Book Review: Diana, Closely Guarded Secret

By Ken Wharfe, with Robert Jobson

When Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in an automobile accident in Paris in 1997, her loss was felt keenly all over the world. Just as they had on the night of her death, the media were in a frenzy, and the now infamous tunnel in central Paris was on the front page of every newspaper. Known as the people’s princess, for her ability to empathize with the downtrodden, her many charities, her great beauty and her innate sense of style, the Princess of Wales has remained an object of public fascination, and much has been written about her. Diana: Closely Guarded Secret is unique in the sense that it offers a very candid personal account of the last years of the princess’s life, and the book caused quite a stir when it was first published in 2002. A revised and expanded second edition was published this year, in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Princess’s death.

Diana: Closely Guarded Secret was written as a response to what Mr. Wharfe perceived as an attempt by certain parts of the establishment to smear Diana’s memory and drag her name through the mud after her death. Her bitter and drawn-out divorce from Charles, the Prince of Wales, and her determination to champion sensitive causes such as HIV/AIDS, as well as her outsized public profile, were causing discomfort in lofty circles. Mr. Wharfe’s book tells the story as he himself saw it, and leaves nothing out, Diana’s good sides as well as her bad ones are all in there, and it is up to the readers themselves to decide what the Princess of Wales was like, after having seen all sides of her complex and fascinating character.        

Inspector Ken Wharfe, who served as Diana’s personal protection officer from 1987 to 1993, came to know his charge well during the almost seven-year long period they spent together. A personal protection officer (PPO) from the Scotland Yard’s Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department is no mere bodyguard like the muscled brutes who shove pop stars into their limousines or the heavily armed Secret Service agents who guard the president. Mr. Wharfe clearly has a great sense of pride when he tells of how every PPO is trained to protect their charges no matter what situation they may find themselves in. The tools of their trade consists mainly of information and communication, to be able to keep out of trouble and keep diplomats and royalty safe with a minimum of fuss. They must be able to blend in seamlessly wherever their charges go, therefore they wear tailored suits and smoking jackets, with their sidearm concealed in a special holster that doesn’t create an unseemly bulk. In other words, a PPO needs to have the concentration and martial prowess of a special forces operative as well as the suaveness of Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me.  

Naturally, guarding one of the most recognizable and popular celebrities in the world was often a quite glamorous assignment, but Mr. Wharfe originally got the job after he had proved himself guarding the Waleses two young sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. The two young boys came to form an affectionate bond with their protection officer over the years that followed, and Mr. Wharfe was often involved in their pranks and bouts of spirited fisticuffs. Mr. Wharfe recalls how, when staying at Prince Charles’s summer retreat, Highgrove, they would knock on his door and one of them would proceed to ask in a mischievous voice if he wanted to fight. The next moment they would surge into his room and throw themselves at him, forcing him to protect his vital parts as the punches rained down upon him. Diana once asked him to take her sons with him to the Scotland Yard firing range and let them hone their marksmanship, an excursion that the two boys enjoyed mightily. They were both capable shots, but Harry in particular was a highly adept marksman, even at so young an age. He credits Diana with giving the boys a grounded upbringing and helping to raise them into two fine young fellows, who will be able to carry the monarchy into the twenty-first century.

During the first years as Diana’s PPO, the state of the Waleses marriage was not known to the public, but the palace staff knew that something was amiss. After having been married in a fairy tale wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981, the pair had started to drift apart in the years that followed. A contributing factor to this estrangement was the fact that Charles kept seeing his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, after he had been married to Diana. The Prince of Wales himself maintains that he only resumed his acquaintance with Camilla after his marriage with Diana had reached breaking point. Even though she regularly attacked her husband for his infidelity, Diana herself had a string of lovers during the course of her marriage. It was Mr. Wharfe’s job to make sure that his charge was kept safe at all times, his job was not to pass judgement, and he even stayed with Diana and one of her longtime lovers, a dashing army officer, in the countryside cottage where they would spend many weekends together. It is true that Charles and Camilla were sometimes less than fully discreet when choosing their rendezvous, but Mr. Wharfe points out that the Prince of Wales should not be seen as callous or heartless. He is a compassionate and thoughtful person, and his charity, the Prince’s Trust, has helped thousands of young people escape poverty and drug abuse over the years.        

Naturally, having to play the role of the dutiful wife while her marriage was crumbling wasn’t easy for Diana, and at times she was under considerable psychological strain, but Mr. Wharfe steadfastly denies those who would question the state of her mental health during this period. She did an incredible job copying with the demands of her station and raising her two young boys while maintaining her marriage during a difficult time. Anyone would have had trouble keeping up a public façade in such a difficult situation, he maintains.

That nature of Mr. Wharfe’s job meant that he witnessed many deeply personal moments in the princess’s life, and was a trusted voice during the difficult times she went through. Getting away from the stresses of her marriage and a feverish press-corps was essential to allow Diana to recharge and spend quality time with her boys. The task of arranging such getaways, and maintaining a low-key but effective security, fell on Mr. Wharfe’s shoulders. The Princess was particularly fond of Necker Island, the private retreat of billionaire businessman and entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. She visited the island several times together with her friends and family, but its remote location was not a deterrent for the paparazzi. The moment they learned that she was staying at the island, they would rent a ramshackle collection of small boats and descend upon the island like a fleet of buccaneers. It seems incredulous that their entourage did not include a press officer, as the task of negotiating a truce with the paparazzi was sometimes carried out by Mr. Wharfe. The procedure was simple, in exchange for a few days of peace and quiet, a photoshoot would be arranged where the princess and her children would frolic on the beach, while the paparazzi were given ample opportunity to take their pictures. This worked surprisingly well on many occasions, but Mr. Wharfe had some explaining to do to his superiors when they returned home. Once, when they thought the paparazzi were getting a bit close to Necker Island, Prince William and Prince Harry used makeshift catapults to lob water balloons into the encroaching skiffs with great success, a feat that delighted all of them, including their mother, to no end.               

During the waning years of her marriage with Charles, Diana devoted herself to growing her profile as a philanthropist and goodwill ambassador. Her stature was great, but Mr. Wharfe argues that she may have been overly optimistic when she expected to carry on as before after her divorce, when she would no longer be married to the heir to the throne. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that the rest of “The Firm”, as the British monarchy is referred to, were not entirely pleased with Diana trying to establish a rival power base. The monarchy has since then been forced to modernize and adapt to the modern world, a change that Mr. Wharfe credits Diana with bringing about. This did not come easy, however, as her devotion to shining a light on those afflicted by HIV/AIDS, a feared diseased and a highly controversial topic at the time, wasn’t looked upon kindly by everyone in the Palace hierarchy.

It is clear that Mr. Wharfe considers himself and his former colleagues at the Scotland Yard to be the finest bodyguards in the world, and it is equally clear how little he thinks of the security detail that was responsible for Diana on the night of her death. Given the fact that he protected Diana for many years without her getting as much as a scratch, and the fact that her protection team on that fateful night in Paris had only been in charge of her security for a couple of weeks, I can understand his frustrations. Mr. Wharfe, like many others, believes that her death could have been avoided, and pulls no punches when he dissects the events of that fateful night. Tensions with the paparazzi were already running high before Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, left the hotel, and the driver was far above the legal drinking limit when he got behind the wheel. He and Dodi then egged each other on and attempted to outrun the paparazzi, which was foolish and irresponsible, argues Mr. Wharf. The last thing he would wish, however, is that Diana is only remembered for the circumstances of her death and the marital turmoil that preceded it.  She may have been hard to deal with at times, but throughout her life the Princess of Wales reached out to the most vulnerable and downtrodden in society, making sure the direness of their plight was heard by all. Her determination to make the most out of each and every day inspired those around her, and her great sense of humor and mischief made sure that there was hardly a dull moment for those around her. Reading between the lines, that is how Mr. Wharfe would like his former charge to be remembered, not as a saintly character placed on a pedestal or an out of touch diva, but as someone whose empathy and down to earth manners truly embodied the epithet the people’s princess. 

Book Review: The Greatest Knight, The Remarkable Tale of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English thrones

By Thomas Asbridge

In 1861, a young French scholar named Paul Meyer attended an auction at Sotheby’s in London. On sale were a collection of rare medieval texts that had not been read for hundreds of years. Meyer, who was presumably feeling like a kid in a candy shop, was amazed by the rich scholarly material on offer. Of particular interest was an ancient tome which seemed unassuming at first but appeared to contain the biography of a previously unknown medieval knight. Unfortunately, it was sold to an eccentric collector and disappeared into the labyrinthine depths of his poorly catalogued collection. It wasn’t until two decades later that Meyer, by this time a distinguished academic, managed to recover the manuscript. The contents of its musty pages exceeded his wildest expectations, as it chronicled the highly eventful life of William Marshal, a legendary knight who served as the regent of England and helped issue the Magna Carta. The manuscript gave a fascinating glimpse into the life of a knight during a time where few historical sources existed, and has fascinated scholars ever since. The Greatest Knight is the tale of William Marshal’s life, a man who rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most powerful knights of the realm and, during the course of his long life, served five English monarchs.

William was born into a tumultuous time, when the aristocracy had plunged the nation into civil war as the empress Matilda (she had previously been married to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, thereby the title, England never had an emperor) led a revolt against the deeply unpopular King Stephen. The English people suffered great hardship as the war grew long and bitter. In fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if King Stephen had been more competent, but in the words of medieval scholar Walter Map he was “…of notable skill in arms, but in other things almost an idiot”.  Among those whose fortunes were laid low by the war was William’s father, John, a minor nobleman who backed Empress Matilda and drew King Stephen’s ire. He was forced to hand over his son as a hostage in order to guarantee his good behavior. This meekness turned out to be short lived, and when William’s father once more defied the king, he threatened to have his young son executed. This didn’t trouble John awfully much, as he let it be known that, should he lose one son, he had the anvils and hammers to forge even finer ones. By the standards of modern parenting, this might seem harsh, and Asbridge speculates that this could have had an adverse psychological impact on the young William, but luckily for him, the almost an idot king had a big heart. He could not bring himself to kill the young boy, and decided to let him live.

This royal clemency allowed a twelve-year-old William to travel to Normandy and learn a knight’s trade from his mother’s cousin, a renowned lord named William of Tancarville. Our William quickly showed an appetite for swordplay and jousting. When Flanders invaded upper Normandy, he got his first taste of action and was knighted during that same campaign. A few years later he left the Tancarville household he took up jousting full time, where he quickly made a name for himself. According to Asbridge, jousting matches during the early medieval period wasn’t as organized as they later came to be. When I mention jousting, you might picture the extravagant and chivalrous displays where one knight charges against another while assorted nobility regard the proceedings from a nearby stand. Back in the twelfth century, however, jousting mostly involved rivaling packs of armed and dangerous young men with some form of lineage meeting up on a dusty field and trying to take one another captive for ransom. In fact, a recurring theme in The Greatest Knight is that during Marshal’s lifetime the very notions of knighthood and chivalry were being defined for future generations of knights, who would look back upon this time as a lost golden age. Much like Marion Cotillard’s character in Midnight in Paris who looked back wistfully on la belle epoque. Success on the jousting fields of Europe earned William fame, practice in the ways of war, and money from the captives he ransomed.

After King Stephen died of natural causes, which in itself is miraculous when you consider how unpopular he was and how many would have wanted to murder him, he was succeeded by Henry II. His long reign was a time of relative peace and prosperity for England, and Henry is one of the key figures who came to determine many of the events in William’s life. When Henry II needed an accomplished knight who could tutor his young son, also named Henry, he chose William Marshal. William was only a few years younger than his ward, and the two of them soon started to become a regular fixture at the tournament field. They both enjoyed crossing lances and partying, and we are given the impression that their relationship was an amicable one. The relationship Henry the boy king had with his father was unfortunately a lot less amicable. After having crowned his son king while he himself was still alive, in order to avoid a messy succession after his death, Henry the younger was constantly frustrated with his father’s inability to share power and wealth. His extravagant living meant that he was often short of money, something which his father proved unwilling to lavish upon him in sufficient quantity. This festering antagonism eventually led to a revolt against his father, but Henry II moved with customary ruthlessness to check his son’s ambitions. Richard II came to outlive his son, who died suddenly of illness aged twenty-eight. 

After returning from a trip to the holy land, William served the old king during the final years before his death in 1189, when he was succeeded by his second son, Richard. The new sovereign honored the promises that Richard II had made to William, and allowed him to marry Isabel of Clare in the same year. He was 49, she was 17, but the marriage was by all accounts a happy one despite the age difference, which wasn’t in any way uncommon at the time. His marriage also granted him large estates in England, Wales, Normandy and Ireland.

When Richard, later to be known as The Lionheart, departed for the holy land in 1190 in order to wage a crusade, William was thrown into the thick end of politics, serving in the council of regency which looked after the realm in the king’s absence. William was by now one of the most influential men in the realm, and had to tread carefully around the king’s paranoid younger brother, John. When The Lionheart returned from his not very successful crusade, which had failed its chief objective of taking Jerusalem, he directed his considerable talent for waging war against the French instead. The Lionheart and William Marshal made a formidable team, and cut a bloody swathe through the French. The fact that Normandy doesn’t belong to England anymore can be attributed to Richard’s untimely death, killed by a stray crossbow bolt when besieging a castle in northern France.

When you realize that no English king since has been called John, it tells tells you all you need to know about the man who succeeded Richard I. If King John sounds familiar it is probably because he is the unpopular and cruel king who reigns when the saga of English highwayman bandit Robin Hood is said to have taken place. The Lionheart may not have had much time to spare for modernizing agricultural production or building new works of infrastructure, but as a general and commander in-chief he was only matched by the great Saladin. His successor, however, soon acquired the unfortunate nickname “Softsword”, as his brother’s hard won gains gradually slipped away and the great Angevin empire that Henry II and Richard I had built started to come apart. Palace intrigue during the time of King John was rife with suspicion and paranoia and William, although he was a shrewd diplomat most of the time, choose to turn most of his attention to the west, to his wife’s ancestral lands in Ireland. One might think that King John wouldn’t mind his adventures on the Emerald Isles, but the king had long eyed Ireland as his own sphere of influence and his natural suspicion towards anyone made him restless of William’s intentions. The rest of King John’s reign after William had headed west was quite similar to what had happened up to that point, that is, everything was a complete shambles. When the noblemen of the realm rose in revolt against their reviled king, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Many western historians look to this “great charter” as one of the high points of western civilization, and it did have some good bits in it to be sure, but Asbridge downplays this document somewhat and points out the fact that it was soon broken by King John, who probably never intended to keep his word.

When the very unpopular and much reviled king died from dysentery in 1216, England was plunged into chaos once more and the Angevin empire that William had loyally served throughout his life teetered on the brink. He was named protector of John’s young heir, Henry III, and devoted considerable energy to stabilizing the realm. Despite the fact that he was now in his seventies, William was bestowed with the energy of a man half his age, and even took to the field of battle at the siege of Lincoln, where he defeated the forces of the French king and the nobles supporting his rival claim to the throne. After a subsequent peace accord was signed, William had saved the Angevin realm and his young charge, King Henry III, was to have a long and prosperous reign.

William Marshal lived a life that was far longer and more adventurous than most of his contemporaries, but in 1219, aged 72, his health failed him and he died from a sudden illness surrounded by his family. Not many knights died peacefully in bed, and fewer still served five monarchs during the course of their life. William’s legacy helped shape the England we know today and he remains the perfect representation of the medieval ideas of chivalry. He lies buried in London’s Temple Church, should you wish to pay a visit, and his statue stands next to the throne reserved for the royal sovereign in the house of lords.

The Greatest Knight offers a rich and nuanced glimpse of England during the early middle ages and the life of one of the greatest defenders of that realm. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in history. It was an act of great good fortune that Meyer, the French scholar, rescued that seemingly mundane manuscript that proved to contain such an interesting tale. Perhaps it can also be considered a touch ironic that it took the efforts of a diligent French scholar to preserve for posterity the tale of the greatest of all the knights of England.         

     

Book Review: The Silk Roads, A New History of the World

By Peter Frankopan

Mankind’s history is simple. After our ancestors climbed out of the primordial swamps, history progressed in a rapid succession of momentous occasions, much like the intro for the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory Theory. Industrious men with beards set about constructing mighty cities like Athens and Corinth. The ancient Greeks were the forefathers of science and philosophy, and Roman engineering was the most advanced the world had ever known. Vasco Da Gama sailed around Africa, the steam engine was invented in England, and the Dutch sold tulips. After the Mayflower set sail for the new world, America was born, and the glorious history of Western civilization proceeded straight as an arrow from that moment onwards. Meanwhile the people at the edges of the map, Chinese, Indians, Russians, and many other, were busy doing whatever. Probably nothing of consequence. According to historian Peter Frankopan, most people in the west are at best a slightly ignorant and uninterested when it comes to the part of the world, Asia, where most people lives and has lived throughout history. Even in academia eastern history is a bit of a fringe subject whose scholars are forced to grab hold of whatever crumbs happen to fall of the table when looking for research funding. In writing The Silk Roads, Frankopan is determined to shift our mental models of the world and how we view history itself, a grand undertaking to be sure, and one could mean his latest book will be regarded as essential reading for anyone harboring intellectual curiosity.

Far from being a backwater of no consequence, the vast stretch of land between the Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean has for millennia been the nerve center and main highway of civilization. Great cities whose sublime splendor have been lost to time were strung out like the beads of a finely crafted pearl necklace along this route, where tradesmen and explorers travelled to find their fortunes. Not just people and goods, but also ideas and philosophies as well as all the major religions of our time, can thank what Frankopan calls the silk roads for having hundreds of millions of followers. Technological advances such as paper, the compass, gunpowder, mathematics, and countless others travelled along these trade routes to the west. This influx of wealth and ideas also had a darker side, as virulent diseases such as the black plague were also spread along the same trade routes.

Western historians have long thought that the death of Ögedei Khan saved the countries that Theresa May’s Brexit Team is preparing to do battle with from complete annihilation. According to Frankopan, this line of thinking shows how westerners are unable to place their history in the proper context. It has never really occurred to anyone in the west that the Mongols might not have been that interested in what we had to offer.

Having masterminded a campaign of breathtaking daring and complexity that smashed the combined armies of eastern Europe in a matter of days, Genghis Khan’s greatest general, Subotai the Valiant, was set to invade Western Europe when he was reached by the news of his Khan’s death. It was certainly true that the need to be present at the Khan’s funeral hindered his invasion plans, but Frankopan argues that one other good reason that the invasion of Western Europe never came about was that there wasn’t anything particularly valuable to plunder or steal east of Constantinople. Having seen the vast wealth of cities like Baghdad, Merv and Samarkand, overflowing with silks, gold, and precious gems, a smokehouse full of otter bladders situated on a bleak Flemish hillside was hardly a great prize. It might sound harsh but it is undeniably true that, at the time, the cities of Western Europe were lagging behind their eastern counterparts when it came to wealth and sophistication. Niall Fergusson said as much in Civilization, which I have previously reviewed on this blog.

Such was the importance of the east that when Columbus set out to sail around the world, he wasn’t looking for the Americas. Instead he sought to find a new route that could be used to transport spices to Western Europe. The continent that impeded his way, however, led to Europe rising from the mists of obscurity to seize a commanding role in global affairs for the next half century. The silver mines of South America bequeathed great wealth to the Spanish who, alongside the Portuguese, became incredibly powerful and influential. International trade and commerce were the underpinnings of the new age of empire, at the start of which a cash strapped England was left to gaze longingly at her southern rivals. This disillusionment proved to be short lived, for The British Empire that followed when Spain and Portugal were no longer in the ascendant was the largest empire the world had ever seen. Even during these heady days of colonialism, however, when the royal navy ruled the oceans and London was the nerve center of the world economy, mastery of the silk roads was crucial for the well-being of the empire. The rise of Russia in the nineteenth century was a cause of great concern to the British, since their vast lands constituted the gateway between east and west. The Crimean War is a conflict few people ever stop to think about, and the reasons why it was fought can often seem hard to grasp. When you consider the fact that Russian control of the black sea could jeopardize Britain’s access to its resource rich colonies, however, it all starts to get much clearer.   

The strategic and economic importance of these silk roads has remained undimmed even though the heydays of the British empire are long gone. When oil grew in importance and Western prospectors searched far and wide for hidden reserves of the black gold, the largest oil fields in the world were to be found in places like Russia, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Then as well as now, countries in the west are affected by what happens in oil producing countries and to this day great powers jealously guard their interests in that region. It is not just oil that they crave, countries in Central Asia that you might  associate with Borat’s rustic home village in Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy film contains some of the world’s largest deposits of minerals such as gold, copper, lead and uranium. Far from having to make do with just one plasticy VCR recorder, like poor Borat did, the nouveu rich elite of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan frequently travel to places like London and Dubai to stock up on luxury goods.    

Frankopan’s great enthusiasm for telling Western audiences an alternative spin on the history they grew up with reading in musty textbooks is both admirable and infectious. He has obviously done a great deal of research and is passionate about the subject he writes about. Unfortunately, I sometimes felt that he treats the history of Western Europe in the cavalier fashion that he accuses its historians of having treated the east, although if you want to read a book about the Roman or British Empire there are quite a few other options available. Another annoying niggle was the unreasonably high amount of simple spelling and grammatical mistakes that I found when reading The Silk Roads. You usually don’t find this with books from reputable publishers, and you would have thought that Bloomsbury could afford to hire someone to read through the script a couple of times. My complaints notwithstanding, The Silk Roads is a very enjoyable read that offers a new and fresh, to Western audiences at least, perspective on history as well as the world we live in today

Book Review: Berlusconi: The Epic Story of the Billionaire Who Took Over Italy

By Alan Friedman

Ask anyone about famous Italians and odds are that they will scratch their head and answer Julius Caesar and Silvio Berlusconi. No other living Italian has played such a prominent role in shaping the future of the country as Berlusconi has. Every Italian seems to have an opinion of Silvio Berlusconi, he is a man you either admire or detest, his larger than life character making indifference all but impossible.

Berlusconi is not an official biography, but when the man himself was approached by Alan Friedman, he agreed to be interviewed and open his private archives. Nearing the end of a long and eventful life, Berlusconi obviously feels the need to tell his life´s story with his own words, which seems entirely reasonable given all the rumors about his personal life and allegations of corruption that has dogged him for many decades. However, and Friedman is astute enough to not play softball with the old man. Berlusconi touches upon all the scandals, corruption and sensationalism that one might wish to hear about, and charts the Milanese businessman’s unlikely rise from humble beginnings.

Born into a working class Milanese family in 1936, Silvio Berlusconi’s fortune is very much self-made, his father was a bank teller and his mother a housewife. During Silvio’s early years, the second world war was raging in Europe. When the allies bombed German held Milan in 1943, Silvio and his family were forced to flee the city and briefly lived in the Swiss countryside. When the war ended, the Berlusconi family returned to Milan and Silvio resumed his studies. He eventually studied law at the university of Milan, where he graduated in 1961. Berlusconi was a bright young man with plenty of drive and ambition, but most importantly he was, as he frequently informs Mr. Friedman, “the most handsome guy on the beach”. He had a passion for music and started a band with some of his friends, which eventually led to Berlusconi working as a cruise ship crooner, singing jazz songs and serenading the passengers every evening. He worked long hours, something he didn´t seem to mind since he enjoyed what he was doing and was popular among guests as well as the staff. One of his band members from those days, Federico Gonfalonieri remains a business associate and close friend.

The life of a cruise ship crooner wasn´t enough for Berlusconi, who was soon drawn to the construction industry. During the nineteen sixties the Italian economy was witnessing a post war boom. Salaries for ordinary people were rising steadily, the economy was robust and there was great demand for housing. A natural dealmaker and salesman, Berlusconi wanted in on the action. Using his family connections, his father having risen from a humble bank teller to one of the managing directors of the small Banca Rasini, Berlusconi was able to attract financiers for buying and developing a plot of land in central Milan. Berlusconi was adept at utilizing the contacts at his disposal, and since there was a boom going on it wasn´t too difficult to attract buyers and investors. Berlusconi´s meagre budget meant that he employed friends and relatives to work on the development while he himself worked long hours fulfilling a plethora of roles ranging from entrepreneur, architect, construction foreman and salesman. The development project went well and, buoyed by his success, Berlusconi soon set about grander property schemes as his fame and wealth grew. 

When the property market collapsed in 1963, the young developer ran into serious trouble. It is a testament to Berlusconi´s skill as a dealmaker and his solid work ethic that he managed to pull off his biggest deal yet in this adversarial climate. Unable to find any individual buyers for the apartment complex he was developing on the outskirts of Milan, Berlusconi got the idea to try and convince a pension fund to buy the whole development. The board, which finally relented and travelled all the way from Rome view the construction site, made no secret of their reluctance to close the deal. Like a young Napoleon requisitioning canons from hundreds of miles away in order to batter down the enemy’s fortifications at the siege of Toulon, Silvio pulled out all the stops to beautify his construction site and woo the pension fund’s board members. He had birch trees shipped in from Holland and uprooted an entire lawn he had bought from Salesian monks. Family members were press ganged into volunteering whatever furniture they could spare in order to furnish the display apartments. When one holdout director was blocking the sale, Berlusconi was able to charm his secretary and ask her to book passage on the midnight train from Rome to Milan that her boss was going to travel on. Hiding behind a newspaper, Berlusconi waited until the hapless board-member was seated next to him, before he pounced. During the hours that followed he succeeded in persuading him to invest in the development, and they parted amicably as best of friends. Faced with adversity, Berlusconi had at last come through in spectacular fashion. Throughout his life he has remained steadfast in his belief that he can convince anyone of anything as long as he can get face to face with them and deploy his charm, something he tried to do many years later when George W. Bush geared up for the invasion of Iraq. His flair for the theatrical, for setting the stage where his showmanship and razzmatazz comes into full bloom, can be traced from the real estate development he tried to beautify all the way to the 2002 NATO summit in Italy and frequent meetings with Muammar Gadhafi in his Bedouin tent, where the two leaders used to happily pose before the cameras.

Before Berlusconi entered the scene and shook things up, Italian television was dominated by Rai, the staid and conservative government owned network. At midnight all broadcasting ceased and viewers would be shown a test card with the occasional loud beep to remind them to turn off their TV-sets. Television was considered a public good that the state provided to its citizens, and what little advertising Rai showed was discreet and toned down, and didn´t increase sales for the products they showed in any measurable way. Berlusconi explains to Mr. Friedman that watching those ads was like pissing in your pants, “You get a kind of warm sense of well-being, but nobody notices anything”. Naturally, this uncharted territory, where no media executive had gone before, beckoned Berlusconi like a siren’s call. Establishing himself in the labyrinthine and often corrupt world of Italian media, starting on a small scale in his native Milan, Berlusconi’s media empire grew rapidly. Spearheaded by his flagship channel, Canale 5, Silvio Berlusconi soon became the new face of Italian television. Before they knew what hit them, the Italians were treated to American movies and sitcoms, interspersed with glitzy ads for all kinds of consumer products. Knowing his audience well, Berlusconi’s flagships shows featured scantily dressed ladies dancing to the latest pop music as well as bawdy- working class humor. Having been shown something they didn’t know that they wanted, the Italian people quickly acquired a taste for ostentatious Berlusconi-style entertainment. Italy’s intellectual community complained about superficial consumerism, but now that the genie was out of the bottle it proved impossible to put it back in. Berlusconi’s successes meant that he was a national celebrity as well as one of the richest men in Italy.

The latter he proved beyond doubt by buying the Ac Milan football team in 1986. As a young boy, he used to talk football with his father when he returned home from work each night, now Berlusconi owned team that both he and his father had always loved. Over the years Berlusconi hired a number of successful coaches and helped lead Milan to several Champions League victories.        

During the early nineteen nineties, Italy’s political establishment was rocked by a series of corruption scandals that upended the established political order. Into this power vacuum stepped the billionaire tycoon turned politician Silvio Berlusconi, with his newly founded Forza Italia Party. Berlusconi himself says that he feared for Italy if the communist party took power, which looked likely after the Christian Democrats, their main opposition, had imploded. The communists had at this point changed their name to the Democratic Party of the Left, but that did little to assuage Berlusconi’s fears. Forza Italia’s aggressive marketing and center right policies caught the public mood, no doubt Berlusconi’s TV channels had helped grease the skids, and in 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was elected president of Italy. However, his first tenure in office turned out to be short lived, after allegations of corruption, he was forced to resign the following year. All in all, Berlusconi served as Italy’s president on three occasions, 1994-95, 2001-06 and 2008-11. His days as a business tycoon were marred by allegations of corruption, which got steadily worse after he entered politics. His detractors say that Berlusconi only entered the political arena in order to dismiss cases filed against him and rig the judicial system, and that he has consistently strived so subvert the Italian judiciary. When Friedman touches on these issues, Berlusconi becomes irritated and tight lipped, yet he insists that all his life he has been subjected to a consistent campaign by communist forces to bring himself, his party and his businesses to ruin. Presumably so that Rai could get back to the business of showing twenty minute commercials where you didn’t know what product was being advertised.      

If what Berlusconi says is true, the Italian left has waged a consistent and incredibly effective campaign to plant false evidence and defame Berlusconi over the course of many decades. If his opponents truly were that crafty one wonders why they have consistently been unable to win an election and hang on to the reigns of government. The chance that Berlusconi is innocent of all the charges that have been levied against him over the years seems slim at best, yet it is undeniably so that Italy’s left wing has steadfastly opposed him on ideological grounds.

The charges of corruption aside, what we do know is that Berlusconi didn’t succeed in unifying Italy, and failed to deliver the structural reforms he promised. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Berlusconi legacy is one rich with bombast but short on substance. Italy today faces many problems, among others a potential banking crisis that has economists in the EU deeply worried, problems that grew worse or weren’t addressed properly during Berlusconi’s three terms in office. At the same time, Berlusconi can’t take the blame for all of Italy’s problems, the country has long had an unstable climate where governments that try to enact reforms are short lived. He certainly found himself addressing wobbly coalitions with all the staying power of wet cardboard and tried to do what was right from his perspective, even if that meant enacting legislation that helped his businesses.

During his time in office Berlusconi made some interesting friends, and to this day talks glowingly about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. During the early 2000s Berlusconi acted as a useful conduit between east and west, maintaining close relationships with the Bush administration as well as with the Kremlin. One glaring failure is, however, his inability to dissuade Bush from invading Iraq, something he tried to do but may in hindsight have been a pointless exercise. Another great friend was Libya’s Muammar Gadaffi, a colorful autocrat who travelled with a retinue of female bodyguards and lived in a grand Bedouin tent whenever he visited foreign leaders. The intervention in Libya pitted Berlusconi against his nemesis, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy. He viewed Sarkozy as trying to thwart Italian interests in Libya, and after Gadaffi was ousted his country’s investments in the desert country plummeted. Italy’s eastern ties, however, still remain. The country was reluctant to launch sanctions against Russia after the annexation of Ukraine and still imports large amounts of Russian oil and natural gas.

During the Eurozone crisis, Italy’s economy was on the rocks, and Berlusconi’s enemies saw a chance to get rid of him at last. When Sarkozy loyalist and former French finance minister Christine Lagarde was named the new head of the IMF, Berlusconi came under intense pressure. Despite his best efforts, the new American president, Barack Obama, didn’t find him all that simpatico either. Some frantic political maneuvering notwithstanding, Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011. Reading between the lines, Berlusconi seems to have felt misunderstood by boring stiffs like Obama and Lagarde, the latter of whom visibly baulked when he tried telling her some of his bawdy jokes. Despite his age and his inglorious departure from office, however, Berlusconi still harbors political ambitions and remains a force to be reckoned with in Italian politics. 

Alan Friedman does an excellent job of telling the unlikely story of Berlusconi’s rise to become Italy’s most powerful man as well as his eventual downfall. Berlusconi’s own words lends credence to the story but, as Friedman himself admits, he’s not entirely sure who the real Berlusconi is. He is certainly someone who has a showman’s mentality who wants you to like him, no matter what room he is in, but getting at the real Berlusconi seems like a fruitless exercise. You get the feeling that the lengthy audience Freidman is granted to Berlusconi’s manor home is an attempt to burnish his tarred image, possibly for a political comeback, and that he is whoever he thinks he needs to be in order to get what he wants from you. All in all, Berlusconi is an excellent autobiography and a highly illuminating read if you are interested in current events and European politics, but who the real man is beneath all the bluster and Bunga-Bunga remains a mystery.

Book Review: Saving Capitalism, For the Many, Not the Few

By Robert B. Reich

“The thing is Bob, government would only get in the way when it comes to fighting poverty. We need to trust the free market and not intrude upon it with stifling regulations. All this red tape is what´s behind our problems. You don´t want monolithic, bumbling, government leading by committee, what you need is the unencumbered and flexible free market to swoop in and save the day”.

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, is a prolific debater who has attended countless seminars and discussions about the state of the economy. Squaring off against a conservative, he is time and time again confronted with the question over government versus the free market. The above quote is made up, but trust me, I have seen enough of these gatherings on YouTube to get a gist of how the debate usually goes. A frustrated Reich will try to explain why that question misses the mark entirely, while his opponent triumphantly declares the debate to be over. Saving Capitalism was born as a consequence of being asked the government versus free market question too many times. In this latest book, Reich lays bare the fundamentals of the US economy, explains what has gone wrong during the last few decades, and how one might go about fixing it. Just like in Aftershock, which I reviewed on this blog a little more than a year ago, Reich illustrates his points in a scholarly manner by showing a plethora of charts and diagrams. It occasionally feels like you are sitting in his lecture hall at Berkeley, but luckily the lecture is engaging a though provoking, not one of those where you have to fight the temptation to fall asleep.

Somewhere, in a galaxy far away, Reich explains, there might be a mythical free market, where no government ever intrudes and, the spirit of Ayn Rand smiles benevolently upon all who enter. On earth however, a market of any kind cannot exist in a state of anarchy. A market necessitates someone setting the rules that its participants must follow, and in most cases this would be the government. These rules protect the property of individuals and ensures that contracts are enforced. A haberdasher could go out of business if the wholesaler he or she has already paid for a shipment of hats decides to not deliver them and instead sell them to someone else. Our haberdasher needs the government to monitor the marketplace and force the wholesaler to deliver the hats that he or she is bound by contract to deliver. Without government there is no such thing as a legally binding contract, and as a consequence there is also no economy of a kind that we would recognize. This debate is oftentimes not a consequence of stupidity, Reich argues, instead it can be used as a way to misdirect and mislead others from debating the issues that really should be debated. If a government is necessary for the marketplace to exist, and the rules aren´t handed down from the heavens, shouldn´t we instead debate the current rules that govern the marketplace?  

As a European, access to high speed broadband is generally cheap, and I have several different operators to choose from in case I´m not satisfied with my current provider. In the United States, customers face higher prices for internet connectivity, and they are often forced to choose from very few service providers. Reich tells us this is because the market suffers from an existing pre-distribution upwards, to benefit the big cable providing companies at the expense of their customers. Big corporations in this industry bankroll the election of politicians, who in turn make sure that the regulators they appoint to scrutinize them are of a lenient disposition. When these regulators retire from their government job they may choose to start working for the very companies they were previously policing, possibly in the form of a lobbyist, in which case they will be frequenting the same restaurants and cocktail bars in Washington DC as their former colleagues. All of this adds up to a climate where big corporations are the most important constituency for politicians and regulators, instead of the American people they ostensibly serve.

This sector is only one of many examples where there is an existing pre-distribution of wealth in favor of those at the top, that is hurting not only American consumers but small businesses as well. Established actors don´t want competition from pesky startups, and prefer to buy them up or make sure they go out of business so they won’t have to compete. Otherwise they would be forced to provide lower prices and better services. This leads to a monopoly effect on the marketplace, where many sectors of the economy see fewer and fewer big actors take control, which hurts startups and smaller companies.  FDR once said that consumers and businesses large and small have the right to be protected from unfair competition, and there are currently laws on the books such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to prevent this, but they are not being enforced. Government regulators, fearful of jeopardizing a lucrative future career in the private sector, prefer to leave things as they are.

All of this no doubt sounds gloomy, and you might wonder why no countervailing power seeks to stop this, the answer is that these forces have been systematically hollowed out and weakened during the last few decades. As the number of American workers who are unionized has declined, the average hourly compensation of workers has declined almost in lockstep. As trade unions and similar institutions that look after the interests of workers and the middle class loose influence, the marketplace is rigged even more forcefully in favor of wealthy interests.

A long running myth that Reich wishes to bust is that in the marketplace, everyone is paid according to what they contribute to society, therefore, raising the minimum wage would be akin to taking a sledgehammer to the beautiful mechanism that is the underpinnings of the economy. If a hedge fund manager on Wall Street is payed millions of dollars a year while a high school teacher only makes 45 000 dollars, does that mean that the Wall Street guy is performing a service that is immeasurably more important to society? Ayn Rand though so, but Robert Reich, who unlike her has actually studied economics, does not. What the two are payed is not necessarily indicative of their relative worth to society. It merely tells us that the financial institutions that line the street adorned with a golden bull hold much more clout than all the teacher´s unions combined.

This outsized influence also shows when it comes to the shareholder value discussion. Fifty years ago, the titans of American industry saw themselves as catering to the interests of several disparate groups, customers, shareholders, employees, the community at large etc. During the last thirty years CEOs have been under increasing pressure to create value for shareholders, at the expense of all other considerations. This has led to a maniacal dash to pump up quarterly earnings while long term profitability and competitiveness has actually declined. More hard earned corporate savings are now spent on stock buybacks than on research and development. Reich presents the credible argument that in order to for capitalism to start working profitably again for everyone concerned, the countervailing power that labor unions, small businesses and other interest groups once had need to start becoming a factor again. Otherwise we will keep seeing this upward redistribution of wealth built into the system continue unchecked. There is actually some hope for this happening, Reich notes. A majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, supports ending subsidies to large multinational corporations and getting money out of politics, through a constitutional amendment or similar means.

Reich ends Saving Capitalism with an attempt to look through the crystal ball and predict what the future of the economy holds. Steadily rising industrial productivity means that a fixed amount of workers can produce ever increasing amounts of goods. Even if America cancels all trade with China and returned the simple manufacturing jobs the country has lost, it wouldn´t be enough to provide employment for everyone. As The Economist recently argued in regards to free trade, increased automation and rising effectiveness means that fewer people are now required to do the job. For example, let´s say that a factory was closed down in 1990, a hundred workers were laid off and the machines were shipped to China. Today, far fewer than one hundred workers are required to produce the same output. Taken together with the fact that the technology industry sees powerful actors such as Facebook and Google consolidating their power and influence, you start to see why it might be a challenge to find jobs for everyone in the future.

This needn´t be a problem, argues Reich. If the system is set up to benefit the many, then prosperity can be shared, freeing up humanity for the first time in recorded history from the drudgery of day to day toil. He suggests a universal basic income, a measure that was recently put to popular vote in Switzerland, as a way of making this system work. The challenge with a universal basic income, I might argue, is to keep citizens productive and hungry to innovate, but it is nonetheless an interesting proposition.   

Saving capitalism reads like a blueprint for shaking the economy out of lackluster growth and great inequality. Reich is a visionary economic scholar whose teachings are well researched and presented in a way that is easy to grasp. Those who have studied his previous works will already be familiar with much of what he says in Saving Capitalism, but Reich´s latest book is well worth reading. Even if you might not agree with his point of view, it helps widen the debate in a time when politicians are scrambling to come up with solutions to the great issues of our time.  

Series Review

The Sharpe Series, By Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series tells the story of Richard Sharpe, a foundling who fled the workhouse to join his majesty’s Britannic army. Fighting under the command of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, Sharpe’s life of soldiering covers an exhaustive twenty-one novels, during which he fights in both the Indian and European theater. The first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, was written in 1981 and the last one, Sharpe’s Fury, came out in 2007. The novel series also saw a popular television spin off starring Sean Bean. Bernard Cornwell has written a great many excellent novels, but his own and Sean Bean’s careers both took off thanks to Sharpe.     

Having joined the army at a tumultuous time for the British Empire, Sharpe had his work cut out for him. During the early nineteenth century, Europe was ravaged by war. Conscription allowed massive armies, on a scale that had not been seen before, to be raised and deployed on the battlefield. After the turmoil of the French Revolution, a young artillery officer from Corsica named Napoleon Bonaparte distinguished himself as a brilliant military leader, and crowned himself emperor of France. The British, ever fretful about the balance of power on the continent (see my review of Henry Kissinger’s World Order), aligned themselves with a series of coalitions in order to defeat the French. Dire socio-economic conditions forced a young Richard Sharpe to join the army, and geo-political ones necessitated that the French were to become his enemy.

As a young man Cornwell fell in love with an American woman and moved to the United States. He lacked a job to support himself but had grown up reading C.S Forester’s Hornblower novels, and had always wanted to be a writer. With Horatio Hornblower serving in the Royal Navy, Cornwell seized the opportunity to write a series of novels centered on a soldier fighting the Napoleonic Wars on dry land. With the stout work ethic that is expected of immigrants to the USA, Cornwell sat himself down at his kitchen table in New Jersey and started clicking away on his typewriter. After the successful publication of his first novel, Sharpe’s Eagle, which centers on the Battle of Talavera in 1809, Cornwell became a full time writer. Chronologically, it falls somewhere in the middle of the series, when Sharpe has already risen to rank of captain and established himself as a shrewd commander.

The bulk of the series finds our intrepid solder fighting for Wellesley’s peninsular army in Spain and Portugal, but later additions tells the story of a young private Sharpe fighting in India against a slew of local warlords, including the feared Tipoo Sultan of Mysore. Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London can gaze upon the Tipoo’s macabre toy featured in Sharpe’s Tiger, an intricate automaton in the shape of a metal tiger sinking its teeth into a luckless redcoat’s throat. Turning the handle causes one of the redcoat’s hands to flap uselessly while a faint sound resembling a tortured scream emanates from the exhibition's mechanical innards.

Having survived the Tipoo and his tiger, Sharpe takes part in the battle of Trafalgar before the series turn to Europe and the long and harsh Peninsular war. The dramatic climax is, obviously, Sharpe’s Waterloo, which I am very much looking forward to. A prospective reader would be well advised to start with Sharpe’s Tiger, since it is the chronological beginning of the story as well as being a thumping good read.

I have praised Cornwell’s writing before on this blog. His language is relatively straightforward and accessible, yet he manages to capture the smell of gunpowder and the sound of the drummer boys sounding the charge. The only way you could possibly get closer to nineteenth century warfare would be to take part in the annual re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo, but then you would have to travel to a muddy field in Belgium and subject yourself to dodgy catering. Being British, however, it is not surprising that he is ever so slightly partial, and most of the French marshals are portrayed as foppish braggadocios.

A recurring theme through the series is the unfairness of British society at the time, particularly its military. This was an age where commissions tended to be sold to the highest bidder, and were very seldom awarded on merit alone. As a no nonsense career soldier Sharpe frequently clashes with incompetent officers fresh from England, who know nothing of war, and whose immaculate uniforms are better suited to the officer’s mess than the front line.

Through a combination of plundered French cash, bravery and dogged perseverance, Sharpe nevertheless manages to slowly and painstakingly rise through the ranks and become an officer himself. This was something that was slightly frowned upon at the time, since people thought that men promoted from the ranks would turn to drink. Sharpe’s first command as an officer is a detachment of Riflemen, where he meets the Irishman Patrick Harper, who becomes his steadfast companion for the duration of the war and helps him capture the eagle standard in Sharpe’s Eagle.   

Bernard Cornwell is one of the great writers of historical fiction, who manages to cater to a wide audience. His Sharpe series would be the perfect read for lazy days on the beach during the upcoming summer holidays.

Book Review: The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

By Maria Konnikova

During the height of the Korean War, a wreck full of gravely injured North Korean soldiers desperately hailed a passing Canadian navy vessel, the HMCS Cayuga. They had been wounded in an ambush, and the crew were in dire need of medical attention. The Cayuga had only one sawbones onboard, the intrepid Dr. Joseph Cyr, who rose to the occasion. Over the next forty-eight hours Cyr performed nineteen surgeries and helped save just as many lives. Aided by a medical field guide he had persuaded a fellow doctor back in Ontario to create “for the troops”, Cyr soon became a celebrity in the press. There was, however, one small niggle. Joseph Cyr was actually Ferdinand Waldo Demara from Massachusetts, a notorious impostor who didn´t know the first thing about medicine. Aided by his field guide he nonetheless managed to carry out the surgeries with some degree of success. So successful was he, in fact, that when he offered his biographer to deliver his wife´s child many years later, he almost managed to persuade him. The North Koreans had survived, after all, so what could possibly go wrong? Throughout his life Demara also masqueraded as a Texas prison warden, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, a civil engineer, a doctor of psychology, and much else besides. He was the consummate con artist, a man with supreme confidence who could fool anyone and got away with it, time and time again.

Robbers hold you at gunpoint and force you to turn over your valuables, burglars break into your home in order to steal your television and bank robbers smash open armored vaults to plunder the treasure trove within. Con artists, however, never resort to violence. In the pecking order of the underworld, they are the aristocrats of crime. They make you trust them, believe them, love them even. Then you willingly hand over your life´s saving as well as every single material possession that isn´t nailed down. When their act is blown you will either stand by them and defend them against all accusations, or you will be too ashamed to speak up, your reputation in tatters and your life ruined. That´s when they toss you aside and move on to the next mark. Maria Konnikova´s The Confidence Game tells you all you need to know about how these people operate and why one of the world´s oldest professions is unlikely to disappear   

If you think you are too smart, well educated, savvy and metropolitan to fall for a confidence trickster, think again. The Ivy league stockbroker from New York who gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to a fortune teller certainly never suspected she was being ripped off. Neither did the French aristocratic family who were persuaded by a charismatic impostor that they were the victims of a masonic plot, and over the curse of ten years made them part with millions of dollars as well as the family estate.

 How is it, then, that these people keep succeeding time and time again? For a harmonious society, Konnikova explains, it is essential that we trust one another. Con artists prey on that trust and tries to use it for their own nefarious ends. The first part of any successful con is knowing who will be the most susceptible mark, and no one is better at reading their fellow human beings than a confidence trickster.

Deceit and trickery thrives in times of uncertainty and upheaval. Wars, revolutions and famines attracts con artists like moths to a flame, and the same is true for people who are emotionally unstable, be it because of a breakup or a death in the family. Even someone who is educated and has both feet firmly planted on the ground can, under the right circumstances, fall for cons that they would otherwise laugh at. The true con artist knows this, and knows how to pick out susceptible individuals from the crowd.

After the con artist has picked out his mark, it is time to introduce himself (Most con artists are men, Konnikova writes), and make a good first impression. The grafter is acutely aware of both the discreet signals that the victim is unwittingly sending out, and how he himself is perceived. An error at this stage is not an option. Otherwise, the mark will never be convinced that you are in fact a wealthy German industrialist offering a once in a lifetime investment opportunity. Once the mark has been identified and contact has been made, the con artist must spin a convincing tale and lure his unsuspecting mark into doing what he wants them to do and believing what he wants them to believe. The most diligent con artists can spend a considerable amount of time building trust and convincing his mark.

Eventually, a breakdown will occur, when the mark is presented with evidence that the magical 

investment opportunity might not be all that it´s cranked up to be.  You might think that anyone who isn´t a complete imbecile would cut their losses and back away at this point, but that isn´t how human psychology works. Positive illusions serve as a defense mechanism when we are faced with threatening circumstances. If all that we have been led to believe is suddenly being questioned, human beings tend to double down and reaffirm their certainty that everything will turn out for the best. This sets the con up for its final phase, that Konnikova dubs “the send and the touch”. This is when the con finally comes to fruition, the send is when the mark is recommitted to the con artist’s tall tale, and the touch is the part when the mark gets robbed blind and (quite possibly) sees his or her life ruined.

While reading The Confidence Game, you frequently have to fight the urge to yell at the hapless victims to not give their life´s savings away to someone who´s an obvious charlatan, yet the flaws in human psychology that makes it all possible are explained in all their embarrassing depth. A lot of research went into writing the book, and Konnikova conducted dozens of interviews all over the world with con artists, victims and psychology professors. She skillfully weaves together tales of real life cons with an explanation of the science behind it that´s understandable to a layman. Like a magician´s tricks being laid bare, Konnikova lets the reader gain an insight into their fascinating world and hopefully helps us prevent being conned in the future. For that purpose alone, The Confidence Game is well worth reading.