Today’s International Herald Tribune has nice piece by Ralph Blumenthal based on a visit to Le Thor, the village in Provence where Pierre Salinger, JFK’s Press Secretary, made his home. Concludes with this story, which will touch the heart of every cigar smoker:

Here in Le Thor, Mr. Salinger’s penchant for fine wine and cigars is fondly recalled. A centerpiece of the museum is a large wooden cigar box, all that remains of a gift that Nikita Khrushchev presented Mr. Salinger during a visit to Moscow in 1962. The 150 cigars had come from Fidel Castro and violated the newly installed embargo. President Kennedy was aghast, directing Mr. Salinger to surrender the cigars so Customs could destroy them.

Years later, Mr. Salinger reflected ruefully that he could have done that himself, “one by one.”

Sigh. In the Summer of 1968 I took an impoverished elderly friend to dinner at l’Epicure, a lovely French restaurant (now sadly gone) in Greek Street in Soho. After dessert, I asked my guest if he would like a cigar. His face lit up: yes, he said, very much. So I summoned the waiter and said we’d like to see a selection of his better cigars. He went off and whispered to his boss, when then approached us and, bending down, asked me in a confidential tone “Would either of you be an American gentleman, Sir?”. “Certainly not!” I replied indignantly. He smiled, bowed and withdrew, returning a few moment later with… a box of Cohibas. Bliss!

Quentin’s two tips for those who are overwhelmed by email.

Don’t have it on all the time, and for God’s sake don’t let it ping or beep at you whenever a message comes in. That way madness lies. For your loved ones as well as for you. I tend to check my emails in the morning and in the evening. Occasionally in the middle of the day…but don’t count on it.

Email isn’t instant messaging. If people need an immediate reply they should be using some other technology to contact you. And one of the best ways to ensure you get more email is to keep responding to it promptly! Besides, I often read emails in a spare minute on my phone, when replying isn’t really practical.

You know it makes sense.

The shark, originally uploaded by jjn1.

This is one of those blog posts that lead people to cancel their subscriptions. I’ve just come back from an academic assignment at one of my almae matres (that’s plural of alma mater, since you ask) — University College Cork. As usual, I flew on Ryanair. Indeed, I had little choice, because I live near Stansted and Ryanair is the only carrier that has scheduled services between there and Cork.

The plane was full on both the outward and return trip. The flights departed and arrived on time. The boarding and disembarking processes were efficient and painless. And the fares were reasonable. And I suddenly fell to thinking: what’s not to like?

At this point, most of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances leap onto my shoulder, where they perch like a flock of cathecising parrots. They complain about, inter alia: Ryanair’s outrageously bumptious CEO, Michael O’Leary; the company’s crassly commercial website with its hidden (and pop-up) traps for the unwary (for example the one that makes the choice of travel insurance a default which can only be turned off by hunting though a drop-down list of countries; or by having non-optional pop-ups trying to flog you car hire or hotels); its fierce restrictions on cabin-baggage (and the brusque way they are enforced by staff); the way it charges extra for everything (speed-boarding, seat-reservation, even the mandatory online check-in); how it adds an “administration fee” for using a non-Ryanair credit card when booking; the intrusive (and idiotic) inflight audio ads for scratch cards, phone cards and coach tickets; the bumpy touch-downs it incentivises in order to achieve rapid turnaround of planes; the canned trumpet fanfare that announces “yet another on-time arrival”; and lots more complaints that I’ve heard but cannot at the moment recall. Listening to this chorus of disdain and disapproval it’s easy to slip into the cliched view of Ryanair as the company that everybody loves to hate.

There’s just one problem with this. How come that Ryanair’s planes are always full? Last year Ryanair carried 79 million passengers, operated 300 aircraft on 1,500 routes. It had fewer cancellations than any other carrier and mishandled far fewer bags than any of its competitors. (The worldwide average for mishandled bags is 9 per 1000; Ryanair’s is less that 0.5 per 1000). If people really hate the company, then they have an odd way of showing it.

I suspect that the cognoscenti’s distaste for Michael O’Leary’s enterprise has something to do with the fact that he stripped away the romantic and exclusive aura that surrounded air travel during the era when it was an expensive mode of travel available only to a tiny elite. When I was a child in the 1950s, for example, only the rich — or company executives who were not paying for their tickets — flew. The Irish national airline (state-owned Aer Lingus) was a glamorous outfit, and a career as an Aer Lingus “Air Hostess” was much prized. (My first father-in-law wanted his daughters to be Air Hostesses because he thought that this would provide them with a fool-proof way of landing rich husbands. Both girls grew up to be militant feminists, I am glad to report.) Every Autumn a fixture on Irish fashion-editors’ calendars was the show in which Aer Lingus displayed the new outfits — designed by some fancy couturier — that their airborne stewardesses would be wearing that year.

But it was much the same in most other countries. National airlines were national flagships. And passengers were treated like royalty. In 1968, as a result of a reservation error, I was once upgraded onto First Class on an Aer Lingus morning flight from London to Dublin, and was astonished to find myself being offered unlimited quantities of champagne. But of course this royal treatment never came cheap. The implicit deal was that you paid through the nose for the privilege of air travel, but that lots of extras — together with sycophantic service and champagne — came with the ticket.

Ryanair’s original sin was to call this bluff. It was the first European airline to recognise that air travel had become a routine commodity. And one of the first (after the sainted Freddie Laker) to realise that if air travel were realistically priced then ‘ordinary’ people would become frequent fliers. Michael O’Leary’s fixed strategy ever since has been relentlessly to pare away the romantic illusions and charge people on an itemised basis for anything over and above their seats. And although they might not like this, passengers recognise that the deal they are getting is at least an honest one.

Ryanair has changed my life for the better. It has made it immeasurably easier to keep in touch with my extended family — who live up and down the Western seaboard of Ireland. In the old days, a journey from Cambridge to there was a two-day affair, involving a long car journey to Holyhead, a three-hour ferry voyage, and then a four or five-hour drive from Dublin. Same story on the return journey. Not surprisingly, we didn’t go back very often. But when the regional airports in the West opened up — Knock in Mayo and Farranfore in Kerry — Ryanair immediately offered scheduled services to both. (Aer Lingus, needless to say, snootily declined to service such low-rent locations.) And where Ryanair went, my kids and I followed. As a result, the family dislocation that used to follow emigration was reduced or dissolved, something that IMHO has been an unmitigated blessing.

So you can perhaps see why I’ve begun to bristle when I hear the well-bred distaste for Mr O’Leary’s airline being endlessly rehearsed. You may not like his style, or how he does business, but at least Ryanair does what it says on the tin.

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?