Tuesday 15th July 2025
Blog Page 1799

Review: Real Estate – Days

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On first impressions, it would be easy to write off Real Estate as flip-flop-clad copyists, all too happy to jump on the beach-pop bandwagon. The recent success of bands such as Girls and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart show how strongly audiences clamour for a musical summer holiday; unfortunately, ‘Days’ sometimes sounds more like being stuck on the M55 to Blackpool than a Venice Beach longboard tour.

That’s not to say Real Estate haven’t tried to keep matters summery and joyous here; opener ‘Easy’ is all lilting guitars and buoyant lyrics (“Around the fields we run/ With love for everyone”) and you can’t help but feel a little less angst-ridden after the delight that is lead single ‘It’s Real.’ The sound is clearer-cut than that of their 2009 self-titled debut, although it is evident that the band have made no effort to shrug off any of their low-slung, surf-garage niceties – not that this is a particularly bad thing.

The songs that make up Days are undoubtedly cohesive and simplistically catchy, all with the requisite floaty atmospherics to boot; the first half of the album is particularly sun-kissed and soothing. Despite this, though, the songs occasionally feel odd/ There is a fine line between a musical hat-tipping and unoriginality, and while part of the charm of songs like ‘Out of Tune’ may be the way in which they feel so familiar on the first listen, the result can come across as more of an effort to remain zeitgeisty than any genuine sense of homage.

Ultimately, Real Estate have created an album which is laidback but bordering on lackadaisical; although it is a collection of well-crafted, cheery songs that will assist you in your struggle against Fifth week blues, Days is far from revolutionary.

Review: James Blake – Enough Thunder EP

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Enough Thunder is the Little Chef of James Blake’s post-dubstep: a rather pointless little stop-off that serves only for Blake to indulge himself on (metaphorical) greasy chips and flaccid fish fingers. It is almost certainly a decision that he will come to vaguely regret, though fortunately one unlikely to stick in the memory.

Hitherto, Blake has harnessed the EP rather effectively, creating humming microcosms of sound that showcase his haunting vocals and quivering bass lines in tasty twenty-minute snippets. Enough Thunder sits heavily and awkwardly – a strange menagerie of bee-buzz and whale-wail – with an odd stiffness that has an almost formal quality. This venture into minimalism does make for a more intimate work – but also a rather boring one, with unsettling white noise playing in the background. It is a lonely, introspective work: a melancholy soundtrack to grey days on the M5. This is drizzle, rather than the bass-heavy lightning and thunder of earlier releases. It isn’t even really bad, just somewhat uninspiring.

Collaborative work between Blake and Bon Iver might be expected to be quite wonderful: while ‘Fall Creek Boys Choir’ is one of the stronger tracks on the release, it is nonetheless a bit of a plodder, punctuated by odd dolphin barks and that same unintelligible fuzz that characterizes the EP. Actually, the straightforward cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ is unexpectedly rather lovely, and perhaps the only place in the release where the minimalist vibe really shines.

 As ‘Not Long Now’ hits minute number four of five and a half, I cannot help but wonder if Blake is referring to the end of the EP. Listening to it in its entirety is a bit of a struggle: I am bored, and uninterested, and actually rather grumpy by the end of it. Hopefully, though, this is only an indigestible minor work – a service station on Blake’s artistic trajectory – and no indication of what is yet to come for an ordinarily extremely talented young man.

News Roundup Podcast: Week 3

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All the latest news from the Cherwell.

Resisting the meaningless

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For an anarchist, Simon Critchley has a beautiful house. As professor of Philosophy at the New School (which he has called ‘a decidedly abnormal university’), he’s been in New York for eight years, but his English accent still seems out of place here in the middle of Brooklyn. Before this, he was at Essex. ‘It was a great place, but it was taken over by bureaucrats,’ and he reckons the rest of British academia is in the grip of the same vice. ‘There’s a vague sense of resentment about philosophy,’ he says. ‘They basically hate what we do.’

But Critchley hasn’t lost his connection to the UK. If he wasn’t here talking to me, he’d be round the corner at the local Liverpool FC bar. And, he says, if he’d been in London back in August, he would have been out on the streets rioting too (he’s been involved in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in New York). From his perch across the Atlantic, Critchley sees events this year in Europe and North Africa as part of the same broader movement. The Arab Spring has been ‘a wonderful confirmation of the way power can shift.’ It is, he believes, ‘an eruption of anarchist sensibility,’ which means people ‘trying to do things in common, non-violently, trying to get autonomy over the means of production.’ The consequences are ‘potentially really radical.’

‘What the riots [in August] revealed is that exactly the same situation could arise in somewhere like England.’ The broader issue, Critchley contends, following Zygmunt Bauman, is a ‘set of increasing disjunctions’ between politics and power. ‘We still act as though [party] politics can transform conditions, but we also realise that power has shifted.’ On the one hand that means that power has shifted to corporations, individuals, and organisations with international reach and limited accountability. On the other, it’s on the streets, in demonstrations, riots, and revolutions like those of Tunisia and Egypt. 

‘Things aren’t going to get better,’ says Critchley. ‘Politicians are right to be afraid of the people they’re supposed to be ruling.’ When the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement erupted soon after I left New York, his remark started to seem all the more prescient.

It’s Critchley’s ‘endless optimism about human nature’ that allows him to offer such a sanguine assessment of this situation. The more the current system breaks down, the more opportunity there is for people and communities to make something better. In Infinitely Demanding (2007), Critchley argued for an anarchist ‘politics of resistance’ that emerges from an ethical perspective, something he called ‘the exhorbitant demand of infinite responsibility’ – a demand that we make of ourselves, and with which we cope through art’s power of catharsis and sublimation. 

So politics, ethics, and aesthetics are inseparable in Critchley’s philosophical work. But that’s a position he’s had to defend against prevailing academic practice, where walls of separation often seem to divide subfields and traditions. ‘Heidegger said that philosophy is the police force at the procession of the sciences, but today philosophy is its own police force,’ Critchley tells me. ‘We need more philosophical omnivores.’

Although he thinks there’s more room for the kind of work he wants to do in the US academic system than there is in the UK, still Critchley fears that ‘universities have become factories for producing degrees in business studies.’ One way of resisting that, for him, has been to move some of his activities into the art world. To his eye, art has a lot in common with philosophy; it deals with the same kinds of questions and problems, and comes out of the same feelings and desires. 

Montaigne wrote that ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die,’ an idea that Critchley explored in a 1997 book, Very Little… Almost Nothing. Two years later, he and the novelist Tom McCarthy launched a strange, semi-parodic organisation, the International Necronautical Society, declaring that ‘death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.’ There’s a provocativeness, not to mention a divisiveness, in Critchley’s writing that shares something with contemporary art. 

He tells me a story about a philosopher who was offered a prestigious post at Sydney. As soon as he was appointed, he withdrew most of his articles from publication; asked why, he said, ‘You have to make yourself as small a target as possible.’ That’s one way of being a philosopher. But Critchley self-deprecatingly prefers an alternate approach: ‘You throw as much shit at the wall as possible and watch it run down, and other people pick it up and play with it.’

All Souls philosopher Derek Parfit, choosing his path back in the 1970s, reckoned that Analytic philosophers wrote lucidly on very narrow, boring topics, and Continental philosophers wrote bewilderingly on what really mattered. Was it more likely that Analytics would become more relevant, or Continentals would become clearer? Parfit went for the former. To Critchley, the distinction between the two schools is a ‘profoundly uninteresting question.’ But in a way it has been central to his career. 

He wrote the Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy in 2001, and has acted as a kind of standard-bearer for English-speaking Continentalists. What’s more, his writing is actually readable. He’s even a little worried by it. ‘My writing has been most often described as “clear.” That’s fine, but I’d like it to also be deep!’ What Critchley really seems to be aiming for is a perfect philosophy, not just deep, or broad, or clear, but all three.

But where Analytic philosophers have a habit of thinking they can actually solve a problem, Critchley has always picked on the insoluble. ‘I’ve always been attracted to difficulty, just for the sake of it really.’ What animates his work is a continual pushing back against meaninglessness: what he calls the ‘problem of nihilism.’ 

Yet he’s hesitant to locate meaning in the political struggle he’s passionate and optimistic about. If anything, the most powerful theme in his work is death, disappointment, ‘almost nothing.’ Was he ever a nihilist? ‘Oh, all the time,’ he says. ‘That juvenile angst of living in an empty meaningless universe – it still gets me.’

 

Simon Critchley’s next book, Faith of the Faithless, will be published next year.

Giraffe George Street: Review

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I’ve always imagined Giraffe to be a noisy restaurant. One of those irritating places that prides itself on its ‘atmosphere’ over the basic ability to hear the person sat two feet away from you.

Thankfully, in this I was mistaken: the ambience was surprisingly relaxed for an eatery on George Street on a Friday night, and the service prompt and friendly.

Eating is my primary concern. I like my food high in quantity and high in quality. Giraffe delivered on both counts. A meal is not a success in my eyes unless I come away in at least a modicum of pain. My partner in crime and I shared the nachos. I like nachos even in their most basic form, and these were nachos on a higher plane. I would say they were probably the very best bit of the meal. Lots of cheese, alarmingly big slices of chili and all the appropriate condiments.

My first error was to have the burger. Not because of the quality, but the quantity. My second was to order a side of onion rings, even on top of the chips it came with. The burger was good, not at all overcooked. I had mine with bacon and avocado, which may offend some burger purists, but avocado improves any and all dishes. It’s the virtuous cousin of mayonnaise.

My accomplice went for the exotic sounding mojito chicken – this was an experiment which fell down a little. The chicken was well cooked, but the spicing was all wrong. It needed a lot more lime to live up to its name. She did however proceed to help me out with the burger and agreed wholeheartedly on the avocado.

For dessert we shared a banana waffle split. The banana was gorgeous, hot and sweet, and there was just the right amount of ice cream to balance out the gooey waffle. A success, had I not eaten so many nachos in the first place.

Giraffe may not be haute cuisine, but it has substance and at least a little bit of style. Just try to avoid undue gluttony, remember the mantra ‘starter or dessert, not both’.

Giraffe are now offering 25% off Monday – Thursday and Sundays from 6pm with an NUS extra card: perfect if your college doesn’t serve hall on weekends or you want a different sort of crewdate.

On this day and through the ages

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2nd week. It’s an uninspiring sort of concept. On the other hand, (although I suppose it was technically 1st week) the freshers had their first real taste of anachronistic Oxford absurdity with their matriculation ceremony. I loved matriculation – an excuse to pose for daft photos of launched hats forbidden to be worn, a pub crawl in pseudo-white-tie, and a useful lesson to never, ever go to Clems again. A Mr. John Moynihan, of Balliol College, felt differently in 1969, when Cherwell reported ‘A colourful anti-matriculation ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 21st October.’ Mr Moynihan first made his name in Oxford last year by going through the matriculation ceremony in drag. [He said]; ‘Our intention is to disrupt seriously, in the funniest and jolliest way possible, what we consider to be an anachronistic ceremony, that long ago outlived its usefulness.’
On the topic of sartorial peculiarity, we have an Evelyn report from 1980 of a character known to us all for his Tory-blue tie – William Hague. Poor Will gets stood up by his ‘frunions’ as ‘Thompson… has been twice persuaded to break blood pacts with cuddly northerner William Hague.
‘First, he agreed not to stand as Secretary;  then, again, he agreed not to stand as President this time round. Hague is so worried by Thompson’s steamroller campaign that he has taken up a deliberate policy of wearing bomber jackets, training shoes, etc. in preference to the traditional Pelling-style 8-piece suits.’ Ten points to the next person who shows up at P&P in a bomber jacket and air force ones.
In more recent news, 2003 saw Pembroke buying a new feline friend after their old moggie was purportedly hurled from Christ Church’s Tom Tower. Cherwell reported ‘when a Christ Church cow was painted Pembroke pink and died two years ago, rumour has it that Christ Church retaliated by hurling Pembroke’s beloved cat, Molly, off Tom Tower. If you’d like a further clarification of the absurdity of painted animals, I suggest you take some time to watch the pets episode of Russell Brand’s Ponderland. Keep an open mind – I didn’t ever think a video of a man hiring a boy to dunk birds in coloured dye would ever be of any use, but I just filled the rest of this article with it. 

2nd week. It’s an uninspiring sort of concept. On the other hand, (although I suppose it was technically 1st week) the freshers had their first real taste of anachronistic Oxford absurdity with their matriculation ceremony. I loved matriculation – an excuse to pose for daft photos of launched hats forbidden to be worn, a pub crawl in pseudo-white-tie, and a useful lesson to never, ever go to Clems again. A Mr. John Moynihan, of Balliol College, felt differently in 1969, when Cherwell reported ‘A colourful anti-matriculation ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 21st October.’ Mr Moynihan first made his name in Oxford last year by going through the matriculation ceremony in drag. [He said]; ‘Our intention is to disrupt seriously, in the funniest and jolliest way possible, what we consider to be an anachronistic ceremony, that long ago outlived its usefulness.’

On the topic of sartorial peculiarity, we have an Evelyn report from 1980 of a character known to us all for his Tory-blue tie – William Hague. Poor Will gets stood up by his ‘frunions’ as ‘Thompson… has been twice persuaded to break blood pacts with cuddly northerner William Hague.’First, he agreed not to stand as Secretary;  then, again, he agreed not to stand as President this time round. Hague is so worried by Thompson’s steamroller campaign that he has taken up a deliberate policy of wearing bomber jackets, training shoes, etc. in preference to the traditional Pelling-style 8-piece suits.’ Ten points to the next person who shows up at P&P in a bomber jacket and air force ones.

In more recent news, 2003 saw Pembroke buying a new feline friend after their old moggie was purportedly hurled from Christ Church’s Tom Tower. Cherwell reported ‘when a Christ Church cow was painted Pembroke pink and died two years ago, rumour has it that Christ Church retaliated by hurling Pembroke’s beloved cat, Molly, off Tom Tower. If you’d like a further clarification of the absurdity of painted animals, I suggest you take some time to watch the pets episode of Russell Brand’s Ponderland. Keep an open mind – I didn’t ever think a video of a man hiring a boy to dunk birds in coloured dye would ever be of any use, but I just filled the rest of this article with it. 

 

Fighting for his Father’s Freedom

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aslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theoretical pyramid which ranks five different categories of human needs. On the bottom are base needs such as food and sleep. Above this come safety and security. Thirdly we look for love and belonging, then esteem in the form of respect and confidence and finally self-actualisation in the form of morality and creativity.
I met Pavel Khodorkovsky on Tuesday after he spoke against the motion ‘This House believes that what happens in Russia stays in Russia’  at the Oxford Union. He took me from Maslow to Moscow by explaining how Vladimir Putin is attempting to jump the Russian state to the fourth ‘esteem’ stage without firstly ensuring the security of individuals and private property required by stage two.
Russia is now a world power with a strong sense of national identity and pride that it lacked a decade ago. However it fails to observe the rule of law, perhaps the most fundamental tenet of a liberal democratic state. The most high profile victim of Eurasia’s ‘managed democracy’ has been the oligarch and anti-Kremlin activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was once Russia’s richest man, but is now languishing in prison until 2017 on fraud charges considered by Amnesty International and Western governments to be politically motivated.
His son Pavel is lobbying internationally to raise awareness of the situation in Russia. He explained that British people should care both because of basic humanitarian empathy and because the powerful geopolitical pull of Russia affects Britain’s national interests in fields  such as energy, security and diplomacy. He described how the UK ‘should be interested in having a fair partner. Not someone who uses force in their diplomacy, but someone on the same level’.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky can hardly call himself lucky, but his son recognises that his case at least has international press attention. The same cannot be said for the thousands of other businessmen, journalists and political activists detained in the Russian Federation. After learning of the extent of journalistic repression I had to get Pavel to calm my fears that an apparatchik in a dimly lit office on the outskirts of Moscow might be etching my name onto a new file while you read this.
Khodorkovsky emphasised how middle class democratic disengagement in Russia is due to the powerlessness and the predictability of the system. ‘They have been cheated time and time again and they believe that whatever they do will have no effect on the result.’
The journalist Ed Lucas, another speaker at Tuesday’s debate, told the audience that ‘Russia is the world’s smallest democracy. There are two people in it, and only one of them votes.’ Putin will become Russia’s next President in March after confirming three weeks ago that he rather than the incumbent President Medvedev will be the candidate for the establishment United Russia party.
His last four years as Prime Minister were largely spent behind the scenes, less concerned with public relations than consolidating power. There are also several recent examples where he has clashed with foreign journalists and officials, and Khodorkovsky predicts he will come back a ‘much tougher person to deal with’.
The ‘gangster capitalism’ of Russia stems from the break-up of the USSR two decades ago. Shares in former state owned companies were distributed amongst the Russian people. Rather than this having an equitable effect, a few oligarchs bought up most of the shares.
Khodorkovsky highlights that this makes the Russian system perhaps easier to destabilise than other regimes. ‘Anyone found engaging in human rights abuses should be denied visas. Destabilising the mafia-like structure starts with only one to two hundred people – if these fall the whole system will fall.’ He sees the UK as complicit in propping up the oligarchs by allowing them to live and operate financially in London while sending their children to British private schools, and implores us to engage with Russian students in the UK.
The tension which led to the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky stemmed from his attempts to get involved in politics. The essence of the Russian state’s relationship with the super-rich is that they may do what they like so long as they stay out of politics.
Khodorkovsky highlighted that these are uncertain times for Russia economically and demographically. Its budget deficit is projected to continue growing in 2013-2014, and the reserve fund which finances government borrowing is running out. Russia also suffers from declining birth rates; its population is projected to fall 20% by 2050. He sees Putin as having two options. Either he continues to repress, which could lead to disorder nationwide, and even another war in Chechnya or the Caucasus, or he makes significant concessions.
Pavel Khodorkovsky, in an American twang from living in the States for the past eight years, spoke movingly about how his daughter has 
never met her grandfather. Though this is just one isolated case in the world’s largest country by geography, one must take concern at the egregiously autocratic nature of a state expected by many to simply slide into democracy after the Cold War. Russia’s long term future is entirely unclear, but its short term future looks grim.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theoretical pyramid which ranks five different categories of human needs. On the bottom are base needs such as food and sleep. Above this come safety and security. Thirdly we look for love and belonging, then esteem in the form of respect and confidence and finally self-actualisation in the form of morality and creativity.

I met Pavel Khodorkovsky on Tuesday after he spoke against the motion ‘This House believes that what happens in Russia stays in Russia’  at the Oxford Union. He took me from Maslow to Moscow by explaining how Vladimir Putin is attempting to jump the Russian state to the fourth ‘esteem’ stage without firstly ensuring the security of individuals and private property required by stage two.

Russia is now a world power with a strong sense of national identity and pride that it lacked a decade ago. However it fails to observe the rule of law, perhaps the most fundamental tenet of a liberal democratic state. The most high profile victim of Eurasia’s ‘managed democracy’ has been the oligarch and anti-Kremlin activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was once Russia’s richest man, but is now languishing in prison until 2017 on fraud charges considered by Amnesty International and Western governments to be politically motivated.

His son Pavel is lobbying internationally to raise awareness of the situation in Russia. He explained that British people should care both because of basic humanitarian empathy and because the powerful geopolitical pull of Russia affects Britain’s national interests in fields  such as energy, security and diplomacy. He described how the UK ‘should be interested in having a fair partner. Not someone who uses force in their diplomacy, but someone on the same level’.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky can hardly call himself lucky, but his son recognises that his case at least has international press attention. The same cannot be said for the thousands of other businessmen, journalists and political activists detained in the Russian Federation. After learning of the extent of journalistic repression I had to get Pavel to calm my fears that an apparatchik in a dimly lit office on the outskirts of Moscow might be etching my name onto a new file while you read this.

Khodorkovsky emphasised how middle class democratic disengagement in Russia is due to the powerlessness and the predictability of the system. ‘They have been cheated time and time again and they believe that whatever they do will have no effect on the result.’

The journalist Ed Lucas, another speaker at Tuesday’s debate, told the audience that ‘Russia is the world’s smallest democracy. There are two people in it, and only one of them votes.’ Putin will become Russia’s next President in March after confirming three weeks ago that he rather than the incumbent President Medvedev will be the candidate for the establishment United Russia party.

His last four years as Prime Minister were largely spent behind the scenes, less concerned with public relations than consolidating power. There are also several recent examples where he has clashed with foreign journalists and officials, and Khodorkovsky predicts he will come back a ‘much tougher person to deal with’.

The ‘gangster capitalism’ of Russia stems from the break-up of the USSR two decades ago. Shares in former state owned companies were distributed amongst the Russian people. Rather than this having an equitable effect, a few oligarchs bought up most of the shares.Khodorkovsky highlights that this makes the Russian system perhaps easier to destabilise than other regimes. ‘Anyone found engaging in human rights abuses should be denied visas. Destabilising the mafia-like structure starts with only one to two hundred people – if these fall the whole system will fall.’ He sees the UK as complicit in propping up the oligarchs by allowing them to live and operate financially in London while sending their children to British private schools, and implores us to engage with Russian students in the UK.

The tension which led to the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky stemmed from his attempts to get involved in politics. The essence of the Russian state’s relationship with the super-rich is that they may do what they like so long as they stay out of politics.

Khodorkovsky highlighted that these are uncertain times for Russia economically and demographically. Its budget deficit is projected to continue growing in 2013-2014, and the reserve fund which finances government borrowing is running out. Russia also suffers from declining birth rates; its population is projected to fall 20% by 2050. He sees Putin as having two options. Either he continues to repress, which could lead to disorder nationwide, and even another war in Chechnya or the Caucasus, or he makes significant concessions.

Pavel Khodorkovsky, in an American twang from living in the States for the past eight years, spoke movingly about how his daughter has never met her grandfather. Though this is just one isolated case in the world’s largest country by geography, one must take concern at the egregiously autocratic nature of a state expected by many to simply slide into democracy after the Cold War. Russia’s long term future is entirely unclear, but its short term future looks grim.

 

5 Minute Tute- Ruling Russia

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How did authorities react to you as a Western 
reporter?

How did authorities react to you as a Western reporter?

I arrived in Moscow in February 2007 which was possibly the worst timing for a British citizen to show up because Alexander Litvineko had just been murdered with polonium two months earlier in a plot which had the fingerprints of the FSB [the successor agency of the KGB] all over it.  Not only was it a major international scandal, it utterly wrecked the Anglo Russian relationship. Within a few months, I found myself caught up in what felt like an incompetently written Cold War drama.  Robert Gates, the last American Defence Secretary, called Russia an ‘oligarchy run by security services’ and it’s true – the apex of the state are often ex-KGB and come with all the ideological baggage you’d expect. The Guardian interviewed the prominent ex-patriot Boris Berezovsky and he claimed to be plotting a revolution against Putin. Purely because I was a Guardian journalist I was summoned to the infamous Lefortovo prison. They genuinely believed I was some sort of James Bond figure and from then on I was followed around by young guys in leather jackets every day: they’d sit so close in restaurants they’d practically be on your lap. They created a whole catalogue of psychological soft torture for me and my family – break ins, strange alarm clocks going off at 4am, a sex manual left on the bed, central heating disconnections, deleted emails. The idea was to wear me down until I couldn’t take it anymore – they decided disappearances and murders were no good if you wanted to be a respectable regime.

How much power do the FSB really wield, and how do their tactics affect the population?

 

The Orange revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in 2004 and 2003 respectively terrified the Russian elite. That’s when the FSB budget was really stepped up. Since Putin’s premiership it’s become the most prominent agency in Russia, used against opposition leaders and human rights workers. The bravest people are Russian journalists and human rights workers, those in Chechnya, the Caucasus. Anna Politkovskaya’s murder inquiry was of course inconclusive.

Scare tactics work differently on different people. They are particularly effective on single women – they did it to one of my assistants. I was just furious. It made my writing tougher because I knew that the gap between public pronouncements about modern Russia as a democracy and the rule of law and the observance of human rights were in fact a joke. Putin sets the tone. He believes that corrupt authoritarian methods are more efficient that democratic ones. He doesn’t even believe the West are real democracies. We know from Wikileaks he’s bought Berlusconi and Gerhard Shroeder.

 

How would you describe the current political climate?

 

The whole Russian system is decorative: of course Putin is coming back to power. The decision has already been made by the elite and it’ll be passed off as a democratic choice but of course it’s not. Russia is sliding towards a central Asia style dictatorship – they’re isolated from the global conversation. These are people whose minds were forged in the Soviet era but who are now trying to deal with a world of Twitter and Livejournal. Russia in the 1990s was chaotic and Yeltsin was very unpopular but the state was at least quasi-democratic. The problem now is that there is a very cynical, very clever and deeply corrupt vertical system. All real opposition is squeezed. That’s not to say it’s the Soviet Union, because it’s not – there are bloggers and one or two independent newspapers but the regime is sophisticated. Putin’s great genius is realising that you don’t have to control private space. People can have affairs, behave badly, get drunk, and that’s OK. Previous Soviet dictators wanted to control everything. Putin gets it: this is new school.

The one place this regime is vulnerable is monetary. Not through diplomatic pressure, or what Cameron might say in Moscow, or students protesting outside the embassy, but the threat of visa bans and losing all their money. The money of the Russian elite is filtered off and spent in the west, and that’s the only lever we have.

 

Mafia state was published by Guardian Books on 29 September and is available on Amazon.co.uk and in all major bookstores

Shake-up in the Premier League

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Barely a week goes by when some football bigwig can resist blurting out some vague comment about the structure of the Premier League – or rather, how it could and might change in the future. A round of interviews usually follows with a few too-public chairmen (I’m thinking of football royalty like Bolton’s Phil Gartside or Wigan’s David Whelan), and eventually, nothing changes at all.

But this week’s news from the League Manager’s Association (LMA) that several club owners are in favour of abolishing relegation could be a different story. It comes direct from the LMA boss, Chris Bevan, who fears that if fourteen owners grouped together they could force through changes to the way the current league system works, and even scrap relegation completely.

It’s easy to see why people like Rao brothers, who own Blackburn Rovers, could be in favour of such plans. Relegation to the Championship is a costly business: TV revenues plummet and attendances tend to dwindle. You lose your best players. Perhaps worst of all, you face the daunting task of having to win back the favour of the fans – harder still when you live in India.

With Blackburn sitting 20th in the league table, their owners in particular would find it hard to resist supporting changes which potentially could guard an asset they spent in excess of £50m on late last year.

Such changes, however, would be a disaster for the top division. The relegation scramble is a central part of the way the league operates and seems to get more nail-biting every season. Indeed the whole system of promotion and relegation is what props up the English football league ladder. It is what makes the bottom fifteen teams in the Premier League competitive. I support Middlesbrough, and had to endure relegation three seasons ago. After two tough seasons in the second flight we finally appear to be heading in the right direction.

We’re all secretly dreaming of hosting United and Liverpool next season, and it would be tragic if that were ever to change.

The imperfection of Muhammad Ali

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Muhammad Ali: three time heavyweight champion of the world, the 1960 Olympic gold medallist, the 1999 “BBC Sports Personality of the Century” and one of the youngest and oldest men to hold the heavyweight championship of the world. The list is endless. The man’s face was at one point the most recognized on the planet and truly no sportsman has proved as integral to popular culture since.

But has this global adulation for Ali got far too out of hand? There is absolutely nothing wrong in awarding Muhammad Ali a place in popular culture as his achievements in and out of the ring are most deserving of it. But when I see article after article of lightweight documentary and biography cultivating the “Ali Myth”, the idea that Muhammad Ali was some sort of larger than life, social enigma and learned intellectual, it is too much to accept.

Are we really to accept the notion that Ali was some sort of hero in the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s, standing side by side with Dr King as a symbol for non violence and peace? The legions of hagiographers tend to understate the enormous contradictions and imperfections which made up the man, and it is important that we do not forget them.

Look at Ali’s boxing rival “Smokin’” Joe Frazier, with whom he shared three memorable and celebrated bouts in the 1970’s. The two first met in the late 1960s when Frazier was giving Ali a lift. While Ali’s famous “I ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong” statement, and his subsequent refusal to participate in the Vietnam War, was dividing American public opinion, Frazier actually supported Ali financially when he was temporarily banned from boxing.

In return, Ali was less forthcoming. Ali bullied, teased and dissected Frazier on the world stage once it came to boxing. He called Frazier a gorilla, an Uncle Tom and an uneducated fool. Of course, insult and trash talking is nothing new to boxing; in fact Ali was a famous exponent of it, but he went too far. Using his articulacy and personality, he cast Joe Frazier as the “White Man’s Champion”: a figure to be scorned and rejected by the black community.

Frazier, without the eloquence and stage presence of Ali was continuously humiliated and ridiculed. He could not even walk the streets of his own hometown of Philadelphia without being called an Uncle Tom. Ali’s treatment of Frazier was brutal and seemingly inconsistent with the image of Ali as a deeply affectionate and kind human being. But it is a reflection on the bullying and nasty side of Ali’s personality often played down by his barrage of 21st century supporters.

Moreover, Ali was no intellectual. Somehow his entertaining but rather lightweight poetry (“I’m so mean I make medicine sick!”) and his conversion to the Nation of Islam in 1964 have put him on some absurdly elevated pedestal of social importance. But when interviewed Ali could discuss the doctrines of Islam only on a simplistic and artificial level and in the 1960’s he advocated segregation between black and white communities, arguing it was the only way that violence could be avoided.

Yet paradoxically, Ali had no qualms in surrounding himself with white promoters, trainers, doctors and celebrities over the course of his career. Biographers particularly highlight Ali’s devotion to Islam; yet Ali has had four wives, with his unfaithfulness being well documented and publicized.

A BBC article calls Ali “a powerful activist for black rights, both in America and around the world”. This is surely overstated. Yes, Ali was brave in resisting the US government who stripped him of his livelihood in the years of his prime, but a powerful activist for black rights? Really? Even the change of name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, the allegedly iconic moment when the man removed the shackles of slavery and ended his subjugation from the white slave masters, was not his decision. It was the decision of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, because Cassius Clay was not an appropriate name for his star promoter for the Nation.

I am not trying to “expose” Muhammad Ali. He is only human and is not a particularly awful one either. I simply think we should re-assess the man and appreciate him for what he really was. His abilities as a sportsman were astounding. He boxed long into the early 1980s and despite being years detached from his prime, Ali was the crown of the heavyweight division going through its golden age with such greats as Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Earnie Shavers and Ken Norton. Ali was, and still is today, the centrepiece and it is not difficult to see why. Ali was witty, extravagant and lively. He was “a photographer’s dream” for Neil Leifer; a man who could floor you with his humour just as much as with his left jab.

His greatest achievement in my mind was his smashing of the race barrier which opposed many black sportsmen of the 20th Century. While men like Joe Louis were slavishly and diligently trained to conform to the acceptable image of what a black sportsman should be in white America, Ali carved out his own image: one of dynamism and charisma. He was, in many ways, the first real personality in American sport. Some of boxing’s most famous stars including “Sugar” Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson have publicly voiced their praise of Ali for making it possible for boxers and indeed sportsmen to achieve fame, recognition and wealth.

It is precisely for these reasons that Ali should be acclaimed. Not for the political, the social, the personal or whatever the cultivators of the “Ali Myth” would have us believe.