Week-end reading

That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate, according to Roy S. Malpass, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the subject since the 1960s. “It has a lot of validity,” he said.

Also in 1976, a French polymath called Jacques Attali wrote a book that predicted this crisis with astonishing accuracy. It was called Noise: The Political Economy of Music and he called the coming turmoil the "crisis of proliferation". Soon we would all have so much recorded music it would cease to have any value, he said. And that sounds pretty accurate to me - I don't remember the last time I spent £10 ($15) on a new album.

For Dornstein, meeting Eter was revelatory. “I had been trying to construct the world of Libyan intelligence in the nineteen-eighties from spare parts, and now suddenly here was this guy who had actually lived it,” he said. “It was as if you’d read all the Harry Potter books, then you got to sit down with a guy who actually went to Hogwarts.”