even bear the same name, and why we often feel more at home in them. He did it by being studiedly haphazard. And his achievement matches that of his contemporary, Shakespeare, who took years of experimentation to make his soliloquies sound less like declaimed speeches and more like overheard thought.

A Montaigne essay, like a Shakespeare soliloquy, gives us the impression that we are in the presence not of a disembodied, opinion-spouting voice, but of a real person. Long after those essays lost their relevance, long after the second-hand reports from the Americas and meditations on 16th-century French politics ceased to be news, they have maintained their appeal because they are a personality embodied. And the foremost trait of that personality is freedom: freedom to take up and turn over absolutely any subject in human experience, on any prompting or none; to follow any tangent simply because it catches his eye; to begin and end a continent apart, or simply to trail off; to know for the simple sake of knowing.

In Montaigne’s day, that freedom was the privilege of an aristocrat. Today, unless we trade it away for a mess of relevance, it’s the birthright of anyone with a high school education and an Internet connection.

My colleague Martin Weller also picked up on the Sullivan post and compiled this thoughtful list on what Montaigne means to him.

For me Montaigne shows the way for good bloggers through the following practices:

Honesty – you really can’t blog if you’ve got a hidden agenda. People have too much choice and so what you are after is some form of connection and this comes from people having good ideas, but also from connecting to them as an individual.

Openness – as Sullivan points out in the quote above, one of the endearing qualities of Montaigne was his willingness to think out in the open. This is what bloggers do well, they put forward ideas, take criticism and comments, and develop those ideas partly in conjunction with their readers. They don’t work quietly for three years and then release a finished masterpiece (this is a good way of working for some writing, maybe novels, but not for blogs).

Relaxed style – Montaigne really developed that chatty, informal style which is a lot harder than he makes it look. This is definitely the style that works best in blogs, because, to reiterate the point, part of what makes a good blog is a connection to the author.

An element of the personal – Montaigne’s essays are famously rambling and rarely connected to the title. This approach doesn’t always work in blogs, which tend to be shorter posts focused on a particular point, but what does carry over is the way he brought in personal elements to back up and reinforce wider points, which a good blogger does without making it a boring shopping list.

Reflective and questioning – good bloggers (and when I say a good blogger, I probably mean ‘bloggers I like reading’) seem to me to adopt Montaigne’s reflective approach, questioning themselves, and others. One of the delights of blogging is that it has no commercial masters to please and so bloggers tend to dig around a story, analyse it in detail and question every aspect of it (unlike many journalists who accept the PR from a company to fill space).

Playfulness – I like bloggers who toy with ideas, mess around with media and inject some playfulness into their posts. Blogs liberate us from the considerations of many formal publications and I like people who embrace this.

Owning a vineyard – oh, okay that one doesn’t apply.

In a much earlier post, Andrew Sullivan had a nice meditation on the political significance of blogging (something that would have been entirely alien to Montaigne, I suppose, but which is relevant to any consideration of how blogging affects the public sphere).

Michael Oakeshott’s conservatism owes a huge amount to Montaigne (and Augustine), which is why one of Oakeshott’s central metaphors is exactly conversation. He believed that such a metaphor captures the dramatic, undetermined, spontaneous and organic association of people in free societies. And such an open-ended conversation is, of course, the exact opposite of fundamentalism, which, in its extreme forms, demands no interaction, merely submission to a sacred, pre-ordained text. That’s why blogging is a little retrovirus called freedom, unleashed into the wider world of media to replicate endlessly. And why the blogosphere’s very existence and potential power is one of freedom’s most potent allies in our generation’s war against fundamentalism. Churchill once spoke of sending the English language into battle. He saw it as a great weapon against tyranny. It still is – in print, but just as powerfully, in pixels.

The point of all this is not to reinforce the trope about there being nothing new under the sun, but to counter the hubristic claims about everything digital being new. Of course the technology enables things that were inconceivable up to now, but it also facilitates and sometimes turbo-charges things that have been done for millennia. Like writing and thinking. And conversation.

LATER: Just realised that Sarah Bakewell has written a lovely blog post about all of this. It concludes thus:

These days, the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris. And it flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before.

Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that such understanding between remote eras and cultures was possible. “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition,” he said. We are united in the very fact of our diversity, and “this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” His book is such a world, and when we look into it there is no end to the strangeness and familiarity we might see.

Sigh. Maybe the heading for this post ought to have been “Thinking aloud”.

One of the (many) pleasures of holidaying in France is having the time to read the International Herald Tribune from cover to cover every day. (I try to look at it most days when I’m back home, but generally wind up just scanning the front page and the Op-Ed pages inside. In France, we buy it every day and savour it over breakfast.)

Le Trib (as some newsagents call it here) is an exceedingly good journalistic product. It uses its front page essentially as a content-bill for almost everything inside — which means that ever front-page snippet ends with a forward reference. So this morning’s piece headlined “Airlines Are Spending Billions in an Arms Race for Leg Room” comes to a temporary halt with “SEATS, PAGE 10” (where I learn that Business Class aircraft seats can cost over $250,000 each to make and install).

Editorially, the Trib makes a pretty good stab at bridging the cultural chasm that yawns between Europe and the US. Its coverage of European countries (especially France and Germany), though necessarily selective, is pretty informative. It’s good on cultural stuff. Yesterday’s paper, for example, had a terrific review of the latest Bayreuth production of the Ring Cycle. Earlier in the week, there was a good double-page spread on the Salzburg Festival, which had just kicked off. And the mix is leavened by ‘quirky’ pieces of the kind that foreign stringers and correspondents love to write — about the madness surrounding the royal baby in the UK, for example, or the astonishing fact that the French are eating fewer baguettes than they used to. Sacre Bleu!

The paper’s coverage is clearly slanted towards areas of the world where the US has major foreign policy interests. So there’s lots about Egypt and the Middle-East generally. And, of course, about China and Russia. In that sense, the Trib is indeed the international edition of the New York Times. And most of the OpEd pieces (Friedman, Krugman, Brooks, Cohen, et. al.) are ones from the Times that I’ve already read online. But that doesn’t matter: sometimes re-reading them in print helps.

What strikes one most, though, is the artfulness of the mixture. In the pre-Internet age, one of the great tests of a traditional newspaper was whether it was a good, satisfying read. The Trib easily meets that criteria, and perusing it over a leisurely breakfast reminds one of what good newspapers used to provide. I read a lot of stuff online, and couldn’t live without the Web. But there are some publications like the New Yorker — and the Trib — where print, despite its limitations, is still best.