Nice essay by Tim Kreider on the prevailing disease of ambitious people.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

I was about to click on my ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet because I was too busy to read it. But I didn’t. Yay!

Ambrose Bierce once defined hypocrisy as “prejudice with a halo”. (He also defined “corporation” as “an ingenious device for obtaining profit without responsibility”.) He must have been thinking of Barclays bank and its CEO, Bob Diamond, who, in return for remuneration totalling £100m, presided over the fiddling of the LIBOR rate. Last year the BBC (on whose Executive Board Diamond’s boss, Marcus Agius, sits) invited him to give the quaintly-named Today Business Lecture 2011, in which he said, in part:

It’s a very personal thing, but throughout my career – from my time as a teacher, to my time as a banker – I have seen just how important culture is to successful organisations.

Culture is difficult to define, I think it’s even more difficult to mandate – but for me the evidence of culture is how people behave when no-one is watching.

Our culture must be one where the interests of customers and clients are at the very heart of every decision we make; where we all act with trust and integrity.

But it’s not just about how we behave towards our customers and clients. It’s also about how we work together with our colleagues, because if you have to deliver for customers with 150,000 colleagues around the world, as we do, you better be able to work as a team.

As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t work well with your colleagues, with trust and integrity, you can’t be on the team.

Culture truly helps define an organisation.

You know what? He’s dead right. And the culture of the banking industry stinks to high heaven — as the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, pointed out with admirable clarity yesterday.

And less you think that it is only a few bad apples like Barclays and RBS that are bringing an otherwise admirable industry into disrepute, spare a thought for the industry’s trade organisation, the British Bankers Association, which on Thursday issued a statement saying that

“The British Bankers’ Association is shocked by yesterday’s report about LIBOR. The banks which contribute to the LIBOR rate must meet the necessary obligations to their regulators. The BBA has proactively co-operated with the authorities at every stage and will continue to work with the regulatory investigations into LIBOR, submitting information and making staff available for interview.

The strange thing about this is that the BBA owns LIBOR and is nominally responsible for it. But the minute the scandal broke, the BBA raced to disown that responsibility. The organisation’s Chief Exec is an ice-queen named Angela Knight. Whenever anything goes wrong, up she pops on the mainstream media explaining in frosty terms that it’s nothing to do with the bankers. But even she is now struggling to escape the implications of what her members have been up to.

Here she is on Channel 4 News, for example, being interviewed by Jon Snow:

We turn now to an admirable analysis of the BBA’s hypocrisy by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News. She starts by sketching the historical background:

Questions about Libor had actually been raised as far back as November 2007 at a Bank of England meeting with bank chiefs, and it seemed clear to everyone at the time that it was the BBA that was responsible for putting its house in order.

BBA spokesman John Ewan said the trade group was already monitoring the situation in early 2008 and would bring forward an internal review, saying: “We want to ensure that our rates are as accurate as possible, so we are closely watching the rates banks contribute.”

And no wonder. By now independent economists had begun to come up with analysis that showed there was evidence of jiggery-pokery.

What was the BBA doing during this period?

On 17 April 2008 a spokesman said the association was conducting a review of Libor and working closely with the Bank of England on the matter.

He added that the BBA would strictly enforce the rules and remove banks who had submitted inaccurate figures from the panel of 16. But there was no independent oversight: the review would be carried internally by BBA investigators who would remain anonymous.

In May of that year Mr Ewan said he had interviewed banks, hedge funds and academics as part of the review.

The BBA initially said it would not be making any major changes to the Libor system, then suddenly hinted that it would increase the panel of banks reporting their borrowing costs in the biggest shake-up for a decade, saying: “The changes will boost the confidence of its many users.”

But two months later there was another change of heart, with the BBA rejecting several radical proposals designed to ensure accuracy. The panel of 16 would remain unchanged.

But the association did promise to improve its scrutiny of the rates submitted by banks. Banks’ input would be “actively monitored every day” and a BBA committee would meet every month to review questionable quotes.

Despite these assurances, in September 2008 accusations of inaccuracy flared up again after analysts noticed that borrowing rates for a US Federal Reserve auction were much higher than Libor, in defiance of all market logic.

BBA spokeswoman Lesley McLeod insisted: “Libor is accurate. It is constantly monitored and currently reflects the extreme market volatility present in these unprecedented circumstances.”

So what are we to conclude about Ms Knight’s sordid little trade organisation?

When suggestions of rate-rigging first surfaced years ago, along with widespread suspicion among bankers and academics, the BBA made no attempt to shift the blame to others.

The association clearly knew about market misgivings about the veracity of the Libor rates as early as November 2007.

Throughout 2008 the BBA promised investors it was monitoring the information supplied by banks closely. There were no revelations of wrongdoing – and no suggestion that it was anyone else’s responsibility to supervise Libor.

The trade body promised to monitor the situation on a daily basis, but failed to undercover wrongdoing that we now know was rife at Barclays.

Given all that, the BBA’s claim to be “shocked” at the report into wrongdoing at Barclays looks like the kind of thing that gives hypocrisy a bad name.

When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints. ‘I knew the tyme when great care was had about printing,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury lamented, ‘but now the paper is nought, the composers boyes, and the correctors unlearned.’ Most copies of what became known as the Wicked, Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible were promptly burned, but a few survive as collectors’ items, their value raised immeasurably by Barker’s error: one featured in an exhibition at the Bodleian Library last year about the making of the King James Bible.

Adam Smyth, reviewing Anthony Grafton’s Panizzi Lectures on “The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe” in the current issue of The London Review of Books.

Hooray! Richard Evans, David Runciman and I have just been awarded a £1.6 million grant by the Leverhulme Trust for our project on “Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political Theory and Internet Research”.

I expect that our esteemed colleagues will now start wondering how we conspired to pull it off!

Wonder if the title is missing the definite article?

My friend Sean French has just finished Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and he’s (rightly) mightily impressed.

I’ve just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s extraordinary novel, Cryptonomicon, and it’s done my head in. For a start, it’s about half as long again as David Copperfield. I’ve written novels in a shorter time than it took me to read Stephenson’s book. And then, as I read it, I kept asking myself: how does he know all this? It’s obvious that he’s a serious expert on computer technology and the science and history of codes and code-breaking, especially in the second world war. But he knows everything else as well, about wartime Britain, about the wartime Philippines, about submarines, about the technology of tunnelling, about just lots and lots of things.

More important, he deploys all this knowledge in a multi-stranded, multi-charactered, pan-global story of the kind that hasn’t been done much since the Victorians, and the different narratives and characters converge with the most amazing virtuosity. It’s got the wild imagination of Gravity’s Rainbow, with the added attraction – for me, at least – that I almost always understood what was going on.

Lovely post. Wonder if I should point Sean at “In the Beginning Was the Command Line”? Or is that really just for geeks?

This blog went missing yesterday, for reasons that were entirely ridiculous, not to say predictable: it was moved to a different server. My web-hosting service had, of course, alerted me well in advance that this would happen but — well, you can guess the rest: the email got swamped in the tide that floods my inbox and…

After I’d reset the DNS pointers, it took 24 hours for the change to ripple through. If you’re a regular reader, please accept my apologies. As usual, incompetence rather than conspiracy provides the best explanation.

No, not a picture of a Jubilee dinner, but of something far more moving and significant. Some months ago, a lovely young man who was a classmate of my daughter at secondary school — a clever, charming, athletic undergraduate — had a terrible accident while on a sporting trip abroad. He fell from an hotel balcony and suffered horrendous head injuries. When they got him to hospital, the medics thought he would die. He was in a coma for weeks, had emergency brain surgery and was eventually flown home to our local hospital where he is beginning to make a slow — but in the circumstances miraculous — recovery. He has a wonderful, supportive family but they’re not rich, and this catastrophe has obviously stretched their resources, so many of us have been wondering how best we can help.

Then two of their closest friends had an idea. Why not organise a “benefit evening”? So they set about it. A dinner in the village hall, cooked by volunteers, with everyone paying a lot more than they would in a restaurant. And an ”auction of promises” afterwards.

So last evening we drove through what VS Pritchett once called ”the most gardened country on earth” to the village hall. It was the kind of beautiful English summer evening that George Orwell (and John Major) would have recognised. The only thing missing was those old maids cycling to Evensong. When we got to the Hall, we were directed efficiently into a field specially set aside for parking. Our stewards were young men — some of whom I recognised from the primary-school gate when I used to meet their parents as I picked up my own children. Then into the Hall, which was packed to the rafters. Long trestle-tables with white linen, glasses and cutlery. Legions of the injured boy’s classmates recruited as waiters and dressed neatly in black trousers and white shirts. Guests of all ages, including many grandparents — and villagers who hadn’t known either the boy or his family but felt moved to put their personal weight behind this gesture of solidarity. Lots of parents I hadn’t met for years. Introductions which went, ”Hello, I’m JP’s Mum. You must be Annie’s Dad”. Teachers from the (terrific) school that so many of our children had attended. And the injured boy’s twin brother.

Then the meal: excellent boeuf bourgignon for the carnivores; and an equally delicious vegetarian option. And lots of dessert, with each table taking its turn to collect it. All in good order and with much cheerful jostling. Afterwards a few short speeches: from the boys’ rugby coach; then the sparky teacher who taught our children English for GCSE; and finally the injured lad’s identical twin.

”Some of you won’t know my brother”, he said, ”but now you do, because usually people cannot tell us apart”. He spoke movingly but without mawkish sentimentality, and left us marvelling at the capacity of human beings to rise above adversity. He and his brother are as close as it possible for two people to be; so in a way part of him was down the road in hospital as he spoke. Listening to him I felt that, for once, Hemingway’s definition of courage as ”grace under pressure” was justified.

And then the auction of promises. People had come up with an amazing array of offerings. Numerous tickets to rugby Internationals (for sums ranging between £120 and £280); a round of golf with the school principal (£120). Tickets to cricket Test Matches. Paintings by local artists. A week in an Alpine chalet (£1200). Another week in a Portuguese villa. A meal for two in a local restaurant (we went to £100 on this and were outbid). A free annual tax return by a local accountant (a snip at £35). And so it went on and on, with the audience being continually amazed — and delighted — by the frenzied bidding.

What fuelled the event was a shared recognition of how fragile is the thread by which life hangs. Here, after all, was a family which had done everything right: brought up two lovely lads who had the world at their feet — boys who turned out to be not only nice people and terrific athletes but also had won places at Oxford. And then — bang! — in one fateful moment, it all disintegrated. They had experienced the terror that lurks at the back of every parent’s mind. There but for the Grace of God and all that…

It was one of the most heart-warming events I’ve ever attended, an affirmation of the power of friendship and human empathy, a reminder — against the horrifying evidence of our capacity for inhumanity that is currently on display in Syria — of the better angels of our nature. And it was all so very English, somehow: no histrionics; no tears; just a quiet, determined pragmatism. As we drove home in the dark I was reminded of why I love living in this country.