Tag Archives: Telegraph

Shell game

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Reading Catching Thunder by by Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Saeter for the Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2018 

In March 23 1969 the shipbuilders of Ulsteinvik in Norway launched a stern trawler called the Vesturvon. It was their most advanced factory trawler yet, beautiful as these ships go, and big: outfitted for a crew of 47.

In 2000, after many adventures, the ship suffered a midlife crisis. Denied a renewal of their usual fishing quota, its owners partnered up with a Russian company and sent the ship, renamed the Rubin, to ply the Barents Sea. There, in the words of Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Saeter, two Norwegian journalists, the ship slipped ineluctably into “a maelstrom of shell corporations, bizarre ships registers and shady expeditions”.

In the years that followed, the ship changed its name often: Kuko, Wuhan No 4, Ming No 5, Batu 1. Its crew had to look over the side of the ship at the name plate, attached that morning to the stern, to find out which ship they were on. Flags from countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Mauritania and Panama were kept in a cardboard box.

It fell to a Chilean, Luis Cataldo, to be captaining the ship (then named the Thunder) on December 17 2014 – the day when, off Antarctica’s windy Banzare Bank, in the middle of an illegal fishing expedition, it was spotted by the Bob Barker, a craft belonging to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The Bob Barker’s captain got on the radio and told Cataldo his vessel was wanted by Interpol and should follow him to port.

Cataldo retorted that he wasn’t inclined to obey a ship whose black flag bore a skull (albeit with a shepherd’s crook and a trident instead of crossbones). And it is fair to say that the Sea Shepherd organisation, whose mission “is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans”, has enjoyed a fairly anomalous relationship with nautical authority since its foundation in 1977.

So began the world’s longest sea chase to date, recorded with flair and precision in Catching Thunder, Diane Oatley’s effortlessly noir translation of Engdal and Saeter’s 2016 Norwegian bestseller. The book promises all the pleasures of a crime novel, but it is after bigger game: let’s call it the unremitting weirdness of the real world.

This is a book about fish – and also a chase narrative in which the protagonists spend most of the time sailing in circles and sending each other passive-aggressive radio messages. (“You are worried about the crew, and now all the Indonesians are nervous,” Cataldo complains. “One person attempted to take his life. Over.”)

It’s about attempting to regulate the movement of lumps of steel weighing more than 650 tons which, if they want, can thug their way out of any harbour whether they’ve been “impounded” or not, and it’s about the sheer slow-mo clumsiness of ship-handling.

At one point the Thunder “moves in circles, directing a searchlight on the Bob Barker, then suddenly stops and drifts for a few hours. Then the mate puts the ship in motion again, heading for a point in the middle of nowhere.” There’s no Hollywood hot-headedness here. The violence here is rare, veiled and, when it comes, unstoppable and ice-cold.

The Thunder was wanted for hunting the Patagonian toothfish, a protected species of “petulant and repulsive” giants that can grow to a weight of 120kg and live more than 50 years. When the Bob Barker caught sight of it in the Southern Ocean, no one could have guessed that their chase would last for 110 days.

Stoked by Sea Shepherd’s YouTube campaign, the pursuit became a cause célèbre and the Bob Barker’s hardened crew were prepared for the long game: “As long as the two ships are operating without using the engines, it is only the generators that are consuming fuel. If it continues like this, they can be at sea for two years.”

Engdal and Saeter must keep their human story going while doing justice to the scale of their subject. At the start, their subject is the fishing industry, in which a cargo of frozen toothfish can go “on a circumnavigation of the world from the Southern Ocean to Thailand, then around the entire African continent, past the Horn of Africa, across the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea before ending up in Vietnam.” But they also have something to say about the planet.

Suppose you catch fish for a living. If you saw that your catch was dwindling, you might limit your days at sea to ensure that you can continue to fish that species in future years. This isn’t “ecological thinking”; it’s simple self-interest. In the fishing industry, though, self-interest works differently.

And in a chapter about Chimbote in Peru, the authors hit upon a striking metonym for the global mechanisms denuding our seas.

The Peruvian anchovy boom of the late 2000s turned Chimbote from a sleepy village into Peru’s busiest fishing port. Fifty factories exuded a stench of rotten fish, and pumped wastewater and fish blood into the ocean, to the point where the local ecosystem was so damaged that an ordinary El Niño event finished off the anchovy stocks for good.

The point is this: fishing companies are not fisherfolk. They are companies: lumps of capital incorporated to maximise returns on investment. It makes no sense for an extraction company to limit its consumption of a resource.

Once stocks have been reduced to nothing, the company simply reinvests its capital in some other, more available resource. You can put rules in place to limit the rapaciousness of the enterprise, but the rapaciousness is baked in. Rare resources are doomed to extinction eventually because the rarer a resource is, the more expensive it is, and the more incentive there is to trade in it. This is why, past a certain point, rare stocks hurtle towards zero.

Politically savvy readers will find, between the lines, an account here of how increasingly desperate governments are coming to a rapprochement with the Sea Shepherd organisation, whose self-consciously piratical founder Paul Watson declared in 1988: “We hold the position that the laws of ecology take precedence over the laws designed by nation states to protect corporate interests.”

Watson’s position seems legally extreme. But 30 years on, with an ecological catastrophe looming, many maritime law enforcers hardly care. Robbed of income and ecological capital, some countries are getting gnarly. In 2016, Indonesian authorities sank 170 foreign fishing vessels in less than two years. They would like to sink many more: according to this daunting thriller, 5,000 illegal fishing vessels ply their waters at any one time.

What’s the Russian for Eastbourne?

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Reading Davies and Kent’s Red Atlas for the Telegraph, 13 January 2018

This is a journey through an exotic world conjured into being by the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. Tasked by Stalin during the Second World War to accurately and secretly map the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, its Western adversaries, and the rest of the world, the Directorate embarked on the largest mapping effort in history, Too many maps have been lost for us to be entirely sure what coverage was attained, but it must have been massive. Considering the UK alone, if there are detailed street plans of the market town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, we can be reasonably sure there were once maps of Carlisle and Hull.

From internal evidence (serial numbers and such-like) we know there were well in excess of 1 million maps produced. Only a few survive today, and the best preserved of them, the most beautiful, the most peculiar, the most chilling, are reproduced here. The accompanying text, by cartographers John Davies and Alexander Kent, is rich in detail, and it needs to be. Soviet intelligence maps boast a level of detail that puts our own handsome Ordnance Survey to shame — a point the authors demonstrate by putting OS maps alongside their Soviet counterparts. You can not only see my road from one of these Soviet maps: you can see how tall the surrounding buildings are. You can read the height of a nearby bridge above water, its dimensions, its load capacity, and what it is made of. As for the river, I now know its width, its flow, its depth, and whether it has a viscous bed (it hasn’t).

This is not a violent tale. There is little evidence that the mapmakers had invasion on their mind. What would have been the point? By the time Russian tanks were rolling down the A14 (Cambridge, UK, 1:10,000 City Plan of 1998), nuclear exchanges would have obliterated most of these exquisite details, carefully garnered from aerial reconnaissance, archival research, Zenit satellite footage and, yes, wonderfully, non-descript men dawdling outside factory gates and police stations. Maybe the maps were for them and their successors. Placenames are rendered phonetically: HEJSTYNZ for Hastings and “ISBON” for Eastbourne on one Polish map. This would have been useful if you were asking directions, but useless if you were in a tank speeding through hostile territory, trying to read the road signs. The Directorate’s city maps came with guides. Some of the details recorded here are sinister enough: Cambridgeshire clay “becomes waterlogged and severely impedes off-road movement of mechanized transport.” Its high hedges “significantly impede observation of the countryside”. But what are we to make of the same guide’s wistful description of the city itself? “The bank of the river Cam is lined with ivy-clad buildings of the colleges of the university, with ridged roofs and turrets… The lodging-houses with their lecture-halls are reminiscent of monasteries or ancient castles.”

Though deployed on an industrial scale, the Soviet mapmakers were artisans, who tried very hard to understand a world they would never have any opportunity to see. They did a tremendous job: why else would their maps have informed the US invasion of Afghanistan, water resource management in Armenia, or oil exploration in India? Now and again their cultural assumptions led them down strange paths. Ecclesiastical buildings lost all significance in the Republic of Ireland, whose landscape became dotted with disused watermills. In England, Beeching’s cull of the railways was incomprehensible to Russian mapmakers, for whom railways were engines of revolution. A 1971 map of Leeds sheet not only shows lines closed in the 1960s; it also depicts and names the Wellington terminus station, adjacent to City station, which had closed in 1938.

The story of the Soviets’ mapping and remapping, particularly of the UK, is an eerie one, and though their effort seems impossibly Heath-Robinson now, the reader is never tempted into complacency. Cartography remains an ambiguous art. For evidence, go to Google Maps and type in “Burghfield”. It’s a village near Reading, home to a decommissioned research station of the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Interestingly, the authors claim that though the site is visible in detail through Google Earth, for some reason Google Maps has left the site blank and unlabelled.

This claim is only partly true. The label is there, though it appears at only the smallest available scale of the map. Add the word “atomic” to your search string, and you are taken to an image that, if not particularly informative, is still adequate for a visit.

Two thoughts followed hard on this non-discovery of mine. First, that I should let this go: my idea of “adequate” mapping is likely to be a lot less rigorous than the authors’; anyway it is more than possible that this corner of Google Maps has been updated since the book went to press. Second, that my idle fact-checking placed me in a new world — or at any rate, one barely out of its adolescence. (Keyhole, the company responsible for what became Google Earth, was founded in 2001.)

Today anyone with a broadband connection can drill down to information once considered the prerogative of government analysts. Visit Google Earth’s Russia, and you can find traces of the forest belts planted as part of Stalin’s Great Transformation of Nature in 1948. You can see how industrial combines worked their way up the Volga, building hydroelectric plants that drowned an area the size of France with unplanned swamps. There’s some chauvinistic glee to be had from this, but in truth, intelligence has become simply another digital commodity: stuff to be mined, filleted, mashed up, repackaged. Open-source intelligence: OSINT. There are conferences about it. Workshops. Artworks.

The Red Atlas is not about endings. It is about beginnings. The Cold War, far from being over, has simply subsumed our civic life. Everyone is in the intelligence business now.

Stalin’s meteorologist

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I reviewed Olivier Rolin’s new book for The Daily Telegraph

750,000 shot. This figure is exact; the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, kept meticulous records relating to their activities during Stalin’s Great Purge. How is anyone to encompass in words this horror, barely 80 years old? Some writers find the one to stand for the all: an Everyman to focus the reader’s horror and pity. Olivier Rolin found his when he was shown drawings and watercolours made by Alexey Wangenheim, an inmate of the Solovki prison camp in Russia’s Arctic north. He made them for his daughter, and they are reproduced as touching miniatures in this slim, devastating book, part travelogue, part transliteration of Wangenheim’s few letters home.

While many undesirables were labelled by national or racial identity, a huge number were betrayed by their accomplishments. Before he was denounced by a jealous colleague, Wangenheim ran a pan-Soviet weather service. He was not an exceptional scientist: more an efficient bureaucrat. He cannot even be relied on “to give colourful descriptions of the glories of nature” before setting sail, with over a thousand others, for a secret destination, not far outside the town of Medvezhegorsk. There, some time around October 1937, a single NKVD officer dispatched the lot of them, though he had help with the cudgelling, the transport, the grave-digging. While he went to work with his Nagant pistol, others were washing blood and brains off the trucks and tarpaulins.

Right to the bitter end, Wangenheim is a boring correspondent, always banging on about the Party. “My faith in the Soviet authorities has in no way been shaken” he says. “Has Comrade Stalin received my letter?” And again: “I have battled in my heart not to allow myself to think ill of the Soviet authorities or of the leaders”. Rolin makes gold of such monotony, exploiting the degree to which French lends itself to lists and repeated figures, and his translator Ros Schwartz has rendered these into English that is not just palatable, but often thrilling and always freighted with dread.

When Wangenheim is not reassuring his wife about the Bolshevik project, he is making mosaics out of stone chippings and brick dust: meticulous little portraits of — of all people — Stalin. Rolin openly struggles to understand his subject’s motivation: “In any case, blinkeredness or pathetic cunning, there is something sinister about seeing this man, this scholar, making of his own volition the portrait of the man in whose name he is being crucified.”

That Rolin finds a mystery here is of a piece with his awkward nostalgia for the promise of the Bolshevik revolution. Hovering like a miasma over some pages (though Rolin is too smart to succumb utterly) is that hoary old meme, “the revolution betrayed”. So let us be clear: the revolution was not betrayed. The revolution panned out exactly the way it was always going to pan out, whether Stalin was at the helm or not. It is also exactly the way the French revolution panned out, and for exactly the same reason.

Both French and Socialist revolutions sought to reinvent politics to reflect the imminent unification of all branches of human knowledge, and consequently, their radical simplification. By Marx’s day this idea, under the label “scientism”, had become yawningly conventional: also wrong.

Certainly by the time of the Bolshevik revolution, scientists better than Wangenheim — physicists, most famously — knew that the universe would not brook such simplification, neither under Marx nor under any other totalising system. Rationality remains a superb tool with which to investigate the world. But as a working model of the world, guiding political action, it leads only to terror.

To understand Wangenheim’s mosaic-making, we have to look past his work, diligently centralising and simplifying his own meteorological science to the point where a jealous colleague, deprived of his sinecure, denounced him. We need to look at the human consequences of this attempt at scientific government, and particularly at what radical simplification does to the human psyche. To order and simplify life is to bureaucratise it, and to bureaucratise human beings is make them behave like machines. Rolin says Wangenheim clung to the party for the sake of his own sanity. I don’t doubt it. But to cling to any human institution, or to any such removed and fortressed individual, is the act, not of a suffering human being but of a malfunctioning machine.

At the end of his 1940 film The Great Dictator Charles Chaplin, dressed in Adolf Hitler’s motley, broke the fourth wall to declare war on the “machine men with machine minds” that were then marching roughshod across his world. Regardless of Hitler’s defeat, this was a war we assuredly lost. To be sure the bureaucratic infection, like all infections, has adapted to ensure its own survival, and it is not so virulent as it was. The pleasures of bureaucracy are more evident now; its damages, though still very real, are less evident. “Disruption” has replaced the Purge. The Twitter user has replaced the police informant.

But let us be explicit here, where Rolin has been admirably artful and quietly insidious: the pleasures of bureaucracy in both eras are exactly the same. Wangenheim’s murderers lived in a world that had been made radically simple for them. In Utopia, all you have to do is your job (though if you don’t, Utopia falls apart). These men weren’t deprived of humanity: they were relieved of it. They experienced exactly what you or I feel when the burden of life’s ambiguities is lifted of a sudden from our shoulders: contentment, bordering on joy.

Brilliant by Jane Brox

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Brilliant: the Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox (Souvenir Press) reviewed for the Telegraph.

Jane Brox’s fascinating history is let down by its subtitle. Artificial light good enough to live and work by did not “evolve”; it was, as Brilliant ably demonstrates, the grail of an ugly, stumbling and occasionally farcical 40,000-year quest.

If the first half of Brox’s account is more engaging than the second it’s because, since Edison and Tesla fought their electrical duels in the 1880s, light has ceased to be something we make.

Most of the time, it’s not even a product. It’s a utility – ignored until it fails. Brox’s engagement with her subject never falters, but really, how do you follow tales of Shetland Islanders, threading a wick down a storm petrel’s throat and setting it alight? Or the Javanese thief whose shuttered lantern was powered by fireflies?

Brox handles this sense of diminishing returns head-on. Toughened by her earlier studies of hardscrabble American farm life, she absolutely refuses to succumb to nostalgia.

The first forms of artificial light were smelly and gruesome. According to Herman Melville, even in the bowels of a whaling ship it seemed an outlandish thing that “mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp”.

If ever a technology were welcomed without reserve, it was the technique of making candles and lamp oils from something other than the stuff of “the barnyard and the slaughterhouse, from blood and sinew and bone”. Even pure, white candles made from spermaceti – the waxy substance scooped from the head of a sperm whale – were no match for candles made from paraffin, which first appeared around 1850.

The small, independent British publisher, Souvenir Press, is brave to have snapped up this United States title. Popular science from overseas is hard to import. Indeed, Brox does omit much European experience, missing out the 1900 Paris Expo entirely, though 1900 was a vital coming-of-age moment for electric light.

It doesn’t matter: Brox’s concern for the local, the everyday, the rural and the poor gives her book a universal appeal. There’s real passion in the way she uses the tale of power outages to unpick the excesses and inequities of California’s deregulated energy market, and traces the cringing historical correlation between an American’s access to light and the whiteness of their skin.

Enthusiasm for new and better forms of light is powerful and iconoclastic. In the 1830s, thousands were killed and maimed by newfangled camphene lamps, powered by a fuel distilled from turpentine and mixed with alcohol. The stuff wasn’t even cheap. Newness was its only selling point.

Towards the end of the 19th century, massive steel towers were erected over modest cities like Wabash, Indiana. The arc lights they supported were so bright, you could see colours at night. The enthusiastic townsfolk soon found these “second moons” unendurable: they replaced them with street lights.

Brox might have brought this story of Promethean error up to date by exploring the problem of light pollution more deeply than she does. Light pollution isn’t driven by mere carelessness. Our ancient, star-obliterating obsession with more and brighter light shows no sign of abating. Now it’s marring our sunlit hours. Across Europe, vehicles are being fitted with daytime running lights in spite of a pile of ophthalmological evidence that they cause more accidents than they prevent.

Instead, Brox reaches for a sense of closure, and suggests artificial light is losing its significance. It’s being replaced by data. “Any mariner of the 18th century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles,” she writes.

But stranger still is Eddystone’s new obsolescence, replaced by radar, GPS and electronic charts. “Data,” Brox writes, “would become the new lamp.”

This is neatly put, a clever capstone for a narrative that could so easily have petered out – and it’s perfectly true. In 2006, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte launched the One Laptop per Child campaign to promote world education and citizenship. In one Cambodian village where there is no electricity, Negroponte’s solar-powered and hand-cranked laptops are the brightest light source in the home.

 

Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku

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Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku (Allen Lane) for The Sunday Telegraph.

There are books written to so tight a formula, you slide off them. They elude categories of good and bad. They just are. Anecdotes from filming programmes for the BBC, Discovery and the Science Channel provide the leavening agent for Michio Kaku’s brick of a book about how technology will change our daily lives over the next hundred years. (Thanks to that technology, some us will still be around to see if he’s right.)

Each chapter explores a set of technologies, from artificial intelligence to energy, space travel to medicine, and offers near, middle and long-term predictions. Each opens with a synopsis of a classical myth – the promise being that we will eventually acquire a Godlike control over our lives and our surroundings. Like the heroes of old, we ought to be careful what we wish for. Still, the outlook is bright. Dazzlingly bright. At times, unbearable.

In a chapter dealing with telepresence, Kaku gushingly evokes the moment when “from the comfort of the beach, we will be able to teleconference to the office by blinking”, using special contact lenses. If that wasn’t disconcerting enough, Kaku then quotes approvingly from Max Frisch that “Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it”. Is the co-founder of string theory having us on?

The thing is, Michio Kaku the “science communicator” is like a character from a Hollywood film: an accomplished real-life version of the ex-hippy who directs Area 51’s secret subterranean laboratory in the film Independence Day (“As you can imagine, they don’t let us out much”).

Indeed, Kaku’s naivety is enough to chill the marrow when he explains how United States drones are “targeting terrorists with deadly accuracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. (A respected study published by an American think-tank last year concluded that almost a third of those killed in drone strikes between 2004 and February 2010 were civilians.)

Naivety is one side of the coin, the other is Kaku’s enthusiasm for what science and technology can bring to our day-to-day lives; lives that have always been, and always will be, directed by what Kaku calls “the caveman principle”. As he says: “Our wants, dreams, personalities and desires have not changed much in 100,000 years.”

There are strange gaps in Kaku’s account. No mention, for example, of the fact that every ecosystem on the planet is suffering measurable decline and that our natural resources are shrinking to the point where we can’t afford them. (Kaku says that cables made of carbon nanotubes are set to replace copper wiring because they’re lighter and more efficient; he says nothing about the spiralling cost of copper.) There is virtually nothing here about how technology and science, mishandled over the next 100 years, may prove to be the medicine that kills the patient.

This is a missed opportunity. The technology of the next 100 years will be environmental. It will be grown. Be they self-assembling robots or genetically engineered bacteria, many of our most recent inventions are acquiring lives and evolving behaviours of their own. Are their creators oblivious to the environmental ramifications of their work? If so, we are in danger from science getting out of control. I don’t think the scientific community is so clueless, and I don’t imagine Kaku thinks so, either. But it will take a more sophisticated book than this one to address our fears.

Physics of the Future will be very easy for pessimists to dismiss. For those who can put their anxieties aside, though, there are rewards. Kaku writes very well about exponential thinking. In the mid-Nineties, for example, he delivered a keynote address at a conference in Frankfurt, predicting that by 2020, everyone would have a CD-ROM with their genome recorded on it. The Human Genome Project had just cost $3billion, and some in the audience responded with indignation.

But Kaku had a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware on his side. For as long as computers have been around, a dollar buys twice as much computing power as it did two years ago. Examining a CD-ROM from Vanderbilt University, Kaku recently discovered that he thankfully does not carry his family’s susceptibility to Alzheimer’s. His prediction about personalised genomes was wrong: he’d been far too conservative.

Spinning I-told-you-so stories from exponential thinking is easy. Making the exponential character of technological progress stick in the reader’s head, so that they come to look at the world differently, is a more onerous task, and one Kaku accomplishes well.

Three hundred interviews with leading scientists and engineers went into this book. Still, Physics of the Future has an old-fashioned flavour. It is partisan about technology in a way that smacks of Gerard K O’Neill’s deliriously technocratic vision of space exploration, The High Frontier.

For those of us who read O’Neill in 1976 (and who of us, reading it, was not inspired?) Physics of the Future works best as a homage to that book, that time, and that us-against-the-world vision of technology. Kaku the futurist may be showing his age, but that’s not a bad thing. There’s a place on the shelves for sheer wonder, and, if nothing else, Kaku reminds us that the Seventies did wonder well.

 

Maths into English

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One to Nine by Andrew Hodges and The Tiger that Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
reviewed for the Telegraph, 22 September 2007

Twenty-four years have passed since Andrew Hodges published his biography of the mathematician Alan Turing. Hodges, a long-term member of the Mathematical Physics Research Group at Oxford, has spent the years since exploring the “twistor geometry” developed by Roger Penrose, writing music and dabbling with self-promotion.

Follow the link to One to Nine’s web page, and you will soon be stumbling over the furniture of Hodges’s other lives: his music, his sexuality, his ambitions for his self?published novel – the usual spillage. He must be immune to bathos, or blind to it. But why should he care what other people think? He knows full well that, once put in the right order, these base metals will be transformed.

“Writing,” says Hodges, “is the business of turning multi?dimensional facts and ideas into a one?dimensional string of symbols.”

One to Nine – ostensibly a simple snapshot of the mathematical world – is a virtuoso stream of consciousness containing everything important there is to say about numbers (and Vaughan Williams, and climate change, and the Pet Shop Boys) in just over 300 pages. It contains multitudes. It is cogent, charming and deeply personal, all at once.

“Dense” does not begin to describe it. There is extraordinary concision at work. Hodges covers colour space and colour perception in two or three pages. The exponential constant e requires four pages. These examples come from the extreme shallow end of the mathematical pool: there are depths here not everyone will fathom. But this is the point: One to Nine makes the unfathomable enticing and gives the reader tremendous motivation to explore further.

This is a consciously old-fashioned conceit. One to Nine is modelled on Constance Reid’s 1956 classic, From Zero to Infinity. Like Reid’s, each of Hodges’s chapters explores the ideas associated with a given number. Mathematicians are quiet iconoclasts, so this is work that each generation must do for itself.

When Hodges considers his own contributions (in particular, to the mathematics underpinning physical reality), the skin tightens over the skull: “The scientific record of the past century suggests that this chapter will soon look like faded pages from Eddington,” he writes. (Towards the end of his life, Sir Arthur Eddington, who died in 1944, assayed a “theory of everything”. Experimental evidence ran counter to his work, which today generates only intermittent interest.)

But then, mathematics “does not have much to do with optimising personal profit or pleasure as commonly understood”.

The mordant register of his prose serves Hodges as well as it served Turing all those years ago. Like Turing: the Enigma, One to Nine proceeds, by subtle indirection, to express a man through his numbers.

If you think organisations, economies or nations would be more suited to mathematical description, think again. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot’s The Tiger that Isn’t contains this description of the International Passenger Survey, the organisation responsible for producing many of our immigration figures:

The ferry heaves into its journey and, equipped with their passenger vignettes, the survey team members also set off, like Attenboroughs in the undergrowth, to track down their prey, and hope they all speak English. And so the tides of people swilling about the world?… are captured for the record if they travel by sea, when skulking by slot machines, half?way through a croissant, or off to the ladies’ loo.

Their point is this: in the real world, counting is back-breaking labour. Those who sieve the world for numbers – surveyors, clinicians, statisticians and the rest – are engaged in difficult work, and the authors think it nothing short of criminal the way the rest of us misinterpret, misuse or simply ignore their hard-won results. This is a very angry and very funny book.

The authors have worked together before, on the series More or Less – BBC Radio 4’s antidote to the sort of bad mathematics that mars personal decision-making, political debate, most press releases, and not a few items from the corporation’s own news schedule.

Confusion between correlation and cause, wild errors in the estimation of risk, the misuse of averages: Blastland and Dilnot round up and dispatch whole categories of woolly thinking.

They have a positive agenda. A handful of very obvious mathematical ideas – ideas they claim (with a certain insouciance) are entirely intuitive – are all we need to wield the numbers for ourselves; with them, we will be better informed, and will make more realistic decisions.

This is one of those maths books that claims to be self?help, and on the evidence presented here, we are in dire need of it. A late chapter contains the results of a general knowledge quiz given to senior civil servants in 2005.

The questions were simple enough. Among them: what share of UK income tax is paid by the top one per cent of earners? For the record, in 2005 it was 21 per cent. Our policy?makers didn’t have a clue.

“The deepest pitfall with numbers owes nothing to the numbers themselves and much to the slack way they are treated, with carelessness all the way to contempt.”

This jolly airport read will not change all that. But it should stir things up a bit.