Return of the Flying... Tic-Tacs?

As someone with a lifelong interest in both science and science fiction, it would be strange if I didn’t have an informed opinion about UFOs. And in fact, I do.

     

It’s changed quite a bit, though, since I was nine years old and convinced that people from faraway planets were visiting Earth in flying saucers and playing funny tricks on its inhabitants – mutilating American cows, having sex with Brazilian farmers and so forth. Actually, that phase didn’t even last into my teens: the science (and science fiction) I was reading taught me that there is a universal speed limit, three million metres per second, that nothing can exceed, and that fact, combined with the sheer size of the Galaxy and the vast distances separating its constituent stars, makes it unlikely verging on impossible that beings from other planets ever have, or ever could, visit this one. Besides, most of the reports of UFOs published in the media (and later, on the internet) were obvious piffle; any scientifically literate person could debunk them with ease.

As for the ‘ufologists’’ claims of US government cover-ups, aliens walking among us in disguise and people being taken for rides in flying hospitals with artificial insemination facilities and investigative-enterology departments, they were clearly the work of people who were quite deranged, or else were looking for deranged people to make money out of. UFOs had become – or maybe always were – part of what I snobbishly refer to as underclass culture. By my early twenties I had pretty much put them out of my mind, though I happily continued to read science-fiction stories full of starships, aliens and even, yes, close encounters of the third kind.

Yet even such a sceptic as I had to acknowledge that a few of the reported encounters with UFOs defied straightforward explanation. The most difficult of these were instances where visual sightings were corroborated by radar traces or other electronic evidence, such as the encounter between a US Air Force RB-47 and one or perhaps two unidentified flying objects over Texas and Mississippi on 17 July 1957. In that encounter, visual sightings by members of the aircraft crew were supported by evidence from radars both on board the plane and on the ground. Other sightings involved multiple witnesses, trained observers and sometimes both. There were enough of these incidents – as well as credible reports from individuals known to me that never reached the media – to indicate that there was something else at work besides a bunch of overactive human imaginations. Yet this handful of credible occurrences were so rare, so bizarre and seemed to have so little in common with one another that it was hard to fit them into any kind of hypothesis. Besides, they were inconsequential, affecting no-one but a few people directly involved with them. It hardly seemed worth spending time and effort to try and make sense of them.

*

That was then. This is now. I remain thoroughly sceptical, when not frankly disbelieving, of most claims of UFO encounters, all claims of personal encounters with aliens and every single theory I have heard or read concerning the origins or causes of such incidents. But I now firmly believe that there is something or someone operating out there that we do not understand and cannot explain.

     

I believe this because the US Navy believes it.

     

We’ve been hearing a lot about UFOs from the Americans recently. We heard that the USN had declassified reports of certain ‘encounters’ and modified its reporting protocols for aircrews and others involved in such incidents to make it easier for them to come forward. We heard that US lawmakers, and finally the President himself, were briefed on things Navy personnel had seen, or detected with electronic surveillance and targeting equipment. The President told us he was sceptical, but then, he probably regards UFOs as his competitors in the battle for eyeballs among members of his trailer-park demographic. In fact, the evidence for the real presence of something out there has never been stronger.

     

Nearly all of it comes from sophisticated electronic defensive and offensive systems on US warships, military aircraft and military bases. Apparently, they keep picking up ‘bogies’ all the time but they’re almost never reported because there’s no proper procedure for doing so and no soldier wants to look like an idiot. But that doesn’t mean the sightings aren’t there.

     

Then there was the Nimitz incident, of which I learnt only recently, although it took place in 2004. A flotilla of warships around the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was conducting manoeuvres off Santa Catalina Island on the US Pacific coast when the radar officer aboard the ship acting as the ‘eyes’ of the flotilla saw what appeared to be a whole fleet of UFOs heading towards it. After some discussion, a pair of F/A-18 Super Hornets was scrambled and directed towards one of the UFOs. What happened next can be read at the link above.

     

What is remarkable about the incident is that the Navy took it seriously but did not forbid personnel to talk about it. One of the pilots went on the record about what he saw; his wingman corroborated the story, but anonymously. The radar officer, too, has been talking to the media. He claims there was a cover-up, because the radar data on his hard disks were erased later, leaving only the date stamps.

     

Be that as it may, the Navy has been quite open about a more recent spate of incidents, this time off the East rather than the West coast of the USA, involving UFOs and F/A-18s. It has even permitted the public release of three videos showing the UFOs being tracked by Navy aircraft.

So what’s going on? Ghosts in the machine – data artifacts thrown up by the equipment itself? Pilots hallucinating due to sensory overload? Absurdly advanced human technology being tested in secret against the best the United States military can throw at it? Visitors from outer space, or from one of those bizarre but scientifically tenable parallel worlds physicists speculate about? Or some Earthly phenomenon of which we are totally unaware, possibly the work of some unknown intelligence sharing the planet with us? Nobody has a clue. And given how little we know, no sensible person would even hazard an opinion.

But it’s no longer possible to dismiss the phenomenon out of hand.

Absolutely about Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

by Haruki Murakami 

I was going to review this but I just read this sizzling review by Jeanne Thornton and realized I don't need to bother. Merci bien, Jeanne.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1913526136

I will add, though, that these conversations are about a bit more than just conducting -- anyone who has ever played ensemble, regardless of what kind of music they play, can get a lot out of Ozawa's rehearsal tips. And Murakami, of course, writes in his inimitable style, even, seemingly, when he's transcribing Ozawa. I guess Ozawa was the score and Murakami the conductor. 

Polite applause, but no cry for an encore.

Genghis Khan: Weatherford Also Khan (But Not So Much)

Genghis Khan & the Making of the Modern World
by Jack Weatherford

Although I was not entirely unaware of the impact of the Mongol conquests and Mongol rule in many different parts of the world, I found this book full of unexpected and sometimes astonishing information – a real eye-opener. Though not all of his statements are accurate, Weatherford’s errors seem to be largely about peripheral historical matters and not the main subject, which he has thoroughly researched. For some information about what he gets wrong, see this review.

I’d have given this book five stars is the man wasn’t such a bad writer. He has his moments, especially during the earliest part of the book, which deals with Genghis’s early life as an outcast on the steppe. In this section Weatherford is closest to his own speciality – which is anthropology, by the way, not history – and also, I think, to his source materials. It shows: at times the quality of writing is almost novelistic.

It doesn’t last. The Mongol explosion was, any way you look at it, high adventure, yet Weatherford makes the telling of it as dull as a fishknife. He is the kind of writer who likes to say ‘three decades’ instead of ‘thirty years’ – boring and a bit pompous. He is also clearly determined to rehabilitate the popular image of the Mongols, and is often rather credulous of pro-Mongol sources and too dismissive of opposing views. His blatant partisanship does warn the perceptive reader to proceed with caution, but proper scholarly detachment would have been much better.

I was almost tempted to dock him another star because of the utterly awful, nauseatingly sentimental ending, an account of how he, his research assistants and collaborators rode to the top of some Mongolian rock they had discovered to be associated with Genghis, conducted ‘shamanistic’ rituals and got drunk. I’m sure they found it all joyous and fulfilling and suchlike, but it was completely unnecessary and entirely out of keeping with the dignity of a work of this kind to tell us about it.

All the same, if you can stomach the blundering, pedestrian prose – and if you would like to be astonished by just what the Mongols did and what effect it had on the world – then I heartily recommend this book for its factual content.

The Height of Foreign Mountains

While researching material for a history I am writing of my old school, St Thomas’s College, I found myself reading some speeches by Canon R.S. De Saram, who was Warden of the College during a very interesting period in our country’s history – the run-up to national independence and the years immediately following.

One of the principal causes of Lanka’s slow but inexorable reversion to barbarism is our national education policy, which despite much meddling with the details has retained the shape it assumed many years before Independence. Influenced by Sinhalese-Buddhist ‘nationalist’ imperatives and animated by a vengeful intent to destroy the power and privileges of the educated Anglophone elite, this policy was the work of C.W.W. Kannangara, who was appointed Minister of Education in the first democratically elected government of the country, taking office under British rule in 1931. His 1945 Education Bill, despite its laudable intent to extend free education to all Ceylonese, has been the source of a multitude of national woes.

Kannangara was chief guest at St Thomas’s on Prize Day, 1940, by which time his ideas concerning education and the nationalist demagoguery on which they were based were already matters of public controversy. De Saram, who fiercely opposed those ideas and values, was relatively gentle with Kannangara, to whom he addressed the following remarks:

[Yours] is a great and difficult task, for Education is a delicate matter; its problems vary with place and with the passage of time. In addition problems peculiar to Ceylon arise from our special conditions: problems connected with differences in language and religion. It is natural, therefore, that there should be criticism and that feeling should sometimes run high. This is in the main all to the good. It means that difficulties are being drawn into the open and being faced. It will however be unfortunate if the amount of criticism should cause us to forget the real progress that has been made. There are undoubtedly many things needing improvement in our educational system; but there are also, it is right to remember, a good many things about it that are excellent.

Again, it would be a pity if criticism should be allowed to degenerate into mere acrimony between those who differ on fundamental problems. Ill temper or partisanship will not solve our difficulties; nor the imposition by decree or otherwise of any one rigid system for all schools. On the contrary, toleration within limits of many varieties of educational practice is indicated by our varying conditions as the right and wise policy.

De Saram’s words fell, predictably, on deaf ears: the Minister’s own speech to the assembly indicated as much. Nothing daunted, the Warden tried again on Prize Day the following year. This time he spoke more frankly, for his principal auditor was the British governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, an excellent administrator and a great friend of Ceylon. But the powers of the Governor of Ceylon were already waning by then, and there was little Caldecott could do but listen with approval.

That considerable uneasiness exists among schools like ours as to the trend of educational policy it is idle to try to conceal... To put it bluntly there is a feeling of hostility and lack of appreciation which is hard to understand. For we have but one object – to serve our country by providing for its sons the education that will best fit them for its service; and we are always eager and ready to cooperate in any policy which will secure that end. If our cooperation were frankly sought it would be freely given. In any case, whether policy be hostile to us or not we stand firm in the knowledge that we have a service to render to the country which is understood and appreciated by a very great number of people, and we shall continue to render it whatever comes...

Education in Ceylon is at this moment at a most interesting and, in some ways, a critical stage. On the one hand there is the already fully-awakened pride in our national life and heritage. On the other there is the solid fact that external forces, cultural, political and commercial, are affecting us and must affect us increasingly as the years go by... We can attempt to turn all our attention to one or other of these facts. Or we can attempt a synthesis... That this is the only sound course must be clear to every sensible person...

We [at St Thomas’s] have for long recognized how important it is that all boys should have a competent knowledge of Sinhalese and Tamil... As two Ministers of State who were our chief guests on two separate occasions have in their addresses laid great stress on the danger of neglecting our own heritage in the pursuit of knowledge of other countries and other cultures, I feel it is fair to say that we have taken this advice some twenty years or more before it was offered, and that ample place has been found in our syllabus for many years for a study of our own country, its history and languages, and to repudiate the suggestion, if it were implied, that we stood in any special need of this warning. To the query by one of these speakers as to what was the use of knowing the height of Mount Everest when we did not know the height of our own mountains we reply that knowing the height of our own mountains perfectly well, we regard it as of great importance to know that of Mt Everest as otherwise we might think our own the highest in the world. Similarly in the realms of intellect and of the spirit. There are eminences reached by the human intellect and the human spirit of which every cultured man should be aware: ‘What do they know of Ceylon who only Ceylon know?’

In 1945, three years before Independence, Kannangara’s famous (or infamous) Free Education Bill was passed in Parliament. In 1951, the government demanded that all private schools strictly follow the officially mandated syllabus and accept government oversight and control. Those that did not would be expelled from the national grant-in-aid system, depriving them of funds that would allow them to continue to function. Despite initial resistance, nearly all bowed to what they saw as the inevitable.

One school, at least, held out. De Saram, still Warden at St Thomas’s, refused to accept the government’s demands. Though STC already suffered from a heavy burden of debt (originally incurred in rebuilding the College at Mt Lavinia after being forced to move from Mutwal in 1918), De Saram accepted the crippling financial consequences in order to remain independent – that is, to continue to conduct classes in English for those to whom it was their mother-tongue, to teach subjects outside the syllabuses set by nationalist ideologues in the Department of Education, and to continue to offer boys from Christian families an education guided by Anglican religious and moral principles.

*

Reggie de Saram retired as Warden of St Thomas’s the year I was born. When I was in the senior forms at STC in the late Seventies the consequences of his great decision were still evident. The beautiful Neoclassical senior classroom block did not have a single window without at least one broken pane; the forms inside those classrooms were still Edwardian wrought-iron, with the names of Ceylonese notables of an earlier era carved into their jakwood tops; they were, in fact, so rubbled with illicit carving that you had to put an exercise-book under the sheet of paper you wished to write on, or your pencil would soon make a hole in it. The College grounds were drab and dusty, with only a minimum of funds spent on their upkeep; the equipment for cricket and other sporting and extracurricular activities was hard-worn and patched-together, as were the hymnals in the Chapel and even the choristers’ and servers’ cassocks. At least a third of the staff were of pensionable age, some of them physically decrepit, but continuing to serve, on exiguous salaries, for love of the school.

Somehow we managed, and I would not change the education I received at St Thomas’s during those terrible lean years (which lasted decades) for any other, however well-furnished and privileged. In spite of the poverty and disrepair all about us, neither I nor my contemporaries doubted for one moment that we were at the best school in the world.

St Thomas’s does a lot better these days, now that national education policy (if it can still be called that) has become more liberal, and old alumni with deep pockets have helped the school pay off its debts and re-equip itself to the highest standards. Sometimes, visiting the College on research trips these days, I look about me and feel almost like an imposter. New buildings and evidence of modern technology everywhere I look, old buildings and grounds all spick and span, the Chapel once again robed in full High Church glory – STC now looks as grand as she deserves to. Her grandeur was, of necessity, somewhat occulted in my own day.

That was the fruit of De Saram’s great decision – the sacrifice he caused us, willy-nilly, to make, for the good of the future. Despite the inconvenience and austerity it imposed upon us as schoolboys, I don’t believe any of us are or were the worse for it. Its wisdom, indeed, is now beyond question, for the College has retained its independence of spirit and action because of it, and continues to serve the country as it always has. Meanwhile, Kannangara’s education policy has proven to be a disastrous failure, whose consequences the country is suffering, as I write, in the shape of an attempted constitutional coup that may well succeed simply because too few Sri Lankans have sufficient education or understanding to understand the gravity of their loss. Pity the country whose citizens no longer know the height of foreign mountains – or, indeed, their own.

The End of History, Again

Identity and Belonging

An essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa

Does he make you think 
of Francis Fukuyama?

Someone for whom I have great respect has asked me to review an essay by Sanjana Hattotuwa that appeared in the Island on 29 September. I do so somewhat unwillingly. The kind of writing this essay represents is of little interest to me because I view historical processes (including, inter alia, all social and political processes) as being ultimately beyond human control. It is true that men and women, individually and in groups, can grasp and sometimes make use of these processes to further their own ends, but in doing so they unavoidably change both the process and its results. These changes and effects are not fully predictable by anyone and can have serious unforeseen consequences. Hence my deep conviction that sociopolitical activism is at best ambiguous in its effects, and at worst downright dangerous.

Readers of an optimistic, pragmatic or executive bent will surely contest this. What nonsense, they’ll say. Of course you can plan a course of action, carry it out and if all goes well you will see the results you expected to see. That’s exactly how people win wars, succeed in business, fly to the moon and do all the other great things they have done throughout history. Anyone who claims otherwise is surely deluded.

Yet it takes no more than a moment’s reflection to vindicate my thesis. Yes, indeed, we can predict the outcomes of processes – but only some of the outcomes. Whatever the process, there will always be unintended, unforeseen consequences attendant upon it. These can be problematic, negative, even fatal unless they are addressed by further action – that is, by more process. This may – may – offset the negative consequences of the first action, but it will produce further unforeseen outcomes that will then have to be addressed by more action, and so on. The people performing these actions may kid themselves that they’re controlling some process or the other, but any fool can see that the process is really controlling them.

Of course this does not mean we should give up studying history (or political science, or sociology); it is both our instinct and our duty to learn about the world we live in and how our words and deeds affect it. Our knowledge will always be imperfect, and we cannot help changing the things we study simply by the act of studying them, but we may yet learn something useful. The question, for me at least, is whether Mr Hattotuwa’s essay helps us in our understanding of the historical process.

Well, does it? The essay opens with a longish description of an LTTE child soldier fascinated by the workings of an ‘in-dash CD player’ fitted to a van in which the author was travelling in the course of his laudable fact-finding and peace-building activities during the Sri Lankan civil war. This was apparently intended to serve as an affective, human-interest-filled introduction to the rather cerebral think-piece that follows, but I’m sorry to say it failed to evoke in me any emotion whatsoever. Neither did it provide any logical point of ingress to the ideas and arguments contained in the essay.

The child soldier, says Mr Hattotuwa, reminded him of Francis Fukuyama, the turn-of-the-century political scientist who famously proclaimed that the fall of Communism and the worldwide success of the liberal-capitalist model of political economy had brought about the End of History. Prof. Fukuyama is hardly the first person I would think of if a teenager were to point a loaded gun at me, but I suppose Mr Hattotuwa may have been reminded of him by the potentially imminent end of his own history. Or maybe the kid just looked like Prof. Fukuyama. Never mind: it is with the ruminations of Professor End of History that the essay is really concerned.

Francis Fukuyama’s famous prediction was, of course, a washout. It failed for precisely the reasons I describe in my first paragraph above: the developments that brought about the supposed end of history also had other, unforeseen consequences, making sure that, Gorbachev and Walesa and the falling Wall notwithstanding, history still kept rolling along like Old Man River. This does not, however, appear to have dinted the good professor’s standing with Mr Hattotuwa, who writes that

Fukuyama’s central thesis is that populism’s rise and appeal at present is because of the indignity suffered by those in society who are rendered invisible by the dominant narratives undergirding the politics, practices and policies of the government.

Oh, nice. So the rise of populism isn’t due to any characteristic or tendency in the populists, or in the populus, themselves, but to the way they’re treated in ‘the dominant narratives’ of the State. Here we encounter the great Illusion of the Reformers, one that goes all the way back to Rousseau: humanity in a state of nature is perfect, and it is only society (or rather its engines, such as the State) that mar his perfection and turn him selfish, violent and anti-social. Reform society – as Communists, Socialists, Nazis, Islamic fanatics, Tamil Tigers, Sinhalese nationalists and zealots of all and every description are forever dying to do – and we shall all be transformed into angels. Yes, there it is – that doleful, superannuated hunk of philosophical horseflesh, the Perfectibility of Man, dragged out for yet another flogging, another hopeless totter round the track.

Well, I’m not buying it, especially not from a failed prophet like Francis Fukuyama. Yet this, I fear, is the meat – if you will pardon the expression – of Mr Hattotuwa’s essay:

Fukuyama suggests that the politics of the left has lost its way, focussing on ever smaller issues anchored to specific communities, giving way to right-wing politics that uses identity politics, including by appropriating the language of marginalization and outrage, to appeal to ever greater numbers. Fukuyama focussed on the deterioration of liberal democracies in the West, but his critique of polarization in political dialogue, lack of robust critique, the rise of emotion over reason, short-term fixes instead of long-term reform holds true even in Sri Lanka. 

Seriously, did we need a somewhat discredited Japanese-American political scientist to diagnose our ills for us? ‘Polarization in political dialogue, the rise of emotion over reason and short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’ have been staples of Sri Lankan politics since before Francis Fukuyama was born. Anyone who has struggled to follow the self-interested antics of the constituent groups and individual members of the Ceylon National Congress and its precursors during the early years of the twentieth century will have learnt more about polarization in political dialogue than he may well care to know. Polarization in Ceylon politics began the day the Jaffna Association rejected Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s attempts to create a non-communal basis for political activism in Colonial Ceylon; it has been the very basis of Lankan politics since the death of D.S. Senanayake, the last truly unifying figure in our country’s political history. As for the rule of emotion over reason, identity politics is simply the only demotic politics we have; such has been the case ever since the Sinhalese Buddhist revival of the late nineteenth century. Reasonable polities are concerned with issues such as the economy, national defence, law and order, public welfare, education and health; polities ruled by emotion get themselves all worked up over race, religion, language, caste and other issues in which government rightly has no place at all. As for ‘short-term fixes in place of long-term reform’, what else can you hope for from a political culture in which everyone is in it for what they can grab?

The problems of Sri Lanka are, no doubt about it, similar to those facing Western democracies today; but while the disease may be the same, the symptoms in our country are far more extreme than they have yet become in the West. Our patient is not nearly as strong, and the disease is much further advanced in its course.

The disease? I call it civilizational decline. In Sri Lanka, as in the West, it has been discernible – if only to hindisght – since about 1900 or so, and acquired real momentum after the Second World War came to an end. Barring calamitous climate change, however, the fall of Western civilization may yet be deferred for a generation or two, perhaps indefinitely; it is a high civilization, quite possibly the highest in human history, and it has far to fall. In Sri Lanka the collapse of civilization is already pretty well accomplished. People like Mr Hattotuwa and me are its relics.

I speak, of course, of the civilization imposed on us by our erstwhile masters the British. Our own high civilization has been dead these seven hundred years or more; barbaric successor kingdoms and foreign powers then fought over Lanka for half a millennium until at last, about twenty years after the establishment of British rule in the island, civilization returned – as a foreign product. It didn’t stay long: in less than a century it had begun to ebb away again. Much was already lost by the time colonial Ceylon gained independence in 1948; by 1972 the decline had become unstoppable. Today what little is left of the modern, democratic nation-state of Sri Lanka is running on the dregs of momentum acquired in the colonial past. Very soon that will be gone, and we shall have returned to the conditions of oriental despotism punctuated by periods of bloody anarchy that were the only political reality the people of Lanka knew from the death of Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa in the thirteenth century to the adoption of the Colebrooke-Cameron mission report by the British colonial authorities in 1833.

History, of course, never ends. Yet it is hard to see any great change being accomplished in Sri Lanka without a revolution so comprehensive that it destroys not only the present order and its institutions but also our national myths and superstitious fictions. It might even have to be a world revolution, for these days not even an island is an island. And revolution alone will not suffice: a century or so of rebuilding – or else occupation by yet another foreign power – will have to follow before any kind of civilization returns to our beautiful, unhappy motherland.

I am selfish enough to hope the revolution doesn’t come to pass in my time. As for occupation by a foreign power, well, my Oriental-language skills have always been rather poor. Much as I would like to see a return to civilized life in Lanka, I don’t see any hope of it for generations to come. Certainly it will not be brought about through ‘constitutional reform to address issues around identity and dignity that were drivers of violent conflict’, as Mr Hattotuwa suggests. For constitutional reform to work, people have to take constitutions seriously. And only civilized people can do that. 

Gene Editing Made Simple

A Crack in Creation

by Jennifer A. Doudna

& Samuel H. Sternberg

If you’re looking for a simple explanation of how CRISPR and other forms of gene editing work, what they are capable of and what they aren’t, you’ll find it here, and straight from the horse’s mouth at that. There’s also a great deal of discussion about the social, ethical and evolutionary issues involved with manipulation of the human germline. I found that part of the book rather boring, I’m afraid, having heard it all before. Anyone paying attention has heard it all by now.

Indeed, if you really have been paying attention, you may notice a yawning gap in this book. This concerns another CRISPR pioneer, Feng Zhang, whose work at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT was also critical to the development of CRISPR gene editing, but whom Doudna and her colleagues apparently regard as competitors for recognition. Of course, that kind of thing is hardly unknown among academics.

The writing is lucid and works hard to meet the reader more than halfway, but it is also generic, slick and affectless. I recognized many of the tricks American professional authors employ: my guess is that a ghostly hack was present in addition to the two scientists identified as co-authors.

Not So New, Really

The Silk Roads

A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan

The fourth star is awarded grudgingly. Mr Frankopan’s subject is so interesting that it would take real effort to to produce a dull book about it. This he has not done, but I think he could have made much more of his material.

His thesis – that Central Asia, the crossroads of the world, is also the place of origin of many of the peoples, events and movements that have shaped history – is one it would be hard to rebut. The author makes his case by giving us the history of the world as a series of transactions between far-flung peoples, transactions that profoundly affect the individuals and cultures that participate in them. This is all quite convincing, but unfortunately Mr Frankopan’s perspective remains very much a Western one, and after we reach the twentieth century (the history of which occupies about half of this thick, square volume) the focus shifts across the Atlantic and the tale becomes mostly about American foreign policy in relation to the Old World rather than about changes taking place in that world itself. In the end we are left with the impression that it is the West, even in decline, that really matters – at least to the author.

There needed to be a lot more Silk Road in this book: a lot more Central Asia, a lot more about the cultures that grew up there and what life was like in the lands that lay along these major international trade routes. Instead, we get far too much about how life changed for Europeans due to the influence of such trade, and far too much about US foreign policy in the twentieth century – a period long after Central Asia had ceased to be any kind of omphalos at all, except perhaps to the energy industry. The author’s account of the history of Iran during this period is valuable; the rest is just the old familiar tale of Cold War woe.

And here we come to the biggest problem of all. To be complete, Mr Frankopan’s thesis must describe and account for the decline and fall of the Russian (later Soviet) Empire in parallel to the decline of the West, especially since he has given us such a lot about the rise of Russia in his book; yet the Bolshevik revolution and the later collapse of the USSR are subjects he barely touches. This, to my mind, is a huge, almost fatal flaw in the work.

Other gaps in the account yawn nearly as wide. This is a ‘history of the world’ that tells us hardly anything about Africa or Latin America; what little there is treats of these continents as mere playgrounds of Western culture. In truth, Mr Frankopan’s supposed rejection of ‘Eurocentricism’ is entirely cosmetic; this is just another history of the West written by a Western historian, though with a slightly different skew than usual.

Taken as such, it’s a three-star read at best. The prose, for instance, is pedestrian. The extra star is awarded merely for the plethora of incidental detail presented by the author – if we get any idea of life on and athwart the Silk Roads from his book, it is through these fragments. Sadly, they weren’t nearly enough to satisfy this reader.