Douglas Edwards: Google Employee No 59

• In 1998 two Stanford University PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started a company whose aim was: "To organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Eleven years later, the company has a value of $172 billion, has one billion users every year and fulfils more than one billion search requests per day. Douglas Edwards took a pay cut to join Google in 1999, aged 41, as director of consumer marketing and brand management when the company had fewer than 60 employees. He left five years later a tired, relieved millionaire.
  
  Cindy McCaffrey, director of public relations, brought me back to the conference room to wait for Sergey. I wasn't nervous. Sergey was about the age of my favourite T-shirt and a Russian by birth. I had lived in Russia. I spoke some Russian. I had Russian friends. I understood their dark humour, their cynical views and their sarcastic ways. I felt unusually confident that the interview would go well. Perhaps I would become his mentor and we would toast each other's health with fine Siberian vodka. Sergey showed up wearing roller hockey gear: gym shorts, a T-shirt and inline skates. He had obviously been playing hard. I had known better than to wear a tie, but he took office casual to a new level.
  
  I sat back and resumed toying with one of the rubber balls, feeling so relaxed that I accidentally removed its stopper, causing half the air inside to rush out with a hiss. Sergey found that amusing. He pored over my resume, and began peppering me with questions. "What promotion did you do that was most effective?" "What metrics did you use to measure it?" "What types of viral marketing did you do?" "How much do you think a company our size should spend on marketing?" Sergey asked me. Based on his earlier questions, it was easy to guess what he wanted to hear from me.
  
  "I don't think at this stage you should spend much at all," I said. "You can do a lot with viral marketing and small budgets. Shooting gerbils out of a cannon in a Super Bowl spot isn't really a very effective strategy for building a brand." He nodded his agreement, then asked about my six months in Siberia, casually switching to Russian to see how much I had picked up. Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call "the hard question".
  
  "I'm going to give you five minutes," he told me. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room towards the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she told me. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you really understand well."
  
  I reached for a piece of scrap paper as my mind raced. What complicated thing did I know well enough to describe to Sergey? Nappy-changing didn't seem appropriate. How newspapers are printed? Kind of dull. I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind, because I'd only learnt it recently.
  
  One of my dirty little secrets was a complete lack of academic preparation for the business world. Instead of statistics and economics, I'd taken planetary geology, Latin and Spenserian verse. Fortunately, Annie Skeet, my boss at the Mercury News, had a Harvard MBA and a desire to drive some business theory into my thick skull. She had given me a bunch of her old textbooks along with strong hints I should spend time reading them. I had found a couple of titles interesting, including Porter's Competitive Strategy and Aaker's books on branding. I began regurgitating everything I could remember on to the paper in front of me: the five Ps (or was it six?), the four Ms, barriers to entry, differentiation on quality or price. By the time Sergey came back, I had enough to talk for ten minutes and was confident I could fill any holes with the three Bs (Buckets of Baffling Bulls***). I went to the whiteboard and began drawing circles and squares and lots of arrows. I was nervous, but not very. Sergey bounced on a ball and asked questions that required me to make things up on the spot.
  
  "What's the most effective barrier to entry?"
  "What's more important: product differentiation or promotion?"
  "How does the strategy change if the price is zero?"
  He seemed to be paying attention and I began enjoying myself. We were developing a special rapport! Clearly, he wanted to hear what I had to say and valued my opinions. Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if Sergey gained insight into something he didn't already know.
  
  The light was fading by the time I finished and Sergey invited me to join the staff for dinner, which was being brought into a small kitchen across from the conference room. A crowd of hungry engineers bounced from plate to plate with chopsticks picking at a large selection of sushi.
  
  "We just hired a chef, so this is a temporary set-up," Sergey told me. "And we've got a couple of massage therapists coming in as well."
  
  A warning light flashed in my head at that. This was the guy who didn't think there should be a marketing budget, and he had hired a chef and two massage therapists? But then I saw the platters of fatty tuna and shrimp and salmon and yellowtail. I grabbed some chopsticks and began loading my plate. Concerns about a business plan and revenue streams and organisational structure faded away. Google met most of my requirements. It offered at least the appearance of superior internet-related technology, some eccentric genius types, funding that should last at least a year and a fun consumer brand that I could help develop. Two weeks later, on November 29, 1999, I started work as Google's online brand manager. You would have needed uncanny foresight or powerful pharmaceuticals to envision Google's success in 1999. Or maybe just money to burn. Kleiner and Sequoia had something, because the two venture capital firms invested $12.5 million each, leading cynics in the Valley to define "googling" as "getting funding without a business plan".
  
  What did it feel like? I mean the experience of coming to work at Google when it was fewer than 60 people? Let me give you a few impressions. Before I started at Google, I had never said any of the following on the job:
  
  "Yes, I see the eight shelves of programming books. Where do we keep the dictionaries? No, I can't just print out the words as I look them up online."
  "Is it a good idea to have all those bikes leaning against the fire door?"
  "Sorry. Did I get the printer? Super Soakers are really inaccurate at more than 15 feet."
  "Who do I ask if I have questions about Windows? No one? Really?"
  "Wow Larry. Who trashed your office? Well, it's just that... uh, never mind."
  "Wouldn't it be easier to buy Rollerblade wheels that are already assembled?"
  "Is there any way to set the sauna for more than half an hour?"
  "Is it OK to go into the women's locker room to steal some towels?"
  "Oh sorry. Didn't realise anyone was napping in here."
  "See, you knock down more garbage cans if you bounce the ball instead of just rolling it straight at them."
  "It's in the area behind the coffee can pyramid, right across from where the Big Wheel is usually parked."
  
  Google was growing. The company was still self-contained in a single building when the millennium began, but the offices lining the outer edges of the Googleplex had all been occupied.
  
  One day a crew of Pacific Islanders - their thick biceps shrink-wrapped in coconut-leaf tattoos - arrived to fill the open space with cubicles. The area was now partitioned by a maze of cheaply acquired, mismatched fabric panels; the flotsam and jetsam of the dotcoms that had suddenly started sinking all around us. Fast-food toys, manipulative puzzles, empty soda cans and geek-chic objects feathered the work nests. Ratty couches shambled through open areas and settled on brightly coloured crop circles cut into the carpeting, offering lumpy, coffee-stained comfort and filling in for laundry hampers. I brought in a couple of 4ft inflatable dinosaurs and left them to graze on the new flooring.
  
  Walking the grey padded arroyos, I glimpsed the backs of many heads, staring intently at screens. It sounds deadly dull, but there was an energy to the place - conveyed in quiet conversations, snatches of laughter, the squeak of dry-erase markers on rolling whiteboards, exercise balls bouncing and electric scooters humming down hallways.
  
  The head of engineering's woolly mammoth of a dog, Yoshka, ambled past - ears flapping, collar jingling. Someone flopped on a couch, took off their skates and dropped them on the floor. Someone ground coffee beans for an afternoon espresso. A pool cue slapped a cue ball. It passed the aggression on - smacking an eight-ball loitering in its path and sending it into the deep funk of a faux-leather pocket.
  
  I felt the tension of potential - building and bound only by time - like crossing the tracks in front of an idling train. Great efforts were being made. They vibrated just beyond the visible, rippling outward and seeking physical release. Sometimes that physical release took an intimate form behind closed doors with a willing partner. "Hormones were flying and not everyone remembered to lock their doors," recalls HR manager Heather Carnes.
  
  Larry and Sergey encouraged everyone to channel their excess energy into roller hockey instead. Any employee who signed up was issued a free jersey emblazoned with his or her name and Google's logo. Hockey provided yet another metric by which Googlers could be evaluated.
  
  "There is no better way to get to know someone," facilities manager George Salah, a regular participant, believed. "To have their true colours come out, play sports with them. You get to see how aggressive they are, if they're ruthless or not, if they're capable of giving 110 per cent."
  
  At the age of 41, I had much to prove. I voiced objections based on "irrelevant" experience gained over a 20-year career. I drove a station wagon that smelt of baby wipes and spit-up. I didn't want the unripened grads with whom I shared the locker room to assume I was slowing down physically or mentally. One afternoon, the receptionist called. "Doug, can you come downstairs? Sergey asked if you could load his scuba gear in the car. He said you're the strongest guy here." "Sure," I replied. Halfway to the lobby, I slowed down. Then I stopped. The founder of the company wanted me to do his scutwork. That couldn't be good, could it? But Sergey felt I was uniquely capable. That was a plus, right? I was glad to be singled out, but embarrassed about the reason for it. Was I that in need of recognition? Google's obsession with metrics was forcing me to take stock of my own capabilities. What did I bring to the table? What were my limits? How did I compare? Insecurity was a game all Googlers could play, especially about intellectual inferiority.
  
  Everyone but a handful felt they were bringing down the curve. I began to realise how closely ambition linked to insecurity and how adeptly Google leveraged the latter to inflate the former - urging us to pull ever harder to advance not just ourselves, but the company as whole.
  
  Towards the end of my Google run, a newly hired senior manager put into words what I had discovered long before. "Let's face it,Doug," he confided to me, "Google hires really bright, insecure people and then applies sufficient pressure that - no matter how hard they work - they're never able to consider themselves successful. Look at all the kids in my group who work absurd hours and still feel they're not keeping up with everyone else."
  
  I had to agree that fear of inadequacy was a useful lever for prying the last drop of productivity out of dedicated employees. Everyone wanted to prove they belonged among the elite club of Google contributors. The manager who articulated that theory, though, considered himself too secure to play that game. Which may be why he lasted less than a year at Google.
  
  Many of my overcaffeinated twentysomething colleagues had relocated from outside the Bay Area. They had no local friends, no attachments, no relatives to distract them. They had Google. It was hard to let go of the absolutes I had clung to so tightly over a long career of managing brands. Sergey tried to help me by prying tenets from my rigid belief system and beating me over the head with them. Case in point, the daily affirmation I chanted to our logo's inviolate purity. "This is our logo." "It looks like this." "If it looks like this, it's our logo." "Because our logo looks like this." One of the convictions I brought with me to Google, based on the two books I had read about branding, was that you needed to present your company's graphic signature in a monomaniacally consistent manner; to pound it into the public consciousness with a thousand tiny taps, each one exactly the same as the one before.
  
  So when Sergey reminded me that he wanted us to play with Google's signature home-page graphic, I put my foot down. Remember, this was not only the most prominent placement of our logo; it was the only placement of our logo. We weren't advertising on TV or on billboards or in print. The logo floating in all that white space was it. And though we had millions of users, we were hardly so well known that we could assume people already had our brandmark burned into their brains.
  
  Sergey didn't see the big deal. He had changed the logo twice during Google's infancy, adding a clip-art turkey on Thanksgiving, 1998, and putting up a Burning Man cartoon when the staff took off to explore nakedness in the Nevada desert. But now Google was a real company, I told him. Real companies don't do that. Even as we argued, Sergey enlisted webmaster Karen White to resurrect the turkey for Thanksgiving, create a holiday snowman in December, and festoon the logo with a hat and confetti for New Year's 2000. "What about aliens?" he asked. "Let's put aliens on the home page. We'll change it every day. It will be like a comic strip that people come back to read."
  
  I tried not to be condescending. I explained again why it was bad branding. I gave him my spiel about consistency of messaging and uniform touch points and assured him it wasn't just my opinion; it was the consensus of marketing professionals worldwide. Manipulating one's logo was identity dilutionary.
  
  I knew I had finally convinced him when he stopped asking me about it. I was wrong. Sergey wasn't convinced; he just didn't like repeating himself. So he turned to marketing manager Susan Wojcicki instead. Susan didn't argue - she started looking for an artist to execute Sergey's vision. She found illustrator Ian Marsden and put him to work. In May 2000, Ian created the first Google doodle. It featured, surprise, surprise, aliens making off with our logo. NYU professor Ken Perlin created a bouncing heart applet for Valentine's Day and a bouncing bunny game for Easter. Larry showed his gratitude with an offer of Google stock sufficient to make the code Ken sent us - line for line - quite possibly the most expensive ever written.
  
  Our users loved the randomness of the logo artwork and sent us dozens of appreciative e-mails. Google's brilliant strategy of humanising an otherwise sterile interface with cute little cartoon creatures was an enormous hit and as the company's online brand manager - the person responsible for building Google's awareness and brand equity - I had opposed it as adamantly as I could. Yes, if it had been left to me, there would be no Google doodles at all; just our cold stiff logo lying in state, wrapped in a sterile sheet of pristine white pixels.
  
  It was so blindingly obvious that I was right, yet I was so clearly wrong. Google did that to you - made you challenge all your assumptions and experience-based ideas until you began to wonder if up was really up, or if it might not actually be a different kind of down. A month after we bought an online archive of Usenet posts known as Deja News, 140 Googlers packed up overnight bags, boarded a fleet of buses and headed for the hills. It was time for Google's annual ski trip.
  
  The ritual started when Google was just eight people and Larry drove a rented van to Lake Tahoe while Sergey, Craig, Ray and Harry killed time playing logic games in the back and Heather struggled to stay awake. The group saved $2.50 a day by designating Larry the only driver, which was a given anyway because Larry wasn't about to put his life in anyone else's hands.
  
  I didn't go with the group in 2000, even though it was clear that the ski trip was not optional. The trip was a team-building exercise and thus only for staff members. No family. That didn't sit well with my wife, Kristen, who had already seen enough at Google to have reservations. The tipping point may have been the day she came to lunch and noticed an attractive twentysomething woman whose thong underwear was all too visible through her sheer harem pants.
  
  "Who's that?" my wife whispered directly in my ear as the woman slid her tray past the entrees toward the desserts. "Oh, just one of the engineers," I replied. "She rides a motorcycle," I offered helpfully. So when I told Kristen that Google required my presence at Lake Tahoe for an employeeonly bonding trip, what she heard was, "Please stay at home with our three children while I head out with a busload of adrenalin-charged, hormone-drenched post-adolescents for three days of bacchanalian binge-drinking, substance abuse and room-key swapping."
  
  As usual, she got it mostly right. I know, because the next year, I convinced her my career would be damaged if I didn't go along. Google lodged us at the elegant Resort at Squaw Creek. It wouldn't cost me anything and it was only for a couple of days. Please, honey? Please? While I'm proud to say I was so hopelessly unhip that I missed out on anything more decadent than a late-night soak in an outdoor hot tub with Larry and a dozen others, it was clear others were showing less restraint.
  
  I heard tales of excess involving not only recent college graduates, but those who had the years and experience to know better. Many of these tales coincidentally began with a visit to 'Charlie's Den' - the room Chef Charlie Ayers occupied with Keith from accounting and an SUV-load of liquor ferried up from Mountain View. As the trip grew in scale and Charlie's hospitality grew in reputation, the party relocated to a luxury suite and then a meeting room with an open bar sporting $75,000 worth of booze and a supply of other social lubricants including herbinfused brownies and dark chocolate gooballs. Out of coincidence, or perhaps the perverse humour of the HR folks managing the event, Larry's room was usually adjacent to the party. One year, all the liquor was unloaded into Larry's suite by mistake. Larry didn't drink, though he carried a thimble-full of beer at parties to put others at ease.
  
  "My mind is money," Larry once told Charlie, pointing to a bottle, "and that kills the brain." "I think he could spare a few brain cells," Charlie told me later. Other members of the executive staff more willingly sacrificed bits of grey matter, and Charlie would make sure their rooms were stocked with their favourite indulgences in case they didn't make it to the party in the Den.
  
  "It's always cool to see people let loose and have a good time," Charlie observed, confirming the opportunities for staff bonding. "Googlers really let go in ways you wouldn't have seen otherwise." He may have had in mind the toga-wearing ops guys who were only too willing to prove they were unburdened by underwear. Or maybe the sales rep who jumped on the back of another Googler, pulled off her own shirt and began whipping him with it jockey style. Or perhaps, the senior manager seen crawling on all fours, barking like an inebriated hound in the hallway. Preparation tip: don't cook the flavouring ingredient more than once because it loses its potency that way.
  
  There was a pyjama party with costume prizes. Larry won a bet with Sergey, Salar and engineer Lori Park that ended with the losers jumping into an icy Lake Tahoe after dinner.
  
  "We tried to recreate Google's 'un-corporation' attitude," Charlie Ayers explained to me, "a kind of 'f*** you' to the man - the way Google was saying that same thing to the tech industry as a whole."
  
  By 2007, the size of the company made the annual ski trip impossible and Google ended it in favour of smaller outings to more family-friendly locales like Disneyland. That's probably a good thing, though I'll always cherish the scars I earned at broomball and the camaraderie of shared experiences on the slopes and in the lodge. I've heard the speculation about Google since I've left. That it's a monopoly. That it's tracking users. That it's in cahoots with the government. That it spies on people. That it's evil.
  
  Well, maybe it is all that. I haven't worked there in more than five years. Things change. But, based on the people I knew during my time in the Plex - many of whom still put in long hours perfecting a product used by millions every day - I'd say that's highly unlikely.
  
  Is Google secretive? No question. Arrogant? Maybe. Tone-deaf to the concerns of the very users it claims to serve? Occasionally. But evil? I don't think so. I started my career working at ad agencies. It was fun, challenging and potentially wellpaying. I quit because I didn't like the idea I might have to sell something I didn't believe in. I worked in public broadcasting and then newspapers, where I found co-workers who sacrificed material rewards to be part of something more connected to the common good than selling someone else's products. I got that same sense at Google, but with greater intensity and urgency. And stock options. This was no institution continuing a long tradition of public service. This was a headlong rush to reshape the world in a generation. And therein lies the company's biggest flaw in my estimation - impatience with those not quick enough to grasp the obvious truth of Google's vision.
  
  "When were we ever wrong?" Larry asked me.
  
  Not often. But "not often" is not never. If Google's leaders accepted that reality, they might understand why some people are unwilling to suspend scepticism and surrender to Google's assurances the company can be trusted. After Google, I find myself impatient with the way the world works. Why is it so hard to schedule a recording on my DVR? Why aren't all the signal lights synched to keep traffic flowing at optimum speed? Why, if I punch in my account number when I call customer service, do I have to give it to them again when I get a live person? These are all solvable problems. Smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything. I feel lucky to have seen first-hand just how true that is.

Ray Dalio Bridgewater Hedge Fund

Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund, is tall and somewhat gaunt, with an expressive, lined face, gray-blue eyes, and longish gray hair that he parts on the left side. When I met him earlier this year at his office, on the outskirts of Westport, Connecticut, he was wearing an open-necked blue shirt, gray corduroy pants, and black leather boots. He looked a bit like an aging member of a British progressive-rock group. After a few pleasantries, he grabbed a thick briefing book and shepherded me into a large conference room, where his firm was holding what he described as its weekly "What's going on in the world?" meeting.

Of the fifty or so people present, most were clean-cut men in their twenties or thirties. Dalio sat down near the front of the room. A colleague began describing how the European Central Bank had just bought some Greek bonds from investors at a discount to their face value—a move that the speaker described as a possible precursor to an over-all restructuring of Greece’s vast debts. Dalio interrupted him. He said, “Here’s where you are being imprecise,” and then explained at length what a proper debt restructuring would entail, dismissing the E.C.B.’s move as an exercise in “kicking it down the road.”

Dalio is a “macro” investor, which means that he bets mainly on economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth. In search of profitable opportunities, Bridgewater buys and sells more than a hundred different financial instruments around the world—from Japanese bonds to copper futures traded in London to Brazilian currency contracts—which explains why it keeps a close eye on Greece. In 2007, Dalio predicted that the housing-and-lending boom would end badly. Later that year, he warned the Bush Administration that many of the world’s largest banks were on the verge of insolvency. In 2008, a disastrous year for many of Bridgewater’s rivals, the firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund rose in value by nine and a half per cent after accounting for fees. Last year, the Pure Alpha fund rose forty-five per cent, the highest return of any big hedge fund. This year, it is again doing very well.

The discussion in the conference room moved on to Spain, the United Kingdom, and China, where, during the previous week, the central bank had raised interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation. Dalio said that the Chinese economy was in danger of overheating, and somebody asked how a Chinese slowdown would affect the price of oil and other commodities. Greg Jensen, Bridgewater’s co-chief executive and co-chief investment officer, who is thirty-six, said he thought that even a stuttering China would still grow fast enough to push world commodity prices upward.

Dalio asked for another opinion. From the back of the room, a young man dressed in a black sweatshirt started saying that a Chinese slowdown could have a big effect on global supply and demand. Dalio cut him off: “Are you going to answer me knowledgeably or are you going to give me a guess?” The young man, whom I will call Jack, said he would hazard an educated guess. “Don’t do that,” Dalio said. He went on, “You have a tendency to do this. . . . We’ve talked about this before.” After an awkward silence, Jack tried to defend himself, saying that he thought he had been asked to give his views. Dalio didn’t let up. Eventually, the young employee said that he would go away and do some careful calculations.

After the meeting, Dalio told me that the exchange had been typical for Bridgewater, where he encourages people to challenge one another’s views, regardless of rank, in what he calls a culture of “radical transparency.” Dalio had no qualms about upbraiding a junior employee in front of me and dozens of his colleagues. When confusions arise, he said, it is important to discuss them openly, even if that involves publicly pointing out people’s mistakes—a process he referred to as “getting in synch.” He added, “I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.”

Dalio is rich—preposterously rich. Last year alone, he earned between two and three billion dollars, and reached No. 55 on the Forbes 400 list. But what distinguishes him more from other hedge-fund managers is the depth of his economic analysis and the pretensions of his intellectual ambition. He is very keen to be seen as something more than a billionaire trader. Indeed, like his sometime rival George Soros, he appears to aspire to the role of worldly philosopher. In October, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, he circulated a twenty-page essay immodestly titled “A Template for Understanding What’s Going On,” which said the economy faced not just a common recession but a “deleveraging”—a period in which people cut back on borrowing and rebuild their savings—the impact of which would be felt for a generation. This line of analysis wasn’t unique to Dalio, but almost three years later, with economic growth stagnating again, it does not seem off the mark.

Many hedge-fund managers stay pinned to their computer screens day and night monitoring movements in the markets. Dalio is different. He spends most of his time trying to figure out how economic and financial events fit together in a coherent framework. “Almost everything is like a machine,” he told me one day when he was rambling on, as he often does. “Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.” His constant goal, he said, was to understand how the economic machine works. “And then everything else I basically view as just a case at hand. So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work—what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?” Dalio is serenely convinced that the precepts he relies on in the markets can be applied to other aspects of life, such as career development and management. And he has enough regard for his own views on these subjects to have collected them in print. Before our meeting, he sent me a copy of his “Principles,” a hundred-page text that is required reading for Bridgewater’s new hires. It turned out to be partly a self-help book, partly a management manual, and partly a treatise on the principles of natural selection as they apply to business. “I believe that all successful people operate by principles that help them be successful,” a passage on the second page said. The text was organized into three sections: “5 Steps to Personal Evolution,” “10 Steps to Personal Decision-Making,” and “Management Principles.” The last of the two hundred and seventy-seven management principles was: “Constantly worry about what you are missing. Even if you acknowledge you are a ‘dumb shit’ and are following the principles and are designing around your weaknesses, understand that you might still be missing things. You will be better and be safer this way.”

Dalio’s philosophy has created a workplace that some call creepy. Last year, Dealbreaker, a Wall Street Web site, picked up a copy of the Principles and made fun of a section in which Dalio appeared to compare Bridgewater to a pack of hyenas feeding on a young wildebeest. In March, AR, a magazine that covers hedge funds, quoted a former colleague of Dalio’s saying, “Bridgewater is a cult. It’s isolated, it has a charismatic leader and it has its own dogma.” The authors of the article noted that Dalio’s “emphasis on tearing down an individual’s ego hints at the so-called struggle groups of Maoism,” while his search for “human perfection devoid of emotion resembles the fantasy world in Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead.’”

Dalio doesn’t pretend that Bridgewater is a typical workplace, but he is sensitive to criticism. The recent media attention irked him, because, in his view, it misrepresented and trivialized Bridgewater’s culture, which he insists is central to the firm’s success. “It is why we made money for our clients during the financial crisis when most others went over the cliff,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “Our greatest power is that we know that we don’t know and we are open to being wrong and learning.”

After the “What’s going on in the world?” meeting, he walked back to his office, an airy but modest-sized corner space that overlooks the Saugatuck River and is lined with pictures of his wife and four sons. He sat down behind his desk and showed me a book he had been reading—“Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius,” by Hans C. Ohanian. “Here was the greatest mind of the twentieth century, and he made lots of mistakes,” Dalio said. In his Principles, Dalio declares that acknowledging errors, studying them, and learning from them is the key to success. He writes, “Pain + Reflection = Progress.” Bridgewater puts this equation into action by organizing lengthy assessment sessions, in which employees must discuss their mistakes.

The next item on Dalio’s agenda was a meeting with his two co-chief executives: Jensen and David McCormick, a former senior official in the Treasury Department under George W. Bush. Like virtually all meetings at Bridgewater, this one was taped. Dalio says that the tapes—some audio, some video—provide an objective record of what has been said; they can be used for training purposes, and they allow Bridgewater’s employees to keep up with what is going on at the firm, including his discussions with senior colleagues. “They get to see all of my mistakes,” Dalio told me. “They get to see all of my humanity.”

Once a tape recorder had been switched on, Jensen, McCormick, and Dalio discussed the possible promotion of an internal candidate to a senior-management role. McCormick, a soft-spoken forty-five-year-old who studied engineering at West Point, argued that the candidate’s prior experience at a big Wall Street firm indicated that he could probably do the job. Dalio disagreed. An investment bank is a “totally different world,” he said. But, rather than continue the discussion, he asked one of his assistants to call in the candidate. One rule of radical transparency is that Bridgewater employees refrain from saying behind a person’s back anything that they wouldn’t say to his face.

The man arrived and stood before Dalio’s desk. Dalio explained what the discussion was about and said, “I don’t imagine that you would be a good fit for the job.” The man took a seat, and Dalio and McCormick continued their discussion about his qualifications. The candidate explained his experience on Wall Street and said he thought he could do the job well. Dalio leaned back in his chair, looking skeptical. The employee didn’t get the promotion. The only child of Italian-American parents, Ray Dalio was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1949. His father was a jazz musician who played the clarinet and saxophone at Manhattan jazz clubs such as the Copacabana; his mother was a homemaker. When Dalio was eight, the family bought a three-bedroom house in Manhasset, and enrolled Ray in the local public school. “I was a bad student,” he recalls. “I have a bad rote memory, and I didn’t like studying.” From the age of twelve, Dalio caddied at the nearby Links Golf Club, whose members included many Wall Street investors. Some of them gave Dalio tips. The first stock he purchased was Northeastern Airlines, which soon received a takeover offer. Its shares tripled. “I figured that this was an easy game,” Dalio said. By the time he started college, at a nearby campus of Long Island University, he had built up a stock portfolio worth several thousand dollars.

After signing up for some finance classes, he discovered that there were some topics he enjoyed studying. Transcendental meditation, which he took up following a trip to India by the Beatles, also helped his work habits. Most mornings before going to the office, he still meditates. Demonstrating his technique, he sat back in his office chair, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands in front of him. “It’s just a mental exercise in which you are clearing your mind,” he said. “Creativity comes from open-mindedness and centeredness—seeing things in a nonemotionally charged way.”

After graduating, Dalio went to Harvard Business School, where he traded commodities—grains, oil, cotton, and so on—for his own account. Not long after leaving Harvard, he landed at Shearson Hayden Stone, the brokerage firm run by Sanford Weill. Dalio worked in the commodity-futures department, advising cattle ranchers, grain producers, and others on how to hedge risks. (The horns of a longhorn steer, the gift of some California ranchers, are mounted behind his desk.) On New Year’s Eve in 1974, Dalio went out drinking with his departmental boss, got into a disagreement, and slugged him. About the same time, at the annual convention of the California Food & Grain Growers’ Association, he paid an exotic dancer to drop her cloak in front of the crowd. After being fired, he persuaded some of his clients to hire him as a consultant and founded Bridgewater, operating it out of his two-bedroom apartment. He was twenty-six years old.

By the early nineteen-eighties, Dalio had got married, started a family, and moved to Wilton, Connecticut, where he lived and traded out of a converted barn. He also advised businesses on how to manage risk and published an economic newsletter. One of his readers was Bob Prince, a young financial analyst who worked for a bank in Oklahoma, and who is now Bridgewater’s co-chief investment officer. Prince showed one of Dalio’s articles to his boss, David Moffett, who went on to become the chief executive of Freddie Mac. “He said it was the best thing he had ever read on how the economy works,” Prince recalled. Another of Dalio’s articles that stuck in Prince’s memory was titled “What Is a Jeweler?” It described a jeweller as basically an investor with a long position in gold and precious stones. If the market price of these commodities goes up, the jeweller makes money on his stock. If prices fall, he can lose out. To limit the risk, Dalio wrote that jewellers should purchase gold-futures contracts designed to rise in value when the price of gold falls.

In 1985, Dalio persuaded the World Bank’s employee-retirement fund to let Bridgewater manage some of its capital. In 1989, Kodak’s retirement system did the same. At the time, Kodak had most of its money invested in stocks. Dalio’s pitch, which hasn’t changed much over the years, was that by investing in a variety of other markets, such as U.S. and international bonds, and using leverage to bolster its exposure, Bridgewater could match or beat the stock market with less risk. “He had a new way of thinking,” Rusty Olson, who ran Kodak’s retirement funds for many years, told me. “You get the same return, but you get a heck of a lot of beneficial diversification, too.”

Hedge funds date to 1949, when Alfred Winslow Jones, a writer at Fortune, opened a private investment firm using sixty thousand dollars he had raised from friends and forty thousand he had saved. To boost his returns, Jones borrowed heavily and bought stocks he liked “on margin”—a practice that had been discredited in the late nineteen-twenties. As a “hedge” against the market falling, Jones also picked out some stocks he believed to be overvalued and bet against them—a practice known as “selling short.” Jones’s fund regularly beat the Dow, and by the late nineteen-sixties it had attracted many imitators.

Worldwide, there are now some ten thousand hedge funds, which the government regulates only loosely. Together, they have about two trillion dollars under management. Even today, they employ the two basic tools that Jones used—borrowing (“leverage”) and selling short—and they charge their clients hefty fees, as Jones did. On top of a two-per-cent management fee, they deduct twenty per cent of any investment gains they generate. Jones claimed that this remuneration scheme, which is known as “two and twenty,” was inspired by the way ancient Phoenician merchants financed their trading expeditions. But the practice is also tax-driven. It allows hedge-fund managers to classify much of their income as capital gains, which are taxed at a far lower rate than regular income. While cops and schoolteachers face a marginal tax rate of twenty-five per cent, hedge-fund managers like Dalio have for years paid fifteen per cent on the lion’s share of their income.

Some hedge-fund managers, such as Steven A. Cohen, of S.A.C. Capital, and David Einhorn, of Greenlight Capital, are stock pickers, like Jones. Others, such as James Simons, of Renaissance Technologies, are known as “quants.” They use computers to sift through market data, spot profitable opportunities, and place trades, all with minimal human intervention. As a macro trader, Dalio is working in the tradition of George Soros and Julian Robertson, famous speculators who ranged across markets.

Bridgewater has long run two primary investment funds. One, called All Weather, has low charges attached to it and seeks to match the over-all market return, which is known as “beta,” in whichever market the client chooses. Another, Pure Alpha, which has the standard two-and-twenty charges, aims at beating the market return but also at limiting risk. To investment professionals, “alpha” is the return over and above the market return. If in a given year the S. & P. 500 returns fifteen per cent and an equity-fund manager generates a return of twenty per cent, his alpha is five per cent.

Part of Dalio’s innovation has been to build a hedge fund that caters principally to institutional investors rather than to rich individuals. Of the roughly one hundred billion dollars invested in Bridgewater, only a small proportion comes from wealthy families. Almost a third comes from public pension funds, such as the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System; another third comes from corporate pension funds, such as those at Kodak and General Motors; a quarter comes from government-run sovereign wealth funds, such as the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore. “Making money on a constant basis is the holy grail, and Ray and Bridgewater have done that,” Ng Kok-Song, the chief investment officer of the Singapore fund, told me. “They are consistently innovating—constantly soul-searching and asking, ‘Have we got this right?’ ” Kok-Song went on, “I am constantly asking myself, ‘If Bridgewater is doing this, shouldn’t we be doing the same thing?’ ”

At some hedge funds, client service is an afterthought. Bridgewater’s investors receive a daily newsletter, monthly performance updates, quarterly reviews, and conference-call briefings from Dalio and other senior executives. “When a lot of folks were very, very secretive, Ray could see the value in creating something that was more open, something that was attractive to very large streams of money,” Robert Johnson, a former senior executive at Soros Fund Management, who now runs the Institute for New Economic Thinking, said to me. Recently, the hedge-fund industry has been shaken by allegations that it exploits inside information. In May, Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group, was convicted on fourteen counts of conspiracy and securities fraud. Other government investigations are continuing, including one involving S.A.C. Capital. Dalio and Bridgewater don’t appear to be involved. Dalio told me that Bridgewater hasn’t received any subpoenas, adding that he had no reason to believe that the firm was under investigation by any official agency. Dalio is an outdoorsman and naturalist of the Hemingway school: he likes to go places and kill things. He fishes in Canada, shoots grouse in Scotland, and hunts big game in Africa, with a bow—particularly Cape buffalo, which weigh up to two thousand pounds, are famously ornery, and sometimes gore hunters with their giant horns. Naturally, Dalio sees this as a metaphor for how he invests. “It’s always a matter of controlling risk,” he explained. “Risky things are not in themselves risky if you understand them and control them. If you do it randomly and you are sloppy about it, it can be very risky.” The key to success, he said, is figuring out “Where is the edge? And how do I stay the right distance from the edge?” One way he does it is by spreading his bets: at any given time, the Pure Alpha fund typically has in place about thirty or forty different trades. “I’m always trying to figure out my probability of knowing,” Dalio said. “Given that I’m never sure, I don’t want to have any concentrated bets.” Such thinking runs counter to the conventional wisdom in the hedge-fund industry, which is that the only way to score big is to bet the house. George Soros famously did this in 1992—selling short some ten billion dollars’ worth of sterling. A few years ago, John Paulson wagered hugely against U.S. mortgage bonds and made several billion dollars.

Dalio is a consistent hitter of singles and doubles—the José Reyes of Wall Street. Among the bets the Pure Alpha fund placed last year were long positions in Treasury bonds, the Japanese yen, and gold, and short positions in the euro and European sovereign debt. A potential problem with this type of global investing is that these days many markets move in the same direction, which makes it hard to achieve real diversification. Bridgewater’s solution is to place a lot of “spread” bets, purchasing one security it considers undervalued and selling short another one it considers overvalued. For example, it might buy platinum and sell silver, or buy a thirty-year U.K. bond and sell a ten-year bond. The returns from spread bets tend to be uncorrelated with the over-all market.

Other hedge funds have tried to mimic Dalio’s approach, which is sometimes referred to as “portable alpha,” but none have proved as successful. The strategy depends on an ability to outperform the market consistently, which many economists regard as virtually impossible. Dalio somehow seems to manage it.

At the start of the year, Bridgewater turned bearish on U.S. bonds and built up a short position. When the bond market stumbled, this bet (which the firm has since reversed) paid off handsomely, as did wagers on commodities and emerging-market currencies. So far in 2011, while the average hedge fund has struggled to make any money at all, the Pure Alpha fund is up more than ten per cent. The bet against Treasuries gave the lie to a criticism sometimes made of Dalio—that he is basically a bond-market investor, who has benefitted from a twenty-year rally in bonds. “We have been equally likely to be short bonds or long bonds,” he said. “The performance of the Pure Alpha fund is not correlated with any asset class or any market. It has done equally well in any environment.”

What accounts for Dalio’s success? His colleague Bob Prince describes him as “a big-picture thinker connected to a street-smart” trader. Many economists start at the top and work down. They look at aggregate statistics—inflation, unemployment, the money supply—and figure out what the numbers mean for particular industries, such as autos or tech. Dalio does things the other way around. In any market that interests him, he identifies the buyers and sellers, estimates how much they are likely to demand and supply, and then looks at whether his findings are already reflected in the market price. If not, there may be money to be made. In the U.S. bond market, Bridgewater scrutinizes the weekly U.S. Treasury auctions to see who is buying—American banks, foreign central banks, mutual funds, pension funds, rival hedge funds—and who isn’t. In the commodities markets, the firm goes through a similar exercise, trying to figure out how much demand is coming from corporations and how much from speculators. “It all comes down to who is going to buy and who is going to sell and for what reasons,” Dalio explained.

To guide its investments, Bridgewater has put together hundreds of “decision rules.” These are the financial analogue of Dalio’s Principles. He used to write them down and keep them in a ring binder. Today, they are encoded in Bridgewater’s computers. Some of these indicators are very general. One of them says that if inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline. Others are more specific. One says that, over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.

In any given market, Bridgewater may have a dozen or more different indicators. However, even when most or all of the indicators are pointing in a certain direction, Dalio doesn’t rely solely on software. Unless he and Jensen and Prince agree that a certain trade makes sense, the firm doesn’t make it. While this inevitably introduces an element of human judgment to the investment process, Dalio insists it is still driven by the rules-based framework he has built up over thirty years. “When I’m thinking, ‘What is going on today?,’ I also need to make the connection to ‘How does what is happening today fit into our framework for making this decision?’ ’’ he said. Ultimately, he says, it is the commitment to systematic analysis and systematic investment that distinguishes Bridgewater from other hedge funds. “I hear a lot of people describing what’s happening today without the proper historical context and without the framework of how the machine works,” he says.

In looking at the economy as a whole, Dalio pays particular attention to the amount of credit that banks and other financial institutions are creating, which he regards as a key factor in over-all spending. This may seem like common sense, but until recently many economists and policymakers didn’t pay much heed to the growth of credit, concentrating instead on the amount of actual money in the economy—notes, coins, bank deposits—which is largely determined by the Federal Reserve. In July, 2007, Dalio and a co-author wrote in Bridgewater’s daily newsletter about “crazy lending and leveraging practices,” adding, “We want to avoid or fade this lunacy.” A couple of weeks later, after the subprime-mortgage market froze up, Dalio’s newsletter declared, “This is the financial market unraveling we have been expecting. . . . This will run through the system with the speed of a hurricane.” Searching for historical precedents, Bridgewater put together detailed histories of previous credit crises, going back to Weimar Germany. The firm’s researchers also went through the public accounts of nearly all the major financial institutions in the world and constructed estimates of how much money they stood to lose from bad debts. The figure they came up with was eight hundred and thirty-nine billion dollars. Armed with this information, Dalio visited the Treasury Department in December, 2007, and met with some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s staff. Nobody took much notice of what he said, but he went on to the White House, where he presented his numbers to some senior economic staffers. “Ray laid out the argument that the losses he foresaw in the banking system were astronomical,” a former Bush Administration official who attended the White House meeting recalled. “Everybody else was talking about liquidity. Ray was talking about solvency.”

His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008. Rather, it would be a disaster in which “the financial deleveraging causes a financial crisis that causes an economic crisis. . . . This continues until there is a reflation, a currency devaluation and government guarantees of the efficacy of key financial intermediaries.” As the crisis deepened, Dalio continued to assess it far more accurately than many senior policymakers did. When the government allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, he despaired. “So, now we sit and wait to see if they have some hidden trick up their sleeves, or if they really are as reckless as they seem,” the newsletter said on September 15, 2008.

Eventually, after the near implosion of the financial system had brought about a deep recession, some policymakers came to respect Dalio’s analysis. “I think the central policy judgment was that there was more risk in doing too little than in doing too much,” Lawrence Summers, who headed the National Economic Council between 2009 and 2010, recalled. “That was a judgment I reached, and it was a judgment Ray reached.” While Summers was in the White House, he read Bridgewater’s economic newsletter and spoke every few months with Dalio, whom he described to me as “an impressively intellectually aggressive guy.” Summers went on, “He had a fully articulated way of looking at the economy. I’m not sure I would agree with all of it, but it seems to have been a very powerful analytical tool through this particular period.”

And a powerful investment tool, too. Anticipating that the Federal Reserve would be forced to print a lot of money to revive the economy, Bridgewater placed a number of bets that would pay off in such a scenario—for instance, going long Treasury bonds, shorting the dollar, and buying gold and other commodities. These trades helped the Pure Alpha fund make money in 2008, but Dalio’s bearishness cost him in 2009. Despite the Fed’s actions and the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, Dalio predicted that the economic recovery would be weak. When growth rebounded faster than he expected and the Dow rose nineteen per cent, the Pure Alpha fund gained just four per cent. But last year, when G.D.P. growth faltered, the fund made a great deal of money betting on Treasury bonds and other securities that tend to do well in a weak economy.

In April, an article in New York ridiculed Dalio’s Principles, saying that they read “as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies.” It also accused him of running Bridgewater like a cult. “I’ve been surprised that there’s been so much controversy about us having such clearly set-out principles, especially since they’re all about being truthful and transparent to do good work and have meaningful relationships,” Dalio wrote to me subsequently. “Most of the people who don’t like us having them haven’t read them—they just assume that us having a lot of principles makes us a cult. That’s O.K. I figure that the people who matter to us will take the time to read them and form their own opinions and those who don’t care enough to read them don’t matter to us.”

Dalio may protest too much. The word “cult” clearly has connotations that don’t apply to an enterprise staffed by highly paid employees who can quit at any moment. But Bridgewater’s headquarters are in the woods, isolated from any other financial institution; Dalio is a strong-willed leader; and the employees do use their own vocabulary—Dalio’s vocabulary. Bob Elliott, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard graduate who has worked at Bridgewater for six years, told me earnestly, “Once you understand how the machine works, you have the ability to take that and study and apply it across markets.” It’s also the case that in the time I spent at the firm I saw senior people criticizing subordinates—but not the reverse.

In his Principles, Dalio acknowledged that his firm can seem strange to outsiders and newcomers: “Since Bridgewater’s culture is very different from what is typical in the world at large, people often encounter culture shock when they start here.” In part to minimize this shock, for years Bridgewater recruited young men and women straight out of college. (Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth were favorite targets.) But the firm’s in-your-face attitude—and the relentless pressure to perform—takes its toll. “We get a lot of people who self-select out of that pretty quickly,” Michael Partington, a recruiter at Bridgewater, said to me. Within two years of arriving at Bridgewater, about a quarter of new hires have quit or been let go.

Bridgewater has been expanding rapidly—it now has more than a thousand people on its payroll—and it has brought in a lot of mid-career executives. One day, I drove to Westport and sat in on a management-committee meeting, which had been set up for the purpose of “getting in synch” with a recent recruit, whom I’ll call Peter and who had come from a big financial firm. All nine members of Bridgewater’s management committee were sitting at a long wooden conference table. Peter, a lean man with fair hair, sat stiffly near the front: he looked like somebody anticipating a root canal. Jensen and McCormick were nominally in charge, but Dalio took over, telling Peter that, during a previous management meeting, he had answered emotionally in response to questioning from Jensen. “This is a common thing when somebody’s getting probed,” Dalio said. “Because the amygdala gets stimulated and you have that emotional reaction.” Peter agreed that he had become upset, especially when he sensed he was being accused of misleading his colleagues. “I felt in some sense my integrity was being attacked,” he said. “That’s when things spiralled out of control.”

Dalio walked to the front of the room, where he wrote on a whiteboard, “felt,” “integrity,” and “misled.” “?‘Felt’ is the key word here . . . and it’s a challenge for people,” he said. After a bit more discussion, he went on, “What we’re trying to have is a place where there are no ego barriers, no emotional reactions to mistakes. . . . If we could eliminate all those reactions, we’d learn so much faster.” Another member of the committee, Eileen Murray, intervened to say she assumed that Peter had not encountered this type of conversation at his previous job. He confirmed that he hadn’t. Murray nodded sympathetically. “When I first came here, I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” she said.

Dalio wasn’t finished. He suggested that the problem was that Peter had an idea of how things should be handled, and when the reality turned out to be different he hadn’t been honest with his colleagues. “The issue is that you are not freely releasing those beliefs,” he said to Peter. “Unlike a lot of companies, where you are meant to sit there and be quiet . . . here we respect your notion that you have a point of view. . . . Your responsibility is to say, ‘Does it make sense to me?’ And if it doesn’t make sense don’t keep it bottled up.” Dalio went on, “I’m saying, just let it flow, man.”

Peter said he thought it was understandable that somebody new to the firm would react under stress as he had. Still, he added, “If I had to replay this thing again, I’d be much more open with my thoughts.” “What would you say the duty of a leader is?” Dalio asked him. Peter replied, “The duty of a leader, first and foremost, is to be transparent.” Bridgewater’s decision rules surely contribute to his firm’s success. But Dalio also believes that his management principles play a role. “What is a typical organization?” he asked me one day. “A typical organization is one where people are walking around saying, ‘This is stupid, this doesn’t make sense,’ behind each other’s backs.” In support of his management theories, Dalio has an expert witness. “About eighty-five per cent of what’s in the Principles could be documented and supported by research,” Bob Eichinger, an organizational psychologist who has done consulting work for Bridgewater and other large companies, said. Eichinger went on, “Is it a better way to run a company? From a results perspective, probably so. Could a large portion of the working population be comfortable in that environment? Probably not.”

Some senior executives at Bridgewater do relish working there. Eileen Murray, who runs the firm’s accounting and technology systems, is one of them. Before moving to Bridgewater, in 2009, she spent twenty-five years on Wall Street, rising to a senior post at Morgan Stanley. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t joining some petri dish in Westport, Connecticut, as part of a big experiment,” she said, recalling her initial, lengthy conversations with Dalio. “If someone’s intention is to make me a better person, I really appreciate that. If people do things because they can, or because they are the boss . . . I don’t react to that well.” Murray said she is now reassured, because “the intention is to make people better. . . . I have never seen a C.E.O. spend as much time developing his people as Ray.”

Another new member of Bridgewater’s management committee is James Comey, the firm’s top lawyer, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the Bush Administration between 2003 and 2005. “Most of my friends think I am having a midlife crisis,” Comey told me in a recent phone conversation, referring to his decision, last year, to leave Lockheed Martin and accept an offer from Dalio. He was tired of corporate politics and craved a setting where people spoke truth to power, but, he said, it took him a while to get used to dealing with Dalio. “When Ray sent me an e-mail saying, ‘I think what you said today doesn’t make sense,’ I tended to think, What does he really mean? Where’s he coming from? And what is my play? Who are my allies? All of the things you think about in the outside world. It took me three months to realize that when Ray says, ‘I think you are wrong,’ he really means ‘I think you are wrong.’ He’s not trying to provoke you, or anything else.”

Comey was initially struck by how long it took Bridgewater to make decisions, because of the ceaseless internal debates. “I said, ‘Lordy, we have to put tops on bottoms. Let’s get something done,’ ” Comey recalled. But he added, laughing, “The mind control is working. I’ve come to believe that all the probing actually reduces inefficiencies over the long run, because it prevents bad decisions from being made.” Comey said of Dalio, “He’s tough and he’s demanding and sometimes he talks too much, but, God, is he a smart bastard.” And yet Dalio’s acuity prompts an awkward question: how much of Bridgewater’s success comes not from the way it is organized, or any notion of “radical transparency,” but from the boss’s raw investment abilities? At other hedge funds, it is taken for granted that the firm’s principal asset walks out the door every evening and settles into a chauffeur-driven car. Is Bridgewater really any different? Although the firm trades in more than a hundred markets, it is widely believed that the great bulk of its profit comes from two areas in which Dalio is an expert: the bond and currency markets of major industrial countries. Unlike some other hedge funds, Bridgewater has never made much money in the U.S. stock market, an area where Dalio has less experience. “Bridgewater really is Ray,” one former employee told me. “The key decisions they have made—where they have really made their money—is Ray. Most of what really matters is Ray, with help from Greg and Bob. You could run the firm with forty or fifty people instead of a thousand, and it would be basically the same.” As long as Dalio remains healthy, the fact that he plays a key role in directing Bridgewater’s investments isn’t an issue. (Based on past experience, it is a big advantage.) But, from a business and marketing perspective, the suggestion that Bridgewater’s success continues to hinge on Dalio is a problematic one. As the former employee explained, “It’s hard to market that model—one guy and his brilliant track record. If you want to sell your firm to institutional clients, it’s critical to appear to be ‘rule-driven.’ That takes a lot of smarts. Most people want to take the credit. To say ‘I just run this machine’ detracts from your own individual brilliance. But that is very smart business.”

Dalio contests this account. He insists that he is but one member of a large team, with Greg Jensen and Bob Prince acting as his co-chief investment officers. He compares the comments of former employees to the carping of ex-spouses. In fact, with the firm prospering, Dalio has been living up to a promise to spend a bit more time away from it, and he has ceded some day-to-day management responsibility to Jensen and McCormick. “I’m stepping back a little: I’m going to a minister/mentor role,” Dalio said, comparing himself to Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, who relinquished his post in 1990 but even today retains great influence. This month, Dalio is formally giving up his co-C.E.O. title in favor of “Mentor.”

The managerial changes and Dalio’s lean appearance have ignited some speculation that he is sick, but he insisted to me that he is fine. He said his weight loss was the result of an “intended weight-loss program,” and he said he has absolutely no intention of giving up his role in directing Bridgewater’s investments. In stepping back from day-to-day management and in bringing in senior people, he said he is seeking to preserve the essence of the firm he built while preparing it for his eventual departure. Bridgewater has grown so large that its two main funds are now closed to new investors. Recently it launched a third fund, which is called Pure Alpha Major Markets.

Last year, Dalio sold about twenty per cent of Bridgewater to some of its employees in a deal financed by several of the firm’s longtime clients, and he told me that ultimately he would like to sell his entire ownership stake to his colleagues. Unlike certain other hedge-fund managers, though, he has no interest in making another fortune by floating his firm on the stock market. “I don’t want Bridgewater to go public or have it controlled by anybody outside the firm,” he said. “I think people who do that tend to mess up the firm.” Dalio insists that money has never been his main motivation. He lives well, but avoids the conspicuous consumption that some of his rivals indulge in. He and his wife, Barbara, to whom he has been married for thirty-four years, own two houses, one in Greenwich, Connecticut, and one in Greenwich Village, which he sometimes uses on weekends. (They are currently building a new house on the water in Connecticut.) Apart from hunting and exploring remote areas, Dalio’s main hobby is music: jazz, blues, and rock and roll. Recently, he joined a philanthropic campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, pledging to give away at least half of his money. (Forbes estimates his net worth at six billion dollars.) He and his wife wrote in a public letter, “We learned that beyond having enough money to help secure the basics—quality relationships, health, stimulating ideas, etc.—having more money, while nice, wasn’t all that important.”

Not that Dalio makes any apology for his fortune or his profession. An agnostic and a self-described “hyperrealist,” he regards it as self-evident that all social systems obey nature’s laws, and that individual participants get rewarded or punished according to how far they operate in harmony with those laws. He views the financial markets as simply another social system, which determines payoffs and punishments in a like manner. “You have to be accurate,” he says. “Otherwise, you are going to pay. Alpha is zero sum. In order to earn more than the market return, you have to take money from somebody else.”

Dalio is right, but somewhat self-serving. If hedge-fund managers are playing a zero-sum game, what is their social utility? And if, as many critics contend, there isn’t any, how can they justify their vast remuneration? When I put these questions to Dalio, he insisted that, through pension funds, Bridgewater’s investors include teachers and other public-sector workers, and that the firm created more value for its clients last year than Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo combined. However, it is one thing to say that the most successful hedge-fund managers earn the riches they reap. It is quite another to suggest that the entire industry serves a social purpose. But that is Dalio’s contention. “In aggregate, it really contributes a lot to the efficiency of capital allocation, and capital allocation is very important,” he said.

Like many successful financiers, Dalio justifies capitalism and his place in it as a Darwinian process, in which the over-all logic of the system is sometimes hidden. This is actually what the mention, in his Principles, of hyenas savaging a wildebeest was about. “Is this good or bad?” he wrote. Like “death itself, this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life.” Of course, this view conveniently ignores the argument that hedge funds, through their herd behavior, have contributed to speculative bubbles, in tech stocks, oil, and other commodities. Even some defenders of the industry concede that the problem is real and potentially calamitous. “There is a basis for the argument that hedge funds add economic value,” Andrew Lo, an economist at M.I.T. who runs his own hedge fund, says. “At the same time, they create systemic risks that have to be weighed against those positives.”

Because hedge funds use a lot of borrowed money to magnify their bets, they are subject to rapid reversals: the history of the industry is littered with blowups. This wouldn’t matter much if other parts of the economy weren’t affected by the actions of hedge funds, but sometimes they are. In 2008, hedge funds had hundreds of billions of dollars on deposit at investment banks, which acted as their brokers and counterparties on many trades. When the Wall Street firms got into trouble, a number of other hedge funds demanded their money back immediately. These demands amounted to a virtual run on the banks and helped to bring down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Dalio acknowledged to me that Bridgewater was one of the funds that pulled a lot of money out of Lehman and other Wall Street firms, but he said he had little choice. “I’m a fiduciary to my clients. My responsibility is to know where it’s risky and where it’s not risky, and to get out of the risks.”

Hedge funds have also contributed to the radical increase in income inequality. Fifteen years ago on Wall Street, remuneration packages of five or ten million dollars a year were rare. Today, C.E.O.s and star traders routinely demand vastly higher sums to keep up with their counterparts at hedge funds. In addition to distorting salary structures elsewhere, the rewards that hedge-fund managers reap draw some of the very brightest science and mathematics graduates to the industry. Can it really be in America’s interest to have so much of its young talent playing a zero-sum game?

Rather than confronting these issues, Dalio, like all successful predators, is concentrating on the business at hand—the markets and the global economic outlook. This spring, he told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. “We are still in a deleveraging period,” he said. “We will be in a deleveraging period for ten years or more.”

Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo “classic depressions,” Dalio said. The recent deal to avoid an immediate debt default by Greece didn’t alter his pessimistic view. “People concentrate on the particular thing of the moment, and they forget the larger underlying forces,” he said. “That’s what got us into the debt crisis. It’s just today, today.”

Dalio’s assessment sounded alarmingly plausible. But when one plays the global financial markets a thorough economic analysis is only the first stage of the game. At least as important is getting the timing right. I asked Dalio when all this would start to come together. “I think late 2012 or early 2013 is going to be another very difficult period,” he said.

Philip Leakey

We are born with what some psychologists call an "explanatory drive." You give a baby a strange object or something that doesn’t make sense and she will become instantly absorbed; using all her abilities — taste, smell, force — to figure out how it fits in with the world.

I recently met someone who, though in his seventh decade, still seems to be gripped by this sort of compulsive curiosity. His name is Philip Leakey.

He is the third son of the famed paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey and the brother of the equally renowned scholar, Richard Leakey. Philip was raised by people whose lives were driven by questions. Parts of his childhood were organized around expeditions to places like Olduvai Gorge where Louis and most especially Mary searched for bones, footprints and artifacts of early man. The Leakeys also tend to have large personalities. Strains of adventurousness, contentiousness, impulsivity and romance run through the family, producing spellbinding people who are sometimes hard to deal with.

Philip was also reared in the Kenyan bush. There are certain people whose lives are permanently shaped by their frontier childhoods. They grew up out in nature, adventuring alone for long stretches, befriending strange animals and snakes, studying bugs and rock formations, learning to fend for themselves. (The Leakeys are the sort of people who, when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, manage to fix the engine with the innards of a cow.)

This sort of childhood seems to have imprinted Philip with a certain definition of happiness — out there in the bush, lost in some experiment. Naturally, he wasn’t going to fit in at boarding school.

At 16, he decided to drop out and made a deal with his parents. He would fend for himself if they would hire a tutor to teach him Swahili. Kenya has 42 native tribes, and over the next years Phillip moved in with several. He started a series of small businesses — mining, safari, fertilizer manufacturing and so on. As one Kenyan told me, it’s quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.

The Leakey family has been prolifically chronicled, and in some of the memoirs Philip comes off as something of a black sheep, who could never focus on one thing. But he became the first white Kenyan to win election to Parliament after independence, serving there for 15 years.

I met him at the remote mountain camp where he now lives, a bumpy 4-hour ride south of Nairobi near the Rift Valley. Leakey and his wife Katy — an artist who baby-sat for Jane Goodall and led a cultural expedition up the Amazon — have created an enterprise called the Leakey Collection, which employs up to 1,200 of the local Maasai, and sells designer jewelry and household items around the world.

The Leakeys live in a mountaintop tent. Their kitchen and dining room is a lean-to with endless views across the valley. The workers sit out under the trees gossiping and making jewelry. Getting a tour of the facilities is like walking through Swiss Family Robinson or Dr. Dolittle.

Philip has experiments running up and down the mountainside. He's trying to build an irrigation system that doubles as a tilapia farm. He's trying to graft fruit trees onto native trees so they can survive in rocky soil. He's completing a pit to turn cow manure into electricity and plans to build a micro-hyrdroelectric generator in a local stream.

Leakey and his workers devise and build their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard acacia wood. They’re inventing their own dyes for the Leakey Collection’s Zulugrass jewelry, planning to use Marula trees to make body lotion, designing cement beehives to foil the honey badgers. They have also started a midwife training program and a women’s health initiative.

Philip guides you like an eager kid at his own personal science fair, pausing to scratch into the earth where Iron Age settlers once built a forge. He says that about one in seven of his experiments pans out, noting there is no such thing as a free education.

Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.

Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment.

The late Richard Holbrooke used to give the essential piece of advice for a question-driven life: Know something about something. Don’t just present your wonderful self to the world. Constantly amass knowledge and offer it around.

Alan Whicker

Alan Whicker, who has died aged 87, once said he was the only person who really was interested in other people’s holiday snaps. It was this innate sense of curiosity that drove his career as a reporter and presenter. Over five decades, he went from being a war correspondent to unearthing the impressive and bizarre in his series Whicker’s World.

His dapper figure, inevitably clothed in neatly pressed slacks, blazer and regimental-style tie, made him one of the most recognised figures on television. His scripts had a full quota of alliteration and puns, and his slightly nasal delivery was distinctive — and much mimicked, most notably by Monty Python. His interviewing technique was relaxed, and he never shirked an awkward or embarrassing question. The secret, he said, was to ask it agreeably.

Three years after Whicker’s birth in Cairo, his family moved to Richmond in Surrey. His father, a former army officer, became ill and died soon after the move.

Whicker was educated at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree, Hertfordshire, and joined the army straight from school. He was commissioned in the Devonshire Regiment and worked with the army film unit in Italy, directing cameramen.

After leaving the army he got a job as a newspaper reporter and found himself working as a war correspondent covering the conflict in Korea. At one stage it was reported he had been killed. But a telegram to his office — “Unkilled, Uninjured, Onpressing” — reassured his editor the despatches would keep coming. He joined BBC television in 1957 and worked on the Tonight programme, which saw him presenting a whole series of offbeat reports from a wide variety of places and countries.

Two years later came Whicker’s World. In a remarkable run of 30 years, first on the BBC and then ITV, he crossed continents covering a bewildering variety of topics. His list of interviews was a veritable host of the great, the good and the not so good, most notably the notorious Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Peter Sellers, Joan Collins and the Sultan of Brunei were among the figures who subjected themselves to his courteous but penetrating style of questioning.

He effortlessly crossed class divides and had a natural ability to persuade his subjects to bare all for the camera. At his best he would charm his way into people’s confidence, then allow them enough rope to hang themselves.

Whicker never married, but he once lived with the millionairess Olga Deterding, who made him the beneficiary of her will. From 1969 he shared his home in Jersey with his partner, Valerie Kleeman.

Michael Palin

Some years ago, in the course of one of his long journeys for television, Michael Palin was in a hotel room in Helsinki. The phone rang.

“It was some Finnish fans,” he recalls. “I said, ‘It’s not a good time.’ They said, ‘We can come any time.’ I said, ‘I am at the hotel packing.’ The voice said, ‘We’re in the lobby, it’s fine. We can come up and see you.’ ” It is easy to imagine the mounting frustration of the famously polite Palin as the voice on the end of the phone refused to be deterred. “I got quite ratty. I said: ‘It’s really not a good time.’ ” Then the stubborn Finn delivered the ultimate insult: “We just wanted to ask you what it was like working with John Cleese.” Palin exploded. “I said: ‘That’s it, absolutely not. Ask John Cleese.’ There was this great tubercular laugh on the other end and, of course, it was John. Just brilliant. Got me completely.”

Cleese himself recounted this story recently at Palin’s 70th birthday party at the Union Club in Soho. Fellow Python Terry Jones was also there. Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle, the two other surviving Pythons, sent their apologies. We are back at that rambling Georgian town house today to talk about Palin’s latest novel. Fiction is just one of the strings he has added to his bow in a long and distinguished post-Python career. But when the conversation turns to that comedy troupe, he still talks about their antics more than half a lifetime ago with an enthusiasm that enables a Python fan to dare to dream of a fresh collaboration.These days Palin would “rather watch The Killing,” but occasionally finds himself in a situation where Python clips are being shown for the zillionth time and “I really do enjoy them. A lot of Python I still find very funny. There are bits that I find embarrassing. At the time I knew they weren’t quite right.”

He’s been one of the most adamant opponents of a Python reunion. “I don’t think the Python reunion is going to be the best [idea]. But working with the Pythons on something new could be interesting. I don’t know where it would come from and, at the moment, I think I would be less likely to want to do it than I was before, because I’ve got so many other things I enjoy doing.”

OK, forget about those other things you enjoy doing, please. Put those out of your mind. Let’s talk about what is meant by “something new.” What is that? Would you take the rest of the Pythons on trips with you? That’s got to be the holy grail of television.

Palin smiles. Funnily enough, he has had this idea himself. “John was always wanting to be present in one of my documentaries. We had this wonderful idea that in some totally remote part of the world I would be walking down a street and John would be there behind a newspaper, put the newspaper down, ‘Hello’, ‘Hello, John’ and just carry on. John thought this would be hilarious. I did too.” Cleese got to the stage of looking at flights to Bolivia, but in the end it never happened. The other scheme Palin has knocked around is that of a globe-spanning documentary relay in which each Python travels a leg with a TV crew and hands over to the next man. “It would be a nice idea. I think all the Pythons probably could make better travel documentaries than me.”

The difficulty would be peeling them all away from their other projects. Cleese is currently touring the world with his “one-Cleese show”. “God, he works hard to pay off the alimony. All those shows, all over the world. I don’t think it’s ideally what he’d want to be doing.”

The Pythons were reunited in one sense this month, in a High Court battle with Mark Forstater, producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He won a ruling that he was entitled to a larger share of the royalties from the spin-off stage musical, Spamalot. Palin says he has little to add to the statement that the Pythons put out, saying they were disappointed and considering an appeal.

Palin’s aim is to tackle only projects that really interest him. The latest is The Truth, his first novel since Hemingway’s Chair (published in 1995). It is a gentle thriller, mostly enjoyable but occasionally not wholly convincing and containing some surprising stylistic clichés (a chapter opens in a street that is “as quiet as the grave”.) The plot involves a journalist investigating an enigmatic environmentalist, Hamish Melville, who travels under the radar while touring the world’s environmental hotspots.

“There are many things I envy about Melville; one is that he is able to work away from the public eye. He doesn’t do interviews with the press,” says Palin. He says this charmingly, and he is never less than friendly, but implying that, frankly, he’d rather we didn’t have to have this conversation, is disconcerting. His fictional creation “makes his own rules, makes his own life”.

But isn’t the whole point of Palin’s professional life that he is very much in the public eye? He says his wife of 46 years, Helen, takes this position. “I say, ‘Oh God, someone has written about me in the paper and got it all wrong. Why do people write all these things?’ ‘Well don’t do ten-part television series,’ she says, which is quite right.”

There is a part of him that does not want to perform. “We all have different sides to our personalities. I never sat down and thought: ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ I ended up acting and writing jokes for a living and that was great and that became Python and Python became quite famous and celebrated. There was no point saying, ‘Oh God, we are becoming successful, stop now.’ But there is an element of me [that would] sometimes like to slow down and maintain the independence of what I do, that just wants to do what I do and be judged on the work that I do. A whole lot of other things — on Michael Palin representing this and niceness and all — it’s all stuff which is not essential.” By “not essential” I think he means “complete bollocks”. But he’s too nice to put it like that.

Or is he? Does he, like Melville, have a secret side? Is he really a hard bastard and we just don’t know it?

“I like to think I am. Definitely a little bit.” But the closest he seems to have come to being a very naughty boy was at a hotel in Saudi Arabia when he put a bathrobe in his suitcase and was confronted when he tried to check out. “Since then I have learnt my lesson. I don’t take anything at all apart from the little notepads.”

The Truth tackles some serious subjects. He researched the Indian chapters in Orissa where there is a real-life battle rumbling on between a London-based mining group and local tribes over plans to open up hills to bauxite mining. He is concerned about what humans are doing to the planet, but he is not a doom-monger.

“I came back from Brazil on my last trip rather encouraged that the rate of deforestation had dropped.” Global warming and population explosion haunt us but he is more hopeful now. “Things can change rapidly. I can’t believe when I look at my grandchildren that there is not going to be a solution. I get slightly irritated by the total Cassandras. You’ve got to say there is something we can do and every day discuss the whole issue.”

Palin does not have much time for politicians. “I am not very good with people in power. I find it very difficult to find any common ground. We used to meet politicians when we went round the world and it always got cut.

I tend to be rather timid in such situations and shut up and listen. The encounters on boats and trains and in ticket offices and in restaurants turned out to be much more interesting.”

These people make him feel optimistic because they are not usually motivated purely by greed. He segues into a little attack on the banks, asking why have “three houses when you have one already. Is that the kind of aspiration everybody needs?” This seems a somewhat strange thing for him to say because he lives in three houses close to Hampstead Heath that have been knocked together. But even before I can mention this, he admits:

“I can’t speak because I have three houses. But, at least they are all knocked into one, and we live in all of them, and they are very small.”

He is currently editing a third volume of his diaries. The first volumes not only covered the Python years but included the depression and suicide of his sister, Angela in 1987. “I felt it had to be told. In many ways, it has been quite a therapeutic process.”

Later this year, he will appear in The Wipers Times, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s drama about a satirical newspaper produced in the trenches of the First World War. It will be his first TV drama since the acclaimed GBH in 1991. Why such a long break? “I wasn’t quite so interested in acting any more. I enjoy it but, if I do a film, I get a car in the morning, probably a lovely dressing room with a carpet and wi-fi and books to read; glass of wine in the evening. But will you do any acting that day? Chances are you may do one hour. That to me is a waste of life.

The great thing about the travel programmes is we work as soon as the sun comes up till the sun goes down.”

There is no TV travelogue in the pipeline. He quite fancies following China’s Grand Canal. “But might be a long trip. Might miss the pub.”

His leisure travel, with Helen, is rarely exotic. “She is not a great adventure traveller. We go to cities: New York, Barcelona, Antwerp. Bit more adventurous this year, went to Oman. She doesn’t like needless suffering.”

She is however “extremely tolerant and very down-to-earth and never admits to being impressed by anything I do. Occasionally, she’ll come along and listen to me talking and say, ‘That wasn’t bad but your collar looked a bit odd.’ The way partners should do really. People say, ‘How on earth can you stay married when you are away for so long?’ That’s the way you stay married: because you are away.”

Helen used to show him maps and atlases, as if to encourage him to plan his next trip but “she doesn’t anymore. Changed a bit since the grandchildren.” Their two grandsons are the children of their eldest son, Tom, who runs the climbing equipment company Urbanrock. Their second son, Will, is a conservationist and their daughter, Rachel, is a producer on MasterChef: The Professionals.

Sometimes, when he is somewhere remote, Palin will look up at a star-laden sky and find “the sheer size and scale utterly and completely incomprehensible. I just get smaller and smaller and smaller.” Is that when he broods on the big existential questions? “No. I go and have a glass of wine and think: ‘My God, I’m in the best place in the universe.’ ”

His only fear is that Cleese might bring it all to an end. All the Pythons have asteroids named after them.

“I think mine’s coming this way — gaaaah!” he shrieks, Pythonesquely, staring out over the rooftops of Soho. “We don’t know whose is the biggest. I just hope mine isn’t going to do too much damage. John’s, I am sure, will destroy the earth. I’ve just got that feeling: a manic asteroid.” Part 2 (Dec 28 2013)

Michael Palin has travelled the world for more than 30 years, observing other countries and cultures. He has sailed by dhow from Dubai to Mumbai and floated by hot air balloon as part of his journey from the North to South Pole.

His television travelogues and best-selling books have made him an international icon. Even the Dalai Lama once said he’d like to have his job. In fact it’s Palin’s role in capturing the eccentricities and absurdities of Britain — as part of Monty Python — that made his name and guaranteed his lifelong popularity.

Tickets for the group’s reunion show at the O2 arena next year sold out in 43.5 seconds and there have been calls for a global tour. “My fear is that we have to do it for the rest of our lives,” the youngest member of the troop, who is 70, says. “Lots of people have offered money but I love the diversity of what I do now.”

Even in the obscurest archipelagos, people can recite the dead parrot sketch. “I was in one of the most remote places I’ve ever been — a tiny island with a few Eskimos in the Bering Straits. At the end of the day there was a lot of bowing from the elders. I thought: ‘Gosh there’s some ceremony coming up, there might be nose-rubbing’. Then the leader fixed me with a beady eye and said: ‘Aren’t you the guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?’”

On Monday, Palin is guest-editing Radio 4’s Today programme. He is determined to retain a lightness of touch. “The essence is to keep it personal, not to think: ‘I’ve got the BBC here so now I can solve all the world’s problems’,” he says.

He has commissioned a discussion on political lunches, with Ken Clarke and Tessa Jowell, and a report on statistics. “There are so many surveys every day that tell you hopping on one leg is going to increase your life by 20 years. The BBC have put their science correspondent on to it.”

Although the news is often all “doom and gloom”, he thinks life is full of comedy. “There was a story about a school party at a swimming pool and they had to clear out all the children because they saw a naked leg coming out of one of the lockers. They thought it was a ‘pervert’ but what it turned out to be was a prosthetic limb of someone who was perfectly happily swimming. Is that not totally Monty Python?”

He has interviewed John Cleese for Today. It will be a rare meeting. “I can never keep up with him. He’s always terribly rude about my travels — whenever he talks about them he yawns — but he’s always jetting around trying to make money for his alimony.”

Although some of the Pythons were persuaded to get back together by cash, Palin insists he is only motivated by fun. “I’m a little apprehensive,” he says. “But we had a great time reading through the material and immediately became 20 years old again.”

There have always been creative tensions within the group. “Everybody has different lifestyles, different obsessions, different numbers of wives, but if anything that makes the end product better. The great thing is that when we get to get together we make each other laugh. It’s just when we say ‘what restaurant shall we go to?’ that everybody starts disagreeing.”

With its big-breasted secretaries, and bowler-hatted City gents, the Flying Circus, first performed in 1969, seems dated in some ways. “There’s probably a lot of political incorrectness in Python but we can’t rewrite it,” Palin says. “I suppose attitudes have changed — a lot of British comedy at that time was ladies’ clothes falling off but in a rather sweet farcical way. Now what you can watch on television is incredibly explicit about sex.”

He sees the shows as a fascinating sociological study. “When we were writing you couldn’t even talk about homosexuality at all,” he says. “Python has always been about dealing with things you’re not meant to deal with. It’s like being at school — as soon as the teacher said ‘it’s not funny’ you started laughing.”

There are different taboos now. “Religion is more difficult to talk about. I don’t think we could do Life of Brian any more,” he says. A parody of Islam would be even harder. “We all saw what happened to Salman Rushdie and none of us want to get into all that. It’s a pity but that’s the way it is. There are people out there without a sense of humour and they’re heavily armed.”

Comedy has also changed along with society, he thinks. “We didn’t target people and say ‘we’re going to have a go at this or that’. We were just writing what would make the six of us laugh.” These days, the humour is more pointed. “One of the reasons people like Python is that it is quite a joyful experience watching it. Now there’s lots of comedy that is very funny — think of The Thick Of It or The Office — but you’re left thinking ‘oh no, what a terrible world’.” It’s not necessary, he says, for comedy to be cynical. “There are lots of laughs to be got from the way life is. The English love embarrassment. We are the ‘sorry’ society. Someone punches you in the face and you will say ‘I’m terribly sorry my face was there. Is your hand all right?’ But each generation of comedians is looking for something new. It was only very recently before Python that somebody openly made a joke about the Prime Minister. There was an establishment which still had to be respected. Now we can talk about anything . . . and in an odd way it’s made us more depressed.”

Unlike Russell Brand, Palin says he always votes. “I’m quite a conformist really. I’m not a rebel.” But he thinks politicians aren’t helping themselves to retain public respect. “Everyone has been to classes at which they’ve been taught how to behave under questioning. It gets very boring. I’m longing for someone to say ‘shut the **** up, I absolutely believe in this.’ ”

Boris Johnson is the only one who is “photo proof” — “he could walk down Oxford Street in his underpants and people would say how wonderful,” Palin says. The world’s most famous traveller agrees with Mr Johnson about Heathrow. “I’m not in favour of expanding Heathrow at all — it’s going to have a huge imprint”. But he does not want a new Boris Island. “Having an extra runway at Gatwick can probably be done slightly more easily.”

David Cameron’s “selfie” with Barack Obama “looked a bit tacky” but he thinks it revealed a wider truth about society. “We live in a world where everyone is taking photos all the time and that’s a problem. I get stopped in the street by people who want to take a photo of me on their phone. I used to offer to sign an autograph instead, but now I just grin because if someone took a photo of me looking miserable everybody would say ‘what’s happened to Michael Palin? Is he unhappy about the Monty Python show?’ ”

Twitter seems equally pointless to him. “I am busy enough without twittering people. I need any spare time I have just to enjoy life,” he says. “I like meeting people. I like going into a shop rather than sitting at home ordering absolutely everything on a screen.

“I’m not on Facebook. I feel a little bit alarmed by the whole depersonalisation of the internet. People are friends with people they’ve never seen, people are walking down the street and never look up because they’re on their phone. What’s happening to real life in all this?”

It’s human contact that sparks off creativity — he even likes queues. “My mother used to go to the post office where she lived in Suffolk and if she got straight to the counter she was rather miffed because she hadn’t had time to get all the gossip.” Although he uses Amazon, he prefers bookshops. “E-books are fine but it’s not the same as an actual object which you can rifle through, with a size and colour that makes it different from everything else you’ve got.”

Britain should beware of uniformity. “Eccentricity is something that this country has always tolerated and I think it’s very important that we keep that,” he says. “When people say we’re much less efficient than Canada I think, ‘Well go and live in Canada.’ I like the rough edges.”

Palin still lives in the small terrace house in North London that he bought with his wife Helen more than 40 years ago. Although he cherishes stability, he is convinced that diversity is this country’s greatest attribute. “I love the fact that you can live in Leeds and not quite understand the accent of someone who lives 40 miles away in Sunderland, the fact that you can go to the west coast of Scotland, the most beautiful empty landscape in the world, and it’s only half an hour from Glasgow. Socially and in terms of landscape and culture it’s such a rich country.”

Immigration is part of that. “I’m all for a sense of Englishness, if you want to feel pride in what you’ve got, but when it’s directed against the rest of the world as though somehow they’re a danger to us, that’s just plain bonkers.”

A natural optimist, Palin wishes everyone could, like him, look on the bright side of life. “My parents’ generation had been through two world wars and a major depression, yet they were happy because the family was OK. They didn’t go around with long faces saying this country has got to improve. Now we’re all much more comfortable, we can talk more, we can eat whatever food, but people are not any happier really. Perhaps there’s too much choice.”

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is sitting curled up on a sofa in the library of the Covent Garden Hotel in central London. The Ports- mouth-born author of bestselling children’s fantasy novels such as Coraline and Stardust — both of which were made into films — and the cult Sandman series of graphic novels, is in England on a quick tour from America, where he has lived since 1992. He may be turning 53 in a few months’ time, but Gaiman is indelibly, slinkily childlike as he sits under his electric cloud of hair, talking in his vaguely Tony Blair-ish mid-Atlantic drawl about how happy he is to be back home.

In the 20 years since he decamped to America (he went there to be with his then wife, Mary McGrath) Gaiman has yearned almost continuously for the British media landscape, the sense of British cultural history and Radio 4. After two long decades, he is now, he discloses, finally ready to make his way home.

“I miss the oldness,” he says, looking like an attractive young Harold Pinter, but cuddlier. “The ridiculous truth is I’m probably happier here than anywhere else. I can write anywhere. But England makes me happy.”

He is back here because he has just attended a bizarre ceremony in Portsmouth, a few miles from where he was born. Portsmouth city council, comically, has named a seafront road after his latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which sat for weeks in the bestsellers’ lists.

With spooky Gaimanesque coincidence, the council picked a lane only a few hundred yards from the house where Gaiman’s grandparents lived until he was a teenager. At the unveiling, the lord mayor of Portsmouth reeled off the names of the famous authors who have passed through the city. “Dickens was born here. Conan Doyle wrote here. Kipling was here for a while. And we’ve got Neil Gaiman!” Gaiman is delighted.

“It was,” he says, “the most glorious, weird, wonderful, silly and absolutely delightful thing I think I’ve ever been involved in. Most people who see the lane’s name won’t know what it means. They’re just going to see this road sign and it’s going to be weird and it’s going to be strange.”

Gaiman came to prominence in the 1990s as a god in the pantheon of comic-book fiction. From comics, he leapt into publishing a series of hugely popular novels in the fantasy, horror and children’s genres. When Gaiman turns up to do his book signings, thousands of fans wait for hours to see their hero. One of those fans is the horror writer Stephen King.

Despite the success and adulation, though, Gaiman says he has spent practically his entire adulthood dogged by a sense of crippling inadequacy. When the fourth Sandman comic came out in America, King approached Gaiman, and invited him out for dinner. Gaiman sat there with a two-hour queue of fans waiting to meet him. King, Gaiman recalls, said: “You should enjoy this, you have to enjoy this. And I didn’t.”

A revealing photo of Gaiman’s wife Amanda PalmerA revealing photo of Gaiman’s wife Amanda Palmer at Glastonbury was recently published by the Daily Mail; revenge was swift (Alpha Press) Two decades on, Gaiman is possibly starting to enjoy himself for the first time. Legs drawn up under him on the sofa, he is dressed — as he has been since historical records began — entirely in black. His hair’s closest model is that of Robert Smith of the Cure. Its wildness is explained when I see that, as he talks, Gaiman tousles it compulsively, pushing it this way and that, as though he is certain that if he finally nudges it into the right configuration, it will open a portal to a parallel universe.

A year ago, Gaiman had, in fact, already been planning to make a long-awaited return to British soil. His youngest daughter, Madeleine, was about to finish secondary school and start university. “I thought, good, I’m not needed any more. I was looking forward very much to coming back to England, and it was a really good plan, but it kind of fell apart at the moment I fell in love.”

Love arrived in the form of the 37-year-old American alternative cabaret singer Amanda Palmer, who also goes by the stage name Amanda F****** Palmer. Gaiman met her when she asked him if he would write a series of captions for a book of photographs she had taken of herself posing dead.

Gaiman did not fall in love immediately. But when he saw her with a broken foot hobble onto stage at a gig, it was thunderbolts. “It was as if somebody had hit me over the back of the head with a love-shaped brick. And I just felt, Oh, I like you, I really like you. I want to look after you.”

The couple married in 2011 and now live in bookish Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is, though, now determined to spend “my maximum allotted time” in England.

It might prove tricky, however, convincing Palmer to follow him — she had a run-in with the Daily Mail after it published a photograph of her nipple exposed on stage at Glastonbury this year. Palmer responded (Gaiman recounts this like a proud dad) by singing a song called Dear Daily Mail on stage at London’s Roundhouse, dressed in a kimono. Halfway through the song, she dropped the kimono, and performed the rest of the number nude.

Gaiman is clearly dewily mesmerised by Palmer’s chutzpah. He looks like a geeky goth teen who cannot believe he has got married to a rock star. On the lapel of his jacket, he wears a little pewter cyberman from Doctor Who. Appropriate — as in May he wrote his second episode of the series, fulfilling a childhood dream. He keeps mentioning the Doctor Who episode, as though he is still stunned that his career path has worked out quite as well as it has.

Until a few years ago, he says, he felt like an utter fake. “I went for at least 25 years absolutely convinced on some level that one morning, at 8.30am, there would be a knock on the door and I would go down and there would be a man with a clipboard and it would be the Fraud Police. They would say, ‘Neil Gaiman’, and I’d say yes, and they’d announce, ‘Well, according to this, you say you’re a writer, and you make stuff up and you publish it. We are from the Fraud Police and we have caught up with you, and now you have to go and get a real job’.”

The remarkable thing about this is that Gaiman has achieved every single thing he has dreamt of since he was the nerdy schoolboy who permanently carried around a copy of Lord of the Rings. At 15, he wrote down a list of the things he wanted to do in his life, and showed it to his mother. She, like Gaiman’s father, was a Scientologist. Both Gaiman’s sisters are now Scientologists. Was he drawn to the religion? “No. I wanted to be a writer,” he says curtly. On his list he noted the following: write a science-fiction novel, write a fantasy novel, make a film, write a great comic, write an episode of Doctor Who.

He has done them all. But when he reminded his mother of the list not long ago, he asked: “Did you think I was going to do all that?” And she replied, “Well, of course not, but I wasn’t going to say that to you.”

Nobody in Gaiman’s extended family, it turns out, ever assumed that he would come to much. His Aunt Janet was recently asked by a Gaiman fan whether he had been clever as a boy. “No, he was just really weird,” Aunt Janet replied.

As a child, Gaiman would be found at family get-togethers sitting under a table, reading. “If we turned up at a wedding, I would always have managed to hide a book somewhere on myself. My dad would frisk me, and find the book and then lock it in the back of the car.”

He lived constantly in books, keen to escape the real world. “I don’t think anybody should feel understood by their parents,” he says. “I think it’s very, very good for writers to be dissatisfied. A general sense of dissatisfaction is one of the things that actually sends you off into a what-if, wouldn’t-it-be-interesting-if, wouldn’t-it-be-more-interesting-if frame of mind.”

When Gaiman was five, his family moved into the former servants’ quarters of an old manor house in East Grinstead, West Sussex. Through the wall lived a well-to-do family, who occupied the main house. Gaiman became obsessed with the door in the living room that opened onto a brick wall — blocking the passage to the next-door house.

“I would walk up to it and wait patiently and quietly, convinced that if I opened it the right way, it wouldn’t be a brick wall any more. Maybe it would open into a corridor. I don’t know where it would have gone. But I knew that I just wanted to go down it.”

Gaiman has spent his career opening those doors in books. When he won the Carnegie and Newbery medals for The Graveyard Book, published five years ago, he became the first author to have received both honours for the same publication. And it appears to have done the trick.

“After I won the Newbery medal, I sort of thought, you know, there’s a point where if the Fraud Police do come to the door, I’ll have to say to them, well, actually I have the Newbery medal, and a Carnegie medal — you have to f*** off now.”

***********************

His confusing childhood in a household of Scientologists has not held back Neil Gaiman, once dubbed “the most famous writer you’ve never heard of”. These days the British author is a global cult in his own right.

To his worshipping multitudes the 52-year-old has been the equivalent of a rock god since his Sandman comic books were first published 25 years ago. In the meantime he has written Doctor Who episodes and the Neverwhere miniseries for the BBC, co-scripted the film Beowulf and won a shedload of awards for his dark fiction fantasies. His 2005 book Anansi Boys went straight in at No 1 in the New York Times bestseller list.

Gaiman’s first novel for adults in eight years is thus a big publishing event and will be read by the actor Michael Sheen on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime next month. Expectations are high — not least the author’s. He believes it is his “best” and “most personal” book. Early reviewers, while mostly positive, are in two minds over whether he is appealing to the child in adults or the adult in children.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane concerns the extraordinary events that befall a seven-year-old boy when his parents’ lodger commits suicide in their car — an incident borrowed from Gaiman’s own past. The death stirs up ancient powers, best left undisturbed, that can be laid to rest only by three women.

Portsmouth, which is near the author’s Hampshire birthplace, has come up with a cracker of an idea in the hope of winning a place on the book lover’s map — renaming a seafront street after the novel’s laborious title.

The tale not only confirms Gaiman’s mastery of the horror genre but also raises the familiar question of where such gruesomeness springs from. To outward appearances the writer is “an immensely likeable man”, according to one interviewer, although there is something of the night about his proclivity for black boots, black socks, black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets.

If Gaiman resembles the hero of Sandman, which he recast for DC Comics between 1988 and 1996, his numerous female fans pride themselves on adopting the black clothing and elaborate eye make-up of the main character’s elder sister, Death. Such is the clamour surrounding Gaiman that when he once appeared at a convention with Angelina Jolie, who played the mother of the monster Grendel in Beowulf, he put the actress in the shade.

Jon Levin, Gaiman’s film agent, has recounted that he realised the extent of his client’s popularity during a meeting at Warner Bros when all the secretaries rushed to ask for autographs. Someone remarked: “That never happens when Tom Cruise is here.”

Cruise, of course, is the poster boy for the Church of Scientology. It’s a subject on which the normally chatty Gaiman has little to say, other than that he is not a Scientologist. His discretion is understandable: his two sisters are still active in Scientology. One, Claire Edwards, works for the church in Los Angeles; the other, Lizzy Calcioli, helps to run the family business, a vitamin shop.

For more than 20 years Gaiman has lived in a huge, Addams Family-style house in Wisconsin, where he moved with his first wife, Mary, in order to be close to her family. They have three children and she is now reported to live in a cottage on his property. In 2011 — three years after their divorce — he married Amanda Palmer, a songwriter and performer, who enlivens his public readings with dark chords and naked, bloody images of herself projected on a wall.

It is all a long way from East Grinstead in West Sussex, which was the centre of English Scientology when Gaiman moved there with his family at the age of five. His father, David, a grocery owner, and his mother, Sheila, a pharmacist, were taking classes in Dianetics — Scientology’s self-help approach to mental health. In 1977 they founded their G&G vitamin shop on East Grinstead’s High Street. David, who died in 2009, began working for Scientology’s public relations wing, rising to a prominent position within the organisation.

The Gaiman children found their beliefs difficult to explain — the family was Jewish, of Polish descent on David’s side. “Most of our social activities were involved with Scientology or our Jewish family,” Neil’s sister Lizzy once recalled. “It would get very confusing when people would ask my religion as a kid. I’d say, ‘I’m a Jewish Scientologist.’”

Neil was equally uncomfortable. At seven he was banned from entering Fonthill School for boys in East Grinstead. The headmaster cited government measures taken in 1968 declaring L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, persona non grata in Britain and forbidding foreign Scientologists to enter the country.

Among the sources of inspiration Gaiman has credited for his writing — CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and GK Chesterton, among others — he has seldom mentioned Hubbard, a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy whose influence pervaded his childhood home. However, Gaiman once made an interesting confession: if he had not been a writer, he would have liked to design religions (rather like Hubbard, in fact): “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say, ‘I’d like a religion.’ And I’d say, ‘Cool, OK. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it?’”

From the outset it seems that Gaiman had his own views on religion. Born on November 10, 1960, in the Hampshire town of Portchester, he has described himself as “a feral child” who learnt to read at an early age and devoured books. He was “a much weirder kid than I ever thought I was”. Rather than study for his bar mitzvah, he prevailed upon his teacher to concentrate on Bible stories such as the Leviathan and the Behemoth.

He was educated at several Church of England schools, including Whitgift School in Croydon, south London. Leaving home, he lived in Edgware for two years and “did the starving writer thing, producing a bunch of short stories and a children’s novel that everyone rejected before I realised that I hadn’t written enough, lived enough”.

He then had three happy years working as a freelance journalist for publications such as Time Out, “living off chicken wings at film screenings” and interviewing the likes of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett — both of whom were to collaborate with him on books.

By his mid-twenties the pull of comics had become irresistible. Through a chance meeting with Alan Moore, whose work on Swamp Thing was transforming the comic book into something more literary, Gaiman found a berth at DC Comics, where he was asked to rework Sandman. The comic had first appeared in 1939, telling the story of an everyman crime fighter. In Gaiman’s hands it took on a more otherworldly spin, steadily introducing readers to seven siblings who shape human lives. The writer Norman Mailer said: “Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.”

After a spell of working on non-graphic fiction, Gaiman followed Neverwhere, his six-part BBC television series of 1996, with a debut solo novel of the same title. A glimpse of a shooting star inspired Stardust, a fairy tale that became a comic miniseries, a novel and finally — after the model Claudia Schiffer read it and beseeched her director husband Matthew Vaughn to film it — a movie. Another fantasy, Coraline, was also adapted for film and nominated for an Oscar.

Gaiman’s literary stock rose sharply in 2008 with The Graveyard Book, which recounts the adventures of a boy who after his family is murdered is brought up by dead people. The parallels with Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book are unmistakable — reworking classic stories is a Gaiman trait, although he succeeds by refusing to remain faithful to their genres.

He admits that his success is due in part to frenetic blogging — he often tweets a dozen or more times a day. He evidently needs the company: he once explained that he blogs “because writing is, like death, a lonely business”.

Baldrick

As the turnip-scoffing Baldrick, the half-witted and hygiene-challenged servant of Lord Blackadder, Tony Robinson epitomised downtrodden servitude. So there is something piquantly amusing in the fact that in the Queen’s recent Birthday Honours, he was appointed a knighthood, while Rowan Atkinson, who played his Machiavellian master, only bagged a CBE.

Should I call him Sir Anthony, I ask, when we’re sitting opposite each other in a radio studio somewhere in deepest Camden. “I don’t think so, do you?” he says with a laugh. “It would seem rather oppressive.”

Despite his new knightly status, he is still looking a bit Baldrick around the edges: his grey hair is dishevelled, he’s wearing jeans and one of his shirt buttons has popped open to display an inch of portly tum. All the same, he says that he’s noticed people treating him in a different way. “There is a deference,” he says. “It’s very, very odd. It’s like you’re a slightly different person. You have to take time to digest that this new name is you. But it’s enormous fun processing it — just as much so for my wife, who is now Lady Robinson . . . ” He tails off, laughing almost disbelievingly.

He’s even considering having his own heraldic crest. “I’d have to make my own up,” he says. “It would have to be a turnip severed by a trowel, wouldn’t it?” (A reference to the recurring turnip-based jokes in Blackadder.) So does he use his title to get better tables in restaurants? “I must admit when I get into a restaurant on a Saturday night I always wonder if it’s because they know I’ve recently been knighted,” he says. “But normally the people who take the reservations don’t sound like they have any idea who I am.”

Aside from his TV roles as Baldrick and as a mad keen amateur archaeologist on Time Team, Robinson is principally known as a staunch Labour party activist, which makes me wonder if he ever considered refusing his gong? “No, why would I?” he says, astonished. “Not for a second. It puzzles me that people do. Why would the notion that 30 people sitting in a room trying to work out who they want to flatter for doing something for their country — why is that anti-Labour? I’ve never understood that. It’s like your country suddenly points its finger at you and says, ‘you’ve done all right for us’. It’s such a lovely thing to be recognised in that way.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t have issues around the constitution. “But most people do. You can meet someone who describes themselves as a strong monarchist, but then you say to them, how do you feel about the fact that the Queen is the head of one church but no others? How do you feel about the fact that the Queen appoints bishops and the bishops make laws and that she can veto bills in the House of Commons? And they don’t really like that.

“Talking about that kind of thing ought to be a really mature and sensible conversation that we all have but it’s reduced to a cartoon element that I don’t think they have in other countries. It’s odd, isn’t it? Those kinds of conversations are a bit like how we talk about dementia or cancer. Immediate embarrassment hangs over the whole room,” he concludes.

Robinson is semi-happy about the birth of Prince George: “I just felt so frustrated that it wasn’t a girl. It would have been so interesting,” he says, with the fervour of a true historian. “Well, maybe another time.”

We are actually here to discuss drains rather than the monarchy, as Robinson is fronting a campaign promoting Dyno-Rod’s 50 years in the business. Not as incongruous as it sounds, since he’s explored plenty of sewerage systems on Time Team and other TV series.

“They’re cleaner than you imagine they would be,” he assures me. “The thing that really fascinates me about sewers is that they’ve done more than anything else in the world to extend our lives. It’s phenomenal. Men’s lifespan has gone up over 50 per cent, women’s over 60 per cent, all because we can flush away our waste and wash our hands. That’s far better than antibiotics.”

And he’s just as keen on cesspits. “Cesspits are a treasure trove!” he enthuses. “They’ve always been so disgusting that if you drop anything down them, by and large, you’re not going to roll your sleeves up and rescue it. So you find silver spoons and brooches and lord knows what — it’s great! The cesspits I’ve gone down are 300 years old, so it’s just earth, the only difference is it tends to be a bit blacker than the earth around it. One occasionally finds the odd stool but it’s just part of nature.”

He gleefully launches into a quote from Deuteronomy, Chapter 23, which gives quite specific instructions about where believers should defecate (with a spade tied to the end of their spears, apparently).

Robinson is descended from a long line of Eastenders and was born in Hackney, but brought up in South Woodford. “My dad got a £998 mortgage for a semi, and all his friends and family said to him, ‘Are you mad? You’ll never get that money back!’ ” he chuckles.

The house had a garden which was his father Leslie’s playground. “There weren’t many gardens in Hackney, so for him it was this wonderful new thing. After the war was over, he planted gooseberries, raspberries, loganberries and put in apple trees, so that I would always have a non-stop run of vitamin C,” he says. “I still find that quite moving.” Leslie worked for the London County Council, and Robinson’s mother, Phyllis, was an audio typist. He was their only child and devoted to both of them.

He was 12 when he made his stage debut as a member of Fagin’s gang in the original production of Oliver!, and he continued to work in the West End throughout his childhood. But fame and fortune eluded him until he was 38 when he landed the Baldrick role; by then, he already had children (Luke and Laura) and had seen people he loved die. That put his success into perspective. “If I had achieved some kind of celebrity earlier, I’d have been a monster.”

Blackadder ended in 1989 but still has an iron grip on public consciousness: he says that even now people shout “Oi! Baldrick!” at him or ask him if he has a cunning plan.

“I went and gave a lecture at a Cambridge college the other day and for the main course, there were four elegant little turnips in sauce. Nobody said anything, but you knew they knew what they were doing,” he laughs. So he likes turnips? “Yeah! Those little turnips are gorgeous. The big ones — well, they’re a bit functional, aren’t they?”

Robinson remains close to Atkinson. “We don’t see each other much but there is a terribly deep affection. To tap into that is one of the great pleasures in my life.”

But his principal pleasure seems to be his work. After almost 20 years on TV, Time Team has now bitten the dust. Robinson, though, is busier than ever. He’s doing a documentary about the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, another about holy islands around Britain, a third about body snatchers, a six-part series on historical walks ... In his spare time, he writes popular children’s books.

No surprise, then, that his weekends are usually spent working. “And if I’m not, everything feels a bit dead on a Sunday — there’s a disappointment that there isn’t that buzz,” he confesses. “Although, as someone who’s always supported the rights of shop-workers I was outraged when Sunday opening happened, another part of me was saying, ‘Great! Sundays are going to be fun again!’ ”

Is he a workaholic? “I say I’m not, but my family say I am,” he admits. “I just love doing what I do so much.” His marriage to his first wife, Mary Shepherd, a lawyer, ended in 1992. His second wife, Louise, whom he married two years ago, often accompanies him on his trips. “I think I have more quality time with my partner than most people do because we’re able to do that.”

They live in West London and holiday in their second home in rural Spain (“About half-way down and on the warm side,” is all he reveals.) “I chill, write, think about what to do next in the garden. It’s an enormous privilege — thank Baldrick for providing me with a life that makes that possible.” Otherwise, he loves playing with his granddaughters — Holly, 3, and Lyla, six months. “They’re the great joy of my life.”

He will be 67 this month, but doesn’t worry about ageing. “Youthful beauty isn’t something I’ve ever traded on,” he laughs. “Ageing is part of life. It’s just the next thing. I’ve always loved the next thing.”

Kenny Everett

Kenny Everett was hailed as a radio genius almost from his first broadcast. Other DJs used to gather on the pirate ships and listen in awe. He was so young — just 20 when he started — so witty, so spontaneous, so original. And so nice. Everyone agreed he was an exceptionally sweet boy, shy, modest, sensitive and extraordinarily innocent. At one point he was sacked for using the word orgasm on air, but was quickly reinstated when his bosses realised he genuinely had no idea what it meant. He had been brought up a strict Catholic and seemed to be clueless about sex.

He was born in 1944, long before pirate radio existed, but it was as if he spent his childhood training for it, listening to The Goon Show, playing with a tape recorder in his bedroom, inventing jingles and funny voices. He sent one of his tapes to a local journalist, who suggested he send it to the BBC. They invited him for an audition that was a disaster because he was too nervous, but the producer was sufficiently impressed by the tape to pass it on to a friend who was hiring DJs for a new pirate ship, Radio London.

Radio London was the second of the pirate ships — it launched at Christmas 1964, a few months after Radio Caroline — but was generally agreed to be the best. It was housed on a terrible old rust bucket minesweeper moored off the Essex coast, yet its mast was powerful enough to broadcast right across England and Wales, whereas Radio Caroline barely reached Birmingham. Everett was constantly sick for the first few weeks on the ship, but he soon settled down.

Pirate radio was perfect for him because it meant he had access to studio equipment 24 hours a day, engineers to teach him how to use it, and absolutely nothing else to do. The DJs worked three weeks on board, and one week off, and, while the other disc jockeys spent their free time partying in London, Everett headed back to his family in Merseyside. He always shunned the celebrity life. Meanwhile his audience was growing to 8m — and among that audience were the Beatles. They were thrilled to find their favourite DJ was a Liverpudlian, and recorded jingles for him, gave him exclusive interviews and slipped him advance copies of their records — Everett was the first to play Strawberry Fields Forever on air.

The government managed to close the pirate ships in 1967 and launched Radio   1. Everett was an obvious hiring, but he was never happy at the BBC and complained of the “pinstriped prunes in offices miles away” who kept sending him reprimands. Eventually he was fired and, at 25, was out of a job. Then in 1973 he joined the first commercial radio station, Capital, and reigned there for the next seven years. He also took his first tentative steps in television. He disliked it at first because it lacked the spontaneity of radio, but by the fourth series his Kenny Everett Video Show for Thames Television was attracting 13-15m viewers.

Meanwhile, he was getting into drugs and grappling with the vexed subject of his sexuality. He was homosexual but didn’t want to be, and he found that LSD enabled him to find women attractive. He fell for Billy Fury’s girlfriend, Lady Lee, who was seven years older, and eventually bedded her. He rang all his friends to say “I’ve done it!” and insisted they get married immediately. Everyone, including his family, told him he was making a big mistake but the marriage actually lasted 10 years, and he was the best man at Lee’s next wedding. By then he had a live-in boyfriend and had finally accepted he was gay.

By the mid-1980s, many of Everett’s friends were dying of Aids, though he believed he was safe because he only went in for bondage. But he had a wildly promiscuous Russian boyfriend who may have infected him — at all events, Everett was photographed looking “gaunt” (the usual tabloid code) attending hospital in 1993, and confirmed that he had Aids. He died, much mourned, in April 1995.

If Everett had a secret, it was not, as he believed, his fondness for gay clubs but, rather, his unstarry tastes. His hobbies were doing housework, stockpiling cleaning products, and embroidering tapestries. And he spent some of his happiest times on walking holidays in Yorkshire, staying at B&Bs with Eric Gear, his bank manager, and Gear’s wife, brother and sister-in-law. Everett never wanted to live the celebrity life. He just happened to be a radio genius who had celebrity thrust upon him.

This book is described as “the authorised biography” and was written with the help and approval of Everett’s sister Cate and ex-wife Lee. The authors seem to have talked to almost everyone who knew him and not one person has a bad word to say about him. Even Cliff Richard, whom Everett hung from the ceiling so that he could end a show with “I’m going to leave you with a cliff hanger”, remembers him fondly. This is a warm and likeable biography of a warm and likeable man.

Ronnie Wood

Ronnie Wood is explaining what happened when, a few years ago, Keith Richards fell out of a tree in Fiji. He is standing up with his back to me, gesturing with his arms. “The sea was over there, there was rock-hard sand and he was like a monkey swinging underneath the tree and talking to me. Then I heard this thump. He’d landed head-first and we were laughing. He was saying, ‘Oh, my teeth are bleeding,’ and they were. He ended up a few days later in a foetal position and had to be rushed into hospital. Sorry, I’d better get that.”

His phone is ringing. He fishes an iPhone out of his cream-and-grey checked jacket and stares at the screen that says “Jo”. “Oh, it’s my ex-wife.” I’m all ears. A few days earlier, Jo told a newspaper that the picture of Ronnie tattooed on her bottom had been removed, so this could be one scratchy call. Sadly, he does not take it.

So you get on OK?

“Yeah, we keep in touch, quite pally.”

I ask him how he feels about the tattoo removal. “I forgot it was there! No, don’t print that! I’m not sad about it. I didn’t paint it. It was the little cartoon man I put on my autographs.”

The Fiji fall finally persuaded Keith that the late-sixties might be a good age to ease up. By his epic standards — he could, it is said, eat nails and piss rust — he is pretty sober these days, though probably not as sober as Ronnie, who says he hasn’t touched booze, his primary “issue”, for four years. He’s also clean drug-wise, though he is still an enthusiastic smoker, a habit of which Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger both disapprove. “They say ‘get that thing out of here!’ when I light up... Charlie’s been clean for many years. Mick might have a glass of wine, Keith is in and out, but basically he’s as clean as I’ve ever seen him.”

Jo was his second wife. His first, Krissy, died of a suspected valium overdose in 2005; they split up in 1978. Krissy blamed the break on Ronnie’s affair with Jo. They married in 1985 and broke up in 2008 after Ronnie, then on two or three bottles of vodka a day and in and out of rehab, ran off to his place in Ireland with one Ekaterina Ivanova, aged 20 at the time. To nobody’s amazement, probably not even Katya’s, it didn’t last and, last year, Ronnie married Sally Humphreys. “Yeah, it was on 21/12/12, all the ones and twos. According to the Mayan calendar it was the day the world would end. For me, it was the start of a new era.”

Sally is not crazily young — only 31 years younger than Ronnie — and she has her own theatre-production company that could suggest long-term stability. We’ll see.

'Damien Hirst had an interest in keeping me alive. He saw I was wasting myself' Ronnie is the work-experience Stone. He joined the band in 1975, the three others are all founder members, going all the way back to ’62. He didn’t become a full partner, in the business sense, until 1990, which meant that in the 1980s he sometimes found himself in the unusual, for a Stone, position of needing money, which is why he started doing more painting, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

All his life he has been the junior partner. He was eight and 10 years younger than his two brothers, both now dead, and, at 66, he is between three and six years younger than the other Stones. “It’s followed me all through my life. I’ve always been the youngest.”

He wears the years well, though strangely. Rakes would look obese in his presence. He’s 5ft 9in tall and has never weighed more than 10 stone. He is currently 9½. He claims to eat, though there is no evidence of it. His hair is thickish and darkly dyed, and his face... well, where to begin? Think architecture. The high cheekbones are cantilevered out below the eyes and are supported by two columns running up from his chin which each splay out into angled shores, forming the striking Y shapes which are one’s first impression of the man. “Gaunt” would not be the right word as the skin is very smoothly and finely (possibly artificially) tanned. He looks, in short, outrageously well, considering the life he has led. But he seems a touch deaf — no wonder — and he is very fidgety which, perhaps unfairly, suggests to me he could easily fidget his way into more bad behaviour.

Being the youngest has at least meant that he has often been able to play the role of Ban Ki Moon to the warring nation states of Mick, Keith and Charlie. “Oh yeah, especially in the ’80s, that was a really bad period, we were about to fold a few times. I like to think I got them talking again. That was the big problem: they refused to talk.”

And what about Keith’s autobiography, which upset Mick, perhaps because he called him “unbearable” and referred to his “tiny todger”? Ronnie laughs. “I did my best but that healed itself. I had my fingers crossed that it would.”

But to business. Like me, I’m sure you’ve often wondered what goes on behind all those rich, dark, high Mayfair windows. The answer is, in one case, that a Rolling Stone paints, sleeps and plays snooker. You see, Ronnie is now the artist-in-residence at Castle Fine Art in Bruton Street. He has a big exhibition called Raw Instinct there at the moment and they’ve handed over a whole floor to him where he can chill, paint, sleep, whatever. There are pictures everywhere, hanging or leaning on the walls. The snooker table is the biggest I have ever seen, there’s a giant leather bean baggy thing, a Stones- themed pinball machine and so on.

On one table is a glass vase full of big, unwrapped brushes. These, it turns out, were part of a giant present package given to him in 2007 by Damien Hirst in an attempt to get Ronnie to paint rather than drink. “He just had an interest in keeping me alive. He saw I was wasting myself and said, ‘Do you want to get better, to stop drinking?’ ” Ronnie was living in Belsize Park — his London place is now in Holland Park — and had, he recalls, just come out of one of his many rehabs, this one was at the Life Works centre in Woking. Hirst shipped in enough equipment to fit out an art college and told Ronnie: “You’ve no excuse now.” Has Hirst been an influence?

“I admire his art machine and the way he puts it into action. He doesn’t give much away, but I learnt quite a lot from his organisation, going round to his office, just seeing how the wheels turned over.”

Ronnie was not new to art, far from it. He’d been an art star as far back as primary school and had even appeared as a competition winner on TV art shows. In fact, for all three brothers, art and music ran side by side. They were a family of “water gypsies” who worked on the Thames out west near Heathrow. They drank and sang at the pub, then drank and sang at home — this was Ronnie’s first experience of “after-parties”, dangerous, life-threatening events, as he was to learn. “When I was growing up everybody drank, it’s just what they did.”

All three brothers ended up going to Ealing College of Art, but Ronnie soon swerved into rock’n’roll, starting with the Birds (not the Byrds), moving on to the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces and, finally, the Stones. He was drawing all the time, but nothing too serious. “Before the ’80s I didn’t make much use of art. I’d sketch in my spare time. Then, when things hit rock bottom when I was in New York, I had to generate some money, so I thought, ‘Hang on, I can paint, why don’t I do more of this?’ I started to make some monotypes, silk screens, to see how it would go. I never lost the art touch but it became necessary to exploit it more in the ’80s to pay the weekly running, supporting my family.”

Art is now a very nice little earner. In 2005 he sold one picture of the Stones — Beggars Banquet — for $1m. The paintings on show at the gallery go for £300,000; even small drawings are priced at £10,000, about what it would cost you to buy a drawing by a decent Old Master. OK, Ronnie’s said to be worth £70m, but this is still real money.

'You should live your life to the full, knowing it's not going to last'

Does he think these prices are because he’s a rock star? “That’s always at the back of my mind. It’s only short-lived, though. Once people see I can actually paint, they ease up.”

He's had some serious names endorse his work — Brian Sewell, Peter Blake, Edward Lucie-Smith — a South Bank Show has been devoted to his art and he has proper collectors. There are, in particular, two American rock stars manqué — a “cancer doctor” in Florida whose wife pleads with Ronnie not to let him buy any more or they’ll have to move house, and Bernie Chase, who owns hundreds of Ronnie originals and is constantly finding lost works going all the way back to his childhood. “Bernie does connect with a lot of dodgy people who say they’ve got a Ronnie Wood. He says, ‘I’ll buy it and I want to see it,’ then he shows it to me and says, ‘It’s yours,’ and nine times out of ten they are mine. I’ve found some early stuff I thought was lost for ever: stuff from art school, some stuff I did when I was 12. At least I can see I can draw, it’s like looking at somebody else’s work.”

Startlingly, Ronnie is a patron of the English National Ballet. He paints their dancers and he is going to paint the dancers of the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi.

This is art as real work. But, at another level, art is therapy, as Damien Hirst plainly saw. The problem with being a Stone, you see, is twofold: it’s not a full-time job and, even when you’re working, it’s a bit, well, stressful. After the end of their 50th-anniversary tour, they went back to their separate lives. Stones seldom communicate unless there’s business involved, Mick especially. There’s something comical about these dispersed not-Rolling Stones, seeking other identities at various points on the map. “Mick’s never happy unless he’s on the road. I’ve been trying to get him to come up to London and see us but he’s got all these gardener problems where he lives. There’s very little communication. We’re always on top of each other during a tour. With important things like birthdays we stay in touch but, in general, Charlie goes about his life down in Devon, you never really know when Keith’s in town and Mick flits everywhere.”

So they all have to think of other things to do. Ronnie seems to have dispersed himself and his art — he has homes, all with full studios, in Barcelona, Ireland and London. Painting, for him, is the exact opposite of being a Stone. “I’m quite an action painter, a lot of energy goes into it but it’s channelled from me. When I’m with the band that’s a group effort and you’re giving and taking and listening and putting ideas forward. But when you’re painting, it’s very much a personal thing and a great way to relax.”

Then there is the stress when they are being Stones. It’s not easy just stopping after sweating your way through a show in which you are expected to live up to the title of greatest ever rock band. “Drink, drugs and girls take the edge off the adrenaline, but they take their toll, especially when the tour ends. Suddenly you go from the big kerfuffle of touring to, bang, nothing. I think drink and drugs were the way to combat it and it worked for a while. Obviously it all backfired and luckily enough I got out of that way of life, and now I’m channelling my time much more creatively.”

In fact, his new after-show strategy is what he calls “murder mysteries”, mainly TV shows. It started with CSI but he’s moved on to more sophisticated stuff. “Now I’m more into Spiral and The Killing and Wallander. I think the best thing I come up with after the music and the tangibility of a concert is a good blood-and-guts murder mystery.”

Retreating to his hotel room to watch DVDs is not very rock’n’roll, but, then again, what now is? More importantly he has taken on a meditation regime. Every day he reads from a book published by Hazelden, an American addiction treatment-and-recovery institution. He spends a year going through five books with titles like Promise of a New Day and Wisdom to Know and then he starts the whole process again with the same books on January 1.

“They’re little affirmation books, I swear by them. They’re daily diaries of people through the years, putting their experiences down, how they’ve managed to get by in a new way of living without alcohol and drugs. There may be a quote from Tolstoy or John Lennon or whoever it may be. They just give you a little wake-up call. If I feel really awful one day and think, ‘Oh f*** it all,’ they hit exactly the mood and give you a way out of it. It’s the same books every year but they take on a totally different meaning.”

'I look back and think, "Ouch! I won't do that again"'

This is the heart — and, indeed, the art — of the matter. To be a rock star is, as David Beckham would put it, to “live the dream”, but it never seems to be enough. They want some kind of salvation, some kind of meaning. The smart move is to die at 27, as did Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones’ own Brian Jones and many others. To live past that fateful year is to find yourself thinking of ways to parlay your way past the adrenalin and into credibility if not immortality. No Stone rolls for ever.

Ronnie isn’t the only rock-star painter. Paul McCartney, Patti Smith and David Bowie have been at it, and there’s a Bob Dylan display at the National Portrait Gallery this month. The big thing about paintings is they physically outlast the performance, the virtual trace that recorded music has now become, and that grimmest of all reapers, fashion. They go beyond death and Ronnie has seen a lot of death in his life — his brothers and Krissy as well as the casualties of the 1960s he remembers walking around to stop them falling into drug-induced comas. “Death is part of everyday life. None of us get out of here alive. You should live your life to the full, knowing it’s not going to last. It’s evident in painting. When I paint I’m thinking it will outlast me. I’ve learnt to live with the thought of it.”

But he is cool with his life so far, perhaps too cool. There is little sense that he feels he should atone for the sins alcohol and drugs made him commit. “I look back and smile and think, ‘Ouch! I won’t do that again,’ but I wouldn’t change anything because life’s not perfect.”

What about guilt? He has a lot to be guilty about. Jo, his second wife, wrote an autobiography — Hey Jo — that portrayed him as a drugged and alcoholic monster, threatening at one point to throw acid in her face, and a coldly unfaithful man. He may be better now, but such a past does not easily go away. Unless you are a Stone. “If you address it and make your amends with the people that maybe you hurt, that’s good. But hurt is a two-way thing and I don’t take on a lot of guilt because I wasn’t guilty of a lot of it. I address it and let it go. You have to look after yourself at a certain age, you have to put yourself first. I’ve been pleasing too many people.”

They are the words of a very spoilt man. I’ve met recovered alcoholics who hide behind the claim that they have a disease and are, therefore, not really at fault. For the very famous, this no-fault attitude is endorsed and magnified by their fans and hangers-on. Film stars, footballers and rock stars are spoilt out of the possibility of shame. We want celebrities, so we must have monsters.

But Ronnie, though spoilt, is clean and cool now. He’s working on more art projects than I can list. He seems happy but, as I said, fidgety. Being slightly deaf, he hasn’t heard the distant thunder of another Stones tour.

“Something will happen before the end of the year,” says Sherry Daly, the mighty, motherly manager who had been watching over us, taking notes. She seems mysteriously confident.

“Really?” says Ronnie, perking up slightly.

Art is never enough, not for a Stone.      

Terry Pratchett

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud      

Ray Davies

I rather foolishly got married [to Rasa Didzpetris, a Lith­uanian student and singer] at the end of 1964, and we lived in a bedsit in Muswell Hill. As I was due to go on tour, and she was pregnant with our first child, Louisa, we decided to buy a house.

At this point, the Kinks had had No 1 singles, but I didn’t have enough money to pay the £9,000 asking price, so I had to get an advance from my management.

We moved into 87 Fortis Green, a semi-detached in north London, in early 1965. It was a lovely house, set back from the road, with a driveway covered in trees. It was from the Regency period, and I think it was listed. It had four bedrooms — two on the first floor and two little attic rooms. Even though it was on the main road, it was quite quiet.

I wrote a lot of my favourite songs there. I wrote Sunny Afternoon on an upright piano in the front room, which was painted orange. Waterloo Sunset was written on a mini grand piano in the back room. The walls in there were Thames Green, and that’s probably what inspired me to write the song. I also wrote Days there.

At the time, the Kinks were at their early height, and we couldn’t go far without screaming fans running after us. Nowadays, I’m a sociable and amicable person, but then I just felt invaded. The house was a refuge to me. We’d have fans hanging around outside. I’d call the police, but my parents lived 200yd away, and as my mother was a very accommodating person, she’d take them in.

The first house Ray bought in north London, the only place that ever felt like home The first house Ray bought in north London, the only place that ever felt like home.

People I knew used to descend on me, thinking I was some sort of special person, but I was dull just like everybody else. They’d come up from the West End, assuming I lived in a mansion, then get disappointed when they arrived at a semi. I’d be playing Max Miller records and drinking from a six-pack, whereas they’d be expecting to hear psychedelic music, and tune in and turn on. I can’t remember who used to come round — all hippies looked the same then. I was close to Ned Sherrin at the time, though, and he visited a lot.

My wife was more sociable than I was, so we did have the occasional party. I remember, at one, having a disagreement with a fashion guru after he accused me of wearing flares. He left in a huff — and when I’d thrown everyone out, I wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion to get my anger out.

I never thought I’d ever own a house. My second daughter, Victoria, was born there, and I had an extension built at the back, so we had a bigger room for dinner parties, kids’ parties and meals at Christmas. We had a 100ft garden with an apple tree and swings for the girls to play on. It was very un-rock’n’roll.

My marriage broke up in 1973, and my wife and children moved up the road. I hung on in there until late 1974, living alone or with girlfriends. It never felt like a home again, which is why I left. I sold it to my sister, Gwen, for £25,000, so it stayed in the family. She sold it in 1988, and I believe it’s owned by a BBC producer now.

That house was important to my writing — I wouldn’t exchange my time there for anything. When I was a kid at art school, I used to walk up and down that street, and I always thought what a great house it was. I got what I wanted. I was lucky. I’ve lived in a lot of places since, but it’s the only house I’ve ever thought of as home.      

Ronald Coase

The economist Ronald Coase showed how free markets help the environment.

It’s not often that the ideas of a 102-year-old have as much relevance to the future as the past. But the death this week of Ronald Coase, one of the world’s most cited economists, comes at a time when there is lively debate about the very issue he raised: why neither markets nor government are panaceas.

Born in Willesden in 1910, Coase spent much of his career in the US, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991. His fame rested on two papers. The first, in 1937, explained why companies exist — islands of central planning in a sea of market negotiation. His answer was “transaction costs”: you could order a car from the suppliers of its many parts, but it’s a lot simpler to get Henry Ford to assemble it for you.

Not only do companies lower the cost of goods by co-ordinating production, they depend on having a reputation for doing so. You cannot know all the suppliers with whom you might deal, let alone if they can be trusted. Firms such as Amazon spring up to save us these transaction costs.

Companies also face transaction costs: for renting buildings, employing accountants and managers and so on. Coase taught us that the ideal size of a company will be set by the interplay of lower co-ordination costs through central planning and higher transaction costs associated with holding managers accountable.

This is a penetrating insight for markets and government. Steam and electricity, by making production lines possible, lowered co-ordination costs, making bigger firms viable. But bigger companies, like bigger government bureaucracies, have higher management costs. The difference, of course, is that profits in the marketplace signal whether firms are too big or too small.

Coase’s second famous paper, The Problem of Social Cost, published in 1960, was also about transaction costs. It was written after an argumentative evening in Chicago, when he changed the minds of 21 economists, including Milton Friedman, over whether radio frequencies could be bought and sold rather than allocated by government. Coase’s insight has a more general application to environmental issues. In a dispute between (say) two people in Sussex, one of whom wants to drill for oil, while the other wants a pretty view, Coase explained that in a costless world, the winner could best be determined by negotiation, not regulation. If A values the view more than B values the oil, let A buy out B.

Coase recognised that such transactions were not costless, but used his legal training to show how courts clarify rights and thereby lower transaction costs. But he did not see markets as a panacea. A world of zero transaction costs is as unattainable as a true vacuum in physics. In both, however, the question is how much difference do transaction costs (or air pressure) make in the real world.

Coase always focused on the institutional setting, asking how markets compare with governmental regulations. Neither is perfect. Government regulation, too, has transaction costs: enforcement and monitoring, corruption, inefficiency and resistance to innovation. Just as Coase dragged economists away from assuming perfect competition, so he tried — and largely failed — to drag them away from assuming perfect government with perfect knowledge.

Consider pollution by an airport, a nuisance effectively nationalised by the State. A resident of Hounslow cannot sue Heathrow for disturbing his sleep because the Government has decreed that airlines may make a certain amount of noise at certain times while using the airport. That robs the Hounslow resident of something of value. Had he been able to negotiate with Heathrow, he might have demanded less noise, or might have settled for even more noise so long as he was well compensated.

But government restrictions on night flying and on building a third runway steal something from a resident of Edinburgh, too, by insisting he circle uncompensated over Buckinghamshire every time he flies to Heathrow. Surely there is a possible deal here. But transactions costs might get so complicated — one Hounslow resident holds out for more or one Edinburgh resident refuses to pay — that government regulation may be less trouble than a noise market. Coase, always the pragmatist, said it depends on the circumstances.

Lest you think environmental markets are scarcer than hen’s teeth, consider that a US charity called the Nature Conservancy has purchased fishing rights off California to reduce the impact of trawling on marine ecosystems. A think-tank in Bozeman, Montana, called PERC, seeks out such solutions created by what it calls “enviropreneurs”. It has found many cases of conservation organisations doing deals with oil drillers to the benefit of both, or buying water rights off farmers to help fish — all without any government regulation. Terry Anderson, president of PERC, thanks Coase “for giving us the intellectual foundation on which free market environmentalism is built”. Coase constantly reminded us that economics is in the business of explaining how people actually behave, not telling then how to behave.      

Michael O'Leary RyanAir

Michael O'Leary maintains that there is no such thing as bad publicity because all publicity serves to hammer home the message that Ryanair is cheap, which is good for bookings. So let me say at once that Ryanair is cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. And, of course, nasty. Famously nasty.

O’Leary claims that Ryanair does have some happy customers (especially in Poland), but I’ve never met them, whereas I’ve met a lot of people who say they will fly any airline except Ryanair. My colleague Rod Liddle summed it up the other week when he said that he can always console himself, while standing in a mile-long easyJet queue at Stansted, by looking across at the Ryanair queue and thinking: “Hell, I may have sunk low, but I haven’t sunk that low.”

O’Leary has for years gone out of his way to let his customers know he despises them. His attitude has always been: you want cheap, we’ll show you cheap! We’ll charge you for luggage and make you queue at the gate for hours and we’ll give you non-reclining seats and constant on-board announcements so that you can’t sleep, because if you sleep you won’t be buying all the outrageously overpriced drinks and snacks and knick-knacks and scratchcards we plan to sell you. We’ll dump you at obscure airports miles from anywhere with no transport into town and, of course, we’ll fine you £70 if you fail to print out your boarding card.

By unhappy chance, I had to print out my boarding card for a Ryanair flight to Frankfurt-Hahn (70 miles from Frankfurt) the other day and it took me a whole morning and reduced me to tears. It was not just difficult, it was fiendishly difficult and obviously designed to be so. Oddly enough, just at the moment that I was deciding O’Leary must be the devil incarnate, he was announcing that he had undergone a Pauline conversion. He has decided to become lovable. He is going to stop punishing passengers and show that he cares. He is going to give them allocated seating — well, not quite give, let’s not go mad, but only charge £10 so they don’t have to queue at the gate; and he will only charge them £15 if they lose their boarding card.

He has been running around the media for weeks offering this new line and, so far, it seems to have worked. Yet still he can’t stem the flow of Ryanair horror stories. In December, one Italy-bound passenger who complained about a £4.20 cheese-and-cracker snack was told by a flight attendant that the price allowed people like him to get cheap flights — then the attendant added several “F*** you”s for good measure.

I was interested to see how the charm offensive might work, so I went to meet O’Leary in the bowels of a charmless hotel in the City and caught the end of a television interview he was giving to CNBC, about Ryanair’s wonderful new routes, fares, passenger numbers, et al. He used the word “cheap” in every other sentence, but he really didn’t need to because he looked so cheap — Gap shirt, jeans, rubbish watch, nondescript jacket.

Later, I asked what was the most expensive thing he was wearing and he said probably his glasses — £60 from Specsavers. He is worth at least £80m but really, really hates spending money. Yet he was clearly trying to be charming when I met him. Until this sea change he was famous for effing and blinding, but talking to me he only once used a rude word and then spelt it out — “S.H.I.T.” — to spare my delicate ears. I might have thought this man has been seriously misjudged. Except, of course, that I still had vivid memories of trying to print my Ryanair boarding card. I told him about it and he breezed: “Yes, but go back and try it now. We did have a fiendishly messy and complicated website, but we relaunched it.

“What we did wrong was, up until recently, if you were trying to print off your boarding card, it was all, ‘Do you want car insurance? No. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Life insurance? Are you sure?’ We were putting all these obstacles in the way of passengers.” Well, yes. He says it as though it’s only just struck him, but in fact the website has been terrible ever since it started (not least because O’Leary hired a 17-year-old schoolboy to design it and beat him down on price), so why has it taken him all this time to do anything about it?

“The difficulty, I think, up till about a year ago, was that nobody else’s website was any better. I think I’ve been asleep at the wheel. In the last 12 months, competitors have significantly improved their websites and really focused on making it easier for people to use, and we’ve been blithely going, ‘Ach, doesn’t matter, we’ve much cheaper fares than BA or easyJet, people will put up with it.’ But that’s not good enough any more. We don’t want people to have to put up with it, we want them to have a much nicer, pleasanter experience dealing with us. We had to learn from my mistakes. And the great thing is, I’m generating so much free publicity from this Damascene conversion! You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

True. But I didn’t say I believed it. It’s just another way of taking his passengers for mugs, waving a magic wand and saying now he loves them, having hated them all these years. What it’s really all about is that Ryanair had to issue a profit warning in September, because its ever onwards and upwards expansion seems to have stalled. O’Leary airily dismisses this idea: “I hate to tell you that’s a media invention. Our profit warning was only that we said this year our profit was going to be €520m after tax, instead of €570m. So we’ll make only half a billion after tax, when most other airlines in the world are losing money hand over fist. In actual fact, if you look at this year’s growth, we grew from 79m passengers last year to 81m this year — we’re going like gangbusters!”

So why are profits down? “Because fares will be lower this winter. Which is great! We’re selling more seats at lower fares. Why? Because the market’s a bit soft this winter. But that’s great because when prices get soft, the airline with the lowest cost, which is Ryanair, makes more money ultimately and we can drive more competitors out of the way. I’m the second- or third-largest shareholder and I don’t actually care about the short-term profits or the short-term share price. I care much more about whether we can actually grow this business and take it to 100m or even 110m passengers over the next five years by lowering air fares.”

Oddly enough, the first person who ever told me that Ryanair was evil was the actor Paul Newman. I interviewed him in 1994 in Ireland, where he was opening one of his Hole in the Wall Gang clubs — holiday camps with medical facilities that gave free holidays to terminally ill children. He was meant to be telling me about the ethos of these clubs, and he did, but what he also said was: “Listen, you’re a journalist. You’ve got to expose this airline, Ryanair.”

Apparently, one of his friends, an elderly lady in a wheelchair, had flown over for the camp opening, and Ryanair had left her in her wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs and made no effort whatsoever to help her onto the plane. Her daughter and another passenger had to carry her, while Ryanair staff shrugged their shoulders. As Newman said, that sort of staff attitude can only come from the top. So what, precisely, is O’Leary’s attitude to wheelchair users now, given that he’s so caring and all? “Exactly the same as it’s always been — we’ve always welcomed wheelchairs.”

And charged for them? “No, never charged for a wheelchair — it’s against the law. Under EU legislation, all airports must now provide a service to get you from the car park to the door of the aircraft, and all the airlines pay the airport to provide that service. But the people who get the blame when the system breaks down are always the airlines — ‘Ryanair abandoned me!’ We occasionally have a case where, for some reason, the airport handling doesn’t deliver the passenger to the gate — so do we delay a flight?” Ooh, let me guess. In any event, wheelchair users are not O’Leary’s problem.

So, what do we know about him? Actually, not very much, despite his being the subject of a full-length biography, A Life in Full Flight (2008), by Alan Ruddock. I asked if the biography was accurate and O’Leary said pretty much — Ruddock knew him because they went to college together. So the basic facts are these: he was born in 1961, the second child (and eldest boy) of six and grew up in Mullingar, Co Westmeath. He went to a Christian Brothers junior school, then to Clongowes Wood Jesuit boarding school (which James Joyce attended). He was an average student, keen on sport but not outstanding. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, to read business studies, then worked for 18 months for an accountancy firm, specialising in tax. So far, so ordinary. But — and this is what singles him out — he was always driven to make money.

Ruddock quotes him as saying: “I would have murdered, I would have gone through concrete walls, to make money.” Even as a student, he managed to accumulate savings: he did bar work at the weekends and during holidays, and saved enough to buy a Mini. Then he saved his salary from the accountancy firm and left after two years to buy a newsagent’s in a rundown area of Dublin called Walkinstown, with the help of a £25,000 overdraft. He made the business profitable by working harder and opening for longer hours than any rival newsagent. But his biggest coup was deciding to open on Christmas Day (no one else did) and to stock the shop with batteries and boxes of chocolates at three times the normal price. By lunchtime he had made £14,000, precisely 14 times his normal daily turnover. He told a friend: “I have never had a sexual experience like it.”

He has fond memories of it still. “I think at the time I was 25 or 26 and it was my first job. I’d been a trainee accountant for a year and a half, blowing my brains out. And all of a sudden I was out in the real world, making money for myself, and it was fantastic. But it was obviously very small scale. I’m now 52, I’m married, I’ve got four children, so now I think sex is better than making money, but of course I have lots of money, so money is no longer the great ambition. Once you’ve made money, it’s no longer a particularly satisfying thing. I mean, I don’t work now because I need the money, but I genuinely want to transform the way people fly around Europe.”

But why was he so obsessed with money when he was young? He didn’t come from the sort of grinding poverty that usually produces such hunger; he came from quite a comfortable middle-class background. But it was a financially insecure background. O’Leary always says he grew up on a farm, but his father wasn’t a farmer. He was an entrepreneur who was always setting up new businesses, then getting bored with them and going bust.

He had a textile business at one stage, then a rendering plant, then he bred rabbits for their skins, and even set up a “herbal remedy” company making products out of nettles, which the children had to pick. But these efforts were all hit and miss. “It was a boom-bust, boom-bust cycle. And the funny thing is, what you remember is not when you had lots of money as a child — what you remember is when they were sitting round the table with the bank manager saying, ‘There’s no money.’ And those scenes are ingrained into your memory.”

It was lucky for him, he says, that his father was going through one of his boom periods when it was time for him to start secondary school, so he went to Clongowes Wood, “which gave me a terrific education, for which I am perennially grateful”. But he remembers a few times before that, when his father went bust and they had to move house. “We moved down a couple of times because he was raising money to start a new business, then we’d move up again when the business made money, then he would go bust again and move down again.

“He was an extraordinarily talented individual, but, like a lot of talented individuals, I don’t think he was good at the humdrum of running something with stability. He was mercurial. I don’t have his mercurial nature, but maybe I’m better at running things consistently over a long period of time. I’m more the accountant.”

O’Leary says his ambition was never to own yachts or fabulous cars, but to make enough money to not be poor and be able to raise his children in the country. He didn’t get round to having children, or even a wife, until his forties, but meanwhile he was making money. After buying a further two newsagents, he sold up and went into property, which meant he had some free time. So he approached Tony Ryan, an Irish multimillionaire who was just starting Ryanair, and offered to be his apprentice.

He said he didn’t want a salary or a job title, but a 20% cut of any money he saved Ryan. For several years, he was Ryan’s eyes and ears in the company, but completely low-key. Staff noticed that he was always around — working at night, at weekends, even helping with baggage-handling — but he had no official position and nobody knew who he was. He didn’t become CEO till 1994, but was effectively running the company long before then.

Once he had made his pile, he started to think about marriage and, in 1999, got engaged to his long-standing girlfriend, Denise Dowling. They actually fixed a date for the wedding, but then he suddenly pulled out — he said she was “too good for him”.

At all events, he was still a bachelor at 40 and “you begin to think it [marriage] might not happen and, if it doesn’t, I’ll just work and that’s fine. And then I was fortunate enough to meet someone who was way above my league and she was silly enough to marry me. I’m very happily — or at least I hope I’m very happily — married, though it took me a long time to find the right girl.” He refers to her quaintly as “Mrs O’Leary” — before that she was a banker called Anita Farrell — and they married in his local church in September 2003.

The guests included a few well-known Irish politicians and businessmen but no celebs, and certainly no Hello! magazine. He took his bride to Mauritius for their honeymoon, said he wanted “to get the heir to the empire under way” and, sure enough, they had the first of four children (a boy) a year later. They live near his parents in Mullingar, in a house he bought and subsequently expanded. A journalist who managed to sneak into the house reported that it had lots of “ancestral portraits” and paintings of horses, but only two personal photos — one of O’Leary with a golfing team and one of him skiing.

It also had a huge TV and lots of horse-racing videos. Owning racehorses is his one extravagance, though he bridles at the word. “I wouldn’t call it an extravagance because they’re jump horses, which are very cheap compared to flat-racers.” Nevertheless, he admits he’s spent “£10m or £20m” on them over the years. “That would be my one failure.” He won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 2006 with one of the first horses he owned, and “I should have stopped then”.

He doesn’t back his own horses. He doesn’t gamble, ever, because “I’m an accountant by nature and accountants are not gamblers. We’re somewhat dull and introverted.” Is he cheap in daily life? Does he go around switching lights off, or drive out of his way to get cheaper petrol? “I don’t think so. But I don’t waste money. I fly Ryanair, I don’t have a private plane, I don’t buy expensive clothes, I don’t drink expensive wine. I’m not interested. I have more money than I will ever need, hopefully, to give myself, my wife and my family a nice lifestyle, but after that I go to work at Ryanair because it’s fun, and what we’re doing is revolutionary.”

What did he buy his wife for her last birthday? “That’s entirely confidential,” he snaps in what I imagine is a return to the pre-conversion O’Leary, before remembering he’s meant to be likeable now: “Generally speaking for birthdays, Mrs O’Leary likes jewellery and I like lingerie, so she gets a bit of both.”

He told his biographer Alan Ruddock years ago: “I didn’t want a high profile — I wanted to make lots of money but not be known.” But for years now he has had a high profile. “It’s always been the price of running Ryanair. Because if you look at what Branson has done over the years, he generated enormous amounts of free publicity by just being Richard Branson.

“But, in my defence, you’ll find almost no personal publicity out there about me. No family things. We don’t go to charity balls, we don’t go to premieres. I get asked almost every week to do something for the papers about my favourite weekend or my favourite place — I won’t do any of that, because I try to keep the private away from the kind of clown act that is a performance for Ryanair. And it works like a dream. But there’ll be much less of that going forward now because that’s not the way we want the business to be. I can now retreat backwards thankfully.”

It’s interesting, though, that he mentions Branson — he is, or certainly was, the great role model for how to give a business personality. But the difference between Branson and O’Leary is that Branson made Virgin likeable. Flying Virgin, at least in the early days, made you feel you were buying into some of his charisma, it made you feel a bit dashing and adventurous. Whereas flying Ryanair feels like signing up for the salt mine.

The businessman who O’Leary actually reminds me of, much more than Branson, is Alan Sugar, and of course O’Leary admires him. “He’s great. I think he’s a bit of a caricature and he plays up to this idea of being a monster, but he’s very clever.” Clever, yes — except that Sugar’s company, Amstrad, ultimately failed. Sugar made his fortune by selling a cheap, no-frills home computer, which for many people was the first computer they ever owned. But once they got used to owning a computer, they wanted something better — which Amstrad failed to provide — so they moved on to Apple or whatever while Amstrad was left whining: “But we’re still the cheapest!” This could be the way of Ryanair. It created a market for cheap European travel but, now we’re used to it, we’re also more discriminating. We know a cheap air fare is not cheap if you then have to spend £80 on a taxi to reach your destination.

And, ultimately, I think it does boil down to personality. Ryanair is Michael O’Leary — we can read his character in his airline. Ruddock concluded: “He may look and sound like a showman, but O’Leary is at heart an accountant.” O’Leary himself said several times while talking to me that he was “just a boring accountant” with, I thought, a tiny pause in which I was perhaps meant to protest: “Oh no, you’re riveting.”

In fact, I found myself nodding heartily in agreement. I think that is the secret of O’Leary. He is a bean-counter: he is obsessed with saving money, shaving a penny off here, a penny off there; he is the genius who realised that if you didn’t have seat pockets in the backs of aeroplane seats, you wouldn’t have to pay someone to empty them. He is a multimillionaire who will actually read the small print on electricity tariffs to work out the best deal. Most of us think life’s too short, which, of course, is why we’re not multimillionaires, but most of us get our thrills from something other than saving a few bob.      

Jony Ive

Only one country has made the modern world twice. Britain. We industrialised first and paved the way for the mass production of everything from cogs to togs. Two centuries later, two rather shy blokes from London have defined the 21st century as the technology century. Sir Tim Berners-Lee from East Sheen invented the world wide web, then a chap from Chingford put it in our hands, our pockets and our ears. We’ve been taking it — him — with us ever since.

We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. Some of us like his screens more than our families.

For years, Ive’s natural shyness, coupled with the secrecy bordering on paranoia of his employer, Apple, has meant we have known little about the man who shapes the future, with such innovations as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. But last month, he invited me to Cupertino in Silicon Valley where Apple is based, for his first in-depth interview since he became head of design almost 20 years ago.

The gods — or was it the ghost of Steve Jobs? — seemed against it. Jobs didn’t like Apple execs doing interviews. It had not rained properly in California for months but that morning the clouds rolled off the Pacific, turning the Golden Gate Bridge black. Interstate 280 south to Silicon Valley was a river of water, instead of the usual lava streaks of stop-start SUVs. But just after 10am, an Apple tech-head appeared in an all-white meeting room on the first floor of Building 4 of the firm’s antiseptic headquarters with strict instructions to find an earl grey tea bag.

“Hello. Thanks for coming,” grins Ive, as he rolls in, picking up his brew. Ive is the most unremarkable remarkable person you could meet. You might think you’d recognise him if you passed him on the street, but you wouldn’t. He’s not particularly tall, is well built and bald(ish), has two-day-old stubble and dresses like dads do on weekends — navy polo shirt, canvas trousers, desert boots. He speaks slowly and softly in an Essex accent totally unaffected by living in America for more than two decades. “I can’t even bring myself to say math, instead of maths, so I say mathematics. I sound ridiculous,” he laughs.

Ive is in a good mood today — and not just because he’s celebrating his 47th birthday. He likes the idea of the Sunday Times Magazine’s Makers series because he sees himself as more of a maker than a designer. “Objects and their manufacture are inseparable. You understand a product if you understand how it’s made,” he says. “I want to know what things are for, how they work, what they can or should be made of, before I even begin to think what they should look like. More and more people do. There is a resurgence of the idea of craft.”

Ive has been a maker ever since he could wield a screwdriver. He inherited his craftsman’s skills from his father, Michael. He was a silversmith who later became a lecturer in craft, design and technology at Middlesex Polytechnic. Ive spent his childhood taking apart the family’s worldly goods and trying to put them back together again. “Complete intrigue with the physical world starts by destroying it,” he says. Radios were easy, but “I remember taking an alarm clock to pieces and it was very difficult to reassemble it. I couldn’t get the mainspring rewound.” Thirty years later, he did the same to his iPhone one day. Just to prove he still could.

A love of making is something he shared with Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive who died three years ago. It helped the two men forge the most creative partnership modern capitalism has seen. In less than two decades, they transformed Apple from a near-bankrupt also-ran into the most valuable corporation on the planet, worth more than £400bn.

“Steve and I spent months and months working on a part of a product that, often, nobody would ever see, nor realise was there,” Ive grins. Apple is notorious for making the insides of its machines look as good as the outside. “It didn’t make any difference functionally. We did it because we cared, because when you realise how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure.”

For a man whose products are all called iSomething, it’s surprising that “I” is one word Ive scarcely uses. He talks constantly about his team or Jobs, using “we”. This is not “aw-shucks” false modesty or dorkish US corporate-speak. “I don’t like being singled out for attention. Designing, engineering and making these products requires large teams,” he says.

Ive really does keep a low profile — or at least as low a profile as you’d expect one of the world’s most highly paid designers to keep. He has only one house — in the swanky Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, where his neighbours include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, PayPal founder Peter Thiel and the actor Nicolas Cage. He lives there with his British wife, Heather Pegg, a writer and historian, and their twin sons. He avoids publicity — he and his design team have only been seen in public once: in London two years ago when they all turned up to accept a prestigious D&AD design award.

The simple truth is, Ive hates fuss and relishes simplicity. You can see that from his products. They may be revolutionary, hi-tech magic boxes, but they look so elegantly simple that you know what they are for and how to use them the moment you first pick them up. The iMac banished complicated, hard to use PCs from our desks and made computing easy. With just a tiny white box with a scroll wheel, he put 1,000 songs in our pocket. The iPhone was so touchy-feely, it trashed the fiddly BlackBerry in a heartbeat. Five-year-old kids can pick up and use the iPad — and frequently too.

His love of simplicity and directness extends beyond tech. He collects point’n’ shoot cars — the kind that are hewn from a single block of aluminium. He has a few Bentleys and a natty 1960s Aston Martin DB4 in a silvery blue. It was his teenage love of cars that made Ive decide to become a designer. When he left school, he checked out a few car-design courses in London, including one at the Royal College. He swiftly changed his mind. “The classes were full of students making Vroom! Vroom! noises as they drew,” he recalls, still horrified. So he headed to Newcastle Polytechnic to study industrial design. His work there — notably a telephone and a hearing aid — was so good it was exhibited at the Design Museum.

After leaving Newcastle, he went to work for Roberts Weaver Group, the London design agency that had sponsored him through college. He left a year later to join Tangerine, a new design agency in the capital’s Hoxton Square. (He obviously has a thing about firms named after fruit.) There, he designed everything from microwave ovens to toothbrushes. But he quickly became disillusioned working for clients he didn’t like or whose values he didn’t share. The last straw came one rainy day when he drove to Hull to present his design for a new hand basin and toilet for Ideal Standard. It was Comic Relief day and the boss lampooned his work as too modern and too expensive to build — while wearing a giant plastic red nose.

But there was one Tangerine client Ive admired: Apple, for which he had started working as a consultant. He came up with the early designs for a portable computer that became the PowerBook in 1991. He had first come across Apple after “having such problems with computers” during his student years that he feared he was “technically inept”. Apple’s intuitive mouse-driven system suddenly made it all seem so simple. The company had been asking him to work full-time for two years, but he had hesitated. Apple was in trouble at the time and the firm was half the world away. This time he signed up. It was 1992.

His first few years were frustrating. Back then, Apple’s products were dull. Remember the Newton? Thought not. Design didn’t matter much. He almost quit several times. But when Steve Jobs, who had been ousted in 1985, returned to try to save the firm in 1996, he spotted Ive’s talent and the two men set out on their maniacal journey to remake what they saw as the bland, lazy world around them — or at least the bits of it they thought they could change. Unlike other electronics giants that make everything from computers to cameras to fridges, Apple makes and has only ever made three things: computers, entertainment devices and phones.

Ive works in a design studio in a building on one corner of Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop, the firm’s made-up address. It looks like all the other dull, un-Apple-like glass and beige — yes, beige — concrete blocks. With one really big difference. The glass is opaque and no-one other than Ive, his core team and the top Apple executives is allowed in. “The reason is, it’s the one place you can go and see everything we’re working on — all the designs, all the prototypes,” Ive says.

His team, from Britain, America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, “is really much smaller than you’d think — about 15. Most of us have worked together for 15 to 20 years”. That’s useful. “We can be bitterly critical of our work. The personal issues of ego have long since faded.” The large open-plan studio is, like most of Ive’s personal Apple products, all-white. A large wooden bench, like the Genius Bars in Apple stores, is devoted to new products. At one end are a lot of CNCs — hi-tech machines that are used to make prototypes. “Everyone I work with shares the same love of and respect for making,” he says.

Ive starts a project by imagining what a new kind of product should be and what it should do. Only once he’s answered those questions does he work out what it should look like. He seeks advice in unlikely places. He worked with confectionery manufacturers to perfect the translucent jelly-bean shades of his first big hit, the original iMac. He travelled to Niigata in northern Japan to see how metalworkers there beat metal so thin, to help him create the Titanium PowerBook, the first lightweight aluminium laptop in a world of hefty black plastic slabs.

He spent “months and months and months” working out the exact shape of the stand of the desktop iMac computer because “it’s very hard to design something that you almost do not see because it just seems so obvious, natural and inevitable”. When he has finished a product, even one as fresh and iconic as the white headphones that came with the first iPod, he is haunted by the idea: could I have done it better? “It’s an affliction designers are cursed with,” Ive frowns.

It was an affliction he shared with Jobs, although he seemed to apply it to everything, with — almost — funny consequences. Ive recalls travelling with Jobs. “We’d get to the hotel where we were going, we’d check in and I’d go up to my room. I’d leave my bags by the door. I wouldn’t unpack. I’d go and sit on the bed and wait for the inevitable call from Steve: ‘Hey Jony, this hotel sucks. Let’s go.’ ”

Jobs’ presence still looms large at Apple. Outside the room where Ive and I meet is one of his sayings printed in huge letters on the wall. It reads: “If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

What made the two men work so well together? After all, they are very different. Ive has a gentle, easygoing manner. The laser-sharp intensity of his ideas is leavened by warmth and humour, much of it self-deprecating. No one ever described Jobs as easygoing or self-deprecating. “When we were looking at objects, what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same. And we would ask the same questions, have the same curiosity about things.”

Was Jobs as tough as people say? Stories abound of him humiliating underlings and even — perhaps especially — top executives. “So much has been written about Steve, and I don’t recognise my friend in much of it. Yes, he had a surgically precise opinion. Yes, it could sting. Yes, he constantly questioned. ‘Is this good enough? Is this right?’ But he was so clever. His ideas were bold and magnificent. They could suck the air from the room. And when the ideas didn’t come, he decided to believe we would eventually make something great. And, oh, the joy of getting there!”

For such a determined maker, you might think that Ive would single out a product, probably the iPhone, as his greatest achievement. It is certainly the most copied invention of the modern era. But it is an idea he likes most. He and his team have, he says, proved that consumers are not the price-obsessed philistines they are often assumed to be.

“We’re surrounded by anonymous, poorly made objects. It’s tempting to think it’s because the people who use them don’t care — just like the people who make them. But what we’ve shown is that people do care. It’s not just about aesthetics. They care about things that are thoughtfully conceived and well made. We make and sell a very, very large number of (hopefully) beautiful, well-made things. Our success is a victory for purity, integrity — for giving a damn.”

Perhaps. But critics complain about the built-in obsolescence of Apple products, its hermetically sealed operating systems, the need to buy new chargers for new products and the prices Apple charges. Oh, the prices! £25 for a plastic charger that probably costs less than £1 to make! Chargers and iOS are matters for Apple’s software fellas and the firm’s new boss, Tim Cook. When it comes to obsolescence, Ive himself concedes he is carrying the fifth version of a phone that was only invented in 2007, with, yes, a new charger. But, he says: “One of the things that is distinct about our products is that they get reused and passed on.” What do you do with your old iPhones? “Erm. Actually, they’re not mine. They’re the company’s.” What does the company do with them? “We reuse stuff and then we’ll disassemble stuff and recycle stuff. I understand what’s behind the question, but I think it’s a fundamental — and good — part of the human condition to try to make things better. That’s the role we’re playing.”

On price, Ive points out that developing life-changing products that we could not have imagined before but when we see them we want at once, is very expensive. What’s more, manufacturing them the Apple way, often to tolerances far higher than needed, costs a bomb. “We don’t take so long and make the way we make for fiscal reasons. Quite the reverse,” he laughs.

Ive picks up his iPhone to demonstrate how technically complex its construction is. “The body is made from a single piece of machined aluminium,” he says, sticking to the British pronunciation Jobs used to tease him about. “The whole thing is polished first to a mirror finish and then is very finely textured, except for the Apple logo. The chamfers [smoothed-off edges] are cut with diamond-tipped cutters. The cutters don’t usually last very long, so we had to figure out a way of mass-manufacturing long-lasting ones. The camera cover is sapphire crystal. Look at the details around the sim-card slot. It’s extraordinary!”

It’s pretty, all right, and doubtless costs a pretty penny to make. But there’s something else at play, something Ive won’t say. As long as Apple keeps on making such wildly innovative products — no other manufacturer, not even Apple’s arch-rival Samsung, has even come close to beating the iPad, and not for want of trying — Apple can charge whatever it likes and consumers will pony up. Apple sells about 250m iPhones, iPads and Macs a year and, since its launch, customers have downloaded more than 25bn songs and 1bn TV episodes from the iTunes store — all with margins that make its competitors weep.

Ive talks so much more about making things than designing them, it seems odd that he has chosen to work in tech, where so much of the magic is in the software, not the hardware. You can’t touch tech. There are no wheels or moving parts in an iPad or an iPhone. Ive says tech products offer something unique — and uniquely challenging. “The product you have in your hand, or put into your ear, or have in your pocket, is more personal than the product you have on your desk. The struggle to make something as difficult and demanding as technology so intimately personal is what first attracted me to Apple. People have an incredibly personal relationship with what we make.”

That relationship is getting closer all the time. The new big thing is wearable tech. Google has brought out web-enabled Google Glass spectacles. Samsung and Sony have introduced web-linked smartwatches. Will Apple make an iWatch? “Obviously, there are rumours about us working on... and, obviously, I’m not going to talk about that. It’s a game of chess, isn’t it?” Sounds like the Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch he’s wearing is not long for his wrist — even though he designed it himself for an Aids-charity auction and it is only one of three in the world.

That’s the trouble with tech. It changes so fast. Just when you think you have the best gadget, something newer, cooler, comes along — usually something made by Ive. Not that Apple’s hundreds of millions of fans care. The newer it is, the more they like it. But should they? When Ive sees customers queueing overnight to buy the latest iPhone, does he worry that we have become too obsessed with the latest “this” or “that”, that we are genuflecting at the altar of technology? A phone is just a phone, not the second coming of Christ. “What people are responding to is much bigger than the object. They are responding to something rare — a group of people who do more than simply make something work, they make the very best products they possibly can. It’s a demonstration against thoughtlessness and carelessness,” he says.

It’s the first time in more than an hour and a half that Ive allows himself to be a little grand. Beneath his studiously modest public demeanour lies a heart of solid steel — OK, aluminium. He’d have to have terabytes of confidence and resolve to win the battles that Jobs deliberately fostered between senior executives in a brutally Darwinian effort to get the best from each of them.

I hear it again when I ask whether he is flattered or frustrated when he sees his designs so widely referenced, reworked — OK, copied. “It’s theft,” he replies in a heartbeat, his eyes narrowing sharply. “What’s copied isn’t just a design, it’s thousands and thousands of hours of struggle. It’s only when you’ve achieved what you set out to do that you can say, ‘This was worth pursuing.’ It takes years of investment, years of pain.” Jobs put Ive’s anger into action. He severed ties with the Google boss and former Apple board member Eric Schmidt, when it emerged that Google was developing its own answer to the iPhone. Jobs also successfully sued Samsung for $1bn for ripping off Apple’s ideas.

Ive describes Jobs as “my closest friend” and says he finds it “odd and tough to talk about him, because it doesn’t feel that long ago that he died.” There is, perhaps, another reason. Since Jobs died, Apple has hit a rough patch, at least by its ludicrously high standards. It has not had a break-out hit since the iPad. There has been no Apple TV set to revolutionise home entertainment. No spiffy watch. (Yet.) The firm’s share price has slumped and it has lost its title of the world’s most valuable firm.

Some speculate that, without Jobs, Apple has lost its golden touch. An acclaimed new book by the former Wall Street Journal technology writer Yukari Kane calls the company “the Haunted Empire”. Others say it has killed its own future: that by creating so many extraordinary products in such a short time, it has run out of things to invent. If that were true, if Apple could no longer make stuff that shreds, not pushes, the envelope, would Ive give up? “Yes. I’d stop. I’d make things for myself, for my friends at home instead. The bar needs to be high.”

But, he adds: “I don’t think that will happen. We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. It’s still so, so new.”

What’s more, after all the years of toil, all the gazillions he’s made, he’s still remarkably hungry. “At Apple, there’s almost a joy in looking at your ignorance and realising, ‘Wow, we’re going to learn about this and, by the time we’re done, we’re going to really understand and do something great.’ Apple is imperfect, like every large collection of people. But we have a rare quality. There is this almost pre-verbal, instinctive understanding about what we do, why we do it. We share the same values.”

So the best of Jony Ive, the best of Apple, is still to come? “I hope so.” And, with that, he gulps down the last of his now-cold cuppa and heads back through the warm California rain to his secret lab. Tomorrow doesn’t wait for the man who designs it.      

Alain de Botton

On a recent Thursday morning, I flew to Amsterdam to meet the writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. As I woke up and left the house, I couldn’t help noticing how much of the minute-by-minute experience of being alive that day had been described and analysed by the signature highbrow self-help books that de Botton has been writing for the past 20 years.

I was making a journey (The Art of Travel, 2002); I was flying from Heathrow (A Week at the Airport, 2009). On the way, I looked at billboards of barely-dressed men and women (How to Think More About Sex, 2012) and checked my phone for news (The News: A User’s Manual, 2014). I was on an early-morning flight, full of people in suits looking at spreadsheets on their laptops and worried, as usual, about my choice of profession (Status Anxiety, 2004). As the plane took off and we rose into a fragile orange dawn, I thought first about death (Religion for Atheists, 2012) and then about how much I was looking forward to seeing the streets and canals of Amsterdam, a city I had never previously visited (The Architecture of Happiness, 2006).

Sometimes it can feel like it’s a de Botton world and we’re just living in it. Working at what he describes as “the interaction between culture and life”, he has sold 6m books. He was in Amsterdam to give a talk for the opening of his Art is Therapy show at the Rijksmuseum. Concurrent shows are under way at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Art is Therapy is quintessential de Botton. The man wants our attention in a busy, distracted world. As a result his books, with their catchy, polemical titles, have often taken on tangible forms: at his School of Life, which will soon have branches in Australia, Turkey, France and Brazil; in his Living Architecture range of modernist holiday homes; in his Philosopher’s Mail website, which describes itself as “a genuinely popular and populist news outlet which at the same time is alive to traditional philosophical virtues”. The empire has earned him a reported £7m.

Art is Therapy has the same origins. Last year de Botton published the book Art as Therapy, with the art historian John Armstrong. It argued that our relationship with the visual arts, particularly in the context of big art museums, has lost its way and we need to find new ways to reconnect with paintings and sculpture on a personal and emotional level.

Before the lecture began, I had time to look at de Botton and Armstrong’s Rijksmuseum intervention, which consists of about 150 large, yellow, Post-it style labels that have been stuck around the place, encouraging people to interpret their visit in broadly therapeutic terms. The captions were instantly recognisable as de Botton’s: witty, academically self-aware, eager to embrace our vulnerabilities. “There is no such thing as great art, per se,” said a sign on the stairs, “only art that works for you.”

At first glance, the art museum struck me as a curious target for de Botton’s concern. The Rijksmuseum, which reopened last year after a major (and universally lauded) refurbishment, was packed. It seemed to be doing fine. Three million people came to see its collection last year and, around me, they were doing what people normally do in big museums. They steeled themselves before floor­plans. They ate apples on benches. They followed guides who waved pieces of paper above their heads.

But this is exactly the kind of aimless experience that de Botton is worried about. He wants us to engage with visual art with the shock and immediacy of feeling we associate more naturally with music. One of his yellow signs was next to “The Feast of St Nicholas”, a painting by Jan Havicksz Steen from the 1660s. At the centre of the image an impish little girl with a bucket of treats backs away from a friendly-looking woman. De Botton’s label suggested that the work takes a tolerant view of the greedy child within us all, and might help us with our feelings of “fragility, guilt, a split personality, self-disgust”. A tall man standing looking at it, who turned out to be an insurance manager from Florida, had his own interpretation. “It reminds me of occasions when you get your family together, and you think it’s going to be fun and tranquil,” he said. “Then it turns into chaos.” He squinted sceptically at de Botton’s text. “He didn’t talk to the painter, did he?”

Other people loved the signs. Because I was wearing a press badge, I was mistaken several times for a tour guide and one woman – also American, from Salt Lake City – came up to me specifically to ask who had done them. “These are brilliant, honestly,” she said. She was called Kathy. “I think it makes people stop and put it in a perspective that they are not capable of.” She wrote down de Botton’s name in her notebook.

In the lecture hall de Botton laid out the main argument of Art as Therapy with the help of slides and jokes. In person, he is a mercurial presence: trim, fine-featured, fluttering with an energy that reads as politeness rather than nerves. He has clear skin, a large soulful mouth, sea-green eyes and an astonishingly smooth bald head (he lost his hair when he was 20). He spoke for 35 minutes without notes, dashing around the history of art and our struggle with its purpose in our lives in a tone that was companionable, clever, admitting of our faults.

“We are all very anxious,” said de Botton, in a riff about the calming effects of minimalism. “You’re anxious. I’m anxious. We’re all very anxious.” All the big names – Aristotle, Ruskin, Hegel – got a look in but colloquially so. Vermeer, Rembrandt, de Hooch – the masters who fill the Rijksmuseum – were always “the guys” or “the 17th-century guys.” When he finished, he took the banal questions of journalists and threw them back in brilliant forms. He was like a bashful boy genius at a prize-giving.

So why do you infuriate so many people? I asked. We were back in the lecture theatre, alone. De Botton had just led a quick tour of the Rijksmuseum’s “Gallery of Honour”, followed by television cameras. Like many of his most ambitious projects, Art is Therapy has received some poisonous reviews. “De Botton’s evangelising and his huckster’s sincerity make him the least congenial gallery guide imaginable,” wrote the Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle. Such hostility has stalked de Botton since his breakout hit How Proust Can Change Your Life was published in 1997. “This reviewer was, unfortunately, intensely irritated by many aspects of de Botton’s thesis, finding it superficial, often contrived and at times patronising,” wrote Teresa Waugh in the Spectator. That morning, a Dutch journalist had turned to me and said: “I suppose he sees himself as a modern Socrates, going around and annoying everybody.”

Early negative reviews of his work, by Proust professors and philosophy dons, devastated him, admitted de Botton. “It was very surprising and upsetting. Then my wife, who is very wise, said to me, ‘It’s obvious, this is a fight.’ This is a turf war, and the battle is about what culture should mean to us.”

De Botton studied history at Cambridge. He started a PhD but chucked it in, turning against the academic establishment. Now, whenever he roves into a new field – asking what Proust, architecture, philosophy, or art museums can do for us – he girds himself for the same embattled responses. “You’ve got academic philosophers going, ‘This guy has sold 22,000 times as many books as any philosophical books we’ve written, therefore he is killing us,’” said de Botton. “He is not allowed to exist.”

De Botton is certainly the victim of professional envy. He comes up with snappy ideas. He is unbelievably productive (he rarely sleeps past 6am). He gives YouTube lectures. But all this still doesn’t quite explain how intensely he gets under people’s skin.

I decided to read out loud a bit of de Botton that I found particularly irritating so we could talk about why. “We need celebs to make a whole lot else sexy,” he wrote recently about famous people and their endorsements, “including reading, being kind, forgiving and working towards social justice.” Yuck, I said. Ghastly.

It was a mistake. De Botton looked at me. He might be supremely comfortable talking about Le Corbusier and the nature of loneliness but this was clearly pushing it. He gave me a rather dizzying lecture about the stupidity of giving interviews – “You put yourself in the hands of somebody who is deeply unsympathetic to what one is trying to do and it gives them the leeway to say any old thing” – and the crudeness of asking him why he thinks he drives other people crazy. “It’s a question one can have about a person,” said de Botton, “but it’s not necessarily a question that that person can answer.”

Fair enough. Despite his relentlessness, the guy has nothing to prove. For every critic in the Guardian, there was John Updike, who found de Botton dazzling. For every insurance manager from Florida, there is a Kathy from Salt Lake City. The books, the sales, the franchised Schools of Life speak for themselves. Whatever emotions he provokes, de Botton is completely plugged into the psychological terms of our age.

A few weeks before we met, I had attended a class on “How to Realise Your Potential” at his School of Life near King’s Cross in London. On a weekday afternoon, costing £40 a head, it was practically sold out. I sat with about 25 others – students, overworked professionals, people recovering from serious illness – as we were guided for two hours through the aperçus of Rilke, Emerson and the sociologist Richard Sennett on how to live a fulfilled life and balance the competing demands of your work, yourself and other people. The tone was secular, humane and smart. My brain buzzed with cynicism about being there and the scale of my imperfections. The rest of the class just got on with it, talking about the passion that had gone out of their jobs, the friends who bored them, their eagerness to retake control of the narrative of their lives. “Everything is fluid,” said a woman who had lost her mother and discovered she had leukaemia a few months later. “Nothing is as bleak as it seems at the time.”

. . . Back in the lecture theatre, the mood between us improved. De Botton more or less interviewed himself. “It is self-therapy before it is anything else,” he said. He was born in Switzerland in 1969, a weedy boy, and came to England when he was eight. Unable to speak the language, he was packed off to boarding school. Art – literature, paintings, music, buildings – became the young de Botton’s solace, his companions, a way “to see into the minds of others and feel you are not alone”. The captions in the Rijksmuseum can at times read as a direct, autobiographical plea for the work to mean as much to you as it has done for him. “I want my mummy,” says the label next to a 14th-century Buddhist statue, “even if I’m 44 and a half.”

His forebears made money. His father, Gilbert, sold the firm he founded, Global Asset Management, in 1999 for $675m. “Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat,” de Botton said to me. “It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.” Everyone was ambitious. Everyone was paranoid. “I was told by my father nine times a day that you were going to get a job the minute you finish your studies.” Hence the momentousness, in de Botton’s eyes, of the decision, aged 21, to write for a living. The guilt. The shame. The need to be prosperous (he has never touched his inheritance). “My father really respected culture but only the successful people,” he said. “He had no patience for the starving artist.”

The mystery, which de Botton has since solved, has been the ache to connect. To grasp the middlebrow. Why does he care if millions of people are trudging around palaces of high culture and not having a particularly good time? The answer is his nanny. De Botton was, in large part, brought up by a woman called Bertha Von Buren. He spent much of his childhood in her village of Ennetmoos, in rural Switzerland. “She looked after me until I was 13 and she is still who I look to as my mother,” he told me. “She was the wisest person, and the kindest person, that I ever knew ... and she’d never read a book in her life.” He still spends every summer in Ennetmoos, now with his own family. His father is dead; Bertha is still alive. “A very intelligent chap told me once that you are trying to write books that both your father and your nanny will understand,” said de Botton. “That is your existential situation.” He recounted all this without a single pause. “I thought that was the most brilliant comment. It explained everything.”

We went outside, into the sunshine. He likes being abroad. “I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English,” said de Botton. “I do weird, European, confessional heart-laid-bare stuff. I have a kind of utopian streak ... England is an empirical country of cynics, you know. It’s Will Self.” Around us, Amsterdam, where de Botton had opened a School of Life the afternoon before, looked much more promising. “I’m very idealistic about this country,” he said. “But what’s it like to live here?”

We sat in the Rijksmuseum’s garden. De Botton talked about some of the writers he loves – Montaigne, and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott – and then he told me about a service, known as “bibliotherapy”, offered by the School of Life, which (I think) he thought I would hate. The idea is that someone suggests enriching books for you to read. “What a load of wank!” he exclaimed, gleefully taking the role of his detractors. “What do I want to say? Just calm down ... ” It occurred to me, as it has long occurred to him, that our reactions to him might say more about ourselves than they do about him. “Is this the enemy?” He asked. “Is this really the enemy?” At the airport, in de Botton-ish fashion, a songbird was trapped inside the terminal and fluttered about the rafters. I checked Twitter. De Botton is, of course, on the site. He has 439,000 followers. His profile picture is of a seascape by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto that he claims is useful for countering anxiety. He had just posted a message.

“The best cure for one’s bad tendencies,” he wrote, “is to see them fully developed in someone else.”      

Freddie Mercury

It was an utterly unexpected rebirth. from the moment Freddie Mercury and the other members of Queen – guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon – took the stage at London's Wembley Stadium, on July 13th, 1985, at the historic Live Aid concert, the group captured the day. Mercury began by sitting at the piano, playing Queen's most famous song, the strange and gorgeous "Bohemian Rhapsody," with the band storming in behind him in majestic stride, and an audience of 72,000 singing the lyrics from a seemingly deep-rooted memory, as if this was what they had waited for all day. Things built from there. Mercury grabbed his sawed-off microphone stand as the band swayed into the rapturous "Radio Ga Ga," and the crowd responded with a collective gesture, slapping hands overhead and pumping fists as the singer pushed them on with his sonorous roar. Some people found the sight of that multitude acting in spontaneous accord, like a human tide, scary: that much power, all at the beckon of one band and one voice.

That it was Queen accomplishing this came as a wonder to nearly everybody. They seemed to have run their course. After their epic 1975 album A Night at the Opera, they had piled up hit after hit in a stylistically diverse range: from baroque pop to hard rock, disco, rockabilly and funk. Then, by the mid-1980s, their fates had shifted – in part because many fans had trouble accepting Mercury's perceived homosexuality. After a mind-stopping error of judgment in 1984, when Queen elected to play a series of shows in apartheid South Africa, the band appeared to be pariahs even in its native England. But then, after the Live Aid performance – which exemplified everything extraordinary about Queen, their scope, their virtuosity, their command of a stage – all anybody wanted was more. Years later, May would say, "That was entirely down to Freddie. The rest of us played OK, but Freddie was out there and took it to another level."

Today, nearly 23 years after Freddie Mercury died of bronchopneumonia related to AIDS, Queen's legacy – as one of rock's biggest and most controversial bands – is still inseparable from him, whatever the success May and Taylor might achieve in the next few months on tour with Adam Lambert. When Taylor and May have talked about the Mercury years (Deacon refuses to talk about the experience at all), it's sometimes as if they're still mystified by how wonderful and horrible it all was. "We were very close as a group," Taylor said days after Mercury's death. "But even we didn't know a lot of things about Freddie." Years later, May said, "It fucked us up in the way only an out-of-world experience can do. Queen were the biggest thing in the world. . . . You're adored – surrounded by people who love you, yet utterly lonely. . . . The excess leaked from the music into life."

Queen begins and ends with Freddie Mercury. He embodied the band's identity, its triumphs and failings, and he was the psyche whose loss it couldn't survive. But in the beginning, there was no Freddie Mercury.

He was Farrokh Bulsara, born on September 5th, 1946, in the British protectorate of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa to a Parsee family that practiced Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. Farrokh's father, Bomi, was a high-court cashier for the British government, which meant that he, his wife, Jer, and Farrokh – and later Farrokh's sister, Kashmira – lived in cultural privilege, compared to much of the island's population. In 1954, when Farrokh was eight, the Bulsaras sent him to St. Peter's Church of England School, in Panchgani, India. Located 150 miles from Bombay (now Mumbai), St. Peter's had been regarded for years as the best boys boarding school in that part of the world. Farrokh arrived as a terribly shy boy, self-conscious about the prominent upper teeth that immediately earned him the nickname "Bucky." (He would remain sensitive about his teeth the rest of his life, covering his mouth with his hand whenever he smiled. At the same time, he realized that the pronounced overbite – caused by four extra teeth at the back of his mouth – may have been his greatest blessing, giving his voice its distinctive resonant embouchure.)

Many remembered Farrokh seeming lonesome at St. Peter's. "I learnt to look after myself," he said years later, "and I grew up quickly." When some schoolteachers began calling him Freddie as an affectionate term, he seized the name instantly. He also cultivated his own tastes. Freddie's family had steeped him in opera, but he was also developing a love for Western pop sounds – especially the boisterous piano-based rock & roll of Little Richard and the virtuosic R&B of Fats Domino. After Freddie's aunt Sheroo noted that he could hear a tune once, then sit down at the piano and play it, his parents paid for a private music tuition. In 1958, he formed a band, the Hectics, with some other St. Peter's students. In Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography, a student at a neighboring girls school, Gita Choksi, said that when he was onstage, Freddie was no longer a shy boy: "He was quite the flamboyant performer," she said, "and he was absolutely in his element onstage."

Some students at St. Peter's believed Farrokh had a crush on Gita, but she said she was never aware of it. Others thought it was already plain Farrokh was gay, though there is little evidence of him being sexually active. Janet Smith, now a teacher at the girls school, remembered him as "an extremely thin, intense boy, who had this habit of calling one 'darling,' which I must say seemed a little fey. It simply wasn't something boys did in those days . . . . It was accepted that Freddie was homosexual when he was here. Normally it would have been 'Oh, God, you know, it's just ghastly.' But with Freddie somehow it wasn't. It was OK."

In 1963, Freddie returned to Zanzibar and his family. British colonial rule ended that same year; then, in 1964, the island erupted in revolution and slaughters, and the Bulsaras fled to Feltham, Middlesex, in England, near London. The weather was rough and the income not as good, and Freddie began changing in ways they didn't get. "I was quite rebellious, and my parents hated it," he told Rolling Stone in 1981. "I grew out of living at home at an early age. But I just wanted the best. I wanted to be my own boss."

Whatever he had left behind in Zanzibar and Bombay, Freddie Bulsara would never claim it as a past that he was willing to talk about. He was just in time for the era of Swinging London, the time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Life was opening up for him, and he intended to revel in every moment of its future.

Like Bulsara, the two other men who initiated Queen, Brian May and Roger Taylor, were attending London colleges in the late 1960s. May was tall, lean, soft-spoken, erudite and developing into a visionary guitarist. What most informed his sensibilities, he later said, was the range of harmony-steeped music he had been hearing since the 1950s: the vocal blends of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the layered strings of popular Italian concertmaster Mantovani and then, in the 1960s, the innovative methods of the Beatles. In late 1963, May and his father built him an electric guitar with mahogany parts taken from a fireplace. (Known as the Red Special, it is the guitar that May still plays.) May and a friend, bassist Tim Staffell, were playing in a cover band called 1984 when both started college careers in the mid-Sixties. May attended Imperial College, studying math, physics and astronomy; in 1968, he and Staffell started a new band, Smile, which would be closer to the fierce improvisational spirit then gaining ground in British rock being made by Cream and others. They posted a note on an Imperial College bulletin board, seeking a drummer who could play like Ginger Baker and Mitch Mitchell. Taylor, who was preparing for a dentistry career but hated studying, answered the ad. Taylor was pretty-faced, a bit rowdy, and could play what Smile was looking for, though he was closer to the spacious style of the Who's Keith Moon, and, like Moon, he had an instinctive sense of tonality. "I remember being flabbergasted when Roger set his kit up at Imperial College," May told Mojo in 1999. "Just the sound of him tuning his drums was better than I'd heard from anyone before." Smile's trio were now in place.

Staffell also shared musical interests with Freddie Bulsara, who by then was attending Ealing College of Art, where both were students. By this point, Bulsara was less reserved. He had long hair, was exotically handsome, even dangerous-looking, and had a sinuous way of moving. Staffell took Bulsara to meet Taylor and May in early 1969. Bulsara struck them as a little peculiar – he painted his fingernails black, he could be effeminate – but he was endearing. He could also be imperious. "At that stage," said May, "he's just kind of an enthusiast. He says, 'This is really good – it's great how . . . you're aware of building up atmospheres and bringing them down. But you're not dressing right, you're not addressing the audience properly. There's always opportunity to connect.'"

Bulsara was in and out of a couple of groups himself during this period, and he tended to remodel everything about them. He liked singing blues – most bands demanded it – but his influences were much broader: the compositions of British composer and singer Noel Coward; the instrumental voicings of Chopin and Mozart; the singing of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Robert Plant and Aretha Franklin; and the histrionics of his two favorite stars, Jimi Hendrix and Liza Minnelli.

After he saw Smile, though, his ambition was to be the band's lead singer. Sometimes at Smile shows, he would yell, "If I was your singer, I'd show you how it was done." In early 1970, after too many false hopes, Staffell announced he was leaving Smile. May, Taylor and Bulsara were sharing an apartment by this time. The others were well aware that Bulsara was a nimble and well-schooled pianist and was developing into an exceptional singer. So in April 1970, the three formed a new band. They went through a handful of bassists – at least one of whom had difficulty with Bulsara's over-the-top style – before meeting John Deacon in early 1971. Deacon was another exemplary student (he had a master of science in acoustics and vibration technology) and struck everybody as extremely reserved. ("He hardly spoke to us at all," May recalled of the first meeting.) But he learned quickly, and in his audition he "plugged a gap and didn't drop a fucking beat," in the words of a musician present that day. Deacon was hired on the spot.

Right away Bulsara began to exert his sway, persuading the others to dress more dramatically, more dandyish. He also insisted he had come upon the perfect title for the band. May and Taylor suggested names such as the Rich Kids and the Grand Dance, but Mercury insisted on Queen. "It's ever so regal," he said. "It was a strong name, very universal and very immediate," he added years later. "It had a lot of visual potential and was open to all sorts of interpretations, but that was just one facet of it."

And crucially, Queen's lead singer was no longer Freddie Bulsara. He was now Freddie Mercury – the new name a reference to the Roman messenger of the gods. "I think changing his name was part of him assuming this different skin," said May in a 2000 documentary. "I think it helped him to be this person that he wanted to be. The Bulsara person was still there, but for the public he was going to be this different character, this god."

In Queen's early years, a legend persisted that the band had spent a year or two mapping out the stratagems of its success before anybody ever heard the music. (Deacon once boasted to friends that the group had a "10-year plan.") For the music press, this sort of ambition showed guile rather than any true passion for the meaning or social possibilities of music. It was an image that Queen didn't escape for most of their career. In truth, Queen's rise was beset by questionable business deals and serious health problems (at one point May almost lost an arm to gangrene, and was later hospitalized with hepatitis, then an ulcer). But for Mercury, there was no fallback. May, Taylor and Deacon could all resort to their original academic-bred careers: May kept working toward his Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics in the band's early years, and Deacon later admitted that he wasn't convinced Queen were truly viable until after their third LP. Mercury eventually persuaded the band that it was worth abjuring any other careers. "If we were going to abandon all the qualifications we had got in other fields to take the plunge into rock," May later said, "we weren't prepared to settle for second-best."

By the time the group released its debut, Queen, in July 1973, the material already felt dated to the bandmates. Mercury didn't have the patience for jams or fantasias. He believed that carefully crafted song forms with strong, focused melodies were radical enough; if you wanted people to hear your work, strive for memorable performances. He also finally convinced the others that how a band looked – how to dress, how a lead singer moved and commanded a stage – was equally important. With his black nails, and his harlequin bodysuits and angel-wing cloaks that heightened his athletic, roundelay-like movements onstage, Mercury reveled in an androgynous splendor – albeit one with an ominous edge about it. These attributes seemed akin to the styles being forged at the time by David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople, which was a concern. "We were into glam rock before the Sweet and Bowie," May said at the time, "and we're worried now, because we might have come too late."

With their next two albums, Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack (both from 1974), Queen successfully caught up with themselves. Queen II's lavish sound and Sheer Heart Attack's harder and more propulsive approach laid the groundwork for the extravagant and complex sound that marked Queen's first triumphant period. Onstage, though, it was Mercury who was the focal point. The British press largely hated what it saw as his campy, theatrical mannerisms. But he was steadily building a powerful, uncommon bond between the band and its audience, often engaging fans in singalongs. "What you must understand," he once told another singer, "is that my voice comes from the energy of the audience. The better they are, the better I get."

Recording their fourth album, 1975's A Night at the Opera, Queen felt that their time had come. May recalled thinking, "This is our canvas, we will paint on it at our leisure." Mercury had ideas for a ludicrously epic track. Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who had worked with Queen on their music up to this point, has told the story of the first time he heard "Bohemian Rhapsody": "Freddie was sitting in his apartment, and he said, 'I've got this idea for a song.' So he started playing it on the piano. . . . Then he suddenly stopped and said, 'Now, dears, this is where the opera section comes in.'" From the opening ballad section, the song soared into operetta form, then into battering rock & roll, finally back to a ballad. Said May, "It was [Freddie's] baby." Queen and Baker worked on the track for weeks. The band overdubbed some 180 vocal parts for the song, fashioning its famous cathedral-like chorale sound. At one point, there were so many tracks that the audio tape wore down to transparency and would have evaporated with any more recording.

When "Bohemian Rhapsody" was done, the band wanted it to be A Night at the Opera's first single. Queen's manager at the time, John Reid – who was also Elton John's manager – said that it could never happen without the nearly-six-minute-long track being edited. Deacon felt the same way, but Taylor and May shared Mercury's resolve. Whatever doubts remained were dispelled when Mercury and Taylor played the finished recording for BBC DJ Kenny Everett. "It could be half an hour," Everett told them, "it's going to be Number One for centuries." As it developed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" became Queen's first Number One British single, and it hit the Top 10 in America. In the years since, the song has routinely headed British lists of all-time best and worst singles. That never daunted Mercury. "A lot of people slammed 'Bohemian Rhapsody,'" he said, "but who can you compare it to?"

Mercury wasn't patient with those who asked him about the song's meanings. "Fuck them, darling," he said. "I'll say no more than what any decent poet would tell you if you dared ask him to analyze his work: 'If you see it, dear, then it's there.'" It's possible, though, that the song had meanings Mercury simply wasn't ready to divulge. "Freddie's stuff was so heavily cloaked lyrically," May later said. "But you could find out, just from little insights, that a lot of his private thoughts were in there." Indeed, "Rhapsody" may have held the key to Mercury's still-secret life. "The song," critic Anthony DeCurtis has said, "is about a secret transgression – 'I'm being punished' – at the same time that there's this desire for freedom."

Mercury guarded his depths closely because he felt he had to. Some thought his effete behavior was largely an affectation. Photographer Mick Rock remembers Mercury "dabbling" in relationships with women ("I do know of one or two names!" Rock said). Also, Mercury sustained a passionate relationship with his partner of many years, Mary Austin, a glamorous young woman he met at Biba, a London fashion house.

"He thought he liked women," an art-college associate of Mercury's told biographer Lesley-Ann Jones. "It took him quite a while to realize he was gay. . . . I don't think he could face up to the feelings it caused inside him." By the time of Queen's 1976 album, A Day at the Races, Mercury had been acting strangely with girlfriend Austin for some time. "I could see that he was feeling bad about something," she said in the documentary Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story. Finally, Mercury told Austin about his new comprehension of himself. "It was a relief to actually hear it from him," she said. Mercury would remain close to Austin for the rest of his life, employing her as his personal secretary and adviser, and despite his numerous subsequent relationships, he referred to her as his common-law wife. From that point on, Austin said, Mercury felt no obligation to explain his sexuality to anybody.

Nor did he tolerate cheap defamations. In Queen: The Early Years, there's a story from somebody who had worked with Queen at a show in Manchester: "Queen had just taken the stage, and this bloke shouted to Freddie, 'You fucking poof.' . . . Freddie demanded that the crew turn the spotlight on the crowd and find this fella. He then said to him, 'Say that again, darling,' and the bloke didn't know what to do. . . . I saw him literally shrink this six-foot bloke down to an inch."

If Mercury's homosexuality was ever an issue for Queen's members, it never played out in public. There were more than enough other judgments beginning to bear down. In 1976, around the time A Day at the Races appeared, the punk movement began to draw divisions in rock, and harshly disparaged the music of bands like Queen. "A rock gig is no longer the ceremonial idolization of a star by fans," declared New Music Express. "That whole illusion, still perpetuated by Queen, is quickly being destroyed." (When Queen found themselves recording at a studio adjacent to the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious reportedly asked Mercury, "So you're this Freddie Platinum bloke that's supposed to be bringing ballet to the masses?" Mercury replied, "Ah, Mr. Ferocious. We're doing our best, dear.") Whatever the reasons, Queen's sound changed dramatically with their 1977 album, News of the World: This was much starker music; lush orchestrations and harmonies had been replaced with odd and novel constructions. May said, "We'd already decided that we had saturated ourselves in multilayered production before the Sex Pistols came along, so we deliberately made News of the World to go back to the basics and find some vitality again."

Two of the album's tracks, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions," are Queen's most widely known songs, and their most contentious. "Rock You," written by May, opened with crashing stomps and a lyric that seemed to warn any doubters to clear way – "Somebody better put you back into your place" – and was taken by some as a refutation of punk. "We Are the Champions," by Mercury, proved controversial even within the band. May was afraid it might be taken as oversized arrogance, and told Mercury, "You can't do this." Mercury said, "Yes, we can." The two songs proved massively popular – and off-putting to some, helping inspire one Rolling Stone critic to scorn Queen as "the first truly fascist rock band." Both songs, May has said, were designed to be stadium chants, "with audience participation in mind." In both songs, Taylor has said, "It's meant to be a collective 'we' – meaning us, the audience, whoever's listening. It's not meant to say, 'We are the best fucking group, so up you' – more a sort of general bonhomie." Some listeners have also heard "Champions" as Mercury's sly, subversive avowal of gay forbearance, though all these interpretations have been upended by how the songs became the universal bully chants of victors at sporting events.

News was perhaps the best album Queen ever made. Most of their remaining albums – including Jazz (1978), The Game (1980), The Works (1984) and A Kind of Magic (1986) – never again aimed for stylistic cohesion, but nonetheless produced a steady series of hits (among them "Under Pressure," with David Bowie; "Radio Ga Ga," by Taylor; "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," by Mercury; and "Another One Bites the Dust," by Deacon) that helped Queen attract larger and larger concert audiences. Parts of those crowds, however, may have got more than they anticipated. By the early 1980s, Mercury had grown weary of his ornate 1970s look. He cut his hair, slicked it back, wore either leathers or trim athletic outfits, and grew a bushy mustache. It was exemplary of what was known as the late-1970s muscled "gay clone" look – a demeanor that the rock world was wholly unaccustomed to. By taking it onstage – in particular during a Queen performance of "Another One Bites the Dust," when Mercury pranced across the stage in tight shorts, firing out phrases like "bite it" and "bite it hard, baby" – he seemed to come as close as he ever would to a public admission of his sexuality. At some shows on the band's 1980 American tour, fans tossed disposable razor blades onstage: They didn't like this identity of Mercury – what they perceived as a brazenly gay rock & roll hero – and they wanted him to shed it.

Queen would not tour the U.S. again after 1982. There were rumors that some in the band held Mercury's image to blame for alienating that huge audience. "Some of us hate it," Deacon told RS in 1981. "But that's him and you can't stop it." May, though, makes it sound like the band was unconcerned about the U.S. market: "There was always someplace where we were shit-hot and we could go and be ourselves and not worry."

Queen remained a touring juggernaut, filling stadiums and arenas internationally through much of the 1980s. The tours were so big, the shows so spectacular, that it all became another aspect that worked against the band: To some observers, Queen was industry, not art. What's more, judging by a couple of awful occasions, a perhaps heartless industry at that. In early 1981, Queen undertook their first brief but eventful tour of South America. It seemed a worthy ambition – no major rock bands had yet taken that continent's audiences seriously enough to mount such a major effort. The first concert was to take place in Buenos Aires, and would be the country's largest to date. A military dictatorship was running Argentina at the time, waging a "dirty war" on leftists and common citizens, killing up to 30,000 during its reign. Queen tried to rationalize the visit. "We were playing for the people," Taylor said. "We didn't go there with the wool pulled over our eyes. However, their reputation was damaged. The image grew even worse when Queen agreed to play 12 performances in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, at the Sun City Super Bowl in October 1984. South Africa was still in the vicious grip of apartheid, and the United Nations was asking entertainers to boycott the country. In addition, Britain's Musicians' Union banned any of its members from performing in Sun City. Queen played anyway, despite passionate controversy beforehand in England, but had to cancel several shows after Mercury's voice gave out on opening night.

By playing in these nations, it appeared as if Queen were on the side of power. "I don't like to write message songs," Mercury said around that time. They were entertainers, he asserted – an apolitical band that didn't sanction the government of a country simply by playing for its citizens. But the backlash remained strong. At the end of 1984, when nobody from Queen was invited to participate in the Band Aid charity recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" – which had been organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money to alleviate famine in Ethiopia – Mercury was genuinely hurt. The group hit a collective depression around this time, and several accounts claim that it considered disbanding, or at least taking a long sabbatical. Mercury would later say, "I don't know what Queen stand for."

A few months later, though, Geldof extended an invitation for the band to play at the July 1985 Live Aid London concert (an American concert took place simultaneously in Philadelphia). Queen hesitated at first. They would be performing in daylight, which they didn't like to do, and they worried about sound quality. Also, there would be some significant competition playing that same occasion in London – Paul McCartney, U2, Elton John, Bowie, the Who, and Sting with Phil Collins – and Queen probably knew they would be seen as the odd fit of the event, given their political blunders in recent years. But Geldof prevailed, and 22 minutes after Queen had walked onstage at Wembley in the early evening of July 13th, during Live Aid's worldwide broadcast, they walked off as unexpected heroes. Elton John found the bandmates backstage in their trailer. "You bastards, you stole the show!" he told them. "It was the greatest day of our lives," said May.

The performance immediately revivified the band. In September, Queen began work in Munich on A Kind of Magic, and also made preparations for a 1986 summer tour. "I think we are probably the best live band in the world at the moment," said Taylor, "and we are going to prove it. . . . It'll make Ben-Hur look like the Muppets." The shows seemed to live up to the propaganda: This was Queen at their peak in every regard. But Mercury was also having dramatic and unpredictable swings in temperament. During an argument in Spain, he told Deacon, "I'm not going to be doing this forever. This is probably the last time." The band, said May, felt jolted.

At tour's end, ticket demand for the concerts was enormous, and Queen added a new final date at Knebworth Park on August 9th, 1986, playing for an audience of about 200,000. Then, that was it. At the show's end, Mercury left the concert site hurriedly. It was apparent something was on his mind. He would no longer want to be seen by the audiences that had loved him. Queen had played their last show.

In the early 1980s, AIDS began to take its steady toll in America – initially centered in New York, where roughly half the infections were first recorded. There were some who referred to the deadly illness as the "gay plague," but it soon became apparent that AIDS wasn't discriminating: It was caused by a virus – HIV – that debilitated the immune system, and it was transmitted by infected bodily fluids, including semen and blood. It was most widely spread by drug users who shared hypodermic needles and by people who had unprotected sex, particularly those with multiple partners. Freddie Mercury fell into this latter category. "I'm just an old slag who gets up every morning, scratches his head and wonders what he wants to fuck," he once said.

In the late 1970s and through much of the 1980s, Queen came to consider Munich their home away from home, later to their regret. The city had an active and diverse sex culture, and the place seemed to prove both a heaven and a hell for Mercury. May later said that the singer could hardly bear being in the studio sometimes – "He'd want to do his bit and get out" – preferring to spend evenings in Munich's discos and clubs. One evening he met actress Barbara Valentin, who had appeared in some of Rainer Fassbinder's films. Mercury entered into a passionate romance with Valentin, while carrying on intense, sometimes tempestuous affairs with various male lovers (including a rumored one with ballet star Rudolf Nureyev). He also used drugs and drank heavily in this period, and a few times experienced blackouts, unable to recall what he had done the night before. Valentin told Lesley-Ann Jones about finding Mercury on an apartment balcony naked, singing "We Are the Champions" to some construction workers below, then shouting, "Whoever has the biggest dick, come on up!"

There are varying accounts about how Mercury coped with the risk of contracting AIDS. Some thought it was why he was never anxious for Queen to tour America after 1982. But BBC DJ Paul Gambaccini recounted running into Mercury one night in 1984, at a London club called Heaven. Gambaccini asked Mercury if AIDS had changed his attitude about free-ranging sex. Mercury replied, "Darling, my attitude is 'fuck it.' I'm doing everything with everybody." Gambaccini said, "I had that literal sinking feeling. I'd seen enough in New York to know that Freddie was going to die.'" Mercury once said to journalist Rick Sky, "By nature, I'm very restless and highly strung . . . a person of real extremes, and often that's destructive to myself and others." At some point, Mercury clearly reconsidered. In late 1985, he had an AIDS test – the results were negative. He abandoned the Munich club scene, as well as his affair with Valentin, and settled into a mansion in Kensington; former girlfriend Mary Austin, who was now his secretary, had found it for him in 1980. "I lived for sex," he would later say. "I was extremely promiscuous, but AIDS changed my life."

In 1987, Mercury submitted to another AIDS test, but then seemed to shrink from learning the results. After trying to reach Mercury on several occasions with no reply, his doctor's office then contacted Austin and shared the urgency of the matter with her: Mercury was now diagnosed as HIV-positive. "I felt my heart fall," Austin said later. Mercury, though, didn't yet tell Queen. "We knew something was going on," May later said, "but it was not talked about." By this time Paul Prenter, Mercury's former personal manager, had already told a U.K. newspaper about the earlier blood test, and the press was starting to put the band under pressure to address the matter. But Mercury insisted that the rumors were false. Some friends conjectured that he had instead developed a liver problem from too much drinking, though in 1987 Valentin had noticed scars on his face and hands: possible signs of Kaposi's sarcoma.

When the band's 13th album, The Miracle, was finished in early 1989, the singer wanted to start another LP right away. He hoped to record as much work as he could, and he now realized he would have to tell his bandmates why. "He decided to just invite us all over to the house for a meeting," said Taylor. Mercury told his bandmates, "You probably realize what my problem is. Well, that's it and I don't want it to make a difference. I don't want it to be known. I don't want to talk about it. I just want to get on and work until I fucking well drop. I'd like you to support me in this." May later said that he, Taylor and Deacon were devastated: "We all went off and got quietly sick somewhere, and that was the only conversation directly we had about it."

The knowledge naturally affected the tenor of the new album, Innuendo. "That produced a coming-together," said Taylor, "a closing of the ranks." May said that, as writers, Queen knew they were facing their ultimate subject, but the band's customs made it hard to communicate about it. "We didn't speak to each other about lyrics," May told Mojo in 2004. "We were just too embarrassed to talk about the words." Even so, Innuendo addresses impending death as memorably and gracefully as any work could hope to, and does so without a moment of self-pity. "It was very conscious toward the end," May said. "Sometimes Freddie wasn't able to vocalize [what he wanted to say], and we in a sense – this is going to sound very strange, but I think Roger and I kind of vocalized for him, in writing some of the lyrics. Because he was almost beyond the point where he could put it into words. So songs like 'The Show Must Go On,' in my case, or 'Days of Our Lives,' in Roger's case, were things that we gave to Freddie as a way of him working through stuff with us. And that wasn't spoken. It was us trying to find the end before we got there." Added Taylor, "And we were determined to stick close to the end."

"There was a lot of joy, strangely enough," says May. "Freddie was in pain . . . but inside the studio there was a sort of blanket around, and he could be happy and enjoy what he liked doing best. . . . Sometimes it would only last a couple of hours a day because he would get very tired. But during that couple of hours, boy, would he give a lot. When he couldn't stand up, he used to prop himself up against a desk and down a vodka: 'I'll sing it till I fucking bleed.'"

After Innuendo, Mercury again wanted to keep on recording – and complete another album if possible. "Freddie said, 'Write me stuff. . . . Keep giving me words. I will sing," remembers May. (The results were released in 1995 on Made in Heaven.) "He carried on because that's what he enjoyed," Austin said. "And working helped him to have the courage to face his illness." Jim Hutton, Mercury's long-term lover who lived with him until the end, concurred: "If he didn't have the music, he wouldn't have lasted."

In September 1991, Freddie Mercury had recorded as much as he was ever going to, and he retired to his Kensington home. He remained wary with his parents, wrote Peter Freestone in Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir, "as he wanted to protect them from things they would neither understand or would not accept." Years later, his mother, Jer, said, "He didn't want to hurt us, but we knew it all along."

Mercury turned away most visitors; he didn't want to be seen as his body degenerated. He stopped taking medications, and had bouts of blindness. He nevertheless insisted on denying any reports that he had AIDS until the evening of November 23rd, 1991, when he issued a statement admitting his condition: "Following enormous conjecture in the press, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV-positive and have AIDS. I felt it correct to keep this information private in order to protect the privacy of those around me. However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth, and I hope everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease." Those attending to him said he seemed more restful after that. Early the next evening, Freestone and Hutton were preparing to change the singer's bedclothing when Hutton saw he was no longer breathing. "He's gone," Hutton told Freestone. Freddie Mercury was 45 years old. Freestone called Taylor, who was on his way to visit Mercury, and told him, "Don't bother coming."

Mercury's funeral took place a few days later, in a Zoroastrian ceremony. Aretha Franklin sang, and soprano Montserrat Caballé performed a Verdi aria. (Caballe worked with Mercury on a semi-operatic album, Barcelona.) Mercury's body was cremated, and Mary Austin – the only person Mercury said he truly trusted, and to whom he left his home – placed his ashes in a location she has never disclosed.

The following April, the surviving members of Queen played a tribute to their late singer at Wembley Stadium, and used the event to launch the Mercury Phoenix Trust, which continues to raise money for various AIDS organizations. After the show, the group disbanded for 13 years. Deacon retired altogether, except for the sessions that completed 1995's Made in Heaven, the quartet's final studio album, which included the recordings Mercury had worked on in his last year. They were all songs about the splendor of love and impermanence.

"I have never got over his death," Taylor later said. "None of us have. I think that we all thought that we could come to terms with it quite quickly, but we underestimated the impact his death had on our lives. I still find it difficult to talk about. For those of us left, it is as though Queen was another lifetime entirely."

People had trouble with how Mercury lived and with how he died. There were homophobes who saw his deterioration as a punishment for his sexuality and promiscuity. Others, who had done work combating AIDS, faulted him for not acknowledging his condition until the end. Those judgments will always follow Mercury, but if his music is any key at all, there was an almost prayerful quality about his failings. In song after song he sang about mortality, solitary desolation and hopefulness, but he also implored some unattainable sanctuary – nowhere so openly as in "Save Me," from The Game: "I have no heart, I'm cold inside/I have no real intent. . . ./Save me/I can't face this life alone." But Mercury often felt he had to stay alone, as he had done in his childhood. "It can be a very lonely life," he said, "but I choose it." (In the early 1970s, when Austin suggested they have a child together, Mercury allegedly responded, "I'd rather have a cat.") Instead of domestic refuge, Mercury sought ecstasy and restlessness for most of his life, and obviously that choice incurred a cost. One of his best songs, "Don't Stop Me Now," set out his ethos with a starkness that was also blissful: "I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars/On a collision course/I'm a satellite out of control/I'm a sex machine ready to reload."

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, poet William Blake famously proclaimed, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." It's a maxim often taken to mean that a life of intemperance – pursuing desires without self-restraint – eventually brings one to realize the futility of those indulgences, and to recognize more meaningful purposes. But it could also mean that without taking risks you never discover what's possible, what might illuminate you the most. In The Miracle, Mercury faced his excesses without sparing himself, and uncovered his answer: "Was it all worth it all these years? . . ./It didn't matter if we won – if we lost. . . ./Living, breathing rock & roll/Was it all worth it?/Yes, it was a worthwhile experience/It was worth it." He knew he had little time left when he sang those words. There was no room to bear false witness. "My mistakes," he once said, "are down to me."

The best song Mercury sang in his last years, "These Are the Days of Our Lives," was written for him by Taylor. It is a song about accepting everything you have made of your life and looking toward your departure with a steadfast grace. The song's video contains Mercury's final moments in front of a camera. He is unmistakably a man almost dead – he is painfully emaciated, and those present at the filming said that even the touch of his clothes on his skin caused him agony. But he is fully present in those moments, even luminous. He looks skyward, his arms spread, then fixes his view on the lens as he says everything he has left to say: "Those were the days of our lives – yeah/The bad things in life were so few/Those days are all gone now, but one thing's still true/When I look and I find/I still love you. . . . I still love you."

In those moments, he is as justified as he will ever be: He has found his hard-learned wisdom in maybe the only way he could. It is Freddie Mercury's dying that saved him.      

Richard Dawkins

It would have been an awkward question for most people, but for Richard Dawkins it seemed to match his spirit of open inquiry. After all, the owner of one of the most eminent scientific minds and thickest skins in Britain does not shy away from hard questions. Not content with waging war on religion, he has inflamed the nation three times in one summer. First, with the suggestion that fairytales may have a “pernicious” effect on children; then introducing the idea of a “mild” paedophilia or rape; and most recently, revealing in a Twitter conversation that if his unborn child had Down’s syndrome diagnosed, he would abort it, for it would be “immoral” not to.

So does Dawkins lack empathy?

“I think empathy is a gift, I hope I’ve got it.” Does he think of his emotional effect when writing his tweets? This week he apologised for “impugning the morality” of women who choose not to abort a foetus with Down’s. “If I’m talking to somebody face to face, then I am, yes, acutely conscious of my emotional effect on them. If I’m having a purely academic discussion about something like moral philosophy, then I don’t go out of my way to think what would be the emotional effect on somebody who listens in on this academic discussion.”

We are nestled on sofas at his home in Oxford, two much-loved lap dogs curling around us, rivalling their master’s upward hair lift, although Dawkins does not need the little hairband his dog wears to keep it in check. Dawkins at home does expose his softer side — husband to his third wife, Lalla Ward, the former Doctor Who actress, father to a medical doctor daughter — in a room decorated, with surprising whimsy, with vintage carousel horses.

We are here to talk stars for his appearance next month at the stargazing festival, Starmus, in the Canary Islands, and stars do something rare to Dawkins. They make him emotional. But it is an emotion derived from science, he says, not the other way around. At 73, he says he is still up for the fight against sloppy thinking and censorship, despite the discomfort it causes others. He doesn’t want to address the Down’s brouhaha directly — “it’s too readily misunderstood” — but why does he keep getting into so much trouble?

“That’s not a thing I relish . . . I like to think logically and clearly. I’m learning that you can get into trouble if you are too logical and clear about certain things. People who think with their emotions rather than logic don’t like it.” Does he think that he could be more persuasive if he were less abrasive? “I don’t think of myself as confrontational, but probably you are right. I think I am simply clear and respect the other person enough to assume they will understand what I am clearly getting at.”

Would he ever think of withdrawing from popular debate, which he entered with the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976? “I can’t imagine doing that. I can’t imagine not wanting to speak, not provocatively but openly. I don’t feel like inhibiting what I say, suppressing what I say, for a quiet life.”

Then does he ever get intimidated by the backlash, especially when some threats from Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are so extreme? “No,” he almost whispers. Then he jumps up to fetch his laptop. His response has been to make a couple of YouTube video satires entitled “Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail”, in which he fashions himself as a cosy grandpa figure reading a bedtime story in front of a fire, but instead reads the expletive-filled, violent emails he gets from people claiming to be holy, such as: “I hope you get hit by a church van tonight and die slowly.” We watch the video together, Dawkins twinkling with amusement. “I think that’s the best way to deal with it,” he says. We stray back to the subject of disabled children — this time whether children born deaf should be given the new implants to allow them to hear — but he demurs, chastened.

“I’ve got all sorts of little red flags waving now. I’ve had my fingers burnt so many times. I’m not going to come out and say you should stop yourself being deaf or anything like that. I know that the roof falls in on you when you say things like that.”

Is he going to stop being bold on Twitter then? “Well, I think there’s a place to be bold, in a full-length essay, but maybe Twitter is not the place to be bold.”

The Selfish Gene, despite its title, explains many forms of altruism among animals. One is that we bear a grudge towards those who treat us badly and so they pay the price by being excluded. How well does this theory apply to the internet, where people can be anonymous? “It’s an interesting point, as those who are anonymous don’t get any comeback as themselves . . . in general the internet is a force for good, but this particular thing of anonymity leading to vituperative abuse is a bad thing. It is no substitute for true argument. If somebody makes a point, it’s no reply to just say you’re a f**ktard. That’s not an argument.”

He has always gravitated to the inhuman universe. One of his first memories is, at age six, pointing out to his younger sister the constellations where they lived in southern Africa. “I was capable of being seduced by the romance of the stars, and still am.” His atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, opens with Dawkins’s description of how the chaplain at his British public school became convinced of the majesty of God by studying the natural world.

As a boy, Dawkins became “tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way ... why the same emotions led my chaplain in one direction and me in another is not an easy question to answer.”

Does he then understand why so many religions place their object of worship in the starry heavens? “I suppose that would be a natural impulse for a primitive person looking up at the stars and not understanding them, but it’s pretty boring and parochial compared to the reality, isn’t it? How much more awe-inspiring when you learn the truth of it.” Why didn’t he follow his heart towards astrophysics, as did his fellow speakers at Starmus, Stephen Hawking and Brian May, the Queen rock guitarist, who has a doctorate in astrophysics? He says “maybe he couldn’t have handled the maths”. Instead, as a biologist, he enjoys imagining the near-unimaginable: non-Earthly life, the subject of his talk at Starmus.

Does his field of evolutionary biology encourage a human pride — that man is the finest-evolved creature — whereas astrophysics encourages a humility as Earth is so insignificant in the Universe? “Yes, although we don’t know whether there are any other living creatures in the Universe, which goes against this feeling of humility. I’m pretty sure there are life forms elsewhere, lots of them, in which case some of them are certainly greater than we are. But the reason for thinking that is the Universe is so large. If life is so rare — and my guess is that it is rare, that there are only a billion examples dotted around — they would be so scattered, these islands of life, that we would almost certainly not know about the other ones, so we might as well be alone.”

Hawking has warned us to avoid extraterrestrials, for fear of enemy invasion. Dawkins disagrees. “The first contact, if there ever is one, will be by radio. I think Stephen Hawking’s fear that we shouldn’t reply due to the danger of being visited is probably unrealistic, as the speed of light imposes an upper limit on speeds at which anything can travel ... I don’t think we need to have any fear of replying, considering our reply would take millions of years to get to the other end of the Universe, you can’t have a conversation.”

People often find gazing at the stars turns their thoughts to their own mortality, as human life is so brief in comparison. Dawkins finds that part of their intense appeal.

“There is something coldly frightening about the idea of eternity, but far from making me frightened of my own death, rather the reverse. Eternity is frightening so I want to spend it under a general anaesthetic rather than experience it.”

Most people, though, would choose to live for ever, wouldn’t they? “If they hadn’t thought about it much, maybe. I love being alive and I’d like to live a bit longer than I’m going to. But eternity is what is actually frightening. Have you any idea how long eternity is?” he laughs.

How does the high priest of atheism comfort people about their approaching deaths? “I think the process of dying is likely to be pretty unpleasant. I would rather spend that under a general anaesthetic too, but being a human and not a dog, I’m condemned to endure the process of dying, rather than being relieved of it by a vet. But when you’re dead, it will be like before you were born, as Mark Twain said: ‘I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it’.”      

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is a year younger than me and worth $2.2 billion. “I’ve done well,” he says, and you can’t really argue with that. But still, waiting for this interview, to which he flies by private jet and I walk from the Tube, you can’t help wondering. What does it take? In the quarter of a century since both of us left university, what has he done that I haven’t?

Here’s what: Thiel co-founded the PayPal online payment website and made his first fortune when it was sold to eBay 12 years ago. His share was worth $55 million. He then sunk $500,000 of that into a social networking site called Facebook. When Facebook went public last year, his holding was worth $1.25 billion.

He has a venture capital firm whose investment in a rocket company called SpaceX has risen in value from $20 million to $500 million in a decade, and he has an 11 per cent stake in a secretive and privately held data-mining business called Palantir Technologies, which is reputed to have helped the CIA catch Osama bin Laden. Palantir’s estimated value has risen from $2.5 billion to $9 billion in the past 20 months.

Along the way Thiel, who is 46 but looks about 37 and lives alone in San Francisco, has also lost money, at least on paper. Like any brass-balled businessman, he has his own hedge fund, whose assets under management have fallen by about $7 billion since the crash. (Not that anyone who’s stayed with him on this particular roller-coaster from the beginning is actually out of pocket, you understand. They’ve made an average annual return of 12 per cent. It’s just that they could have made an awful lot more by cashing out in 2008.)

Why focus on the money? Awe and envy, mainly, but there’s also this: Thiel is not just a rich man. He’s an ideas man. Many of his ideas are either revolutionary or mad, depending on your view — broadly speaking, he’s against death, government and higher education — and you can’t help thinking that he might not be taken as seriously as he is had he not turned several of his hunches into billion-dollar companies.

As it is, he’s taken very seriously indeed, not by everyone and not every time he opens his mouth, but by enough people of high IQ and ambition to suggest that he deserves a hearing.

We meet in a Mayfair hotel, where he’s promoting a book. The book is based on notes from a course on high-tech start-ups that he used to teach at Stanford University. The notes were posted online by one of his students and quickly downloaded by 300,000 readers. Polished up and wrapped in an old-fashioned dust jacket, they are intended as both inspiration and a hearty kick in the pants for anyone hoping to follow him into ultra-high-risk entrepreneurship. “Some of the things I’ve done people think are very extreme,” he admits. (Funding research on reversing the ageing process, paying to have his body frozen when he dies.) “What I find strange is always the complacency that we have instead, where we’re accepting the way things are.”

Thiel hates complacency. He thinks the way things are is absolutely, dangerously not good enough. Within the world of business his disdain, always veiled in thoughtfulness, is aimed mainly at a baby-boom generation that coasted through the second half of the 20th century taking fewer and fewer risks and doing less and less that was genuinely new, until brought up short by the crash.

Then people suddenly realised that “you cannot have a better future if nobody’s working towards it, if everybody’s just counting on everybody else to build it”.

More broadly, he’s angry that the so-called technological revolution has delivered so little in the way of new technology. Not just information technology of the kind that has helped to make him who he is. Big, brave, tangible, world-changing technology of the kind America used to specialise in.

“You know, in the US you had the Manhattan Project, you got an atomic bomb in three and a half years,” he says. “You had Apollo [and people on the Moon] in the 1960s. And now you cannot build a website for the Affordable Care Act.” Thiel is referring to the healthcare reforms better known as Obamacare, whose site notoriously kept crashing for the first crucial months of its existence. He’s exaggeratedly polite and low-key but his exasperation — with incompetence, with stupidity, with small-mindedness and big, expensive, gridlocked, flabby government — is still palpable.

He is Silicon Valley casual on the outside, seething radical on the inside. If you’ve heard about a German-born libertarian dotcom billionaire investment genius who wants to live for ever and build floating city states in the middle of the ocean (and who happens to be a practising gay Christian), well, this is he.

His counterintuitive line on the great tech slowdown will be familiar to long-time Thiel followers. Indeed, his venture capital firm’s slogan — “We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters” — has become a mantra for Silicon Valley types peering over the tops of their screens in search of the Next Big Thing. What’s interesting is his analysis of why the slowdown has happened. Partly he blames the overpriced, underachieving edifice of western higher education. To wit:

“ ‘What are you going to do with your life?’

‘Don’t know. I’ll get a college degree.’

‘What’ll you do once you get a college degree?’

‘Don’t know. I’ll get a grad school degree.’

‘What will you do once you have an MBA?’

‘Don’t know. I’ll work as a consultant.’

And so,” Thiel says, “in all these ways education has become a substitute for thinking about the future.”

Now, in his book, Zero to One, he takes a machinegun to another great shibboleth of capitalist striving, namely competition.

Want to fail? Do something others are already doing, like flying people around in aeroplanes. Compete with them and see your profits shrink to nothing. Want to succeed? Do something different. Build yourself a benevolent and insanely lucrative monopoly, like Google . . . or PayPal. (Google’s profit margin was more than 100 times that of the average US airline in 2012.)

“The way we’re trained and educated involves outperforming people in all these competitive contexts and so we come to think of competition as being a proxy for value,” he says. “So the more intense the competition is, the more valuable something must be, sort of like in the former Soviet Union — if there was a long line of people you would get in line with no idea what you were queueing for.’’

The natural response to this is “ouch”. The Wall Street Journal achieved the same effect when it excerpted a section of the book last month under the headline “Competition is for losers”.

Thiel has a knack for presenting as grand theory musings that are in fact autobiographical. The son of German parents who came to California in the Sixties for his father’s work, Thiel competed furiously through school and university. With no TV at home till he was 12, he became a chess prodigy instead of a couch potato.

He went to Stanford, then Stanford Law School, and was poised to win the ultimate accolade for an American law school graduate — a Supreme Court clerkship — when he didn’t. He got two interviews and flunked them both.

It was “incredibly traumatic”, he says, and it triggered “a rolling quarter-life crisis” that lasted for much of his twenties.

Looking back, of course, he’s glad. He binned law, dabbled in investment banking in New York, then moved back west to ride the tiger that was the dotcom boom. That boom ended with a market crash on April 3, 2000. Three days earlier, by luck or good judgment (Thiel suggests it was the latter), he and his PayPal confrères closed a deal to raise $100 million that secured the company’s future.

He was liberated to think big and unquestionably seized that chance. Whether he has fulfilled the obligations informally heaped on America’s billionaires by an admiring public is open to debate. He questions the value of “social entrepreneurship” and prefers funding young tech tycoons to conventional philanthropy. He insists on time for creativity rather than cramming his diary in the head-of-state style of Bill Gates.

This much is clear: he knows something most of us don’t about picking winners. Most of us, that is, except the rest of the PayPal mafia — a group that after the eBay buyout went on to found seven more billion-dollar companies including YouTube, LinkedIn and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Thiel is counting on his good buddy Musk to do nothing less than reopen the space age by designing a new generation of reusable rockets.

Musk is well on his way and Thiel foresees space travel costs falling ten to a hundredfold as a result. But aren’t space rockets still a bit old-fashioned, I ask? A bit back to the future? Maybe, Thiel muses. “But that’s not the worst place to start.”      

Ego Fundamentalists

Kevin Pietersen and Roy Keane must be exhausted. Goodness only knows how they managed to keep going for as long as they did. The football and cricket were not the half of it. Far more knackering, one would have thought, were the constant arguments, the carefully nurtured feuds, the permanent vigilance for anyone talking them down or (worst sin of all) slighting them.

The basic problem here is not hard to identify. They both believed (and still believe) that the world revolves around them. This is their article of faith, their basic religion. Anybody who seemed to disagree — people who thought that there were other people in the world, other truths, other values — were viewed with suspicion. They were apostates, infidels: people who had failed to see the light.

Religious dogma is, of course, difficult to shake. You can imagine how tough it was for Peter Moores or Andy Flower to reason with KP. “Look Kev, there are other people in the team and we have to act in the best interests of everyone.” You can almost see Pietersen regarding them with the suspicion reserved for the non-believer. “Other people?” his glance would have said. “How can you utter such blasphemy?”

The Times website published a fascinating timeline of Pietersen’s career yesterday. The number of spats must represent some kind of record. He left South Africa in anger at the quota system. He joined Cannock as an overseas player, but alleged that his accommodation wasn’t good enough and that the club didn’t pay his wages for working behind the bar. At Nottinghamshire, he rowed (bitterly) with Jason Gallian, the captain.

On the England tour of South Africa in 2006, he fell out with Graeme Smith, calling him “an absolute Muppet”. He had a series of Twitter tantrums and myriad meltdowns, and sent seditious texts to opponents. And that is before we get to the fallings-out with Moores, Andrew Strauss, Nick Knight, Flower, Matt Prior, Uncle Tom Cobley, Graeme Swann and other sizeable swathes of the English-speaking world.

Keane, for his part, could have had an argument with the mirror. His childishness is, in many ways, even more pronounced than that of Pietersen. The classic story from his new autobiography is that when he was asked to return his company car after the bitter falling-out with Manchester United, he kept it for another three months, and tried to drive it into the ground. “I drove some f***ing miles in that car,” he writes. “Every little victory is vital.”

Acrimonious disagreements are, of course, common among those of a strong religious persuasion. Pietersen and Keane could not understand why everyone else was incapable of seeing the Truth. They did not demand that everyone believed in heliocentricity (the doctrine that the sun is the centre of the universe). Instead, they required people to buy into the cosmology of Keanocentricity and KPcentricity.

And that is why both men were in a constant state of righteous anger that those around them — team-mates, opponents, managers — operated with a different world view. They regarded this as close to sacrilege. They could not compromise with these alternative perspectives. To have done that would have been to betray the basic tenet of their religion. They were (and are) ego fundamentalists.

Seen from this vantage point, everything fits into place. Pietersen is quite right to say that Flower “had it in for me as soon as he took over”. The former England team director (to the bafflement of KP) took the view that Pietersen was just one member of the side; a very important player, to be sure, but just one player all the same. This was irreconcilable with Pietersen’s theology. The falling-out was inevitable.

The situation with Keane was slightly different, but only slightly. His autobiography is a stream of invective and indignation. He spews bile at Sir Alex Ferguson, Alfe-Inge Haaland and Carlos Queiroz. He cannot bring himself to admit that other people might have valid opinions or approaches. After the falling-out with Mick McCarthy in Saipan, when he stormed out of the Ireland team’s training camp before the 2002 World Cup finals, he said that his former manager could “rot in hell”.

There is a big question about how to reconcile big personalities within a team dynamic. There are various theories about how to achieve this, too. With the likes of Keane and Pietersen, however, any sense of co-operation, any fragile consensus, is strictly temporary. They are, in their different ways, too far up their own rear ends. It is, perhaps, the greatest testament to the genius of Ferguson that he kept Keane onside for so long.

Where will these two complex characters go from here? It’s difficult to say. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that whatever they do, they will leave behind a trail of yet more recriminations and feuds. With ego fundamentalism, there really is no other way.      

Neil Sedaka

Neil: I loved my mother and father dearly, but they didn’t always make the best choices. My father was a wonderful man, but very cheap and he didn’t like to spend money. My mother, on the other hand, always wanted the best things in life… jewellery, fur coats. When I started making money from music, my mother and her lover started stealing from me. That’s how she bought her fur coats.

You could say my mother was ahead of her time. Ha ha! She was a very strong woman and I made her my manager. Yes, she had a lover… a man we all knew about. Even my father knew. He actually gave her his blessing and never left her. I was making a lot of money, but my mother was only giving me $250 a week. By the time my kids, Dara and Marc, came along, I was flat broke. I had nothing!

The reason I’m telling you this story is because it shows that being a parent is not easy: you make mistakes, there are ups and downs. But the important thing is that our family stayed together. Sure, I no longer engaged her services as my manager, but I forgave my mother. What else could I do? Have a huge argument and confrontation? I hate confrontation. To me, it was more important that we all got through those difficult years.

As new parents, my wife, Leba, and I really needed that money, but it just wasn’t there. Although I’d had big hits like, Oh! Carol and Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen, it seemed like my career was over. People used to come up to me and say: “Didn’t you used to be Neil Sedaka?” I had a family and I had to find work somewhere, so, in 1972, we came to England.

After all my success around the world, starting all over again was a real ego-deflator, but I had to swallow my pride. I needed to put food on the table, and the only way I could do that was by playing the piano. Thank God the British audiences stuck by me.

The experience with my own mother certainly affected the way I was as a parent. I wanted Marc and Dara to trust me; to know I was always there for them. Unfortunately, one thing I wasn’t great at was discipline. They knew I was a pushover and never took any notice when I told them off.

Eventually, it got so bad I created a character called Dr Bergunka. I used to leave the house, dress up as Dr Bergunka, then magically arrive back home. That was the only way I could get them to do as they were told. Marc and Dara wouldn’t listen to me, but they would listen to him. It actually took them quite a while to work out it was me all along.

After my career started to build again, I decided I wanted to share my success with Marc and Dara. On their 21st birthdays, I gave them substantial sums of money. I didn’t want them having to wait for me to die until they got their inheritance. I wanted them to enjoy it while I was still here.

I’m sure some kids who have been brought up in the world of rock’n’roll would have blown it on parties and good times, but not Marc, and this tells you all you need to know about my son. He used the money to put himself through film school and he’s now a screenwriter in LA.

Money can do strange things to people; just look at what happened to my own mother. Marc was always too sensible and too respectful for that to happen. This might sound like a cliché, but would you mind if I called him the perfect son? We never argue!

Actually, we did argue once. When he was a teenager, he had a little weight problem and I took him to the husky [extra-large] section of a clothes shop. He gave me the meanest look and said: “Papa, I am insulted!”

Marc: My dad is a big kid with a big heart. When I was little, we’d have what he used to call Marathon Days. He would wake me up and say: “Today we’re going to the zoo, we’re going bowling, ice skating, we’ll see a movie and then go for a pizza.” Sometimes he’d come to my school and take me out of class, which was seriously confusing. “Dad, I have math this afternoon.” “Don’t worry, son, tell your teacher today is a Marathon Day!”

By his own admission, he found it hard to lay down the law with Dara and me. We grew up in a household without any rules, and Dad did this strange job that allowed him to hang out with people like Paul McCartney and Jerry Lee Lewis. For some kids, that’s a licence to rebel and go off the rails, but I went the other way. For me, rebelling meant being a very conservative kid. I rebelled by being normal!

I found the travelling difficult. At school I would just start to make friends and we’d be off somewhere new — living in London, back to New York. Dad had to go where the work was, which meant he was away from home a lot of the time, but whenever I heard his songs on the radio or saw him on TV, I used to imagine he was singing for me. I guess seeing his face on the screen was a bit like an early version of Skype. I found it comforting.

Sometimes he’d pull me and Dara out on stage with him, but I was always terrified. I hated being the centre of attention and always felt very vulnerable. My sister did have a hit single with my dad and recorded her own albums, but she suffers from stage fright, too. I honestly don’t know how people can do it. Even karaoke brings me out in a sweat!

Dad’s childlike outlook on life makes him a great person to talk to when things aren’t going well. He’s very empathetic, as if he has an innate understanding of human emotion. After I got married, my wife, Samantha, and I tried for seven years to have a kid. We had what’s called unexplained infertility, and the first man I talked to was Dad. We talked through all the options and eventually settled on what is called gestational surrogate, where a surrogate carried our sperm and eggs. We had twin girls and after that came Michael, who arrived naturally.

Dad’s an ideal grandfather. Now he can be the big kid and my children adore him. You want candy, let’s have candy… you wanna see a show, let’s see a show. Michael is only eight, but he’s an obsessive Beatles fan, and a couple of years ago Dad arranged for him, me and Michael to hang out backstage with Paul McCartney at his Las Vegas show.

We walked into the room and there was Paul, Yoko, Sean Lennon and George Martin. Michael whispered to me: “Papa, my heart is beating so fast.” Michael had brought with him every one of his Beatles albums, and Paul signed them all. Dad just loved seeing the huge smile on Michael’s face. I guess that’s what Dad does best — he makes people happy.      

Bill Gates

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle

In 1978, in a computer lab at Essex University, two brilliant young students invented the future of video games. Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle were the creators of the Multi-User Dungeon – or simply MUD – a text-based adventure that ran on a giant DEC PDP-10 mainframe. They programmed the game in their spare time, accessing the computer labs in the evenings. If they hadn’t made it, massively multiplayer online adventures like EverQuest and World of Warcraft may never have happened.

There had been other fantasy adventure games before MUD, of course. Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure arrived in 1975, while work on Zork, developed by a bunch of MIT students in the university’s dynamic modelling group, began in 1977. These single-player programs were, in turn, heavily inspired by the pencil and paper role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which had been hugely popular in student circles since its publication in 1974.

Although Trubshaw wasn’t a fan of D&D, Bartle played a lot, buying a copy from Ian Livingstone’s Games Workshop store for £6.10 as soon as it was available in the UK. Trubshaw, who started the programming for MUD alone, originally planned to create a virtual world rather than a game. However, when Bartle got involved, he was already a keen computer games player and wanted participants to play together in a similar way to D&D. Consequently, when the first version of MUD uploaded to the university system in autumn 1978, it allowed multiple users to log into a mainframe and go on fantasy quests together.

Bartle had been making games and programming computers since the mid-1970s. His formative experiences in coding were courtesy of the DEC PDP-10 owned by British Petroleum’s petrochemical works in Brough, East Yorkshire, near his home town of Hornsea. “In order to say sorry for filling the air with toxic fumes they let the local schools use their computer,” he told attendees at the recent GameCity festival. “We had to fill in these coding sheets, writing in letters using an actual pen. Then we’d send them off somewhere and someone typed them in.”

Later, he attended Essex University to study mathematics, but quickly changed to computer science, a decision guided as much by intellectual pride as it was by interest. “There were 200 people studying maths at Essex and two of them were better than me,” he says. “But on the computer science course, there were none better than me so I switched to that and did my PhD in Artificial Intelligence.” According to Bartle, there were only three universities in Britain doing AI back then - Essex, Sussex and Edinburgh. The rest were apparently shut down because they’d been told by a professor of applied mathematics named Dr James Lighthill that AI was a useless subject that would never be important.

Before Essex, Bartle had been experimenting with internet connectivity on BP’s computer, using an ancient 110 baud modem (“it could transmit roughly 11 characters a second. You had to be very efficient with your coding”); the programs he created were stored on paper tape. But Essex had a comparatively advanced set-up. “The computer was the size of a room,” he says. “It had false floor panels under it that were filled with 29 carbon dioxide canisters. If there was a fire they’d all go off at once to put it out really quickly. It would also have put out all the operators, too, but they were cheaper than computers.”

Experimenting with this giant system, Roy Trubshaw discovered a mechanism for sharing code across separate teletype machines – an early version of the computer terminal – using an area of memory they weren’t supposed to be writing to. In short, it allowed several people to access the same program running on the mainframe at the same time. From here, the duo decided to create a fantasy adventure; Trubshaw wrote the physics, Bartle wrote the game code. The result was MUD.

They called it a multi-user dungeon, because of Zork. “The version we all played ran in [the programming language] Fortran and was just called Dungen because you could only use six character words. Back then we thought all games would be called dungeons, so ours was a multi-user dungeon. Turned out they were all going to be called adventures so we should have called it MUA.”

The duo ran the game over the university network, which was connected to British Telecom’s Experimental Packet Switching System, which could also be accessed by other UK universities. Bartle and Trubshaw used this to link in to the University of Kent, and from there establish a connection with the US-led ARPAnet, an early precursor to today’s global internet. “People had never played any sort of shared world before,” says Bartle. “You can’t imagine what it was like, you were playing a game and suddenly another real person would enter.”

Very quickly, keen computer hobbyists and hackers found out about the game and started dialing in to it from outside the university. The system couldn’t cope – Essex only had six modems and these were quickly overstretched. “The gamers clubbed together to buy the university a bank of 12 modems,” says Bartle. The computing press started paying attention – Bartle wrote a cover feature on the game for Practical Computing, explaining the creation of MUD and defining his hopes for the future of the genre:

What I would like to see - and it’s a long, long way off - is some local or national network with good graphics, sound effects and a well designed set of worlds of varying degrees of difficulty. In this true meritocracy, you will forever be encountering new situations, new difficulties, new solutions, and above all new people. Everyone starts off on an equal footing in this artificial world.

He was, of course, imagining the actual future of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game; the possibilities were always there in Bartle’s mind. But there was one thing he and Trubshaw never did. They never sought to copyright their game or their technology. Instead they shared it freely.

“We encouraged people to write their own MUDs,” he says. “We made MUD because the real world sucked. We weren’t supposed to be at university - Roy was from Wolverhampton, I was from Yorkshire and sounded like I should be working on a farm. It wasn’t a great atmosphere; we were looked down on because other people were at university for intellectual subjects not mind-numbing technology. We raged against that.”

“You shouldn’t have to be what the world defines you to be. You should be who you really are - you should get to become yourself. MUD was a political statement, we made a world where people could go and shed what was holding them back.”

MUD did indeed proliferate. Other programmers at other universities took the basics of the network code and game design and evolved them. Through the 80s and 90s, several variations were developed and adopted including AberMud, TinyMud (which was more geared toward the social rather than gaming side of virtual worlds) and DikuMud.

The latter, built by a group of students at the University of Copenhagen, was the most stable and easy to install – it was written in the common programming language C and could run on all Unix systems, so spread easily. It also neatly tied together all of the conventions of quest-based multiplayer role-playing games: players took on a specific class of character – fighter, wizard, thief, etc – then “leveled up” by killing enemies with a range of weapons and spells, before collecting experience points and loot.

For Bartle, this structure was, itself, a comment on the stifling class system. But in MUD, progression was based on merit, not parentage. “If you saw someone was at a certain level, it said something about them - about their skill and strength of character,” says Bartle. “It was a way for players to understand their place in the hierarchy and to see that they could always progress - there were no glass ceilings. But it wasn’t really a meritocracy either because, if you didn’t care about your leveling up your character, you didn’t need to, you could still play. It was about freedom.”

Politics aside, the raw structure of MUD would influence most subsequent graphical multiplayer online games such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. And it was that initial decision not to protect MUD as an IP that secured its place as a key progenitor. As Bartle explains, “By the time the games companies got interested in making mutiplayer online games in the late 90s, there were 100 MUD experienced designers for every one who was experienced in one of the other multi-user games that had been invented, because it was all free.”

Bartle is still at Essex University. He’s now a professor and senior lecturer in game design; he also consults in game development. He retains that pervading belief that games are positive and empowering. While society often wonders about their negative effects, he sees in them a model for tolerance and ethical behaviour.

“The original hacker ethic was, you can do what you like as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. That fed into games and it has propagated outwards,” he says. “The more games you play the more sense you have of things like fairness - if you play an unfair game it’s no fun, it’s not a good game. I think that makes you more resistant to examples of unfairness in the real world. You may start to think, why shouldn’t gay people get married, what the hell, it doesn’t effect me?

“I hope that some of the culture that came out of games has affected the real world.”      

Erik Finman

Erik Finman’s parents Paul and Lorna, met at Stanford University in the 1980s, when Paul was getting his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and Lorna was getting hers in physics. Their first date consisted of sitting in her room eating a can of beans. “Our dad is, like, the least romantic person ever,” says Erik, 16. “She had a spectroanalyzer that he wanted.” Paul and Lorna married and eventually moved with their three young sons to Post Falls, Idaho, near where Paul had grown up, and since 9/11, their company, LCF, has prospered, winning lucrative contracts from the Department of Defense to make specialized amplifiers with the ability, among other things, to jam the improvised explosive devices American troops encountered in Iraq.

On the outskirts of Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls is populated largely by the rural poor, but the very rich have also been drawn to its remote beauty. It’s a place where you might hear gunshots over breakfast and also where the Finman family’s friends include Burt Rutan, the Virgin Galactic aerospace engineer. The Finmans, who don’t think much of the local education system, home-schooled their older boys, giving each an office at LCF to pursue his interests. “Instead of recess,” their son Ross, 25, says, “we’d get time with an engineer.” Scott, now 28, who was into coding, entered Johns Hopkins University when he was 16. Ross, who as a kid played with Legos until his fingers bled and scarred, became interested in robotics, did his senior year in high school at Harvard when he was 16, and is now pursuing his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at MIT.

Erik, the youngest, took longer to find his path. Eager for his mother’s approval, and more sensitive to her judgments than his brothers, he bristled at home­schooling. After first grade, his parents put him into a series of private and public schools, but none took. Erik was left disengaged and unhappy. A teacher told him he should drop out and work at McDonald’s.

But it had always been clear to the family that he was bright and curious and creative. When he was a toddler and the Finmans were living in a motel — this was pre-9/11, and their company was ­struggling — he had wandered into the electrical room and started flicking switches, erasing the reservations system. One year, he crept into his mother’s bedroom, swabbed her mouth with a Q-tip without waking her, then used the saliva sample to commission a painting of her DNA with which to surprise her at Christmas. And though he was the only brother not to get his ham-radio license, he did develop an extreme fascination with popular technology, endlessly scouring tech blogs like the Verge, watching every Steve Jobs keynote speech, and perseverating about gadgets to weary family members. “He’d be OCD about their functionality and usability,” Ross says. If Erik identified a product flaw, “it legitimately bothered him. He’d be in a bad mood for a couple of days.” Ross’s Christmas gift to Erik one year was a mini Steve Jobs outfit of jeans and a black turtleneck.

The Finman brothers are close and also extremely competitive with each other. When Scott, in early 2013, told Erik about the digital currency bitcoin, and said he’d bought 50 of them, Erik decided to spend the $1,000 he’d just received from his grandmother to buy a hundred. A year later, Ross gave him a book, Without Their Permission, by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. In Erik’s whole life, prior to this, he had read only a single book voluntarily (Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography), but he devoured Ohanian’s book, which articulates the power of the internet to let anyone — like, say, a 15-year-old mediocre student in rural Idaho — become an entrepreneur. Erik was desperate to meet Ohanian, who, as it happened, was raffling “office hours” for charity. For $8,500, Ohanian promised waffles and a Brooklyn Nets game. Erik asked if his parents would pay the fee for him, but they felt it was too much money and that Ohanian was a fad. So they said no. Erik was undeterred. When he read that the price of a bitcoin had soared to $1,200, he decided to sell his for $100,000, and got his evening with Ohanian. “The whole time I had to check myself and remind myself I was talking to a teenager,” Ohanian says. “He’s a very driven young man, far more driven than when I was at his age.”

Around the same time, Erik found a freelance programmer on Elance and paid him to make a Flappy Bird knockoff; a week later, it was for sale in the Android app store. It wasn’t a moneymaker, but it was an eye-opening experience, real-life proof of Ohanian’s concept. And Erik already had a bigger venture in mind. His disappointing educational experiences had convinced him of the need for a marketplace for video-chat tutoring, where teacher-hungry students in remote places could connect with a far-flung network of student-hungry experts. Plugging a recent homework topic (geometric angles) and a hobby (robotics) into an online word-masher-upper yielded a company name — Botangle — and Erik went to a nearby Starbucks with a sign offering to buy a cup of coffee for anyone who’d listen to his idea and tell him what they thought of it. Some 20 people gave him feedback.

Encouraged, Erik started hiring designers and programmers all over the world, and he soon had a website up and running. He was consumed with what he was doing, and it was proving to be much more educational for him than school had been. Managing programmers made him want to learn to code; having to do taxes made him want to learn about accounting. His mother and older brother suggested he drop out and work on the business full time. Evaluating Erik using traditional academic metrics, Ross says, is “like judging fish by their ability to climb a tree.” When Erik announced that he didn’t want to go to college, his dad agreed on the condition that he make $1 million by the time he turned 18.

Even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Erik Finman is short in the tooth. Venture capitalists, the chief purveyors of the tech whippersnapper as archetype, have tended to focus on mere young adults: “People under 35 are the people who make change happen” (Vinod ­Khosla) … “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32” (Paul Graham) … “They don’t have distractions like families and children and other things that get in the way” (Michael Moritz). Mark Zuckerberg, whose personal contribution to glib ageism was “Young people are just smarter,” was already 23 when he became a billionaire. But the lower the number, the better, it seems, independent of what accomplishments may yet attach to it, and when Erik hosted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit (“I’m 15 and I Have 20 People Working for Me All Around the World for a Company Called Botangle”), it drew scores of comments. Erik found himself trending on Twitter, and he ran with it.

The Reddit AMA led to a write-up on Mashable and an invitation to the Thiel Summit, which led to a summer internship in Palo Alto with the start-up Sprayable Energy (“Like Red Bull for your skin,” Erik explains). While there, Erik had an idea for another business. Based on his gathering conviction that the best way to learn is by doing, he and a fellow intern decided to hold an event, Intern for a Day, that would improve upon traditional résumé-plus-interview recruitment. Companies and would-be interns would meet for a fast round of vocational speed-dating. Employers would then pick a handful of kids to spend the rest of the day working on an actual project they needed help on, assessing them for possible internships. Aspiring interns, for their part, would get a chance to sample a company and line of work while also auditioning for something more full time.

StartX, the Stanford accelerator where Sprayable Energy was based, said Erik and his partner could use their space for the event, and Sprayable Energy itself was one of the companies that would participate. Aiming for a hundred applicants, Erik was inundated by several hundred, and before the event had even taken place, he was trial-ballooning eight more, advertising intern-matching events in other cities and seeing similarly enthusiastic responses. With an unexpected hit on his hands and with Botangle not having gained much traction, he quickly did the classic Silicon Valley “pivot,” moving his focus to Intern for a Day. “It already has a lot more users with a lot less work,” Erik says. He decided to stay in Palo Alto.

Being a 15-year-old entrepreneur living on his own posed certain challenges. Erik had incorporated his company in his mother’s name; now she also had to rent an apartment for him. When he flies, she has to sign a waiver, and until recently exit-row seats were off-limits to him. Expedia requires users to be 18 to book travel, so Erik transferred his loyalties to the Ohanian-affiliated Hipmunk. Though he recently got his learner’s driving permit, he still relies on Lyft and Uber to get around the Valley. Certain grants he’d like to apply for have minimum-age restrictions. All of which gave the dewy-eyed entrepreneur yet another idea. “Eventually, as a side project, I’d like to build an apartment complex for people under 18 and do flight bookings for people under 18.” But, he acknowledged, “I don’t think there’s a lot of money involved; there are probably only 20 people in 8 billion in the world” who face his particular set of problems.

Though his parents are obviously more relaxed than most, they’re still protective: When Erik moved to Palo Alto, his mother installed tracking software on his iPhone, and when Erik had his dinner with Ohanian at Junior’s, near Barclays Center, she hovered anxiously at the Applebee’s across Flatbush Avenue.

His age, whatever its drawbacks, has clearly been an invaluable calling card. While at Sprayable Energy, he and a fellow intern approached Paul Graham, the venture capitalist, at the Palo Alto breakfast spot Joanie’s Café, where Erik says he got flustered and became uncharacteristically inarticulate; nonetheless, Graham recognizes him now, calling him “breakfast guy.” Erik applied to the start-up incubator Y Combinator this fall and also for a Thiel Fellowship. He started auditing 29-year-old Y Combinator president Sam Altman’s class at Stanford. And he gets invited to events like TEDxTeen. A few months ago, Erik sent a bunch of links about himself to the teacher in Idaho who’d told him to work at McDonald’s. Subject header: “Look at me now, bitch!”

In early October, Erik flew to London for TEDxTeen. He was enjoying more freedom than he has in Palo Alto — though he’d brought three phones with him, “the tracking software doesn’t work in England, fortunately.” Still, because he is a minor, the conference had paid for his brother Ross to come along as his guardian. The three of us had breakfast at a greasy spoon near their hotel in the Docklands.

Erik’s relationship with Ross is complicated. When Erik was 7 and Ross 16, there was a three-month period when Ross single-handedly took care of his little brother (their parents were away for work), and besides sharing a fraternal closeness, they are both aware of a secondary, sometimes jousting father-son dynamic. Earlier, in their hotel, Erik had described Ross as “the second-best-­looking guy in the family,” and as Erik drank his tea (he doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol: “We’re basically nonreligious Mormons”), and Ross had a full English breakfast, the rivalry was overt. “I got a news article when I was 8,” Ross pointed out. “Yeah, yeah,” Erik said. Ross continued: “Now Erik has to show me up, and I’ll be working for him one day.” He paused, then added: “Over my dead body.” Erik and Ross debated whether Scott was 16 or 17 when he went to Johns Hopkins. “I’m the only one in my family without a legitimate company,” Ross said, though it turns out he does have a start-up built around a device Erik described as “like SodaStream for food.”

If there is a debutante ball for tech prodigies, TEDxTeen is it. Erik’s fellow speakers included a 14-year-old inventor of anti-cyber-bullying software and an 18-year-old who for several years had been advising multinational corporations on supply-chain logistics. Fewer than half the speakers were still teenagers, but all had either accomplished something at that age or done something the organizers felt would be inspiring to teens. TEDxTeen filters the glibness of TED proper through the theatricality of adolescence (past speakers have included a teen who “invented a cancer-detection test out of paper” and another who “created a radio station out of garbage”). Erik’s talk promised to be more down-to-earth, but with one day to go before he took the stage, he was anxious about whether it struck quite the right balance. In recent weeks, he’d gone to a couple of Toastmasters meetings to improve his public speaking, watched hours of Ohanian videos, and studied the TED talk Guy Pearce delivers in Prometheus. He felt that his own talk’s inspiration-to-funny ratio, which he pegged at 20-80, needed to be more balanced.

Erik’s speaking time approached. “I’m getting nervous,” he said. “I’m gonna wing the ending.” It was time for his session to start. The emcee exhorted the audience of young people to dance to the Auto-Tuned strains of Daft Punk’s “Around the World.” Erik, miked in the front row, shimmied exuberantly. When his moment came, he ascended to the stage and spoke without notes. He didn’t choke. His talk went over well, the audience laughing especially loudly at the rock-hard-abs joke he told while showing a slide of Rodin’s Thinker to illustrate his brow-knitting struggles in school.

After the event came to an end, with a call for attendees to “go out and disrupt,” fans surrounded Erik. A 14-year-old fretted about the challenges facing young entrepreneurs, like the red tape for minors. “Forget the legality,” Erik reassured him. Kids asked for his autograph and for selfies. He high-fived them as a way of saying good-bye, something he’d learned from watching Ohanian. At a party upstairs afterward, while adults toasted with Champagne, Eric drank ice water.

The next day, Erik would fly to Boston and then on to San Francisco, where he would soon decide to give up his apartment — “It smells weird” — and live nomadically, moving from city to city as he puts on Intern for a Day events. Ohanian, who has become a mentor to Erik, has cautioned him to pace himself. “I’ll take him to Shake Shack,” Ohanian says. “I want to give him start-up advice, but I also stress: Don’t forget to have a childhood, too. Clearly he’s going to go places, but it’s also important not to squander this amazing moment of youth, and not be solely focused on work.”

A milestone loomed. On October 26, Erik would turn 16. “I’m starting to count the days,” he said. “I feel old.” Normally, his family made a big deal of his birthdays, but, his mother told me, “he doesn’t want to get to 16. He wants me to ignore it. Of course, I won’t.” As it turned out, when the day arrived, Erik was in Palo Alto. He spent his birthday judging a hackathon at Y Combinator, doing a podcast, and going out for dinner at Chipotle with another TEDxTeen speaker. Nothing special. “I had two Chipotles instead of one,” Erik said the next day. “I feel ancient. I guess the older you get, you have to stand on your own accomplishments. I feel I haven’t done enough. At 16, it feels less impressive. It makes me motivated to do more and more.”

*This article appears in the December 1, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.      

James Smithson

James Smithson, the eccentric British scientist whose fortune and name created the Smithsonian Institution, was himself an international artefact: an Englishman born in France, he was imprisoned in Germany, died in Italy and then left 150 sacks of gold sovereigns to the US, a country he had never seen.

Smithson himself was proof that ideas and objects transcend national boundaries. He left instruction that the institution in his name, now custodian of the world’s greatest collection of museums, should be dedicated to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men” — all men and women, that is, not just those of a particular nation or an educated elite.

The decision to open a branch of the Smithsonian in London is an inspired continuation of that idea, reflecting a philosophy in which important objects are seen not as national possessions but as a shared good within a pooled global inheritance.

Increasingly, the world’s greatest museums do not simply preserve and hoard but borrow and lend their holdings. China’s mighty terracotta warriors were displayed in London; one of the Elgin Marbles has been lent to Russia’s Hermitage Museum; and now important cultural and scientific exhibits from the Smithsonian’s 137 million items will cross the Atlantic for the first time.

There remains a vigorous opposition to this approach — best illustrated by Greece’s demand for the return of the Elgin Marbles — in which ancient objects are seen as “cultural property” to be jealously guarded and angrily “reclaimed” when held by other countries.

The Greek government is blunt: “Whatever is Greek, wherever in the world, we want back.” That is a narrow, nationalist view of what a museum should be and the opposite of what James Smithson thought and the way he lived his extraordinary life.

The illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland and a wealthy French widow, he was born in Paris in 1765. A true child of the Enlightenment, Smithson travelled endlessly, studied voraciously and published widely his findings in geology, chemistry, mineralogy and mechanics. He researched the wings of windmills, the workings of the blowpipe and lamp construction.

He explored the use of calamine in brass manufacture and found the zinc-carbonate mineral that would be named smithsonite. He wrote papers on the chemical composition of coffee, snake venom, human tears and tabasheer, a substance found in the nodal joints of bamboo and used in Indian medicine. He vigorously promoted “new science” throughout Europe and coined the term “silicates”.

A restless wanderer and inquirer, Smithson was in Paris during the revolution, imprisoned by the French during the Napoleonic Wars as a suspected spy and then died quietly in Genoa in 1829, childless and unmarried, leaving behind 27 scholarly articles, a cabinet of curiosities including 10,000 mineral specimens and great deal of money.

Without explanation, his will left the lot to America should his nephew die childless; which, generously, the nephew duly did. Not only had Smithson never been to America, there is no evidence he ever met an American. But he seems to have selected the fledgeling republic, an experiment in democracy, as the place most likely to “increase and diffuse knowledge”. And he was right.

America was initially uncertain how to honour Smithson’s vaguely worded mandate. Should the money — which amounted to a sixtieth of the nation’s entire annual budget — found a university, a library, an observatory or a publisher? Congress eventually settled on creating the largest possible museum, to collect and display . . . everything: art, science, literature, history, music, poetry and engineering. Thus was built the “nation’s attic”, a spectacular collection of collections now incorporating 19 museums, a national zoo and numerous research facilities.

Some have argued that Smithson’s legacy was a posthumous rebellion against British intellectual elitism and the aristocratic father who never acknowledged him (and probably never saw him). “My life will live on in the memory of men when the titles of the Northumberlands are extinct or forgotten,” Smithson predicted. His legacy was partly a rebuke to the Royal Society, which had declined to publish some of his later, wackier papers.

Smithson may have bequeathed the US his vast legacy out of admiration for the American principles of universal education and what his half-brother, who had fought for the British in the revolutionary war, called America’s “spirit of enthusiasm”.

What is certain is that Smithson intended the institution in his name to expand throughout this young nation because that was the most fertile soil in which to harvest and spread knowledge to the largest number of people.

Smithson gathered knowledge everywhere and wanted it diffused everywhere. He knew that ideas and the objects that encapsulate them do not belong to the individuals who made them, let alone the countries where those people happened to live: the great inspiration of the Age of Reason, still preserved in places such as the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, is that they belong to all.

The Smithsonian started in the inquisitive, borderless mind of an intellectually nomadic Briton; and now it is coming home.      

Harley Earl

We Owe Modern Automotive Design To Harley J. Earl

You may not have heard of Harley J. Earl but unless you’ve been living under a very heavy rock your entire life, you have seen tailfins on a vintage car and know what a Corvette is. Those are some of the more popular embodiments of a lasting legacy Harley J. Earl created. These and many other visions are ways that the “Father of Car Design” flipped the automotive world upside down, changing the landscape of automotive design forever.

Harley J. Earl was an industrial designer that focused on automobiles. He was the very first Head of Design for General Motors and then became Vice President making him the first top executive ever designated specifically for product design for a large scale American company. Looking at his history, it seems it was always meant to be.

Born the son of a coachbuilder in the late 1800s, Earl was immediately thrown into the life of vehicles and transportation. His father, J.W. Earl owned and operated Earl Carriage Works in Los Angeles, California, which he officially changed to Earl Automobile Works in the first decade of the 1900s. The senior Earl had switched his company over from building and maintaining horse-drawn carriages to the budding world of automobiles because of the grip automobiles took on the region, and the world.

At a young age, Harley J. Earl (HJE) started building vehicles. The first of which were small handmade box carts that kids would race down the hills in Hollywood. HJE’s coasting carts were often better built, safer and faster than all the others. Around 1909, HJE and his older brother, Art Earl, happened upon a large patch of clay on the family property.

In a 1980 interview Art described the scene, “Harley started designing cars out of clay way back then, clay that he took out of the ground.” He continued, “He’d pick up a big chunk of clay and would work it down to the sort of car he wanted. I guess we had twenty or thirty of these little cars of different shapes; roadsters and touring cars. And, we had a lot of fun.” HJE’s father even remarked, “These models, some were damn near full-size, were not like cars of the day, but as they might be later in the future. It was really kind of eerie seeing all these rounded off car bodies in a period when automobiles were mainly just boxes on wheels.” Automobiles at that time were designed around functionality.

HJE went on to study engineering and art simultaneously at Stanford University. His father continued to grow Earl Automobile Works by becoming the first to make and market custom automobile bodies and accessories, effectively creating the automotive aftermarket. Straight across the street from Earl Automobile Works is Don Lee Cadillac, the region’s Cadillac dealer. This important tidbit would come back up as the years ticked on.

From Hollywood Contracts To Harley J. Earl’s Rise Within GM

J.W. Earl’s company grew to be the largest automotive plant on the West Coast; specializing in custom bodies. J.W. landed automotive contracts with several movie studios. The area around Earl Automobile Works and Don Lee Cadillac became known as “Auto Row” and this area would go on to shape southern California’s massive movement in the transportation world. HJE joined in and began utilizing his artistic nature and engineering skills together, making his talents highly valued.

His custom designed cars caught the attention Hollywood’s celebrities. Silent film actors Tom Mix and Rosco (Fatty) Arbuckle commissioned HJE for custom orders, just so they could keep up with the others in the business. Arbuckle’s custom creation is considered one of the most over the top celebrity customs ever. HJE went on to file for a couple of United States patents. By the time he passed away, Harley Earl had more than 20 US patents in his name. His patent drawings are incredible pieces of artwork all on their own.

The biggest rival for Earl Automobile Works most certainly took notice. Don Lee Cadillac purchased Earl Automobile Works the same year the LA Times reported that Don Lee had sold his 10,000th Cadillac since he started selling them fourteen years prior. Many speculate this was strictly just a ploy to bring HJE under his employment. Regardless of the reasoning, this next step in HJE’s career was a hefty leap. Don Lee and HJE would go on to produce over 1,000 custom vehicles.

As a member of the elite Los Angeles Country Club in Beverly Hills, HJE was rubbing elbows with other legends in the making. HJE knew what Detroit and Henry Ford were doing wrong with the mass produced automobile. “The cars I design for movie stars and millionaires,” explains HJE to the Fisher brothers, “ I can have coming off all of GM’s assembly lines in the future.” The Fisher brothers had ties deep into General Motors; HJE was soon consulting directly to them and was included in a group that was working on new concepts for a car line that would be a “companion car” to the Cadillac.

After HJE was officially hired by Cadillac as a consulting engineer, his gloves came off. He started working diligently on a new concept that he pitched to the Fisher brothers, still the largest shareholding family of GM at the time. Earl kept a tight lip on his plans as he wanted nothing to do with Ford or Chrysler.

In 1927, HJE’s first concept car was being realized. The LaSalle was designed to push the boundaries of automotive style. Meant to be a smaller and more agile auto when compared to a Cadillac, the LaSalle was given a Cadillac V8, making it much sportier than its heavier relative. The LaSalle set the stage for the reinvention of the automobile market. “From this point forward, Harley J. Earl had become the American auto industry’s first industrial designer.” says Richard Earl, Harley’s grandson.

“Car Design Secrecy” became a common practice for all auto manufacturers, increasing the lengths competitors would go to steal ideas and concepts. At this time, engineers within GM were struggling to get a grasp on the forward thinking and pre-designing going on in Earl’s new Art and Colour Section.

In 1930, HJE and Larry Fisher dropped a bomb on the American automotive market by introducing their super car. The 1930 Cadillac V16 was built in secret and when released set a new standard for luxury and performance. This was a spring board for GM to take around 40% of the new automobile market share. One of the many patents HJE had was a design patent for the original V16 Cadillac.

Into the 30s, HJE continued to wow GM and the public. Cadillac asked him to build a special vehicle for them to showcase at the General Motors pavilion at the Century of Progress Exhibition at the 1933 World’s Fair held in Chicago. The Cadillac Aero-Dynamic Coupe was like nothing else the world had ever seen. Several innovations were scattered throughout the entire car, one of which was the one-piece and all-steel roof that would later lead into the Turret-Top.

In 1938, HJE developed the Buick Y-Job. The one-off custom Buick started the concept car trend and was also Earl’s personal vehicle, racking up around 50,000 miles. Soon after, Buick adopted Earl’s turn signal innovations making it the first manufacturer to install turn signals from the factory. A year after that, the turn signals were added to the front and added a self-cancelling system for after the turn had been made. GM began loosening the stones below Ford’s number 1 position. During World War II, GM played a major role in aiding the United States military. The advanced engineering taking place within the GM walls was an edge to be used in the war design efforts.

The GM Futureliner was a large custom truck designed by Earl specifically for the Parade of Progress that GM touted around North America in 1940 and 1941 and then again from 1953 to 1956. These behemoth vehicles carried relevant innovations in advancing technologies such as jet engines, televisions and microwave ovens.

The Le Sabre had many styling points that ended up in production vehicles.

Harley J. Earl’s Everlasting Legacy – Tailfins, Motoramas, And Modern Artists

Tailfins are directly from the artistic mind of Harley J. Earl.

Drawn to styling of modern aircraft, HJE enjoyed incorporating design ideas into his own designs. The automotive tailfin has a direct relation to airplane tailfins. Together with Bill Mitchell, Franklin Q. Hershey and Art Ross, HJE designed the 1948 Cadillac to be very much like the then secret Lockheed P-38 “Lightning” aircraft. This was the first usage of an automotive tailfin in production.

The Le Sabre concept is a prime example of how styling cues can enter the mainstream. Designed to resemble a jet fighter, the Le Sabre had bumper bullets, heated seats and a 12-volt electrical system that would later be adopted all around the industry. Earl drove the car daily for two years as a show of reliability and roadworthiness.

Harley J. Earl’s dream car came to fruition in 1953 with the Corvette, originally codenamed “Project Opel.” 300 fiber-glassed Corvettes were built, many of which were given away to celebrities. In an interview with local Detroit writer Stan Brams, HJE explains how he thought of the idea to build the first American sportscar, “I ran that Le Sabre up pacing a race, […] a sports car race at Watkins Glen, that’s where I got the idea for the Corvette.” Industry reporters refer to GM’s auto designers as “Harley Earlites.” The auto industry buzzed with all things Harley J. Earl. The phrase “Our Father Who Art in Styling, Harley Earl Be Thy Name,” was commonly shared.

Harley J. Earl invented the Corvette, creating the first American sports car.

The Pontiac Boneville Special was taken around to many of the Motorama events, wowing the crowd where ever it went.

“Inside the inner sanctum of his design organization within the new tech center,” Richard Earl explains, “HJE has his team build a custom racing Corvette for his son, Jerry, to take on the US racing circuit. It is named the Corvette SR-2. Harley appoints a team of GM styling members to assist in his son’s racing efforts. Like most things HJE does, this one in particular creates enormous tension inside the corporation since all the other [department heads] have to stand by and watch this man get to build an expensive sports car for his son inside the company with GM’s money.”

Art Earl is seen here (left) with his father, J.W. Earl.

Harley J. Earl created a sector of the automotive industry that hadn’t stood on its own before. He retired in 1958 and knew he was personally responsible for changing the way we all look at a car.

Harley J. Earl died on April 10th, 1969 and The Detroit News headline read: “Death of the one-and-only: CAR DESIGN PIONEER.” Ward’s AutoWorld went on to feature an extensive cover story titled “Harley J. Earl: The Man Who Invented The Modern Car.”

Harley J. Earl had a massive impact on future generations of car designers and enthusiasts. His design principles, concepts and visions have touched many lives in different ways. Steve Stanford is an amazingly talented automotive artist that directly attributes Harley J. Earl to being an inspiration and hero. In a quick interview with Stanford, he explains, “I have always been partial to GM products, even though I like everything.” He continues, “I was just drawn to them. I realized later that [HJE] was responsible for those designs.” Stanford believes that not enough people know of HJE or know the impact he has had on automobile design. The pure unfettered imagination of Harley J. Earl is what drew and continues to draw Steve Stanford to his artistic works.

GM’s famed Motorama was the brain child of Harley J. Earl. The parade of a new model or model change on an annual basis was initiated by HJE. “Back in the parade days of the 50s and 60s inside GM,” says Bob Lutz, former Vice Chairman of Global Product Development for GM, “Design ruled and everything else followed.” HJE effectively created “Planned Obsolescence.” Annual style changes were about refreshing the designs and keeping them continually new-ish if not completely new. HJE had a timeless motto that spans beyond the automotive industry and accurately describes the world we live in today, “Appearance and function are of parallel importance.”

For more on Harley J. Earl, head over to the official website harleyearl.com      

Victor Watson

Victor Watson was one of the British printing industry’s most flamboyant leaders. With a straw hat, Union Jack and a cheery smile, he turned the Monopoly game into a global brand. He also saw off two takeover bids from the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, revolutionised milk cartons and was a popular after-dinner speaker who tirelessly promoted Yorkshire — and Leeds in particular.

His success at Waddingtons was achieved with a modesty that bordered on otherworldliness, saying that he thought event organisers wanted him to speak only because he charged nothing. As the Maxwell jousts showed, Watson could be a tough opponent. He hired city advisers, and mischievously sent financial journalists off to Lichtenstein to investigate the ownership of Maxwell’s secret trusts. The ruse put the normally ebullient Maxwell on the back foot, while Watson was positioned in his shareholders’ minds as a straightforward man with nothing to hide.

Even when taking tough decisions, he felt he was able to connect with the men and women on the factory floor, which he put down to his own experience of working there; his first job was sweeping the factory. “Everybody should work on the shop floor,” he once said. “It opened the doors for me to the way people thought, the way they reacted. I was a marvellous sweeper.”

Watson was a one-company man who, if not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth, could always have had a job for life with the John Waddington printing group as it was run by his father. He was named Victor Hugo after his grandfather, who took over the management of the business from Waddington and shrewdly moved it away from an unhealthy dependence on theatrical printing — playbills, posters and programmes. He took the group into playing cards in the 1920s because they could be produced at times of the year when other business was slack.

In the pre-electronic era, board games were a natural extension of the business. In 1935 the older Victor’s son, Norman, persuaded his father to buy the non-US rights to Monopoly after playing the game one night. Asecretary helped to choose the street names and property values after a tour of London. The younger Victor Watson later recalled that Waddingtons executives became so addicted that they were playing the game instead of working. Waddingtons was soon producing a string of successful games such as Cluedo, Sorry! and Scoop. While the games never produced more than a fraction of the profits generated by commercial printing contracts, they gave the company a high profile. Production of one game, Bombshell, featuring soldiers trying to defuse bombs, was halted in 1981 at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, after it was condemned by both the Prince of Wales and Willie Whitelaw, then home secretary. Watson said he was most upset by the impression that he and his company might be seen as “tasteless money grabbers”.

Watson, who was one of Norman’s two sons, grew up in Horsforth, a mostly affluent suburb northeast of Leeds. He attended Bootham School in York, which was founded by the Quakers. On Saturdays he used to visit the Waddingtons factory with his father and would help to make Monopoly houses. After serving with the Royal Engineers, he took a delayed place at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1948, where he was a contemporary of David Attenborough. He then went straight to Waddingtons — to sweep the floor — in what had effectively become a family business. In 1952, he married Sheila May Bryan, who was still by his side 63 years later. They had two daughters: Amanda, who became a yoga teacher, and Sally, an auctioneer. He believed that the secret to happiness was “someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to”.

Watson became an enthusiastic salesman for Monopoly, marketing it throughout the English-speaking world outside the United States. He carefully preserved the company’s archives, unearthing a letter written in the early 1930s by Winston Churchill thanking Waddingtons for a copy of Monopoly, which he called “most interesting”. Watson also wrote a history of the company in 2008 called The Waddingtons Story. Six years after he succeeded his father as Waddingtons chairman in 1977 he faced what he acknowledged was the greatest challenge of his career; Philip Hanwell, an accountant who ran another Leedsbased printer, Norton Opax, made a hostile bid for Waddingtons as part of an audacious strategy to consolidate the UKprinting industry under his control. Robert Maxwell phoned Watson to offer himself as a so-called “white knight” who would rescue Waddingtons with a friendly bid. “We do not need rescuing, Bob,” Watson told Maxwell, “and I do not want to play second fiddle in a one-man band.” He defeated both the rival bids, but Maxwell returned in 1984. By then Watson had learnt the importance of public relations. He courted the press, which had already been primed to cast Maxwell in a bad light.

Watson also realised that the attempt to buy Waddingtons was only one of several projects that Maxwell had in the air at any one time. He rightly calculated that, if he resisted strongly enough, Maxwell would grow bored and move on — as he did. Latterly, he said of Maxwell: “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, and I will not do so now — because I am not sure if he is.”

Waddingtons’ independence did not long outlast Watson, who retired in 1993. Only a year later the new management sold the games division to Hasbro, which moved it to London. Watson was not pleased.      

Buzz Aldrin

Terry Pratchett

Until JK Rowling’s Harry Potter arrived, Terry Pratchett was Britain’s bestselling novelist of the Nineties. His science fantasy tales, spearheaded by the Discworld series, sold more than 85 million copies and were translated into 36 languages.

Pratchett’s hugely popular novels sold more than 85 million copies and were translated into 36 languages. He completed his final Discworld book last year Yet he never won the most coveted awards and in 1998 received the OBE from the Prince of Wales with some amusement because, he said, his only service to literature was to deny writing it on every possible occasion.

Discworld, a flat planet that floats about space supported by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle — the Great A’Tuin — began, Pratchett said, as “an antidote to bad fantasy”. Its capital, Ankh-Morpork, was inhabited by dwarfs, trolls, humans and even the undead.

The series of books — more than 40 of them — frequently parodied or borrowed ideas from HP Lovecraft or Shakespeare, as well as folklore and fairy tales. Pratchett was said to start his next book the same afternoon he finished the last. He would sometimes suffer from writer’s cramp, which he would treat with a bucket of ice or bag of frozen peas on his wrist.

He was often reluctant to talk about Rowling’s work, but said that if JRR Tolkien had not written The Lord of the Rings, he could not have written the Discworld series: “It’s how a genre works,” he said. “Everyone makes their cake from the same ingredients.”

Born in what is now the largely wellto-do Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield in 1948, Terence David John Pratchett was an only child who grew up in a cottage with no running water or electricity. His father David was a mechanic and his mother Eileen worked as a secretary but was also a gifted storyteller. From an early age, Pratchett was interested in astronomy — he collected Brooke Bond tea cards about space and owned a telescope. His lack of mathematical skills, however, scuppered his dream of becoming an astronomer. What he did possess were the two key attributes of a writer: curiosity and imagination.

Walking home from school, his journey took him through a chalk pit. “When I learnt that chalk was made up of millions of tiny dead animals, it filled me with a deep sense of time,” he said. “This had been the bottom of the sea and I could practically hear the waves.”

He learnt to read later than most children but then made up for lost time, devouring dictionaries and thesauruses from beginning to end for pure enjoyment — “I think I was a rather weird kid, to be frank”. Yet after passing his 11-plus exam to win a place at the local grammar school, he chose instead to go to High Wycombe Technical High School because he felt “woodwork would be more fun than Latin”.

Nevertheless, it was books rather than bookcases that intrigued him. First he exhausted his grandmother’s collection of the short stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and HG Wells, before moving on to the more comprehensive choice at Beaconsfield public library. He fully utilised his Saturday job there by reading hundreds of books, with one in particular seizing his imagination: “It was Wind in the Willows that did it for me,” he said. “It’s an incredibly weirdw book. The sizes of the rat, the mole and the badger go up and down throughout. Toad can drive a car and all thet animals can talk except the horse thatt pulls the caravan. And that’s what I fell in love with, that suspension of disbelief.”

He moved on to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Aged 13, he went to a science-fiction convention, which encouraged him to write a fantasy story, The Hades Business, at school. It was awarded full marks by his teacher and published in the school magazine. And after bribing an aunt with a bunch of flowers to type it, young Pratchett sent the story to a sci-fi magazine. With his £14 payment, he bought a secondhand typewriter.

Soon he was earning a living as a writer, but not of fiction. He left school at 17 before completing his A-Level studies when a journalistic opportunity arose on the Bucks Free Press. During the first of two spells there, he married his wife, Lyn (née Purves). After he took a job on the Western Daily Press and moved to Somerset, the couple had a daughter, Rhianna, born in 1976.

Local journalism demystified writing, he said. “You get less excited about seeing your name in print. You don’t get scared of a sheet of paper . . . You are aware that you have readers.” In his early years as a journalist, Pratchett had written a novel for children, The Carpet People. He took the opportunity to mention it when, as a reporter, he interviewed a director of the Colin Smythe publishing firm. The company gave him an advance of £250 and The Carpet People was published in 1971, with a launch party in the carpet section of Heal’s department store on Tottenham Court Road.

Another book, The Dark Side of the Sun, was published in 1976, but there seemed little prospect of his genre of writing earning him a living. In 1980, soon after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, he became — “with impeccable timing” — a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), which required him to reassure the public constantly about the safety of nuclear power plants. After a particularly stressful day of insisting there was no reason to be concerned about a leak at the Hinkley Point nuclear power station in Somerset, he went home and spent hours at his typewriter. The result was one-third of a book and the surge of a creative flow that never ebbed. “Writing”, he said, “is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

The first of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, The Colour of Magic, was published by Corgi in 1983 and later serialised by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour. While he still had doubts about income, in 1987 Pratchett resigned from the CEGB after the success of his fourth Discworld book, Mort. He was given a £50,000 advance for six books, and would go on to set new records — simultaneously topping the hardcover and paperback lists (more than once) and also seeing his novels heading both the adult and children’s bestseller lists.

Pratchett insisted that he had “no social agenda”, but often drew parallels with the cultural and scientific topics of the day. He acknowledged that many of his books conveyed his satirical view of the world and had been “subtly influenced by moderately current affairs”. After all, “mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this,” he wrote in Pyramids. “You need to be a human being to be really stupid.”

He frequently employed what has been dubbed “stealth philosophy”, by hiding philosophical struggles,questions and arguments within his texts. Topics of satire included religion, Ingmar Bergman films, trade unions and the monarchy. In Equal Rites, he parodied gender stereotyping: “This is a story about magic and where it goes . . . It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author’s control.”

The Hogfather inspired a £6 million television adaptation by Sky, starring David Jason. In the book Pratchett created an alternative version of Christmas, one that dealt with an idea close to his heart: “That it is our fantasies that make us real.”

He explained: “We start off believing things like the tooth fairy and Father Christmas and that educates us to believe in bigger fantasies like justice. You can grind down the whole universe into a powder and you will find no single atom of justice. Yet people will fight and die for the idea — it’s one of the nicer things about humanity.”

Pratchett’s primary interest had always been in writing for children. In 2002 he received the Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Theorising about why he had not won other prestigious awards, he said his novels had tackled the nature of belief, politics and even journalistic freedom “but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer”.

He and his family moved, in 1993, to Broad Chalke near Salisbury, where they lived in a six-bedroom manor house. It had an outhouse for writing and a tennis court he never used. He was always upright and operational by 9am so that he could stop for a bowl of muesli at 10am and feel as though he was taking a break from work, rather than bemoaning not having started.

Whenever Pratchett ventured out from home, he was invariably dressed in black clothes and wearing a widebrimmed hat, which he said was a Zen disguise: “If I take it off, I’m just another bald-headed, bearded man.” His style was always more urban cowboy than city gent.

He founded a television production company, Narrativia, which holds the rights to his works. Though Pratchett eschewed showbusiness engagements, he always found time for his legion of fans, whether on signing tours every May and November or to receive honorary degrees from several universities. His breaks from writing would usually be spent responding to readers’ letters — he and his agent, Colin Smythe, often received plot suggestions, proposals for books (and sometimes complaints when certain protagonists died). Sources at WH Smith said his novels were favourites even among shoplifters.

With his wealth and fame, he was able to indulge his interests: he enjoyed listening to Meatloaf while fussing over his tortoises and plants, and returned to his boyhood love of astronomy by building an observatory in his garden. He knew he had really made it when an asteroid was named after him — 127005 Pratchett. He also became increasingly involved in charity work, using his website to encourage support for the Orangutan Foundation UK, of which he was a trustee.

His books generaated adaptations for tthe stage, radio and television, as well as computer games; Discworld maps and figurines filled toy shops. In 2013 his daughter, who survives him together with his wife, announced her plans to adapt his novel The Wee Free Men into a film. She is a scriptwriter and journalist whow inherited her father’s love of video games (he counted Tomb Raider among his favourites).

It was always difficult tot determine whether Pratchett was genuinely unruffled by being overlooked by the literary cognoscenti. If he was invited to a literary festival, he felt there was a subtext: “Well, of course I personally haven’t read your stuff but my gardener’s son is a real fan, so if you could come along without spitting on the floor we’d be grateful.” He never was short of deadpan wit. “I think I’m probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing,” he mused. Pratchett was diagnosed in 2007, aged 59, with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease but urged family, friends and fans to “keep things cheerful”. He made a substantial donation (estimated at £500,000) to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust and appeared in a two-part BBC documentary based on his illness (which he called an “embuggerance”).

In 2008 he met the prime minister, Gordon Brown, to ask for an increase in dementia research funding. “I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure comes along,” he said. Pratchett also became a vocal supporter of assisted dying, declaring that he was appalled by the state of UK law.

He began to experience difficulties with reading and had to start dictating his works to his assistant, or by using speech recognition software. His final book, another Discworld novel, was completed last summer before succumbing to a chest infection.

He died surrounded by his family, with his cat sleeping soundly on his bed. The first tweet announcing the news was composed in capital letters, which was how Pratchett portrayed the character of Death in his novels. “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” it stated.

In 2009 he was “delighted, honoured and, needless to say, flabbergasted” to be given a knighthood for his services to literature. He once joked that he was most proud of growing a 3lb carrot — “Oh, and writing a few books”. (Economist)

WHEN he was knighted in 2009, Terry Pratchett made a sword. It was the natural accoutrement for a man who, without one, resembled an amiable wizard kitted out by a Houston department store.

With a little help from friends, he dug 80 kilos of iron ore from a convenient field and built a kiln in the back garden. Together the team forged a sword that might have bisected a snowflake, had one drifted past.

It also had a hidden ingredient. Mixed in with the smelt were bits of meteorite, the stuff of thunderbolts. By this Sir Terry put himself on a par with Blind Io, chief of his Discworld gods. Io held the monopoly of throwing bolts about, and thus effortlessly lorded it over Annoia, goddess of Things That Stick in Drawers; Bibulous, god of Wine and Things on Sticks; Errata, goddess of Misunderstandings; and Reg, god of Club Musicians.

The disc-shaped world in which these gods were worshipped—or, more often, blamed—had been created by Sir Terry in 1983, though it had possibly existed from all eternity, borne steadily through space on the backs of four giant elephants standing on an immense dim-sighted turtle. It had swum into his mind as he wrote press handouts for the Central Electricity Generating Board, and by 1987 had proved so phenomenally popular that he left the board to fend for itself. His 40 Discworld novels made him Britain’s bestselling author in the 1990s, and by this year he had sold 85m books in 37 languages: though not, to his disappointment, in Klatch or heathen Trob*.

The literati sniffed at his fantasies, but he gave as good as he got. He had no intention of writing literature, or adding to the piles already mouldering about. Instead he ornamented Discworld with Unseen University, which was never precisely Here or There, where faculty such as the Professor of Indefinite Studies had only to show up for meals, and where the Librarian was an orang-utan who, swinging through the shelves with his prehensile limbs, had reduced all existential inquiry to a craving for bananas.

Sir Terry had not been to university himself, Seen or Unseen. He had just about scraped through High Wycombe Technical High School. Astronomy was his passion, but his star-gazing was not backed up by being any good at maths. He learned instead—mostly from P.G. Wodehouse and H.G. Wells—that universes could be explored in other ways, and could be funny and dark and slyly topical, all at once.

So it was that he built the sprawling, unsewered metropolis of Ankh-Morpork and peopled its mazy alleyways with thieves, beggars, trolls, vampires, vegetarian werewolves and bemused tourists, as well as overworked wizards. People wondered how he was not overworked himself, producing two books a year. He simply loved doing it. Feature-film-makers and their bags of gold were regularly rebuffed; he was the only controller of this universe. (Just to prove it, he gave it eight colours of the spectrum, the eighth being fluorescent greenish-yellow-purple octarine, and let some characters move so fast that light stood red-faced in embarrassment.) His enormous cast of characters, once set in motion, would generally do what he wanted, give or take the odd axe malfunction.

Brandy with Tallis

Among those characters was Death. He had appeared in Sir Terry’s childhood playing chess in “The Seventh Seal” on TV, and had not changed much since. When noticed, as humans tried not to, he had sparkling blue eyes, a glowing scythe and a white horse called Binky. His gathering of souls was untidy—the good fingered, the bad spared—and his life oddly endearing, with cups of tea and curries, and a rubber duck in his bath. He spoke IN CAPITALS, like a coffin lid slamming. In 1991 a New Death appeared with no nice features, but he soon tangled with that scythe.

Knowing Death as he did, Sir Terry was taken aback when in 2007 Binky came nuzzling at his door. He was diagnosed then with a form of early-onset Alzheimer’s. As an optimist by nature, he determined to beat it; when, within a year, it had removed his power to write and type, he realised that might be too tall an order. But his anger was undiminished; and since he had always told Death what to do and where to go, he began to campaign loudly and publicly for the right to die when and how he liked. This was preferably not in a clinic in Switzerland, but in his garden, with his cat on his lap, an excellent brandy in his hand, and Thomas Tallis in the background. In the event he managed, unassisted, some of that; and also put the right-to-die debate in a useful forward gear.

Soon after his diagnosis it was rumoured, mostly in the Daily Mail, that he had found God. He thought this unlikely, since he could not even find his keys, for the existence of which he had empirical evidence. All the same, he admitted to hearing a voice that told him all was well; and to a feeling one February day, when the sunset reddened a ploughed field, that there was “an order greater than heaven”. He knew then, he thought, “where the gods come from”. But why not, like the gods and the universe he had created, from his own black-fedoraed head, and his own thunder-wielding hand?      

Felix Dennis

SOMEWHERE in the hearts of all self-made wealthy people, said Felix Dennis, is a “sliver of razored ice”. He liked being rich, and liked advising people about how to achieve that enviable state. But making money, and then yet more of it, was to assuage inner demons, not to achieve happiness. Indeed what made him happy (and that only occasionally, he stressed) were modest pleasures: “Walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine, or feeding a stray cat.”

Fun and success, however, were another matter. To say he lived high on the hog would be an understatement. By his own estimate he spent $100m on drugs, drink, women and high living in just one decade. He had 14 mistresses on his personal payroll (“If it floats, flies or fucks,” he once said, it was better to rent than to buy.)

He could afford either. His publishing empire, by his death worth hundreds of millions of pounds, started when he turned up at the office of a backstreet rag called “Oz”. He was penniless, having sold his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend’s abortion. Minds met, and he became co-editor—only to end up in jail, briefly, on an obscenity charge when the “schoolkids” issue featured Rupert Bear, a children’s comic-strip character, deflowering “Gipsy Granny”. The judge sniped that the scruffy youngster was “very much less intelligent” than his two co-defendants.

If so, it did not hold him back. His publishing genius lay in spotting gaps in the market and launching titles to fill them. When he saw youngsters queuing in the street in Soho at 9am to watch Bruce Lee films, he launched “Kung-Fu Monthly”, flying to Hong Kong to interview the maestro, who conveniently then died, mysteriously: the media blackout which followed made his material sizzlingly interesting.

When the titles flourished, he licensed them in other countries, or sold them and started new ones. His later successes included the laddish “Maxim” and “The Week”, a lively digest of other outlets’ content. Its huge success in America confounded cynics who thought that the magazine market there was moribund.

He was no great editor and had mostly no interest in the subjects of his titles. Though he made a fortune from computer magazines, he abhorred gadgets. He found management boring too, revering cashflow, but boasting that he could not read a balance-sheet. Why bother, when you could hire people who could?

The secret of getting rich, he reckoned, lay in using other people’s talents—finding them, nurturing them, rewarding them, and when necessary dispensing with them. On top of that you needed persistence, practicality, stinginess, innovation, ruthlessness and fearlessness. The greatest hurdle to fortune was the desire for safety—as addictive as his beloved crack cocaine, but much worse for you, he said.

Biology caught up with him. He nearly died from Legionnaires’ disease, which, he wrote, is “especially lethal to coked-up, overweight, cigarette-smoking, malt-whisky-swilling idiots with too much money who believe they are built of titanium”. Having survived a nurse pouring icy water on his genitals to keep him from falling into a coma, he eventually resolved to ditch the drugs and took up a five-hour-a-day poetry habit instead.

Rhyme and reason

That seemed like a rich man’s folly at first. He paid his publisher to produce the first volume and toured the country by helicopter to give public readings. The promise of free (and rather good) wine brought punters flocking, and they liked what they heard. The books flew off the shelves just as fast as the magazines did. He was perhaps not Britain’s greatest living poet, but he was certainly one of the most popular. At their best, his verse—ironic, self-deprecatory, bleak and amusing by turns, had echoes of Kipling:

They tell me I’m riddled with cancer
So I’m planning to croak with élan
If you’ll pass the cigars and decanter
I’ll be dying as hard as I can.

He had other projects too, notably starting a 20,000 hectare hardwood forest (immodestly named the Forest of Dennis) on his estate, at a cost of £200m ($340m). By his death, more than 1m trees were planted. He created a garden of heroes there too, featuring life-size bronze statues of, among others Bob Dylan, Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin (the latter astride a Galapagos tortoise) and of course himself. Thrifty to a fault when it came to business expenses, he enjoyed making big, capricious donations to friends in need, and to good causes. He once sent $50,000 to a cricket team of former gang members from Los Angeles, to help them tour England. His vocal ambition was to spend his money before he died—which was impeded only by his ability to make more of it, even during his final illness, of throat cancer.

His hippy streak could be deceptive. The restlessness was matched by a fiercely competitive approach to everything from collecting to conversation. He liked intimacy on his terms, but nobody else’s. He had never “properly surrendered to love”; for all his audacity in other parts of life, it would require, he admitted, a particular kind of courage which he lacked.      

Michael Gambon

We all know him as the leading thespian of his generation. But you may not know he also owns a Ferrari, 800 antique guns and was once approached to be the next James Bond. Michael Gambon once claimed that he used to be gay. He had to give it up, he said, because it made his eyes water. He told another interviewer he'd started his career as a dancer in the Royal Ballet. He had to give that up as well, after he fell off the stage.

'It's in one of those handbooks,' he tells me. '"Used to be a dancer." The reporter said to me, "Ooh, was it painful?" So I said, "Yes, I fell through the timpani."'

You will gather that Sir Michael Gambon is not invariably and entirely truthful. Making Sleepy Hollow with Christina Ricci, he used to tell her elaborate stories about the clubs he'd been to the night before and the drugs he'd taken. 'Oh, yes,' he says fondly. 'I used to tell her terrible fibs.' Ricci thought it was a hoot. But it can also be a bit embarrassing if you're the hapless reporter who notes down 'fell through timpani'. So when his first words to me are, 'I had a car crash last night,' I am inclined to ignore him. I ask him instead about the play he is currently rehearsing, and only after about 10 minutes realise he really did have a car crash last night.

A big, bear-like man, Gambon slumps behind a cloud of cigarette smoke in the corner of a sofa in rehearsal rooms near Waterloo. His grizzled hair is long and his face is battered, baggy and jowly. He's wearing a scruffy suit, conveying a sense, overall, of someone a bit seedy, dissolute, tramp-like. But he's rehearsing Beckett's Endgame, in which he plays a man who is blind, in a wheelchair and dying, and whose parents live without legs in their own excrement in dustbins, so I assume it's just a matter of getting into the part (and is not the impression he seeks to convey, for instance, behind the wheel of his red Ferrari, his car 'for posing around London'). His cheeks are livid with bruises, although these turn out to be the result, not of the accident, but of dental treatment. He has, he tells me proudly, in the slightly slurry, old-drunk voice the treatment has temporarily given him, eight titanium plugs in his gums.

He was actually unhurt in the crash, which was the fault of the weather and only damaged the car. 'I'm not thinking about it,' he says. (Now, this, clearly, is a lie.) 'There's no point in losing sleep over it. It's a year old. Positive thinking.'

I am actually less worried that Gambon will tell me lies than that he won't tell me anything at all. He is notoriously publicity-shy, rarely gives interviews and, when he does, works hard not to give anything away. He is sometimes described as having a wife, or an ex-wife (Ann, or Anne, Miller), occasionally a girlfriend. At some point he seems to have lived in Kent, but probably doesn't now.

'Paul Schofield said something like, "If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist,"' he announces quite early on in our conversation. 'Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?' Acting, for him, is a kind of compulsion - 'overwhelming, like being a priest. Something you want to do. Nothing to do with being well known or anything. That other thing comes as an unfortunate part of it. And it's loathsome, the whole panoply of it. I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me.'

'But aren't you interested in -' (I snatch at a name, forgetting he had a scene in her recently released movie, Sylvia) 'Gwyneth Paltrow, or whoever?'

'I did another film with Gwyneth,' he says. 'I'm more interested in my dentist.'

Gambon seems to guard his privacy as assiduously in private as he does in public. 'He restores antique guns and tells jokes that can go on for days,' says Alan Ayckbourn. 'I don't know any more about him than that. He's only really public on stage.' Matthew Warchus, who is directing him in Endgame and has worked with him twice before, says, 'He's very private. I know other actors who are like that and it's connected to the acting. In the theatre, among actors, directors, writers, the skill - talent - is a by-product of social dysfunction: outsiders, shy people. Many actors are incredibly shy. They're channelling something that would otherwise be extremely problematic.'

Gambon, whose job is to abnegate himself, presumably can't see why a person who subsumes himself in other characters should be interesting. The trouble with this, though, as Matthew Warchus suggests, is that actors are in the business of channelling emotion; not primarily learning and expertise (as in the case of his dentist) but feeling.

'He's eminently readable on stage,' says Ayckbourn, who has directed him several times. 'You can see into his heart.' And people are understandably curious about where that comes from. 'I know when an actors is full up with something,' says Warchus. 'And it might well be to do with pain from their own lives, or scar tissue from traumatic events.'

Gambon, as he acknowledges, is an instinctive, rather than a technical actor: 'I admire technical facility in others, but I'm a hit-and-miss merchant. I'm afraid I do my own sort of thing.' His own sort of thing is incredibly powerful: he has the ability to express subtlety and intensity of feeling through apparently small movements or vocal inflections. He does it while he's talking to me, explaining the central character in The Caretaker. 'Someone says to him, "You're Welsh, aren't you?" And he says, "I don't know. It's hard to cast your mind back."' And as he speaks the line, something about him goes limp and defeated, and there is a sense of pathos, loss, and longing. It's like getting a sideswipe; it knocks the breath out of you.

Ayckbourn experienced something similar when he was directing him as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. 'He can be immensely emotional. If he decides to go for something, it is quite awe-inspiring. The day he stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears as Eddie - no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face - just stood there and wept like a child, was heartbreaking. And he does angry very well, too. That can be scary.'

With such access to emotion and such facility in its expression, Gambon's reluctance to talk about his personal life is understandable; he could get himself into all sorts of trouble. Besides, he works at sounding the right emotional note. He must fear that anything he might say in an interview would sound, to his perfect emotional pitch, luvvieish or faked, trivial or overegged.

Michael Gambon was born in Dublin in 1940, but moved to London as a young child. He grew up in a mostly struggling Irish immigrant community in Mornington Crescent, attended St Aloysius Boys' School in Somers Town and, briefly, another school in Kent, before leaving at 15 to become an apprentice toolmaker at Vickers Armstrong in Crayford. He completed the apprenticeship and he remains fascinated by mechanical things. He collects antique guns - and now has around 800.

'I belong to quite a lot of learned societies. We collect firearms and discuss them at dinners and clubs and things' - old clocks, and watches. He has a pilot's licence and, as well as the Ferrari, he tells me vaguely, 'I've got a Mercedes, BMWs and all that shit.' I wonder whether he could have been a happy engineer had he stayed at Vickers, and he says, 'No, I'm a malcontent. I would want to be an actor.' So is he also a malcontent actor? 'Yeah. I think you have to be, don't you? To get going.'

He didn't go to the theatre until he was 19, but he loved the cinema and had a sense of acting as 'like a heartbeat, something inside me. Some dream. I think it's being a dreamer as a child. Dreamy kids become actors, don't they?'

He did some amateur acting, then got his first professional job on the basis of a largely confected CV that he sent to the Gate Theatre, Dublin. His first big break came when he joined Laurence Olivier's startup National Theatre in 1963, as 'one of his spear-carrying boys'.

He was never a matinee idol ('No, I like being rough round the edges. A big, interesting old bugger'), though he was once taken to an office in Mayfair to meet Cubby and Albert Broccoli. 'I was given a smoked-salmon sandwich and a glass of champagne and Cubby said, "We're looking for a new James Bond," and I started laughing. I said, "James Bond, me?" [He sounds, at this point, exactly like Tommy Cooper.] "I'm not the right shape." He said, "Well, we have ice bags for Sean's chest and that thing there [Gambon points to his jowls] that doesn't take more than two days and the recovery period's a week. Teeth, well we can do that in an afternoon. And Sean wears a piece." I said, "I know that." He said, "I'll get a toupe for you."'

In the end, nothing came of it. We should be grateful: instead of a plasticised Bond, we have had a succession of characters who have been knocked about by life, who are grandly individual, who are by turns enraged and vulnerable. The roles he is most likely to be remembered for are the ones he instantly mentions as his own favourites: Brecht's Galileo at the National in 1980, The Singing Detective on television in 1986, and Eddie Carbone at the National in 1987. He is, as Ayckbourn points out, particularly good at playing 'simple' characters such as Carbone - not least, perhaps, because he can find their complexity. 'We're all deeply complex, aren't we?' he says to me. 'We're all that much,' he holds his hands close together, 'on the surface and that much,' he moves them wide apart, 'beneath: the subtext of life. And that's the acting. The subliminal surface there and the vast, vast chasm of everything - bringing some of that to the surface, suggesting it.'

Matthew Warchus says: 'Part of what you're doing in rehearsal is building the only partially visible and the invisible. A great performance gives a glimpse of something, so that you feel there's a huge story behind the character. And there's an enormous story behind Michael. But I think there's a secret part of actors that it's best to leave secret.'

Last year, Gambon was cast as Richard Harris's replacement as Albus Dumbledore in the third Harry Potter movie. I ask if he was conscious that he was taking over a much-loved character, and he seems mildly affronted. 'Do a sort of Richard Harris impersonation, you mean? It never crossed my mind. If you were playing Lear, you wouldn't copy the last person to do it.' While Harry Potter was in production, he also managed to fit in the making of six other movies: 'Sylvia, a gangster film called Layer Cake, another one called Being Julia, with Annette Bening, one in Canada with Kevin Costner and one in Italy with Bill Murray, called The Life Aquatic. It's really about Jacques Cousteau - a comedy, directed by Wes Anderson.'

At this rate of movie making, he can afford the hobbies. A duelling pistol, he explains, might cost £8,000, while 'a beautiful inlaid German wheel lock' might go for £28,000. He also has a nicely lucrative career in advertising, making the most of a voice so gurgling with richness that it sounds oiled - and which is capable of sounding self-consciously posh, like Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army, and of skidding erratically over the vowels.

'I'm an anorak,' he says with some satisfaction. 'I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.'

So where is the house you keep them in? I inquire innocently. 'Greater London', he answers, coming over all curmudgeonly. And he won't tell me if he's married: 'I don't talk about it.'

Lee Evans, who is playing his servant in Endgame, and with whom he evidently has a very good relationship, claims he doesn't know either. 'I wouldn't really like to ask. I can't work him out. I know he fiddles around with cars at the weekend. He's all over the place. That's the most fascinating thing about him.'

Some reports say that you're married, some that you aren't, I persist pointlessly. He pretends to guffaw. 'It's good, isn't it?' But he perks up when we get on to cars. 'They named a corner after me on Top Gear, Gambon Corner. The last corner on the circuit.' (He's talking about the track around which celebrities drive so that they may be ranked for speed.) 'I almost killed myself. I had four wheels off the ground. I'm the oldest person ever to have done it. It was raining and I did very badly. I was so bad that the BBC made an edict after that - you must get a roll bar, because that bloke could have killed himself. So Jeremy had to get a roll bar fitted in that Japanese piece of shit they drive around. Jeremy had a Ferrari, too, but he's sold his now. He's got an SL 55 AMG.'

So, he's a bloke. But a sensitive one. Lee Evans describes him as 'patient and modest' and Warchus as 'amazingly gentle. Very masculine, but very kind.'

He has never wanted to direct. 'I'm too subversive. I like being with actors and knocking the director. Lee and I are in this play with Matthew, whom we love, and we come out here and talk about him. There's a them-and-us thing. I wouldn't want to do it. I'm not confident enough.

'I'm always the bloke just behind, hiding, and when you see the opportunity, shoot out, grab it, and hide again. In an army I wouldn't be an officer. I'd be a sergeant or a corporal or something.'

He's known for subversive fooling around - for ad-libbing upstage, or moving a pencil a couple of inches across a table after a director has set up a shot. 'He's a clown,' says Warchus. 'He has the gravitas, and sadness, and extraordinary comic nature of a great clown. And he's also great fun and remarkably easy to work with.'

In the end, what makes Gambon a great actor is his willingness to take risks. 'He tends to make unusual choices,' says Ayckbourn. 'He rarely does what anyone else would do.' In a recent 'not terribly happy' production of The Caretaker, he tried a different accent in each scene. It didn't come off, but he says he doesn't regret it. 'I live in fear of being a contented passenger. I'd rather get parts I can't play.' There is a sense, as a result, when he's on stage that what's going on isn't entirely under his control. And probably he's right in his assumption that to be this adventurous, he needs to be unknown, capable of being protean, for the audience to have no stake in his being a certain kind of person. Besides, he is acutely aware of himself as a performer, and I suspect it seems somehow to him both self-aggrandising and humiliating to be required to mount a performance about himself.

He's too busy worrying, anyway. 'I want to be good all the time, so I feel anxious. But if you weren't like that, you'd be dead, wouldn't you? If you went out happy down the road, la la la. I've never been like that. I don't want to be.'

'Hmmn,' I say, not entirely understanding. 'You need to feel edgy?'

'Yeah.' His eyes are hooded behind the cloud of smoke. 'I talk a lot of shit, don't I?'      

Dick Frizzell

1. What were your parents like?

Mum was very arty. She loved making things out of the Woman's Weekly. Egyptian friezes, Goldie portraits painted on plates, the house was full of it. My father was a very dry engineer at a freezing works. He was quite an intellect, he loved great discussions, but they were always half-pissed rants about liberals. So he was a mixed-up kind of a dude really. He always went straight to the pub after work. His dinner would be kept with a plate over it in the oven. He used to say, "I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunkard." Quite a fine distinction. But I think they loved each other.

2. What's your own relationship with alcohol?

I'm pretty keen on it, yeah. Jude and I like a drink. We have our little parties. Most nights. But it was only when I had my big midlife-crisis-mental-block-breakdown thing at 43 that I drank far too much.

3. What were you like as a teenager?

I was the only arty guy in the whole of Hastings, pretty much. I had one eccentric friend, we used to parade around town on Friday nights. We always had the latest haircuts. Then when I went to art school in Christchurch I looked around and realised I was with the only freak from Timaru, the only freak from Ashburton. It was like 'Yay!' And all the girls looked exactly like you hoped they would with black eyeliner and black stockings. Jude? Oh, she was gorgeous. I just thought wow, that'll do.

4. You married at 21. Were you and Jude expecting a child?

No, no. The baby was born then. Juliet. It was 1964, I was 20. I didn't want to tell my Mum and Dad what was going on. But you couldn't get married without parental consent until you were 21, so we had to wait. After we were married, I told them. Dad wrote one of his outraged letters in engineer's handwriting which is all block capitals. HOW DARE YOU NOT TRUST YOUR MOTHER TO UNDERSTAND.

5. Can you tell me about the advertising industry in the 1970s?

I worked for Bob Harvey who was crazy - good crazy. One time we all had to go out to his house in Henderson while he showed us the latest thing from America. It was on Super 8, he had a projector. And it was Sesame Street. The colours and the vivacity and the brashness - Bob wanted us to make everything look like that.

6. Your art career took off when you began painting tins of fish. Where did that idea come from?

We lived over in St Marys Bay, before it got totally flash. My youngest boy, Otis, had a Samoan or Tongan friend called Michael who came for lunch and brought a tin of mackerel. Now we never had tins of mackerel in our flash foodie pantry, obviously, because we were young trendies. I picked it up and looked at the slice of fish and the letters across the top PLAZA. I took it out to the studio and rendered it up with this cheap shit enamel paint I was using as a kind of punk statement. It felt like a bone fide epiphany - doiiinggg!!! I had advertising nous so when I had an exhibition I got all my mates who were Radio Hauraki DJs to talk about it. I got posters run up and T-shirts printed. You couldn't get into these shows, seriously. At the opening we had Jude and all our friends' wives dressed as mermaids in this big sea of cellophane singing this song about olive oil and salt and all the stuff off the labels. Then we carried in a big sardine tin on our shoulders and when I opened it with this giant key, two people came out in these fish suits and did a salmon mating dance where they kind of rubbed each other. Unbelievable!

7. You mentioned your midlife crisis at 43 - what was that about?

I ran out of ideas. Actually, I ran out of idea. I only had one. It was the fish cans and all this semi-comic-book stuff. One exhibition seemed to seed the next and then it just stopped and there was nothing there. By then people were calling me an artist. I finally got there and I had nothing to paint.

8. How did you get out of the rut?

I was so desperate I came up with probably the best idea I've had in my career: instead of being a non-artist I'd just be a bad artist. I jumped on painting landscapes. The critics didn't like it but people were buying them. Christ yes. I was getting $4000 for a landscape which was good money in the 80s. Then I had my first exhibition of tiki paintings and - boom. I was credible again.

9. Some people found those tiki paintings offensive - what was your take on that?

My take was that this conversation can't just flow one way. You can't have Ralph Hotere using Western art tropes and then have the culture tell me that I can't use Eastern art tropes. And the other thing that I understood, better than anyone else I think, was that it can't all be good. They were trying to ring-fence Maori art and keep it pure. You can't, you've got to have the trash. I went off on a literal tiki tour to gather references and noticed that all the cheesy tiki motel signs in Rotorua had gone. They took the plastic tikis away from Air New Zealand. There had been this huge cultural culling and it was well-meant but it was very wrong-headed.

10. Did any of the controversy make you uncomfortable?

At the opening of that exhibition, my knees were shaking. I had a posse of very angry Maori feminists bail me up and tell me I was a bad person. In all the media, I was branded a spiritual assassin. A wonderful thing was that Otis was a rapper then and he had a whole lot of young Maori rapping mates who used to come around and they absolutely loved what I was doing. They went away thinking, "well maybe I don't have to rap what the kaumatua tells me to rap. Maybe I can rap whatever the hell I like".

     

Nigel Richards

He's the Kiwi world champion you've never heard of, and that's just the way the 'Tiger Woods of Scrabble' likes it. Tim Hume reveals the brilliant and enigmatic Nigel Richards.

IN THE eyes of Aucklander Howard Warner, the most internationally dominant New Zealander in any sport over the past decade is not Valerie Vili, not Mahe Drysdale, not even Beef and Lamb. That accolade rightly belongs to Nigel Richards, a spindly 43-year-old Peter Davis lookalike whose brilliant, mysterious mind has made him a superstar of the world Scrabble circuit.

"Without a doubt he's the greatest player in our sport, ever," says national Scrabble representative Warner, who, like many serious exponents of the game, considers it a sport.

He has roomed with and squared off against Richards at international tournaments. "I can't think of any other New Zealander who's been so indisputably the best in the world at what they do, for so long. He's like a computer with a big ginger beard."

Many modern sporting celebrities are freakish physical specimens: Michael Phelps with his rowboat oars, Lance Armstrong with his horse's heart. Richards' biological advantage comes in the form of the distinctive mental circuitry which has made him the great enigma of the Scrabble world.

"You go to international tournaments and everyone's sitting around at the end of the day telling Nigel-stories," says Warner. "Of course, he's never there, so the legend grows."

Richards is notoriously reclusive. Tournament profiles typically list his age, occupation, and place of residence as "not disclosed". Even his mother, Adrienne Fischer, is uncertain exactly what his job entails, although it is something to do with closed circuit televisions and security in Kuala Lumpur, where he has lived since leaving his home town of Christchurch in 2000.

He is monklike in his personal habits. "There's not a lot of excess in the way he conducts himself," says Warner. He's vegetarian, doesn't drink or smoke, and is frugal, wearing the same modest clothes and oversized glasses he has for years. He has no interest in television, radio, current events.

"If you asked him how the Crusaders went, I don't think he'd know who they were," says Fischer. "I don't think he's ever read a book, apart from the dictionary."

Richards' only two interests are obsessions: Scrabble, and cycling. He cycles 600km a week, including long rides before the 8am start of each day of tournament play. Everyone in Scrabble knows the story of Richards' first appearance at a New Zealand championship, when he knocked off his job in the Christchurch City Council's water department at 5pm, cycled for 14 hours to Dunedin in atrocious conditions overnight, played all his games over the weekend, then cycled home having won his division, spurning offers of a lift.

While for most people, Scrabble is a wholesome if unenthusing family pastime, for thousands around the world it is serious competitive sport. Two colourful international circuits tour North America and the rest of the world, populated with eccentrically gifted players who devote their days to programming dictionaries into their brains. (There are about 140,000 words up to nine letters long which are acceptable on the "world" circuit, about 40,000 fewer on the North American tour.) For all the feistiness of the competition, the financial stakes are not high. "No one expects to make money in Scrabble," says Paul Lister, president of the New Zealand Association of Scrabble Players. Yet Richards, who won the European Open in Malta last month with several rounds to spare, has made about $200,000 over the past 12 years.

For top-flight players, definitions of words are immaterial; they earn no points, and simply take up valuable mental bandwidth. Words are strings of letters, mathematical possibilities. The centre of the world game is South-East Asia, where the shaky English exhibited by many top players is no barrier to success. Warner estimates the average English speaker has a working vocabulary of 5000-6000 words; he himself would know about 70,000. Richards, who has an uncanny natural ability to store words in his head and pluck them out at will, would know double that.

Richards is the only player to have held both the North American and world champion titles concurrently. "To play in America he has to unlearn 40,000 words for the tournament, then input them back in his memory banks when he's done," says Warner. "It's incredible. Most of the North Americans don't bother trying; to Nigel, it makes no difference."

Michael Tang is the Malaysian organiser of one of the world's biggest Scrabble tournaments, the Causeway Challenge. He says Richards is the biggest drawcard at the event. "He's considered the Tiger Woods of Scrabble."

Comparisons are consistently made to chess prodigies like Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, for the seemingly unparalleled breadth of his word knowledge, his ability to punish opponents with massive scoring plays, his robotic demeanour. "He's what we call a freak," says Tang. At tournaments like the King's Cup in Thailand (the Thai King is an avid player), thousands of fans turn up to watch, and Richards is often mobbed, something he finds exceptionally difficult to deal with.

The king of Scrabble is a man of surprisingly few words. He cuts an awkward figure following his tournament victories, preferring to slip off as soon as possible rather than engage in celebrations or dissections of the matches. Richards lives alone, and seems to have little need of human contact. "He's always been like that, happy in his own company. He hasn't particularly needed other people around him," says Liz Fagerlund, an Auckland Scrabbler who is one of Richards' closest friends. "People, when they first meet him, probably think he's shy; I think it's more he's not into making small talk."

"While he doesn't go out of his way to have a social life," says his mother, "he's not unsociable."

INDEED, RICHARDS is widely admired on the circuit for his gentlemanly approach to the game, in contrast to some of the blowhards with whom he sometimes shares the podium. Win or lose, he betrays no emotion. Stefan Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Word Freak, a bestseller on the carnival of misfits that is the American Scrabble tour, rates Richards as among five inseparable all-time greats of the game. He says Richards stands out most of all for his unflappable, "zen-like" approach to competition.

"Once the word is played, it's played, and there's nothing you can do to take it back. It's really reassuring in this world of hyperactive and emotional minds to see someone who has this complete sense of calm and sangfroid about his ability.

"He's the best in the world at what he does, yet there's no bravado, no ego, no aggression. He just plays the game then rides his bike off."

In an excised section of his book, Fatsis relates an encounter between Richards and an American Scrabble great, who told the New Zealander: "I can never tell whether you won or lost."

"That's because I don't care," replied Richards.

Richards' talents have drawn attention from women on the circuit. "There are certainly women in the Scrabble world who are fascinated by him, despite the fact he's no Dan Carter," says Warner. "Some women find a big brain sexy."

He is as indifferent to their interest as he is to everything other than Scrabble and cycling. The only thing that gets him riled are journalists.

"That's the only time he'll show any emotion and get a little annoyed, because he doesn't like the fuss," says Warner.

He and Richards' other friends are amused at the naivete of a reporter seeking to talk to him. Richards doesn't respond to a request for an interview.

EVERYONE SAYS Richards' talent is the product of a brilliant mathematical mind that is somehow "wired differently", although no one is sure quite how. "When he was learning to talk, he was not interested in words, just numbers," says his mother. "He used to point to the calendars. He related everything to numbers. We just thought it was normal. We've always just treated Nigel as Nigel."

Despite early indications of his special talents, Richards stayed in mainstream schooling, attending the low-decile Aranui High then completing his education at Lincoln High, when his family moved to Burnham Military Camp for his stepfather's career. He spent a lot of time on his own, playing video games. "He never went to discos," says Fischer. He got a scholarship to university, but never went, taking a job at the post office instead.

Richards didn't play Scrabble until he was 28. His mother introduced him to the game, frustrated that his card-counting had turned their Sunday games of 500 into a no-contest. "I said, 'I know a game you're not going to be very good at, because you can't spell very well and you weren't very good at English at school'." Despite his poor affinity with language, he turned out to be a prodigious talent, and in 1997 won the national champs on his first attempt.

Richards provided an insight into his mind by revealing his studying technique to Fatsis. He compiles dense word lists, scanning through them along with a dictionary, and somehow the words stay in there. "I just have to view the word," he told Fatsis. "As long as I've seen the word, I can bring it back. But if I've only heard it or spoken it, I can't do it at all."

But that is only half his gift, says Fatsis. "I've never been around a player who had such a facility with recall. It's one thing to be able to have a photographic image of a page of the dictionary inside your head. It's altogether another task to look at the seven tiles on your rack and look at the letters already played on the board and decipher the riddle contained in them. Nigel has it all."

Warner believes Richards has an eidetic, or photographic, memory.

"He told me whenever he looked up a word in his memory banks, he would see its position," he says. "That's an extremely rare mathematical mind.

"It's uncanny playing him. He doesn't give anything away. You had a sense his eyes were rolling around in his head, as if they were scrolling through a computer screen."

Warner and others were surprised when, in 2000, Richards upped sticks and took a job offered by a Malaysian Scrabble aficionado. "He doesn't like spicy food, and he loved the outdoors here," says Warner. It hasn't all gone smoothly. Richards has kept to his cycling regimen in Kuala Lumpur, leading to a number of traffic accidents, and the lack of a New Zealand ranking saw him disqualified from international competition for several years, until a "Nigel clause" was instituted, which allowed him to represent his country in perpetuity.

But ultimately, says Warner, Richards has benefited being closer to numerous major competitions; perhaps, too, the character of Malaysian life – "people there are friendly, but private" – suits him.

His increased involvement in international competition since the move has raised the bar in the sport. "Ganesh [Asirvatham, a Malaysian who has become one of the world's top players] took a year out in his life to do nothing but word learning to try to catch up with Nigel," says Warner. Asirvatham eventually became one of Richards' biggest rivals, besting him for a streak, until Richards regained the upper hand and Asirvatham dropped out of competition.

Richards keeps performing. "He's been at the pinnacle for 12 years now," says Warner. As a man of such rigorous habit that seems unlikely to change.

"We probably assumed he would have dropped out some time ago, because he's done everything. But no. He just seems to love the challenge of playing. It doesn't matter to him if he wins or loses tournaments. He just likes to be in the moment, playing the game."      

Warren Bennis

WARREN BENNIS was the world’s most important thinker on the subject that business leaders care about more than any other: themselves. When he started writing about leadership in the 1950s the subject was a back road. When he died on July 31st it was an eight-lane highway crowded with superstar professors whizzing along in multi-million-dollar muscle cars.

Mr Bennis produced about 30 books on leadership. Some of them are classics, such as “On Becoming a Leader” (1989). All are surprisingly readable, stuffed with anecdotes, examples and literary references. He offered advice to leaders from all walks of life. Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, regarded him as a mentor. Presidents from both sides of the aisle - John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan - sought his advice. If Peter Drucker was the man who invented management (as a book about him claimed), then Warren Bennis was the man who invented leadership as a business idea.

Central to his thinking was a distinction between managers and leaders. Managers are people who like to do things right, he argued. Leaders are people who do the right thing. Managers have their eye on the bottom line. Leaders have their eye on the horizon. Managers help you to get to where you want to go. Leaders tell you what it is you want. He chastised business schools for focusing on the first at the expense of the second. People took MBAs, he said, not because they wanted to be middle managers but because they wanted to be chief executives. He argued that “failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led”.

Mr Bennis believed leaders are made, not born. He taught that leadership is a skill - or, rather, a set of skills - that can be learned through hard work. He likened it to a performance. Leaders must inhabit their roles, as actors do. This means more than just learning to see yourself as others see you, though that matters, too. It means self-discovery. “The process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” he said in 2009. Mr Bennis knew whereof he spoke: he spent a small fortune on psychoanalysis as a graduate student, dabbled in “channelling” and astrology while a tenured professor and wrote a wonderful memoir, “Still Surprised”.

What constitutes good leadership changes over time. Mr Bennis was convinced that an egalitarian age required a new style. Leaders could no longer crack the whip and expect people to jump through hoops. They needed to be more like mentors and coaches than old-fashioned sergeant-majors. Top-down leadership not only risked alienating employees. It threatened to squander the organisation’s most important resource: knowledge. There is no point in employing knowledge workers if you are not going to allow them to use their knowledge creatively.

The last quarter of the 20th century often saw Mr Bennis in despair. He loathed the Masters of the Universe who boasted about how many jobs they had nuked and how much money they had made. “On Becoming a Leader” is full of prophetic warnings about corporate corruption, extravagant executive rewards and short-termism. He also lamented the quality of leadership in Washington, DC.

But he became more optimistic in his last few years, at least about the corporate world. The Enron, WorldCom and Lehman disasters taught businesses the danger of hubris. And a new generation of CEOs, whom he dubbed “the crucible generation” and compared to his own second-world-war generation, were more impressive than their immediate predecessors, characterised not merely by tolerance of other people, but respect for them.

Mr Bennis’s work on leadership was shaped by three different experiences. The first was the Great Depression: in 1932 his father was fired from his job as a shipping clerk without explanation and managed to put food on the table only by helping the mafia transport bootleg alcohol. The next was the second world war: he led a platoon into battle at the age of 19 and won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. The third was more cheerful: the big expansion of American universities during the post-war boom.

The demobbed war hero went to Antioch College, where he was taken up by its president, Douglas McGregor, a social psychologist who subsequently made his name distinguishing between two approaches to running organisations, theory X (scientific management) and theory Y (humanist management). McGregor pulled strings to get Mr Bennis into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study for a PhD in economics. Despite a frosty reception—one of his professors, Charles Kindleberger, told him to his face that “We didn’t exactly throw our hats in the air when we saw your application”—he got a job teaching in the new field of organisational behaviour. The young scholar took full advantage of the intellectual cacophony of Cambridge, absorbing ideas from sociology to psychology, and eventually he tried his hand at leadership itself. He spent 11 years as an academic administrator at a time when universities were being torn apart by student protests, first as provost of the University at Buffalo and then as president of the University of Cincinnati.

Contrasting counterweights

When Drucker came to a party at Mr Bennis’s post-modern house on Santa Monica beach in California, in the late 1990s, the two men were a study in contrasts: Mr Bennis, thin, tanned and dressed in a light suit; Drucker paunchy, pale and encased in black. Mr Bennis talked animatedly about leadership. Drucker growled that what mattered was followership. But in fact the men were brothers under the skin and worthy counterweights to each other: big thinkers who took subjects too often synonymous with platitudes and gobbledygook, and, by dint of a lot of hard twisting, wrung some sense out of them.      

Steve Jobs

Apple chief’s reputation takes a bashing in hotly anticipated films about his dark side, Ben Hoyle writes

In life he was celebrated for pulling off the “greatest second act” in business history after his triumphant return to Apple rescued the company from bankruptcy and transformed our relationships with computers, music and mobile phones.

Now, four years after Steve Jobs’s death, two new films with Oscar-laden pedigrees are subjecting his character to a similar re-evaluation, emphasising a ruthlessness and lack of empathy underpinning those visionary achievements. Both draw on extensive interviews with people at the heart of Jobs’s professional and personal lives. Together they are likely to significantly alter public perceptions of a man who remains widely revered as a hero for bringing the iMac, iTunes, iPad and iPhone into the world. The biggest film at the New York and London film festivals next month is Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender as the enigmatic, Zen-influenced chief executive. It is written by Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing and directed by Danny Boyle, who made Slumdog Millionaire.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder was consulted on the film. He said that it is a “stellar” accomplishment that gets audiences closer than they have ever been to the private Steve Jobs. He said he felt that he was “seeing the real Steve Jobs in there”, having previously criticised earlier depictions such as Ashton Kutcher’s ridiculed portrayal in the 2013 film Jobs.

Variety’s review said that Fassbender “completely owns the screen” even though his character is “very unlikeable throughout”.

In the opening section of the film Jobs is confronted by Chrisann Brennan, his high-school girlfriend, just as he is about to go on stage for one of Apple’s vaunted launches. Ms Brennan is shown lambasting Jobs for failing to support her and their daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs — who Jobs refused to acknowledge even after a paternity test, and whom he reportedly once refused to pay $500 in monthly child support at a time when his company was worth $200 million.

The Hollywood Reporter’s critic said that while the device might seem “pretty unrealistic, even forced” it works because it helps to illuminate the dark side of his genius, the “overweening ambition, massive self-confidence, ultra-demanding posture, lack of compassion and overriding egomania” that made Jobs who he was.

Sorkin, who won an Academy Award in 2011 for The Social Network — his screenplay about the birth of Facebook — has said that there’s “no point writing about someone unless they’re flawed”. Early in the writing process, he told an audience that he had met people close to Jobs, such as Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, and that “these people revere him, despite the fact that he made all of them cry at one point”.

Boyle’s film earned largely rave reviews after the screening of a “work in progress” cut nine days ago at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It follows the release of a searing new documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, made by Alex Gibney, who won an Academy Award for Taxi to the Dark Side, the Afghanistan conflict documentary.

Currently on cinema release in America, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine was made its debut this month at No9 on iTunes’ movies chart, despite Apple giving it no promotion at all. Eddy Cue, Apple’s software chief, described it as an “inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend”, although Mr Wozniak said that he had heard “from several people who have seen it and they have all said that it matches their dealings with Jobs”.

Gibney, whose other documentaries include investigations into the downfall of Enron, the cyclist Lance Armstrong and the Church of Scientology, was drawn to make the film by the outpouring of grief that followed Jobs’s death from cancer in 2011. He observed people laying flowers or apples with a single bite taken out of them, like the company logo, at makeshift shrines outside their local Apple stores and wondered why so many people idolised Jobs. His film attempts to capture what it was that made Jobs great but also shows a man who could be formidably tough on those close to him.

It relates how Jobs cheated Mr Wozniak out of his share of $7,000 for an early contract, telling him that they had only been paid $700. There is an interview with Bob Belleville, head of programming for the Macintosh, who bursts into tears after talking about how Jobs’s demands ultimately wrecked his marriage.      

Lowell Wood, the Modern Day Thomas Edison

“It’s really a one-person sort of vehicle,” says Lowell Wood, right after he offers me a lift back to my hotel. His brown 1996 Toyota 4Runner, parked outside his office building in Bellevue, Washington, has 300,000-plus miles on the odometer and looks it. Garbage bags full of Lord-knows-what take up most of the back. He squeezes his paunchy, 6-foot-2-inch frame behind the wheel and, using his cane, whacks away papers, more bags, and an ’80s-vintage car phone to clear some room on the passenger side. The interior smells like pet kibble. Wood puts the keys in the ignition and then spends half a minute jiggling them vigorously until the truck finally starts. As we pull away, I wonder aloud if all the detritus crammed in his SUV could be from a hobby. “No, I don’t have time for any of that,” Wood says. He adds that he’s not terribly good with the ordinary aspects of life—paying bills, say, or car washing. He’s too consumed with inventing solutions to the world’s problems. Ideas—really big ideas—keep bombarding his mind. “It’s like the rain forest,” he says. “Every afternoon, the rains come.”

From most people, a comment like that would be preposterously self-important, if not delusional. But Wood is just telling the truth. At 74, he’s been an inventor-in-residence at Intellectual Ventures, a technology research and patent firm, for about a decade. He’s paid to think and orchestrate international teams to develop products such as anticoncussion helmets, drug-delivery systems, super­efficient nuclear reactors—anything, really, that might address some pressing need. In the 1980s he led the development of the space lasers that were meant to shield the U.S. from Soviet missiles as part of the “Star Wars” program. He’s an astrophysicist, a self-trained paleontologist and computer scientist, and, as of a few months ago, the most prolific inventor in U.S. history.

Thomas Alva Edison earned his last patent on May 16, 1933. U.S. Patent No. 1,908,830 (“Holder for article to be electroplated”) is for a device that bonds two metals via electrolysis. It was hardly his most exciting invention. Going back to 1869, Edison had patented breakthroughs in communications, movies, lighting, and power distribution. By the end of his career, he was an international celebrity with 1,084 utility patents to his name, the most for an American.

That record stood until July 7, 2015, when Wood received U.S. Patent No. 9,075,906 for “Medical support system including medical equipment case,” a device that can imbue medical gear with video­conferencing and data-transmission abilities so a patient can leave a hospital and use the machines at home. It’s his 1,085th patent. Just as remarkable, Wood has more than 3,000 inventions awaiting perusal by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He’ll likely remain America’s top idea man for many years to come.

Wood’s work at IV has included whimsical projects such as a laser-based shaver and a microwave that can customize its power for individual items on a plate, so meat, vegetables, and starches all come out at the same temperature. He’s also worked on a low-power clothes dryer, automated anticollision systems for cars, and a large thermos for preserving vaccines. “At least half of his activities—maybe more—are trying to help the least fortunate people on earth,” says Nathan Myhrvold, IV’s co-founder and CEO and former chief technology officer at Microsoft. “He’s really good at it. His ideas have already saved tons of lives and have the potential of saving enormously more.”

As Wood drops me off at the hotel, he mentions how relieved he is to know a good mechanic. He intends to keep the 4Runner on the road long enough to bequeath it to his daughter, who’s getting her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Plus, not worrying about his car frees up time to invent. Of late, he’s been consumed with a project to develop a one-time, universal vaccine. “All we need is a couple of tricks,” he says, “and then you’d be able to grab this newborn—literally right out of the uterus—pinch its thigh and push the stuff in, and all their pediatric vaccinations are done.”

Wood insists that if he’s smart, he didn’t start out that way. Growing up in Southern California, he says, “I didn’t do well in any classes.” He often failed or received the lowest score on the first exam given in a particular course and improved his marks through repetition and intense effort. The strategy worked. He skipped a couple of grades and enrolled at UCLA at 16, where he tested into an honors-level calculus class. The worst score on the first exam—once again—was his. “I’d gotten into the class on the basis of aptitude, not knowledge, which is a ruinous sort of thing,” he says. “It’s like being told I understand the theory of swimming, and so here I am tossed into a high-speed river.”

The score horrified Wood, and he tried to make up for it with a very hard extra-credit problem. “You had to figure out how to cover an area with tiles in a specified fashion,” he says. “This is back in 1958, and it was a famous math problem. It was hopeless, and everyone worked on it for a while and then threw it away.”

As it happened, UCLA had just taken delivery of the first digital computer west of the Mississippi. Wood taught himself how to use the machine over the Christmas break and then wrote a program to solve the tiling problem. “It was a shameless sort of thing,” he says. “I used brute force to solve a problem that was meant to be solved through cleverness.” After he turned in his work, his professor accused him of cheating. “And so I reached down in a briefcase and pulled out the program,” he says. “The professor’s jaw literally dropped, and he said, ‘What is a computer? You can have the points if you teach me how to use this thing.’”

Wood went on to get undergraduate degrees in chemistry and math from UCLA, as well as a doctorate in astrophysics. Then, in 1972, he got a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as a protégé of Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb. Wood worked on projects ranging from spacecraft to the use of gamma rays to place hidden watermarks on objects. Then came the Star Wars project, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, for which Wood pushed a team of scientists to build a weapons system capable of detecting and destroying Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles midflight.

That Wood opens up about this is unexpected. Historians and journalists haven’t been kind to Teller, one of the most polarizing figures of the Cold War, and Wood often gets lumped in with him as a fringe science lunatic, especially when it comes to Star Wars. After billions of dollars and years of controversy, the initiative never made it out of the lab.

Wood is quick to suggest that he knew all along that the system, while technically feasible, was too complex and expensive to be practical. It was mainly for show, he says—a feint that broke the enemy’s morale and treasury. “I went into it with my eyes wide open, and I did the job,” he says. “I got the result that I wanted. The Soviet Union collapsed. Check. It’s done. The Evil Empire is no more. My colleagues and I helped to make it so, and it was just what was aimed for.” For Wood and his wife, who also worked at the lab, the end of the Cold War was a great relief and an opportunity. “When we finally watched the hammer and sickle come down on Christmas Day of ’91, I told my wife, ‘We’ve just been given our lives back.’ What a stunning Christmas present.”

In 2006, after four decades in the government, Wood retired to become a full-time inventor. He’d met Myhrvold many years earlier while interviewing him for a science fellowship. The pair rekindled their friendship at a dinosaur conference - Myhrvold also has a thing for paleontology - and he talked Wood into joining IV. Myhrvold soon introduced Wood to Bill Gates. The men hit it off and now meet regularly to brainstorm. “Lowell is the definition of a polymath,” Gates says. “It’s not just how much he knows, it’s the way his brain works. He gives himself the freedom to look at problems in a different way from everyone else. To me, that is the mark of a great inventor.”

Wood has taken on the role of on-demand puzzle solver for many of Gates’s humanitarian projects. “Whenever there’s a scientific question I need to understand better, Lowell is one of the first people I turn to,” Gates says. “If he doesn’t know the answer, which rarely happens, I’m sure he can figure it out.”

On a recent morning at Intellectual Ventures, Wood potters past a disturbingly lifelike Tyrannosaurus rex head hanging in the reception area and a collection of antiques—typewriters, microscopes, and an 1890 census tabulating machine—toward a conference room. He’s dressed, as usual, in slacks and a tie-dyed, short-sleeve oxford. He has a collection of these shirts, made by a street artist in Berkeley, Calif. The artist retired, and Wood has been cycling through his set for years. “That’s why they’re so faded,” he says. The tie-dye, combined with his reddish-gray beard, suggests a hippie Santa.

Listening to him is like binge-watching several seasons of Nova. He talks for four hours in a soft, deep voice, digressing into one intellectual rabbit hole after another: physics, space lasers, pestilence, rockets, whale oil, lithography, fracking, eidetic memory, war. He’s adept at the tangent—did you know that measles is a zoonosis humans picked up from grazing animals 1,500 years ago?—that somehow always relates back to the topic at hand.

Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. “I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,” he says. “It’s just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don’t read them, I’m doomed. I’ll never come back to them because there will be the next day’s journals and the ones after that.”

“THERE’S REALLY NOTHING TO IT ALL. YOU JUST READ, AND YOU REMEMBER WHAT YOU READ.”

This habit goes back at least five decades. “I went to hear Linus Pauling lecture when I was a student,” Wood says. “Afterward I waited until everybody else went away, and then I asked him frankly, ‘How do you come up with these huge number of wonderful ideas?’ He said, ‘There’s really nothing to it all. You just read, and you remember what you read.’”

As part of his mental regimen, Wood refuses to make to-do lists, even for grocery shopping. If he forgets something at the store, he says, “I will kick myself vigorously.” He gives himself the same treatment at work. “If you make a mistake, you should not only not make that mistake again but also don’t make that class of mistake again,” he says. “That’s an exceedingly important concept to improve human performance at the individual scale.”

The more difficult the problem and the more layers of complexity it has, the more emphatic Wood’s disquisitions get. Take his work on concussions. “Recently folks have been getting really concerned about concussions, because professional athletes are showing up demented in their 40s and dying before they’re 50 with real unpleasant brains at autopsies. So we were asked to look at the concussion situation from an inventive standpoint. The usual sort of thing happens when we do one of these things that none of us know anything about: You go out and you do a massive literature search, and you get 500,000 pages of stuff to read. You paw through it, and you’re trying to understand what in the world is the story.

“It turns out to be a very embarrassing sort of thing. I didn’t know the first thing about a concussion. I thought it was just brain slamming against the interior of the skull, particularly violently.” Wood looks down. It clearly bothers him that he had it wrong. “Basically that has nothing to do with what a real concussion is. A concussion occurs by the brain being very rapidly twisted inside the skull, and in particular the so-called angular acceleration. It’s not just the twist or the speed of twist, but it is the time rate of change and the speed of the twist that tears neural fibers apart. It’s a ghastly sort of thing. It literally just rips the nervous system apart. And it turns out there are definite thresholds for this. If a certain twisting rate is sustained for more than 40 to 60 milliseconds, or the twisting rate goes above 6,000 radians per second square or whatever, then you have significant damage occur.

“But the striking thing is that it piles up. If you do that same thing again a week or two later—or an hour or two later, heaven help you—the damage not only becomes more severe, but it takes much longer to heal. And if you do it three times in a bad afternoon on the soccer field or football field, the damage is likely to be permanent.” He continues: “That’s what happens to the NFL football players. They get a sustained concussion two or three times in an afternoon of play, and they repeat it every week. And they repeat it every year. They end up after 10 or 20 years of this with a ruined brain, absolutely nothing left. And so the issue is posed to us: ‘Well, what in the world do you do about this?’ ”

An organization—he declines to say which—came to talk him into developing anticoncussion technology. He wasn’t interested at first. “These guys are professional gladiators,” he says. “They know what they’re doing. I mean, it’s been documented for a decade or two that this is what happens to you. It’s a self-inflicted wound. Why are we wasting time on this?

“Well, it turns out that’s not where most of the damage occurs. Most of the damage occurs on high school playing fields, nonprofessional athletes. Young males between the age of 10 and 20 are the ones that are inadvertently, unknowingly, innocently taking damage, because there are so very many of them. And they’re determined to not let the team down. And they’ve been hit real hard, and they’ve taken mild damage, and they want to keep playing.

“These kids are not out using their heads as weapons like professional football players do. They’re kind of innocently larking around, and every once in a while they just kind of get hit hard or hit badly in a scrimmage.

“And there’s two interesting things that you can do. First of all, you can give them a helmet that will measure what the level of damage is that happens in any particular hit and will signal, ‘Hey kid, you’ve had enough, this is it for a day, a week, a month, or whatever. You’re just on the sidelines. You had a bad break, and here’s what has to be done in order to prevent permanent damage.’

“Then the more engineering-inventive sort of thing is a helmet that will actually prevent the damage no matter how badly you may misbehave or somebody may mistreat you. You can literally keep the brain from twisting in a helmet, or, worse comes to worst, the helmet will go active on you and will anchor your head to your shoulders.”

Wood’s anticoncussion solution, much like football, isn’t for the squeamish. Sensors in the helmet trigger a mechanism that fuses a player’s helmet and shoulder pads. Wood is vague on exactly how that would work, but spikes or rods of some kind would shoot down from the helmet to keep the head from turning.

“In a fraction of a—a tenth, a twentieth, a thirtieth—second, the helmet will put things down that will grab your collarbones and not only will your neck not break, but your brain won’t be damaged. You may take some collarbone damage, but everybody understands that collarbones heal. At least you won’t take the lasting damage to an organ that you really depend on. That’s what we’ve invented.”

Wood’s refusal to say who approached him to work on helmet technology is typical cloak-and-dagger theater for IV. The company is an idea factory that often gets contracted to work on difficult, potentially lucrative problems. It keeps this work to itself until the invention has been patented and is ready to commercialize.

Many of the best ideas bubble up during IV’s monthly Invention Sessions, where Wood, Myhrvold, Gates, and others gather in a room and brainstorm for hours. Lawyers and assistants sit on the periphery and take notes. “I know lots of supersmart people, but most of them, including me, don’t keep remotely as many facts in their head as Lowell does,” Myhrvold says. “He can remember the physical properties of almost every element. It’s just astonishing.”

Hundreds of staff scientists pile into a laboratory each day to collaborate with a much larger, worldwide network of scientists on retainer. This research community has come up with amazing breakthroughs—patented, of course—which the company is increasingly turning into actual products. It does this by either forming startups or entering ventures with large, industrial partners. The company also has a philanthropic division called Global Good, which is a joint venture with Gates and often does work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

One of IV’s projects with the Gates Foundation grew out of a chronic complication in the fight against infectious diseases: keeping vaccines cool. They become ineffective if they get too hot or cold, which is a huge problem in developing areas where electricity is unreliable. Wood and Myhrvold came up with a superinsulated cylinder. It’s about the size of one of those Gatorade coolers that football players dump on their coaches’ heads and uses materials similar to the insulation on spacecraft. The device—now manufactured by a Chinese refrigeration company under the brand name Arktek—­maintains a constant temperature for a month or more, as opposed to the couple of days that existing vaccine coolers can manage. Workers in the field simply pack the Arktek with ice and let it do its thing. “As much as a third of all vaccines in the developing world have problems, because they’re stored at the wrong temperature,” Wood says. “There’s the so-called cold-chain challenge of being able to transport vaccines all the way on out to every last little wretched hut in Africa or Bangladesh or rural Pakistan. You’ve got to get the stuff out there at the right temperature, or else.”

Wood continues: “Bill Gates and I share the common viewpoint that vaccines are the closest thing to magic that human technology has come up with, because you do this terribly ritualistic little pricking of the skin or sometimes take a pill, and you’re immune to the disease forever after. It’s like the ancient legend of Achilles. His mother grabbed him by the heel, dipped him in the water, and he was invulnerable to weaponry forever after. Vaccination is just exactly like that. Lethal diseases? You just laugh. They can’t touch you.”

Wood’s anti-malaria technology is much closer to his background in weapons research: the Photonic Fence, which is to mosquitoes what Star Wars was meant to be to Soviet ICBMs. The system uses fence-post-mounted cameras and light sensors to measure insect size, speed, and wing-flapping frequency. When a mosquito’s detected, a laser zaps it into a tiny puff of smoke. The technology is being developed for commercial use by Lighting Science Group,a lightmaker in Florida.

“BILL GATES AND I SHARE THE COMMON VIEWPOINT THAT VACCINES ARE THE CLOSEST THING TO MAGIC THAT HUMAN TECHNOLOGY HAS COME UP WITH.”

At its best, IV saves lives. At its worst, it can be a bully. It owns patents in software, medical devices, and other areas, and licenses rights under those patents for a fee. Companies in Silicon Valley, in particular, have complained that IV’s stance is basically, “Pay up or we’ll sue.” The bulk of its revenue comes from these licensing deals. Wood prefers to keep the conversation on IV’s weird, wonderful ideas, leaving talk of this side of its business to Myhrvold.

Like the ridiculously fast plane. According to Wood, it’s feasible to alter the air surrounding a plane in such a way that it creates an enveloping bubble, which in turn lets the plane fly faster. “Why don’t you just go out and endow the medium you’re interacting with—the air—with a much higher speed of sound?” Wood asks. “You don’t have to do it permanently. I just want to make the tiny, tiny little portion of the atmosphere with which the airflow is interacting have a higher sound speed just while it’s interacting with the airflow.” Wood won’t go into much detail about how all that would work—he says he’s still working on the patent paperwork. “Just change the rigidity of the air as it interacts with the airflow. From a physics standpoint, you’re just raining down on the local air, the gravitational flux on the plane. You want the plane to effectively be weightless, to hang where it is. So you just want to take the inter­action of the earth’s gravity with the plane and give it to the air. The earth is kind of a waste product. It just takes the gravitational flux and carries it away, and who cares what it does with it? That’s all. That’s not asking for too much.

“We know how to do it. Why in the world don’t we just go out and do it? If I wanted to get from New York to London or whatever in a hurry, I probably wouldn’t even bother with an airplane. I’d take a submarine, because water has almost five times the sound speed as air does. The Soviets, bless their hearts, demonstrated how to fly through the water at 1-kilometer­per-second speeds. So you can fly through water much faster than you can fly through air.”

On the subject of things like planes and engines, Wood becomes downright distraught and angry. “What have we been doing?” he asks. “How can we be so lazy?” He sees the world as a never-ending puzzle. It’s an attitude that leaves others feeling optimistic after chatting with him. Famine? Evil? Impending environmental doom? They’re but problems waiting to be solved.<

br>
Wood, for example, is of the mind that global warming can be stopped relatively quickly and inexpensively through geoengineering. “There’s all kinds of solutions laying out there on the table that nobody denies are technical solutions. They’re just not politically preferred solutions,” he says. One such solution would be to sink the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide into the deep ocean; another would be to push the warm water on the top layer of the ocean down to the bottom.

He seems most bullish on the idea of using high-altitude balloons to release particles of sulfur or some other substance that would, in effect, provide shade for the planet. He’s convinced this wouldn’t only be feasible but would also come with few, if any, consequences. “All these sort of things involve capital investments on the order of $10 billion, but people are talking about going out and spending $1 trillion a year to cope with global warming, and they’re not even doing a very good job of it,” Wood says. “The solutions are straightforward. Nobody denies that they’re workable. People say, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do that. This is evil. It’s wicked. It’s inelegant.’ But mostly it’s politically incorrect.”

He argues there’s little chance of climate change—or anything, really, natural or human-made—wiping out the species anytime soon. He points out that the sheer number of humans makes us hard to kill, and says we’re still not as good at mass destruction as we imagine. “It’s going to be a long, long time before the human race has the ability to threaten 90 percent of human lives.”

On a much brighter note, Wood thinks there are plenty of ideas—really big, great ones—left to be imagined. “It’s irrational,” he says. “It’s frankly illiterate to not be optimistic. We’re going to see a blossoming across essentially every front, unprecedented in human technological history. This is not something that’s hoped for. This is baked in the cake.”      

Patricia Cornwell

Suited (in expensive black wool) and booted (red Prada high-tops), Patricia Cornwell, America’s queen of crime, sits hip and vigilant on the 17th floor of the UK arm of her publishing house. Her customarily high-end attire is today embellished with a skull motif. There are tiny bijoux skulls sparkling on the black socks that are peeking — just so — out of her leather trainers; skulls winking from her bangles, glistering on her necklace, looming large in diamante studs on the front of her black top; the skulls bulging on her badass knuckle-duster rings — they must be very hard to write in.

“People,” she says, “like to paint me as coming across as slightly freakish, but I don’t care.” British people, in particular, I notice — that is if they are journalists and feel cowed by Cornwell’s outspoken self-belief and competitiveness, the expense and effort that has gone into her face and her hair, or her delight in un-novelistic pursuits such as owning Ferraris and shooting guns.

She loves skulls, she says, because, as is decreed by various religions, and also in Hamlet, “you’ve got to look death in the face, and not be afraid. And that’s certainly something I have to do on a regular basis” — in self-willed, scrupulous, scalpel-wielding forensic detail, it must be explained, in case you haven’t read her books.

Cornwell, 59, is highly security-conscious because of the large quantities of human carnage she’s seen (mostly on mortuary slabs). “If you’ve seen the carnage like I have, there’s no way you ever live with thinking it doesn’t happen to people or that it won’t happen to you.” There are authors with schtick that you can tell they have adopted to widen their appeal. Cornwell’s pale blue glassy stare and lifelong interest in firearms suggests she isn’t one of them. She is drawn to this stuff. She lives it. Thinks about it all the time. Suck it up: “If people don’t want to see bodies cut up on a table and smell it in their sleep, don’t read my books,” she says, with composure and some vehemence.

By “it” she means the rapes and slayings, paedophilia, wanton sadism and unrepentant psychopathy that drive the plots of most of the 34 books she’s written (although not the two cookbooks and children’s books), that together have made her both a stalker magnet and a multimillionaire. It’s left to Kay Scarpetta, her complex heroine, a medical examiner, not always likeable, to make sense of what’s left of the victims’ mutilated, headless, electrocuted, etc, bodies.

When Cornwell sold her first book, Postmortem, someone high up in publishing suggested that she might try a more gender-neutral author’s name, given the graphic nature of her subject-matter: “P Cornwell?” She didn’t take kindly to the suggestion and responded in the same blunt and defiant way she did when years later, in 1996, with her reputation established, another publisher suggested that she might boost sales of her books by pretending to be heterosexual.

There had been a public relations crisis: Cornwell, who was divorced, had been outed as a lesbian (she had been having an affair with a female FBI agent and that agent’s husband was convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, forcing the relationship into the open). “Someone very prominent in my profession called me — it was more than a suggestion — and wanted me to show up on the arm of Tom Clancy at some big black-tie event and thought it would be really good for appearances’ sake.”

Clancy, at the time at the peak of his own groundbreaking crime-writing career, had just separated from his wife and was signed to the same publisher as Cornwell. “I am just not going to get into this game of all this fakery bullshit,” she tells me, and presumably also told the very powerful man in publishing. “You know why? Because I’m a female author. If you don’t like me because I’m gay, if you don’t like me because my character is a woman, then we have a problem.”

Besides the glassy blue unblinking stare, the attention to detail, every word she says is shot through with such rock-steady self-belief that I can understand why the very powerful man who wanted his star author not to be gay backed off. “It was just a gimmick, but from the get-go I was given the impression that a lot of the things that I am didn’t measure up. Being female and then being a gay female.”

Talk of Machiavellian publishers is distracting us from the subjects at hand, which, as ever, are death, danger, being worried and all the bad things that could happen to you even if you’re careful. In Depraved Heart, Cornwell’s latest, there is a home invasion: a young millionairess is found dead, half naked, her skull crushed in her own luxury pad.

Cornwell wants you to know that you’re lying to yourself if you don’t think it could happen to you: “Someone who’s minding their own business, walking back into her locked apartment, not knowing that someone’s hiding in the closet.” Has her research spooked her? “I know what goes on out there. It’s not made up — right? And has that affected me? Of course it has. It’s not that I’m paranoid. It’s like someone who’s been in a war and you know that you could get shot at if you’ve been shot at before, so to speak. It’s about having an awareness that’s rooted in experience that causes you in some instances to pay more attention than other people might.” From up here on the 17th floor we can see the whole of central London. Does she feel safe here? Saf-er. There are fewer guns.

After graduating from Davidson College in North Carolina, she married her English professor, who was 17 years her senior. The couple divorced in the late Eighties. She married her girlfriend, Staci Ann Gruber, a Harvard medical school neuroscientist, in 2005. Now that Cornwell and her wife live in — moderately safe — downtown Boston, she relies on an elaborate security system but no longer owns an arsenal of guns. “But if I were living on 40 acres in the middle of nowhere — yes, I would have my own home protection.”

Gun laws in the US need to be tightened to prevent pyschopaths getting their hands on them, she says. “We have a problem in the United States that goes beyond gun laws, in my opinion: that people are committing crimes for attention. We have developed a whole new breed of killer that decides that it’s worth the price of their life to have 15 minutes of fame because you get the instant pay-off — even the White House acknowledges what you just did.”

She’s a great friend of George Bush Sr but didn’t seem to think much of his son when he was in power. One of his mistakes, she believes, was to set a precedent for American heads of states to acknowledge the deeds of mass-murderers. “I said at the time, BIG MISTAKE. Because this feeds the fantasies of the next disturbed person in line who’s thinking of going out in a blaze of bloody glory. And for these people, the pay-off for them is the fantasies in advance.” What about just abolishing guns? “You almost need to take a magic magnet and take it to outer space and airlift them all away because how are you going to get rid of them?”

In the name of verisimilitude, Cornwell, who was formerly a journalist and assistant to a chief medical officer in Virginia, does the novelist’s version of all her own stunts. In the name of staring death and, I think, some unpleasant childhood experiences, in the face she forces herself to witness things that most people, especially her, find frightening.

Often her characters make her do it, she says. Kay will decide she needs to work a crime scene off the coast of Bermuda, and Cornwell will have to learn how to scuba dive. “I mean, everything’s scary, if you’re going to learn to fly a helicopter, you’re going to learn to scuba dive, you’re going to ride a motorcycle — and I’ve had my share of injuries from these things too. If you’re going to do all that, you’ve got to get beyond fear.”

That said, she’s been on strike from flying a helicopter for a year because, “I’m not having a drone fly into my tail rudder and kill me. I’ve seen too many people ordering this crap off the internet and they get out there and, ‘Oh, that will be funny, here’s a helicopter landing, let me go up and film it,’ and it will go — boom!” She owns a drone for research purposes, but “my cop friends keep it for me”.

Her childhood didn’t set her up for the confidence she now exudes. Her father left on Christmas Day when she was five, leaving his three children to be raised by their mother, who suffered from depression. Her mother’s difficulties with raising children put Cornwell off motherhood: “I was worried I would be a bad mother.” Her mother’s depression meant she was often absent and so, “I got molested by somebody when I was five because I was wandering the streets in Miami by myself and it was a substitute patrolman. It turns out he was a paedophile.”

The family moved to a small town in North Carolina. “We were just sort of on our own. So that creates fear. Especially if you’ve already been victimised once. And I didn’t even understand what had happened too much except that it was something bad because a policeman came to the house and then I had to go to a grand jury proceeding and my shorts were being passed around the room. So that begins to plant the seeds of fear, ‘I don’t live in a safe environment’ and maybe even ‘It’s my fault.’

“For me you get to a point where you just have to go beyond — you can’t give in to it any more. I mean, if you grow up with a lot of instability, it follows you, in terms of worrying about things or thinking the bomb’s going to drop any minute or the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. No matter how stable my environment is now, it’s not the way I grew up. So my first reaction to a lot of stuff is: how’s this going to hurt me? How scary is this?”

She used to be very angry with her father, but since his death she seems to have come to like him more and no longer claims that, for instance, he only visited her out of spite after she was involved in a car crash in Los Angeles, driving drunk. She also says that she was outed all those years ago by jealous journalists who also spread rumours that she was bipolar (spending sprees, alcohol binges). She has talked about being bipolar before but now insists that it was all a smear campaign.

“I never, quote, ‘came out’. The real truth is I was outed by other people,” she says. “There were some people who took it upon themselves to try and sabotage me every possible way they could, including outing, and that’s when all the news started about me being bipolar, which I’m not.”

She did drink too much — “self-medicating”. As for the spending sprees: “I was earning $27,000 a year as a full-time employee of the medical examiners, living in a tiny apartment and driving a Honda, then living in the wealthiest neighbourhood in Richmond [Viriginia] and driving a Mercedes. So, did I act like a drunk Elvis? Darn right I did. I did whatever the hell I wanted. The sky was the limit. I could go into Armani. I could go into a car dealership and buy anything I wanted. I could fly on private planes. So did I go to town on all of that? Yes, I sure did.” It wasn’t very wise, perhaps. “But I had a lot of fun.”

How unintuitive publishers can be about readers. It’s precisely Kay’s gender that made her stand out, and Cornwell’s gender that made her successful. “Most of our clients or patients [she means murder victims] are women or they’re children. It’s a form of nurturing and caretaking to have a woman physician taking care of them when they have been violated in the worst way imaginable.

“I was stunned that people had trouble with this. When I was a journalist I was running after serial killers and shoot-outs and I grew up with boys. I played on the boys’ tennis team at school. I’d always been competing with males, so I didn’t understand the reaction. I mean, it really startled me.”

She was irritated when she heard through the grapevine that Tom Cruise had said how much he’d have loved to play Kay Scarpetta if only the fictional medical officer had been a man. “I remember thinking at the time: ‘Well, that’s disappointing. So no one wants to play her if she’s not a man.’ ”

Given that she’s sold more than 100 million books, it’s mysterious why it’s taken so many years to get Scarpetta on to the big screen. Angelina Jolie is the latest actress to be almost absolutely definitely about to play her. At last the powerful men in film may be about to learn the lesson that their colleagues in publishing did almost twenty years ago.      

Robert Stigwood

Shrewd, ambitious and ruthless, Robert Stigwood built an empire encompassing music, theatre and film to become one of the most successful showbusiness entrepreneurs of all time.

He started out as a svengali manager of pop acts in the Brian Epstein mould and made stars of the Bee Gees, Cream and Eric Clapton. Turning theatrical impresario, he brought Hair! and Oh! Calcutta! to the London stage and produced the money-spinning shows Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. In the film world, he masterminded two of the biggest movie blockbusters in cinema history, Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

In doing so, he amassed a fortune that the Sunday Times Rich List put at £200 million. He was cited as the first pop manager to exert control over almost every facet of the business affairs of his artists, adding the roles of agent, publisher, producer, concert promoter and record company boss to the more usual duties of manager. When he moved into theatre and film he was similarly innovative. Before allowing the public to see the first stage performances of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, he promoted the shows through a succession of hit singles, and he packed the films Saturday Night Fever and Grease with hit songs to create soundtrack albums that topped the charts.<

br>
Simon Napier-Bell, one of the most successful managers in British pop whose clients included Marc Bolan, George Michael and Boney M, called him “the single most important pop impresario in the world” who created “the blueprint of success for all future pop entrepreneurs”.

The blond-haired Australian’s aggressive tactics were belied by his courtly manner, disarming dry wit and pale blue eyes. When he tried to steal the Small Faces from their thuggish American manager Don Arden, whose gangster tactics were notorious, he received a visit at his fourth-floor office in Cavendish Square. With a quartet of hired heavies looking on menacingly, Arden lifted Stigwood from his chair, dragged him to the balcony and threatened to throw him into the street below. “He went rigid with shock and I thought he might have a heart attack,” Arden later wrote. “I dragged him back into the room and warned him never to interfere with my groups again.”

Stigwood was also rebuffed in his attempt to get his hands on the Beatles. When he went into partnership with Brian Epstein in 1967, the group told their manager that they would not tolerate Stigwood. “We will record God Save the Queen for every single record we make from now on and we’ll sing it out of tune,” Paul McCartney told Epstein. After Epstein’s death, the Beatles again rejected his advances and instead appointed the New York businessman Allen Klein, the man whom McCartney to this day holds responsible for the Beatles’ break-up.

Stigwood never married. In his 1988 book, Starmakers & Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management, the author Johnny Rogan identified him as part of a “homosexual network” that dominated British pop management in its early years and which also included Epstein, Napier-Bell, Larry Parnes and Kit Lambert. Rogan attributed the phenomenon to the fact that pop music was then one of the few arenas in which gay people did not have to live a lie.

Robert Colin Stigwood was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1934. His parents — an electrical engineer and a nurse who built a chain of private hospitals — divorced when he was 15. Educated at Sacred Heart College, he considered the priesthood but lost his faith aged 20. He left Australia in 1955 and worked his way to Britain, hitchhiking lifts on land and from oil tankers at sea. He arrived in Britain with dysentery and just a few pounds in his pocket. Several jobs later, he and a friend set up a small theatrical agency on London’s Charing Cross Road.

Among Stigwood’s first clients was a young actor called John Leyton, whom he decided to turn into a pop singer. When none of the record companies showed any interest, Stigwood booked Leyton into a studio to record Johnny Remember Me. He then secured his protégé a role in the television soap opera Harper’s West One and persuaded its director to feature Leyton singing the song. On the back of that exposure, Johnny Remember Me went to No 1 in 1961.The record was co-produced by Stigwood and Joe Meek, who gave him the revolutionary idea of making records independently and then leasing them to a major label. Stigwood duly signed a distribution deal with Joseph Lockwood, managing director of EMI. He enjoyed more success when Mike Sarne’s Come Outside topped the charts in 1962.

Stigwood then spent lavishly, but overreached himself when his latest pop hopeful, Simon Scott, became an expensive failure. Stigwood sent out tacky plaster busts of the singer, but the gimmick backfired, turning Scott into a laughing stock. He tried to recoup his losses by promoting a 1965 concert tour by Chuck Berry. It flopped. Stigwood had to call in the receivers halfway through the tour with debts of £40,000 (about £725,000 at today’s prices).

His climb back to the top began when he paid £500 to become the Who’s exclusive booking agent and then lured the group away from Decca and on to his Reaction label, for whom they recorded the hit single Substitute.

He was paid £100 a week to represent Motown in the UK and put in charge of promoting a British tour for a young singer called Stevie Wonder. “I arranged a press conference for him, but I could only get five journalists to turn up,” Stigwood recalled. “I filled the room with my staff. I thought, ‘Well, he’s blind so he won’t know if they’re journalists, but at least he’ll hear the buzz of the crowd’.”

Next, he created the “super group” Cream. His Australian accent long banished, Stigwood appeared to the guitarist Eric Clapton to be a quintessential English gentleman, “telling us how wonderful our lives were going to be”. Ginger Baker, Cream’s drummer, was not convinced and nicknamed him “Stigboot”. However, it was the start of a prosperous association until Clapton descended into heroin addiction. He then set his sights on the Beatles and, in early 1967, he persuaded their manager, Brian Epstein, to merge their two businesses. For Stigwood, it was the deal of a lifetime, but it went sour when Epstein died and the Beatles refused to have anything to do with him.

He went solo again and set about turning the Bee Gees into one of the biggest-selling groups in pop history after first persuading the Home Office not to deport the brothers back to Australia. By 1968, he had expanded into theatre production.

After seeing Hair! on Broadway, he brought the show to London, where it ran for more than five years. Shortly after Hair! opened, two well-spoken, longhaired young men knocked on the door of his office in the course of hawking around a musical that was called Jesus Christ Superstar. A rather dazed Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice left soon afterwards, having given away all rights to stage and film productions and 51 per cent of their production company in return for £30,000.

Several years later, Stigwood was inspired to make a film after reading a magazine article about a Brooklyn dancer named Vincent. He commissioning the Bee Gees to write the music, and gave the lead role to the unknown John Travolta, whom he had spotted auditioning for the Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The film Saturday Night Fever grossed $100 million, of which Stigwood’s cut was 45 per cent. The Bee Gees-led soundtrack sold 30 million copies and generated another $100 million. It was topped by his next film, Grease, which starred Travolta alongside Olivia Newton-John, and became the highest-grossing musical of all time. The soundtrack album generated five backto-back No 1 singles.

At the point when he was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood and seemingly had the Midas touch, Stigwood presided over a film disaster of epic proportions. With songs by the Beatles and a cast headed by the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band looked a sure-fire hit. The $18 million extravaganza was booed at a New York preview, and the soundtrack album bombed. Filming had been fractious and the Bee Gees had tried to extricate themselves from the production. Stigwood held them to their contract. It damaged his relationship with the Gibb brothers and, in 1980, the group sued him for £30 million, claiming “unfair enrichment”. Instead, an audit revealed that Stigwood had, in fact, overpaid them. The Bee Gees were forced to hand back a hefty cheque, but the falling out so upset Stigwood that he went into virtual retirement and spent the next decade running his affairs as a tax exile from his 126ft luxury yacht in Caribbean.

“Missing his friends”, he returned to Britain in 1991, buying Barton Manor, which had once been part of Queen Victoria’s Osborne House estate, on the Isle of Wight. Visitors would be greeted by an attractive blonde in a white blouse and black shirt whom he introduced as his butler, explaining her as “my blow for women’s liberation”.

He continued to make money from projects such as the stage revival of Grease and the film adaptation of Evita. “I act from instinct,” he said. “It’s a lot about luck and timing. I really do things I enjoy, but I do take the commercial approach. I’m not a believer in subsidised art.”      

Marc Andreessen

On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world’s most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road’s newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm’s deal team and its seven general partners—the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong.

Marc Andreessen, the firm’s co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can’t help but think of words like “jumbo” and “Grade A.” Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes’s Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He’s an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon erase such primitive behaviors as paying cash (Bitcoin), eating cooked food (Soylent), and enduring a world unimproved by virtual reality (Oculus VR). He believes that Silicon Valley is mission control for mankind, which is therefore on a steep trajectory toward perfection. And when he so argues, fire-hosing you with syllogisms and data points and pre-refuting every potential rebuttal, he’s very persuasive.

Doshi, lean and quizzical in a maroon T-shirt and jeans, began his pitch by declaring, “Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” Far better to apply Mixpanel’s analytics, which enable mobile-based companies to know exactly who their customers are and how they use their apps. Doshi rapidly escalated to rhetoric—“We want to do data science for every single market in the world”—that would sound bumptious anywhere but on Sand Hill Road, where the young guy in jeans is obligated to astound the middle-aged guys in cashmere V-necks. “Mediocre V.C.s want to see that your company has traction,” Doshi told me. “The top V.C.s want you to show them you can invent the future.”

If you have a crackerjack idea, one of your stops on Sand Hill Road will be Andreessen Horowitz, often referred to by its alphanumeric URL, a16z. (There are sixteen letters between the “a” in Andreessen and the “z” in Horowitz.) Since the firm was launched, six years ago, it has vaulted into the top echelon of venture concerns. Competing V.C.s, disturbed by its speed and its power and the lavish prices it paid for deals, gave it another nickname: AHo. Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a “warm intro” from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollars—a “unicorn,” in the local parlance. With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.’s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x. There are eight hundred and three V.C. firms in the U.S., and last year they spent forty-eight billion dollars chasing that dream.

Doshi had run the gantlet before. In 2012, he tracked down Andreessen and his equally if less splendidly bald co-founder, Ben Horowitz, at a Ritz-Carlton near Tucson. Then he pitched them in the lobby (having made sure that his parents’ Honda, which contained his father, was well out of sight). Doshi mentioned that he’d become so dissatisfied with the incumbent database software that he’d built his own. Andreessen later told me that this “was like a cub reporter saying, ‘I need to write the Great American Novel before I can really file this story.’ ” A16z gave Doshi ten million dollars, and he gave it twenty-five per cent of his company.

Now he was back for more. He zipped through his slides: hundred-per-cent growth rate; head count doubling every six to nine months; and he still had all the money he’d raised last time. As Andreessen drank an iced tea in two gulps and began to roam the room, Doshi called up a slide that showed his competitors—Localytics, Amplitude, Google Analytics—grouped into quadrants. Then he explained how he’d crush each quadrant. “I want to buy a machine-learning team, I want to buy cutting-edge server hardware,” he said. Indicating his all-but-obliterated competitors, he added, “I want to buy stuff no one here can afford.” He jammed his hands in his pockets: questions?

While entrepreneurs attack with historiography—“The great-man view of history is correct, and I am that great man!”—V.C.s defend with doubletalk. “You’re definitely going to get funded!” means “But not by us.” “Who else is in?” means “Besides not us.” And “I’m not sure I would ever use your product myself” means “So long!” But the best V.C.s test the entrepreneur’s mettle as well as their own assumptions. Andreessen gripped the back of his chair. “So one way to describe what you’re doing is a network effect,” he said. “More data gives you more customers, which allows you to build more services, which gives you more data, which allows you to get more customers, and you just turn the crank.” Doshi thought this over and said, “Sure!” Andreessen grinned: he’s a systems thinker, and he’d grasped how Mixpanel fit into the system. After the pitch, he told me that Mixpanel is “a picks-and-shovels business right in the middle of the gold rush."

When a startup is just an idea and a few employees, it looks for seed-round funding. When it has a product that early adopters like—or when it’s run through its seed-round money—it tries to raise an A round. Once the product catches on, it’s time for a B round, and on the rounds go. Most V.C.s contemplating an investment in one of these early rounds consider the same factors. “The bottom seventy per cent of V.C.s just go down a checklist,” Jordan Cooper, a New York entrepreneur and V.C., said. “Monthly recurring revenue? Founder with experience? Good sales pipeline? X per cent of month-over-month growth?” V.C.s also pattern-match. If the kids are into Snapchat, fund things like it: Yik Yak, Streetchat, ooVoo. Or, at a slightly deeper level, if two dropouts from Stanford’s computer-science Ph.D. program created Google, fund more Stanford C.S.P. dropouts, because they blend superior capacity with monetizable dissatisfaction.

Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations don’t follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Doug Leone, one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital, by consensus Silicon Valley’s top firm, said, “The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty years—the PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhone—nobody had theses around those. So what’s useful to us is having Dumbo ears.”* A great V.C. keeps his ears pricked for a disturbing story with the elements of a fairy tale. This tale begins in another age (which happens to be the future), and features a lowborn hero who knows a secret from his hardscrabble experience. The hero encounters royalty (the V.C.s) who test him, and he harnesses magic (technology) to prevail. The tale ends in heaping treasure chests for all, borne home on the unicorn’s back.

At pitch meetings, Andreessen is relatively measured: he reserves his passion for the deal review afterward, when the firm decides whether to invest. That’s where he asks questions that oblige his partners to envision a new world. For the ride-sharing service Lyft: “Don’t think about how big the taxi market is. What if people no longer owned cars?” For OfferUp: “What if all this selling online—eBay and Craigslist—goes to mobile? How big could it be?” Ben Horowitz, who sits next to his co-founder at the head of the table, is an astute manager who quotes the rap lyrics of his friends Nas and Kanye West to inspire fearless thinking—but he doesn’t try to manage Andreessen. “If you say to Marc, ‘Don’t bite somebody’s fucking head off!,’ that would be wrong,” Horowitz said. “Because a lot of his value, when you’re making giant decisions for huge amounts of money, is saying, ‘Why aren’t you fucking considering this and this and this?’ ”

A16z was designed to be a full-throated argument about the future, a design predicated on its founders’ comfort with conflict. In 1996, when Horowitz was a Netscape product manager, he wrote a note to Andreessen, accusing him of prematurely revealing the company’s new strategy to a reporter. Andreessen wrote back to say that it would be Horowitz’s fault if the company failed: “Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you.” Ordinarily, relationship over. “When he feels disrespected, Marc can cut you out of his life like a cancer,” one of Andreessen’s close friends said. “But Ben and Marc fight like cats and dogs, then forget about it.” Two years later, when Netscape was floundering and forty per cent of its employees left, Horowitz announced that he was staying no matter what. Andreessen had never trusted anyone before, but he began to consider it. Their teamwork at a16z is complementary: Horowitz is the people-person C.E.O., and Andreessen is the farsighted theorist, the chairman. Yet Horowitz noted that “Marc is much more sensitive than I am, actually. He’ll get upset about my body language—‘God damn it, Ben, you look like you’re going to throw up when I’m talking about this!’ ”

Although Andreessen has been a board member of Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, he doesn’t take many board seats in a16z’s portfolio companies, preferring to train his eyes on the horizon. Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibson’s observation “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still can’t buy them at Target. To smooth out such lumps in distribution, Andreessen disseminates his views via every available podcast and panel discussion and CNN interview slot: he’s a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will come—a glorious revenge. He told me, “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group you’re a part of.” The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.

Mixpanel was emblematic of Silicon Valley’s outsized worship of unicorns. At the company’s deal review, Peter Levine, who sits on Doshi’s board, reported that the entrepreneur had e-mailed to say that he’d love for his company to be valued at a billion dollars—an assessment that would set the price for the portion of it that a16z might now buy. However, Doshi would sell the firm ten per cent of his company for eighty million, suggesting a valuation of eight hundred million dollars. Andreessen said, “The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet. And he’s profitable!”

Horowitz exclaimed, “How old is he, twenty-four? God damn it, let’s give him all our money!” A16z provided Doshi all his B-round funding—sixty-five million dollars—for a further 7.5 per cent of the company, which was thus valued at eight hundred and sixty-five million dollars. Doshi was a little sorry that Mixpanel wasn’t valued at a billion dollars, but he told me that he could wait: his business was growing so fast, and everyone was raising money so frequently in the current boom, that “in six or twelve months we’ll be a unicorn.”

Venture firms rarely do an entire follow-on round themselves, for fear of losing sight of a company’s true market value; as Andreessen put it, “You can be thinking your shit smells like ice cream.” None of the half-dozen other firms that Doshi pitched last fall valued his company as highly as a16z did. But Andreessen applied a maxim from his friend and intellectual sparring partner Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in LinkedIn and Yelp. When a reputable venture firm leads two consecutive rounds of investment in a company, Andreessen told me, Thiel believes that that is “a screaming buy signal, and the bigger the markup on the last round the more undervalued the company is.” Thiel’s point, which takes a moment to digest, is that, when a company grows extremely rapidly, even its bullish V.C.s, having recently set a relatively low value on the previous round, will be slightly stuck in the past. The faster the growth, the farther behind they’ll be. Andreessen grinned, appreciating the paradox: the more they paid for Mixpanel—according to Thiel, anyway—the better a deal they’d be getting.

Most businesses don’t work like this. At least, not yet.

Silicon Valley, the fifteen-hundred- square-mile shelf an hour south of San Francisco, was called the Santa Clara Valley until the rise of the microprocessor, in the nineteen-seventies. It remains contested ground. Armies of startups attack every incumbent, with early employees—and sometimes even their lawyers and landlords—taking deferred compensation, in the hope that their options and warrants will pay off down the line. Yet workers’ loyalty is not to a company or even to an idea but to the iterative promise of the region. “Uber is built on the efforts of thousands of people in the Valley,” the investor Naval Ravikant said. “On the back of the iPhone and Android and G.P.S. and battery technology and online credit-card payments, all stacked on themselves.”

V.C.s give the Valley its continuity—and its ammunition. They are the arms merchants who can turn your crazy idea and your expendable youth into a team of coders with Thunderbolt monitors. Apple and Microsoft got started with venture money; so did Starbucks, the Home Depot, Whole Foods Market, and JetBlue. V.C.s made their key introductions and stole from every page of Sun Tzu to help them penetrate markets. And yet V.C.s maintain a zone of embarrassed privacy around their activities. They tell strangers they’re investors, or work in technology, because, in a Valley that valorizes the entrepreneur, they don’t want to be seen as just the money. “I say I’m in the software industry,” one of the Valley’s best-known V.C.s told me. “I’m ashamed of the truth.”

At a hundred and eleven dollars a square foot, Sand Hill Road is America’s most expensive office-rental market—an oak-and-eucalyptus-lined prospect stippled with bland, two-story ski chalets constrained by an ethos of nonconspicuous consumption (except for the Teslas in the parking lot). It’s a community of paranoid optimists. The top firms co-operate and compete by turns, suspicious of any company whose previous round wasn’t led by another top-five firm even as they’re jealous of that firm for leading it. They call this Schadenfreude-riddled relationship “co-opitition.” Firms trumpet their boldness, yet they often follow one another, lemming-like, pursuing the latest innovation—pen-based computers, biotech, interactive television, superconductors, clean tech—off a cliff.

Venture capital became a profession here when an investor named Arthur Rock bankrolled Intel, in 1968. Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore coined the phrase “vulture capital,” because V.C.s could pick you clean. Semiretired millionaires who routinely arrived late for pitch meetings, they’d take half your company and replace you with a C.E.O. of their choosing—if you were lucky. But V.C.s can also anoint you. The imprimatur of a top firm’s investment is so powerful that entrepreneurs routinely accept a twenty-five per cent lower valuation to get it. Patrick Collison, a co-founder of the online-payment company Stripe, says that landing Sequoia, Peter Thiel, and a16z as seed investors “was a signal that was not lost on the banks we wanted to work with.” Laughing, he noted that the valuation in the next round of funding—“for a pre-launch company from very untested entrepreneurs who had very few customers”—was a hundred million dollars. Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of the office-messaging app Slack, told me, “It’s hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you’re with matters—the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It’s like where you went to college.”

A venture firm musters its ammunition—say, a fund of a hundred and fifty million dollars—by recruiting investors such as university endowments and pension funds to become “limited partners,” or L.P.s, in the fund. The firm invests the money for three or four years, then harvests the returns for the remainder of the fund’s ten-year term. In theory, V.C.s, like entrepreneurs, are motivated by delayed gratification. The standard fee is “two and twenty”: two per cent of the fund each year, and twenty per cent of the ultimate profits. (The top firms, including a16z, charge thirty per cent.) L.P.s expect returns equal to at least those they’d get in the stock market, plus an additional five per cent for the illiquidity of the investment. For top firms, the dream is 5x to 10x.

At the moment, venture funding accounts for less than 0.3 per cent of the U.S.’s G.D.P. “Venture is often called a rounding error in the economy,” Herbert Allen III, the head of the investment bank Allen & Company, said. “But the bang for the buck is huge. And venture is a major source of the optimism that underlies the American myth.” Venture speeds the cycle of American impatience: what exists is bad and what replaces it is good—until the new thing itself must be supplanted.

Corporate culture, civic responsibility, becoming a pillar of society—these are not venture’s concerns. Andy Weissman, a partner at New York’s Union Square Ventures, noted that venture in the Valley is a perfect embodiment of the capitalist dynamic that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Weissman said, “Silicon Valley V.C.s are all techno-optimists. They have the arrogant belief that you can take a geography and remove all obstructions and have nothing but a free flow of capital and ideas, and that it’s good, it’s very good, to creatively destroy everything that has gone before.” Some Silicon Valley V.C.s believe that these values would have greater sway if their community left America behind: Andreessen’s nerd nation with a charter and a geographic locale. Peter Thiel favors “seasteading,” establishing floating cities in the middle of the ocean. Balaji Srinivasan, until recently a general partner at a16z and now the chairman of one of its Bitcoin companies, has called for the “ultimate exit.” Arguing that the United States is as fossilized as Microsoft, and that the Valley has become stronger than Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., combined, Srinivasan believes that its denizens should “build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.”

The game in Silicon Valley, while it remains part of California, is not ferocious intelligence or a contrarian investment thesis: everyone has that. It’s not even wealth: anyone can become a billionaire just by rooming with Mark Zuckerberg. It’s prescience. And then it’s removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision: incumbents, regulations, folkways, people. Can you not just see the future but summon it?

Marc Andreessen mentions Thomas Edison often, his family never. When he was growing up, outside the no-stoplight town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin, his father, Lowell, was a sales manager for a seed company called Pioneer Hi-Bred International, and his mother, Pat, worked in customer service at Lands’ End—but I didn’t get that information from him. A friend who knows Andreessen well told me, “We’ve never had a conversation about his parents or his brother—all he said was ‘They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them all that much, either.’ ”

The few details Andreessen let slip to me suggested a climate of antiquity, superstition, frustration, and penury. “The natural state of human beings is to be subsistence farmers, and that was my expectation,” he said, adding that his world was “Scandinavian, hard-core, very self-denying people who go through life never expecting to be happy.” The family telephone was a party line, and the bathroom at his relatives’ farm was an outhouse. Everyone believed in dowsing and the weather reports in the Farmers’ Almanac. One winter, with money tight, his father decided to stop paying for gas heat, “and we spent a great deal of time chopping fucking wood.” The local movie theatre, one town over, was an unheated room that doubled as a fertilizer-storage depot; Andreessen wore a puffy Pioneer Hi-Bred coat to watch “Star Wars” while sitting on the makings of a huge bomb. He had to drive an hour to find a Waldenbooks, in La Crosse; it was all cookbooks and cat calendars. So he later saw Amazon as a heroic disseminator of knowledge and progress. “Screw the independent bookstores,” he told me. “There weren’t any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand.”

Andreessen’s vision of the future, and of his escape route, came from television. He told me, “kitt, the car in ‘Knight Rider,’ was a computer that could analyze a poison-gas attack. The car was magic—but now you can actually do all those things. A new car isn’t kitt, but it does have all the maps and all the music in the world, and it talks to you. Even the transporter beam in ‘Star Trek’ basically makes sense if you understand quantum entanglement. People are composed of quantum elements, so there is a path!”

Something of the transporter beam clings to Andreessen, a sense that he just rematerialized from a city on the edge of forever. He’s not great at the basics of daily life: directions confound him, because roadways aren’t logical, and he’s so absent-minded about sunglasses that he keeps a “reload station” with nine pairs on his hall table. Perhaps Edison haunts his conversation because Andreessen is a fellow-tinkerer, except that his gadgets are systems and platforms, and his workshop is his own mind. He regularly reprograms his appearance and deportment—his user interface—to suit his present role, and friends refer to chapters in his life as versions of an operating system: “Marc 1.0,” “Marc 2.0,” and so on. A charismatic introvert, Andreessen draws people in but doesn’t really want them around. Though he has a crisp sense of humor, it’s rarely deployed at his own expense. He hates being complimented, looked at, or embraced, and has toyed with the idea of wearing a T-shirt that says “No hugging, no touching.” He doesn’t grasp the protocols of social chitchat, and prefers getting a memo to which he can e-mail a response, typing at a hundred and forty words a minute. He didn’t attend Netscape’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, because it combined two things from which he recoils: parties and reminiscing.

Yet he’s also energetic and decisive, which makes him a valued counsellor. In 2006, Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars, and Accel Partners, Facebook’s lead investor, urged Mark Zuckerberg to accept. Andreessen said, “Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo! offer. The psychological pressure they put on this twenty-two-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, ‘Don’t sell, don’t sell, don’t sell!’ ” Zuckerberg told me, “Marc has this really deep belief that when companies are executing well on their vision they can have a much bigger effect on the world than people think, not just as a business but as a steward of humanity—if they have the time to execute.” He didn’t sell; Facebook is now worth two hundred and eighteen billion dollars.

Andreessen’s range of reference extends from Ibn Khaldun to “South Park,” yet he approaches new topics as if starved, eating through men’s fashion or whiskey-making or congressional politics until it has yielded every micronutrient. In a tweetstorm about the question of net neutrality, he observed that anyone who took a position should be versed in the “history, technology, and economics of backbones, interconnection agreement, peering, CDNs, caching, colocation, current and future telco and cable business models including capex and opex models, rate caps, cost of capital, return on investment,” as well as a dozen other equally abstruse matters. He coyly noted that no one, himself included, understood them all—then stated his position. Andreessen’s learning fuses the idiosyncrasy of the autodidact with the thoroughness of what programmers call depth-first search. “I could never tolerate not knowing why,” he said. “You have to work your way back to figure out the politics, the motivations. I always stop when I get to evolutionary psychology, and why we have tribes—oh, O.K., we’re primates cursed with emotions and the ability to do logical thinking.” He keeps rediscovering that we’re australopithecines, and keeps hoping to transform us into Homo habilis: man the tool user, able man.

To this end, he addresses any topic, such as Google’s purchase of the thermostat maker Nest, by launching a dialectics—“1) Either Nest is the most amazing company ever, or 2) Larry Page acqui-hired Tony Fadell for $3.2 billion and got a thermostat business on the side”—whose synthesis is often that the thesis and the antithesis were simplistic (“Or, maybe Google has a larger plan for automating the home”) or irrelevant (“Whatever, whatever, we don’t own it, so who cares?”). Often, he discourses at such lucid length that his cheeks redden and he must pause for breath. If you seize the interval to demonstrate a basic grasp of his argument, he’ll say “Ex-zact-ly,” with a pleased smile, and upload another tranche. What saves him from pompous know-it-all-dom, most of the time, is this eagerness to communicate.

He turns to theory the way a drinker turns to the minibar. But Horowitz told me that every once in a while Andreessen will “get all Wisconsin on you, sticking up for his people. When we looked at an Internet pawnshop, people here said, ‘It’s immoral,’ and Marc went bananas. He said, ‘If you’ve got no fucking money, and you need to pawn your watch to pay for your kids to eat—you think that’s morally fucking wrong because it offends your sensibilities, you rich motherfuckers?’ He knew that guy who was pawning his watch because he’d missed the harvest, or whatever. Or we saw an Uber-for-private-jets thing, or some wine thing that came through, and he just got incensed: ‘We didn’t start the firm for rich people to buy hundred-dollar bottles of wine or to fly around on fucking private jets!’ He reminds me of Kanye, that level of emotional intensity—his childhood was so intensely bad he just won’t go there.”

One afternoon, Alexis Ringwald, the C.E.O. of LearnUp, a job-training startup that has worked with Staples and Old Navy, stood in a16z’s conference room, all poise and smile. “I like to launch movements to tackle huge problems,” she said, launching into her presentation.

“Start at the beginning, where you grew up,” Ben Horowitz said. A16z had made a small seed investment in Ringwald’s company, but most of the general partners, who were about to tell her whether she was ready for an A round, didn’t know much about her. Horowitz also routinely forces a founder to abandon her script and regroup. It’s a stress test intended to elicit biography, resilience, and the real story.

Ringwald, who is thirty-one, blinked, then shifted smoothly to an engaging account of her early years, her work interviewing people on the unemployment line, and how she’d eventually realized that the country’s biggest gulf is between those who have the basic skills to be employable—showing up on time, dressing neatly—and those who don’t. “So it’s a modern ‘My Fair Lady’ sort of thing?” Horowitz asked, ingenuously. Ringwald crisply noted that her process triples an applicant’s chance of getting a job, and that eighty-two per cent of LearnUp’s trainees outperform their fellow-workers. Horowitz and Andreessen nodded: she could handle the pressure. Afterward, Horowitz told me, “My big conclusion was she’s a legit Pied Piper, with charisma and will and fury.”

Pitch meetings are minefields. If a V.C. asks you, “When you get to a hundred engineers, are you worried about the company culture or excited?,” the correct answer is “A hundred? I want a thousand!” Reid Hoffman, a V.C. at Greylock Partners who co-founded LinkedIn, told me, “I look to see if someone has a marine strategy, for taking the beach; an army strategy, for taking the country; and a police strategy, for governing the country afterward.”

A16z wants to learn if the founder has a secret—a novel insight, drawn from personal experience, about how the world could be better arranged. If that new arrangement is 10x better, consumers might be won over. Balaji Srinivasan contributed the concept of the “idea maze”: you want the entrepreneur to have spent years thinking her idea into—and out of—every conceivable dead end.

“Entrepreneurs want to raise money from us,” Andreessen told me, “so the natural thing when we say ‘What if you did this?’ is to tell us what we want to hear. But we don’t want to hear what we want to hear. It’s a delight when they look at you with contempt—You idiot—and then walk you through the idea maze and explain why your idea won’t work.” Such tests help a16z determine whether the founder is a mercenary who wants to sell the company within four years, which will cap a16z’s return at 5x, or a missionary, determined to change the world. “At the same time,” Andreessen said, “we’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition. Companies can only have a big impact on the world if they get big.”

Ringwald, back into her planned remarks, promised bigness: “LearnUp will transform employment in America. We can unleash human potential and move the needle on the G.D.P.” Andreessen said, “Question: This is a known problem. Why do companies not just do this themselves, once they see that it works?” Ringwald replied, “We’ll keep on differentiating by moving fast and collecting more data on what companies need now.”

Then a general partner named Chris Dixon asked, “Is it a marketplace or an enterprise company?” Marketplace companies sell to consumers; enterprise companies sell to other businesses. Clearly perplexed by the distinction, Ringwald said that she was signing up workers as well as companies. Everyone became a shade more remote.

Afterward, Andreessen told his colleagues, “She didn’t really answer Chris’s question. If it’s marketplace, it’s defensible; if it’s enterprise, she can be undercut.” If Ringwald’s customers were the workers, who would keep using LearnUp as they moved from job to job, she could create a network effect. If her customers were actually the companies, they could start doing the training themselves—or another startup could. A16z views marketplace and enterprise companies very differently. The firm invests early with enterprise, but waits with consumer companies, because they tend to take off—suddenly, everyone wants to be on Instagram—or fail fast. It’s a risk-averse way to embrace risk. In 2013, a16z passed on the A round of Oculus VR (waiting to see if it could resolve the nausea issue that has plagued virtual-reality systems) and came in on the B, six months later. It got the same ten per cent of the company it could have had in the A—but it paid thirty million dollars instead of six million. The internal rationale for this expensive “de-risking” is “We paid up for certainty.”

The partners began to discuss how LearnUp might be valued. Valuation, particularly in a company’s early rounds, often derives less from spreadsheets than from market forces—what are other firms offering?—and the “What if”s of mental modelling. Does the company’s traction, leadership team, and “total addressable market” call to mind a Pinterest, or does it feel more like a ShoeDazzle? One partner suggested that LearnUp was a “ten on thirty”—ten million dollars should buy a third of the company, which would then be valued at forty million. “It’s more like ten on fifteen or twenty,” Horowitz said, cutting the company’s value in half. “Or six on twelve,” Andreessen said, whittling it further. Soon after the meeting, Ringwald turned LearnUp into an enterprise company.

Most venture firms operate as a guild; each partner works with his own companies, and a small shared staff helps with business development and recruiting. A16z introduced a new model: the venture company. Its general partners make about three hundred thousand dollars a year, far less than the industry standard of at least a million dollars, and the savings pays for sixty-five specialists in executive talent, tech talent, market development, corporate development, and marketing. A16z maintains a network of twenty thousand contacts and brings two thousand established companies a year to its executive briefing center to meet its startups (which has produced a pipeline of deals worth three billion dollars). Andreessen told me, “We give our founders the networking superpower, hyper-accelerating someone into a fully functional C.E.O. in five years.”

The firm’s fourteen-person deal team also enables it to rapidly assess any new technology, making a16z a kind of Iron Man suit for Andreessen as he pursues his flights of fancy. Jim Breyer, who led Facebook’s first venture round at Accel Partners, told me, “I spend most of my time trying to connect the dots for what the future will look like in five to seven years, but I don’t believe I scale as well as Marc and Ben and their team. They’ve moved into next-gen agricultural products and wearables and drone software, where a lot of us don’t have expertise or networks.”

Andreessen and Horowitz launched the firm in 2009, when venture investment was frozen by the recession. Their strategy was shaped by their friend Andy Rachleff, a former V.C. He told them that he’d run the numbers and that fifteen technology companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in annual revenue—and they account for ninety-eight per cent of the market capitalization of companies that go public. So a16z had to get those fifteen companies to pitch them. “Deal flow is everything, ” Andreessen told me. “If you’re in a second-tier firm, you never get a chance at that great company.” A leading investment banker who has taken numerous software companies public told me, “I put ninety per cent of my effort into seeking out deals from the top eight venture firms, ten per cent into the next twelve, and zero per cent into all the rest.”

The dirty secret of the trade is that the bottom three-quarters of venture firms didn’t beat the Nasdaq for the past five years. In a stinging 2012 report, the L.P. Diane Mulcahy calculated, “Since 1997, less cash has been returned to V.C. investors than they have invested.” The truth is that most V.C.s subsist entirely on fees, which they compound by raising a new fund every three years. Returns are kept hidden by nondisclosure agreements, and so V.C.s routinely overstate them, both to encourage investment and to attract entrepreneurs. “You can’t find a venture fund anywhere that’s not in the top quartile,” one L.P. said sardonically. V.C.s also logo shop, buying into late rounds of hot companies at high prices so they can list them on their portfolio page.

When a16z began, it didn’t have even an ersatz track record to promote. So Andreessen and Horowitz consulted on tactics with their friend Michael Ovitz, who co-founded the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency, in 1974. Ovitz told me that he’d advised them to distinguish themselves by treating the entrepreneur as a client: “Take the long view of your platform, rather than a transactional one. Call everyone a partner, offer services the others don’t, and help people who aren’t your clients. Disrupt to differentiate by becoming a dream-execution machine.”

Believing that founders make the best C.E.O.s—look at Intel, Apple, Oracle, Google, Facebook—Andreessen and Horowitz recruited only general partners who’d been founders or run companies. Then they began constructing the illusion of authority, taking offices on Sand Hill Road and filling them with paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Sol LeWitt—another page from the book of Ovitz, who commissioned a Roy Lichtenstein painting for C.A.A.’s lobby that was so large the firm had to leave it behind when it moved. They were studiously punctual (partners are fined ten dollars for each minute they’re late to a pitch), used glassware rather than plastic, and said no quickly and explained why (unless the reason was doubts about the entrepreneur) in a handwritten note. And, while most V.C.s were publicity averse—Sequoia’s slogan was “The entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs”—a16z banged the drum to draw startups. The tech publicist Margit Wennmachers built an eight-person marketing department and helped to orchestrate stories in Forbes and Fortune.

Andreessen and Horowitz believed that it would take them years to get great deal flow. So instead of fighting for A-round financings—the most competitive round, because it’s when you can buy the largest chunk of an up-and-coming company—they planned to make seed investments in eighty startups. They wouldn’t take the customary board seats (otherwise, they’d each be sitting on forty boards), but they’d help all eighty companies and then lead the A round for the twelve best.

The strategy had flaws. Entrepreneurs want V.C.s on their boards, and so do L.P.s: that’s how you really learn a company. The firm would be sending a huge negative signal about companies it didn’t reinvest in—hardly an entrepreneur-friendly stance. Furthermore, by making so many investments, a16z would create significant opportunity costs. In its first year, it put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a company called Burbn, which soon pivoted and became Instagram—but a16z couldn’t increase its share, because it had also taken a position in a short-lived photo app called PicPlz. Though the firm made 312x when Facebook bought Instagram, the huge multiple amounted to only seventy-eight million dollars. Elizabeth Obershaw, a managing director at Horsley Bridge, a prominent L.P. that invested in a16z after some debate, told me, “Our list of cons was that we didn’t think their original model would work at all. The pros were Marc and Ben—we decided they were learners and adapters and would realize the model wasn’t workable fast enough to fix it—and an industry that was ripe for reinvention.”

They learned fast. After a16z raised a three-hundred-million-dollar fund and opened shop, in July, 2009, it did a lot of seed rounds, but it also spent fifty million dollars to buy three per cent of Skype. Two years later, Microsoft bought Skype, and the investment returned 4x. Andreessen believed that everyone had underestimated the size of the Internet market, so in 2010, after raising a much bigger second fund, the firm spent a hundred and thirty million dollars to acquire shares of Facebook and Twitter at unprecedented valuations. Other V.C.s sniped that a16z was trying to buy its way in: Skype was an established company, not a startup, and the Facebook and Twitter deals were mere logo shopping. But, as Ron Conway, Silicon Valley’s leading angel investor, noted, “In twenty-four months, Andreessen Horowitz was the talk of the town.” The firm won a hundred-million-dollar A round for the coding company GitHub, which Conway called “the most hotly contested deal in five years.” Chris Wanstrath, GitHub’s co-founder and C.E.O., said that a16z’s services were a major attraction: “It’s like a buffet—they offered a bunch of great dishes, and we wanted to sample them all.”

After six years, Andreessen believes, a16z is meeting—and winning—enough new clients to place it “comfortably in the top three” V.C. firms. (This is not far off from the consensus in the Valley.) Its first fund has already returned 2x, and contains such powerhouses as Slack and the identity-management company Okta. The fund’s internal rate of return, a calculation of annualized profit, is fifty per cent, which places it very high among funds raised in 2009. (Sequoia’s rate for its corresponding fund is sixty-nine per cent.) The firm’s second fund includes Pinterest and Airbnb, and its third fund includes Zenefits, GitHub, and Mixpanel; both funds, on paper, are well into the black. A respected L.P. of the firm told me, “They’re one of our top performers.” Yet Andreessen cautioned, “We still have a lot to prove on returns. I wouldn’t be comfortable saying we’re No. 1 until ten years have passed, maybe fifteen. Until then, it’s Schrödinger’s cat, and I’ve got really good arguments on why the cats are both alive and dead.”

At Andreessen’s wedding, in 2006, Ben Horowitz said in his toast that the man he’d long known was “grouchy Marc,” because he’d “gone through his whole life without anyone understanding him, being all by himself.” No one had understood him in his farm town, no one had understood him in Silicon Valley—“Hell, I do not understand him.” But now, at last, he was “happy Marc,” because he’d found “someone who totally gets him”: the bride, a lecturer in philanthropy at Stanford’s business school named Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.

In December, Andreessen invited me to their house in Atherton, five minutes from a16z’s office, to watch television. He and Laura live in a modern, art-filled, nine-thousand-square-foot villa built in a style that she calls “Northern California pastiche.” The ceilings are scaled to Andreessen’s Brobdingnagian proportions, and everything is majestic, minimal, and new. The toilet in the powder room is so visionary, and the surrounding dimmer lights so flattering, that I had to study it for some time to figure out how it flushed.

Arrillaga-Andreessen brought the couple’s dinners into the living room and placed them on matching Costco TV tables. The omelettes and Thai salads that their chef had prepared earlier had been freshly reheated (they have three microwaves, so their food will always be ready at the same time). Andreessen stroked her arm and beamed: “Hello, gorgeous!”

“Hello, my darling!” she replied. Then she gave me a dramatic hug, as we hadn’t seen each other since the previous day. Arrillaga-Andreessen is a tall, ethereal-seeming, yet effusive woman. When the couple met, in 2005, at a New Year’s Eve dinner thrown by the leading investor in eHarmony, they talked for six and a half hours. She told me that Andreessen satisfied most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, and he was bald. (“I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum,” she explained.) For his part, Andreessen felt that “she was spectacular! My biggest concern was that she wanted to live a jet-set life.” In one of the seventeen e-mails he sent her the next day, he asked, “What’s your ideal evening?” She responded, “Stay home, do e-mail, make an omelette, watch TV, take a bath, go to bed.” Before their second date, he delivered what she calls “a twenty-five-minute monologue on why we should go steady, with a full intellectual decision tree in anticipation of my own decision tree.” They were married nine months later. In her and her father, John, a billionaire Silicon Valley developer, Andreessen seems to have found a replacement family. Laura showed me a photograph of the two men side by side, both bald, self-made, and magisterial: “Quite two peas in a pod.”

After some TV time together, the couple reads in bed, so that, she says, “I can fall asleep holding my beloved.” (She invariably refers to her husband as “my beloved,” rather than “Marc.”) “I ask him questions about things I got curious about during the day, so every night I’m going to sleep with a human Wikipedia that can go deeper and deeper and deeper, link upon link. In the past week, we talked about all the hardware components of a mobile phone, how binary code works, what might happen with drone regulation, and whether Putin is using Ukraine as a distraction from the financial crisis in Russia.” Once she’s dozed off, Andreessen returns to work in his home office, where, like a recharging cell phone, he gains energy through the night.

He pushed a button to unroll the wall screen, then called up Apple TV. We were going to watch the final two episodes of the first season of the AMC drama “Halt and Catch Fire,” about a fictional company called Cardiff, which enters the personal-computer wars of the early eighties. The show’s resonance for Andreessen was plain. In 1983, he said, “I was twelve, and I didn’t know anything about startups or venture capital, but I knew all the products.” He used the school library’s Radio Shack TRS-80 to build a calculator for math homework. In 1992, as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he neglected his job—writing Unix code for $6.85 an hour—to team with another programmer to create Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the Web. After graduating, he moved to Silicon Valley, where he and a volatile serial entrepreneur named Jim Clark launched Netscape, to make the Internet available not just to scientists but to everyone. John Doerr, the V.C. who funded their A round, said that the genius of their browser was that “it was like putting photos on the menu at Howard Johnson. You didn’t need to know the language; you could just point.” The story underlying that story, Arrillaga-Andreessen told me—the secret—was that “Netscape was based on my beloved’s own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.”

Netscape Navigator, released in 1994, quickly claimed more than ninety per cent of the browser market, and Andreessen predicted that the Web would make operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows “irrelevant.” When the company went public, in 1995, its stock rocketed from twenty-eight dollars a share to seventy-five dollars, and Andreessen was soon on the cover of Time, barefoot on a throne. But Marc 1.0 was very much in beta. Having given up coding, his first love, to manage coders, he scarfed Pepperidge Farm Nantuckets and Honeycomb cereal straight from the box, skipped meetings, and blazed up without warning. “You’d see him vibrating, and it would inspire a combination of excitement and terror,” Jason Rosenthal, a manager whom Andreessen actually liked, recalled. A favorite Andreessen response to underlings’ confusion was “There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.” Jim Barksdale, the company’s C.E.O., said, “I’d tell Marc after meetings, ‘You don’t have to tell a dumb sumbitch he’s a dumb sumbitch.’ ” Andreessen told me, “I needed Netscape to work, it had to work—it was my one-way door—so I was absolutely intolerant of anything that got in the way”—meaning, he clarified, “people.” He could never relax: “I am very paranoid. And the down cycle hurt a lot more than the up cycle felt good.”

The down cycle began when Microsoft bundled its own browser with its operating system, making it the nation’s browser of convenience, if not of choice. Netscape shifted from marketplace to enterprise, and began selling browser and server software, but it was fortunate to get bought by AOL, in 1999, for ten billion dollars. Peter Currie, the company’s C.F.O., said, “We made a difference, we invented cookies and pioneered downloading software from the Internet, yet Netscape is an asterisk in business history. Maybe the best way to think about it is as a classic tech story: a company creates, invents, succeeds—and gets bypassed.”

In the first “Halt and Catch Fire” episode, Cardiff’s entrepreneurs go to Comdex, the big trade show, and discover that another company has stolen their idea and beaten them to market. In response, Gordon, the hardware engineer, removes the interactive operating system from their Cardiff machine—a system designed by Cameron, a punk female software prodigy—and slots in Microsoft’s dos, which makes the machine I.B.M.-compatible, viable, and dull. It was an excruciating capitulation, but Andreessen nodded evenly: “This was Microsoft’s moment, and Gordon is right—they need to live to fight another day. But . . .” He pointed at the screen, where Apple’s Macintosh was making its début at the trade show. “Hello, I’m Macintosh,” the machine said. Andreessen laughed and continued, “They were doomed from the start, because Apple in Cupertino”—in Silicon Valley—“had spent three years building that. I’ve been totally determined to be on the other side of that dynamic by being here, because success in software follows a power-law distribution. It’s not Coke and Pepsi and a bunch of others; it’s winner take all. Second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is you’re fired.”

In the season finale, Cameron launches her own startup. As Andreessen watched her manage her coders, he said, softly, “The best scenes with Cameron were when she was alone in the basement, coding.” I said I felt that she was the least satisfactory character: underwritten, inconsistent, lacking in plausible motivation. He smiled and replied, “Because she’s the future.”

In “Why Software Is Eating the World,” a widely invoked 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Andreessen put the most optimistic spin on Silicon Valley’s tendencies. The article proclaimed that tech companies are consuming vast swaths of the economy, from books and movies to financial services to agriculture to national defense—which Andreessen saw as the healthful scavenging of a carrion way of life. On Twitter, he pursued the theme: “Posit a world in which all material needs are provided free, by robots and material synthesizers. . . . Imagine six, or 10, billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be,” particularly as “technological progress is precisely what makes a strong, rigorous social safety net affordable.”

Andreessen’s telepathic method—extrapolating the future from current trends—may be the best available, but it has had doubtful results. Of the eighteen firms that V.C.s valued at more than a billion dollars in the heady days of 1999-2000, eleven have gone out of business or have been liquidated in fire sales, including @Home, eToys, and Webvan. A16z bought into Zulily, an online marketer, at a valuation of a billion dollars; it soared to a market capitalization of five billion dollars, and has since slumped to $1.3 billion. Another billion-dollar a16z company, the bargain-shopping site Fab, recently sold for about thirty million dollars. On the other hand, the firm wrote off the gaming company Slack to zero—and then it became an office-messaging app that’s now valued at $2.8 billion.

The random, contingent way that the future comes to pass is a source of endless frustration in the Valley. Sam Altman, the president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, notes that his early investment in Stripe is now worth, on paper, more than 2,000x. “So ninety-seven per cent of my returns from 2010 and 2011 are concentrated in one investment, which I could easily have missed,” he said. “I only let myself think about this sort of thing on vacation, because if I acknowledged that I was wasting more than ninety per cent of my time—which is true, from an economic perspective—I couldn’t get through my days.”

The key to investing, Andreessen contends, is to be aggressive and to fight your instinct to pattern-match. “Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts,” he said, adding, “It’s hard to think this way—I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change.” Andreessen believes that the major barrier to change is sociological: people can embrace only so many new ideas at once. “O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?”

A16z passed on Airbnb’s A round in 2009. Reid Hoffman, the Greylock V.C., who led that round, and who is a friend of Andreessen’s, said, “Once something like Airbnb gets going, Marc can get a very good sense of it, of the economic system—but he’s not necessarily as good at the psychology of why it would get going in the first place.”

Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s co-founder and C.E.O., told me, “In 2011, when we were starting to get some traction, Marc and Ben did a one-eighty and were very humble. Marc said he now saw it through the lens of eBay: buying stuff from strangers.” A16z led Airbnb’s B round. Soon afterward, the company was battered by headlines about renters who trashed a San Francisco home. It wasn’t axe murders, but, Chesky said, “It was a P.R. nightmare. We had just expanded from being ten people living in a three-bedroom apartment and we had no idea how to be a billion-dollar company. Marc came to our office at midnight and read the letter I’d written to our community about the Airbnb Guarantee, and the two changes he made changed the company forever. I’d said we guarantee five thousand dollars for property damage, and he added a zero, which seemed crazy.” Andreessen also added the proviso that claimants would have to file a police report, which he correctly believed would discourage scam artists. “And he told me to add my personal e-mail address. He gave us permission to be bold.”

In venture, it’s not batting average that matters; it’s slugging average. Boldness is all. When Google Glass appeared, a16z joined a collective to seek out investments, and Andreessen declared that, without the face shield, “people are going to find they feel, basically, naked and lonely.” Google withdrew the product in January. But, he would argue, so what? His thesis is that such a16z failures as Fab and Rockmelt and Digg and Kno are not merely a tolerable by-product of the risk algorithm but a vital indicator of it. It’s fine to have a lousy record of predicting the future, most of the time, as long as when you’re right you’re really right. Between 2004 and 2013, a mere 0.4 per cent of all venture investments returned at least 50x. The real mistakes aren’t the errors of commission, the companies that crash—all you can lose is your investment—but those of omission. There were good reasons that a16z passed on buying twelve per cent of Uber in 2011, including a deadline of just hours to make a decision. But the firm missed a profit, on paper, of more than three billion dollars.

The beauty of betting on risky technologies is that you’re sometimes proved right, eventually—perhaps we’ll all feel naked without Google Glass 3.0. When reverses occur, Andreessen tends to believe that he wasn’t wrong so much as overly prescient. Yet, while he professes intellectual comfort with being wrong, he never mentions Ning, a social-networking company that he co-founded in 2004, because, as he conceded when I asked about the elision, “It didn’t do great.” And he can be touchy about criticism. At one Q. & A. I attended, when the interviewer read him a snarky quote from Sam Biddle, a writer who worked for the gossip site Valleywag, Andreessen made a doobie-smoking gesture and plunged an imaginary needle into his vein to suggest the quality of Biddle’s thinking. Being the public face of venture means that you can be challenged on multiple fronts: even as you philosophize about ushering in a new age of democracy, you also have to make money for your L.P.s. And, while the ideal startup advances both goals, most, in truth, advance neither. The V.C. Bryce Roberts told me, “It’s an ego game, where you want to believe you’re changing the world. But how can you write a check to Fab and believe that giving people discounted tchotchkes is changing the world?”

In 1999, Andreessen and Horowitz started Loudcloud, an early cloud-computing service that booked thirty-seven million dollars in contracts in its first nine months. Andreessen, meanwhile, was becoming Marc 2.0. He shed thirty pounds, started wearing Ermenegildo Zegna suits, and traded in his red Mustang for a white Mercedes. “Marc 1.0 was Jim Clark,” Andreessen told me, referring to his impulsive co-founder. “Marc 2.0 was trying to get as polished as possible, more socialized. And Marc 3.0 is a combo. The goal is not to be elegant but to be blunt enough that there’s no confusion. I learned the skills from reading all of Caro’s L.B.J. books.”

The dot-com crash hit Loudcloud hard, and, in 2002, it pivoted to become a software company with a new name: Opsware. In 2007, after years of slogging, Andreessen and Horowitz sold the company for $1.6 billion. Andreessen says that the tech crash scarred him: “The overwhelming message to our generation in the early nineties was ‘You’re dirty, you’re all about grunge—you guys are fucking losers!’ Then the tech boom hit, and it was ‘We are going to do amazing things!’ And then the roof caved in, and the wisdom was that the Internet was a mirage. I one hundred per cent believed that, because the rejection was so personal—both what everybody thought of me and what I thought of myself. I was not depressed, but I was growly. In retrospect,” he concluded, “we were five or six years too early.”

Peter Thiel, who is four years older than Andreessen, observed that “the late nineties, for Gen Xers in Silicon Valley, was an experience as powerful as the late sixties was for the younger boomers. The sixties was a transformative moment that got short-circuited by Nixon, and, for Marc, the nineties—when Netscape was iconic, and he was deeply living the belief that technology was going to inspire liberalization everywhere—was short-circuited by the super-powerful bust and return of the old economy. But Marc is very tenacious.”

Andreessen said he learned that, while technology improves steadily, “psychologically there’s no middle ground—the plane is always headed straight up or straight down.” Recognizing that he was a poor manager, and needing to buffer those emotional and financial swings, Andreessen saw that the obvious next move was a portfolio of investments. In 2003, he and Horowitz began angel investing, separately and then together; they put ten million dollars into fifty companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Then Andreessen began pushing to start a venture firm. “I always thought the entire venture thing was incredibly cool,” he told me. “Going to Kleiner Perkins”—the firm that funded Netscape—“with the high ceilings, the markers on the wall of all the great companies they’d I.P.O.’d, Larry Ellison walking through, and, at 11 a.m., the biggest buffet you’ve ever seen, at a time when I was eating at Subway? It was the closest thing to a cathedral for nerds.” Mark Zuckerberg told me, “When Marc started Andreessen Horowitz, I asked him why he didn’t start another company instead, and he said, ‘It would be like going back to kindergarten.’ ”

A16z was designed not merely to succeed but also to deliver payback: it would right the wrongs that Andreessen and Horowitz had suffered as entrepreneurs. Most of those, in their telling, came from Benchmark Capital, the firm that funded Loudcloud, and recently led the A rounds of Uber and Snapchat—a five-partner boutique with no back-office specialists to provide the services they’d craved. “We were always the anti-Benchmark,” Horowitz told me. “Our design was to not do what they did.” Horowitz is still mad that one Benchmark partner asked him, in front of his co-founders, “When are you going to get a real C.E.O.?” And that Benchmark’s best-known V.C., the six-feet-eight Bill Gurley, another outspoken giant with a large Twitter following, advised Horowitz to cut Andreessen and his six-million-dollar investment out of the company. Andreessen said, “I can’t stand him. If you’ve seen ‘Seinfeld,’ Bill Gurley is my Newman”—Jerry’s bête noire.

A16z’s services model made a strong impression on Sand Hill Road. “Andreessen caused us to up our game on the marketing side,” Sequoia’s Doug Leone told me. “Younger founders pay attention to media, and we don’t want to be de-positioned.” Sequoia hired an in-house publicist and two new marketing specialists to complement the four it had, and most top firms made similar moves, even if they privately believed that a16z’s services were simply a marketing tool. Todd McKinnon, the C.E.O. of Okta, said, “Every firm we talk to now is ‘Hey, we’re doing all this recruiting, and we’ll introduce you to big customers.’ It’s become the table stakes.”

Benchmark, by contrast, took down its Web site. “It’s like watching Coke and Pepsi go head to head,” one C.E.O. told me. Bill Gurley declined my requests for comment, but he has publicly bemoaned all the money that firms such as a16z are pumping into the system at a time when he and many other V.C.s worry that the tech sector is experiencing another bubble. So many investors from outside the Valley want in on the startup world that valuations have been soaring: last year, thirty-eight U.S. startups received billion-dollar valuations, twenty-three more than in 2013. Many V.C.s have told their companies to raise as much money as possible now, to have a buffer against a crash.

Benchmark’s funds top out at four hundred million dollars and are reserved for early-round investing: the original, artisanal venture model. A16z raised $1.5 billion each for its third and fourth funds, in 2012 and 2014, with much of the money earmarked for later, costlier growth rounds, whose returns tend to be capped at 5x. Andreessen argues that startups now wait longer and raise more capital before going public, and a16z wants to be in those conversations, too. He also says that larger funds will allow the firm to provide even more of the services that its entrepreneurs crave. But, in the Valley, increasing your fund size so dramatically is customarily seen as “smoking your own exhaust,” or, among those with a classical turn of mind, hubris. “Venture doesn’t scale,” Diane Mulcahy, the L.P. and venture critic, said. “Raising and investing more doesn’t increase the number of billion-dollar companies, and offering services to entrepreneurs won’t help the firm generate returns. It’s like a Saks Fifth Avenue that gives everybody a free iPhone. Are they going to attract everybody and see everybody? Yes. Are they going to make money? Not for long.”

When I pressed Andreessen on a16z’s fund size, he said that even if the basic assumptions haven’t changed—even if only fifteen companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in revenue—those companies generate more money now. And, he said, “I’d bet the number of companies that reach that revenue is going up.” With a playful smile, he referred to Gurley: “If there’s no profit opportunity beyond the first four hundred million, Bill’s making the case that everyone who follows Benchmark in a later investment round is a moron. I wouldn’t say that.”

One morning, as I sat down to breakfast with Andreessen, a rival V.C. sent me a long e-mail about a16z’s holdings. The V.C. estimated that because Andreessen’s firm had taken so many growth positions, its average ownership stake was roughly 7.5 per cent (it’s eight per cent), which meant that to get 5x to 10x across its four funds “you would need your aggregate portfolio to be worth $240-$480B!” You would, in other words, need to invest in every Facebook and Uber that came along. When I started to check the math with Andreessen, he made a jerking-off motion and said “Blah-blah-blah. We have all the models—we’re elephant hunting, going after big game!”

In addition to assuaging various slights from V.C.s, Andreessen is attempting to assuage the wound of the 2000 crash, by maintaining that it was an isolated event. “The argument in favor of concern is cyclical,” he told me—busts follow booms. “The counterargument is that stuff works now. In 2000, you had fifty million people on the Internet, and the number of smartphones was zero. Today, you have three billion Internet users and two billion smartphones. It’s Pong versus Nintendo. It’s Carlota Perez’s argument that technology is adopted on an S curve: the installation phase, the crash—because the technology isn’t ready yet—and then the deployment phase, when technology gets adopted by everyone and the real money gets made.” So the 2000 tech crash prefigured not the next crash but a sustained boom. And Andreessen’s portfolio, like the entire Sand Hill Road enterprise, wasn’t so much overpriced as underappreciated.

Still, he recently tweeted that startups were spending too much. When the market turns, he wrote, “nobody will want to buy your cash-incinerating startup. There will be no Plan B. vaporize.” And, come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t prudent to raise too much, either. In one pitch meeting where a portfolio company sought a billion-dollar growth round, Andreessen raised his arms overhead and made an explosive sound to warn of what can happen when your valuation vastly exceeds your revenues: “Thanks for playing—game over!” The company went on to secure its round, with only a token contribution from a16z. Andreessen later said that, as in an increasing number of deals, growth investors had paid one round ahead of progress—paid in other words, for the results they hoped to see in the following round. Though the company’s lofty valuation buoyed a16z’s portfolio, his body language suggested that buying at such valuations was maybe not smart—“but, as long as they’re sophisticated investors, it’s not our job to moralize on whether they’re overpaying.”

Another way of framing the growth-funding question, Peter Thiel suggests, is that Andreessen may not be as suited to making early, counterintuitive investments as he is—a point that Andreessen concedes: “Peter is just smarter than I am, and in a lateral way.” But, Thiel says, Andreessen is well positioned, because of his broad knowledge and flexible mind-set, to respond to incremental changes in an array of fields. And that, he argues, is what the times reward: “While Twitter is a lesser innovation than flying cars, it’s a much more valuable business. We live in a financial age, not a technological age.”

In December, Apoorva Mehta, the founder of a grocery-delivery app called Instacart, came to a16z to ask it to fill out his C round. The firm had led Mehta’s B round with an investment of twenty-seven million dollars, but he reminded the team anyway that Instacart “is quite a magical experience.” Then he invoked a few sharing-economy shibboleths, including “we don’t have any infrastructure,” “mobile-powered independent contractors,” and “machine-learning-based fulfillment engine.” In two years, Mehta had set up in fifteen cities, signed up many of the independent grocery chains, including Whole Foods, and showed profitability in a number of stores. And it was a defensible network, because he installed refrigerated lockers in the stores. At the same time, because Mehta had recently changed his model, Instacart was losing money on each delivery, and that amount was growing as he rapidly expanded into new markets.

Andreessen applied a disinfecting wipe and said, “Let me ask you a question I know the answer to. In 1999, there was no more flaming debacle of a business than grocery delivery online. You were probably twelve at the time of Webvan?” “Thirteen,” Mehta said.

“So why now?”

“The main reason is you have access to labor through smartphones. It’s the same reason Uber and Lyft exist now.”

Andreessen nodded with satisfaction: “You can orchestrate the entire supply chain through your phone.” Webvan was what he called a “ghost story”—a cautionary tale that still frightened investors. But Instacart proved that even haunted houses could be rehabilitated.

Another partner asked about competitors, including Uber, TaskRabbit, Amazon Fresh, and Fresh Direct. “The other, older models can’t do instant delivery,” Mehta replied. “And the newer ones don’t have anywhere near our coverage and range of data in groceries. So if you want slower delivery and smaller selection, go with them.” Andreessen smiled, savoring the contempt.

At the deal review, Jeff Jordan, who sits on Instacart’s board, praised Mehta’s progress, while noting concerns about unit economics—how he’d get to profitability on each delivery. Referring to the venture community’s enthusiasm for the round, Jordan went on, “This is an ‘I missed Uber, I don’t want to miss the next one’ climate.” Balancing everything, he recommended that the firm put in ten million dollars.

Horowitz argued for a bigger investment. Mehta’s moat against competitors “is really fucking deep—he already has Whole Foods, monster of monsters. It’s the biggest market of all time, incredibly huge.”

After other partners argued that the valuation seemed high, Andreessen looked at Horowitz: “Ben, I think you’re making an even more provocative point than people understand. It sounds like you’re saying this could be an Uber for real.”

“I think so,” Horowitz said. “What makes unit economics really scary is if you’re in a competitive market. He’s in a monopoly.”

Andreessen said, “We could go to the well, and go in higher.” He beckoned, coaxingly. Horowitz thought it over, then said, “I don’t want to override Jeff.” Andreessen, too, seemed content to temper his enthusiasm and to share the round with other firms. (Mehta eventually raised two hundred and twenty million dollars on a valuation of two billion.) He’d like to make twenty times the investments the firm does, but every opportunity comes with an opportunity cost, and even $1.5 billion doesn’t last forever.

Andrew Golden, the chief investment officer for Princeton University, an L.P. in a16z’s last three funds, told me that, when the firm started, “my worry was that Marc is such a big personality he wouldn’t necessarily listen to someone who told him he was wearing fewer clothes than he thought. But now my working hypothesis is that Marc is smart enough to know that he’ll do better if he doesn’t try to win every argument—if he doesn’t try to go undefeated.”

In March, Andreessen and his wife announced the birth of their son, who’d been carried to term by a gestational surrogate. They named him John, for Laura’s father. “I feel fantastic!” Andreessen told me. “He’ll come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world.” He added, tongue in cheek, “I’m going to teach him how to take over that world!”

Andreessen often remarks that, in the blue-collar milieu he came from, no parent wants his or her child to stay blue-collar. His own circumstances have changed dramatically—he is now a paper billionaire, though he argues that his net worth depends on how you value a16z—so I told him it seemed paradoxical that some of his other babies, such as Instacart and Lyft, make their profits off blue-collar drivers and pickers who must freelance without a safety net to make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, he strongly disagreed: “Maybe there’s an alternate way of living, a free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”

One afternoon, as we sat at his baronial dining table, he made an agonized but sincere effort to discuss his blue-collar childhood without mentioning his nuclear family. “I really identified with Charles Schulz in the David Michaelis biography of him, ‘Schulz and Peanuts,’ ” he said. I was struck by the parallels between Andreessen and both “Peanuts”—in which Charlie Brown has a massive bald head and the parents are kept offstage—and its creator. Charles Schulz, who grew up in Minnesota, was socially awkward, hated being embraced, and loathed his mother’s Norwegian relatives, a farming family. Andreessen went on, “Ninety-six per cent of the people who grow up like he and I did, in the Midwest, just stay there, but the ones who leave”—the cartoonist, too, moved to California—“become intensely interested in the future. In Schulz’s last ten years, he really focussed on Rerun, Linus’s younger brother—the youngest and most optimistic character.”

I told Andreessen that this seemed like a tendentious reading of Rerun, a bland character whose two most famous lines are “I’ll drink to that” and “My brother is the only one in the family with a blanket, and I don’t want to end up like him.” Taken aback, he explained, “He’s the youngest, he’s the newest, he has the most life in front of him.” Andreessen, as he saw himself, was both an immigrant to the land of opportunity, like the entrepreneurs he preferred to fund, and someone whose childhood was merely an installation phase. He told me, “It wasn’t that I felt misunderstood or badly treated; it was that I was so completely different. I wasn’t seeking understanding. I wasn’t indexing myself against the people around me.”

Andreessen reminded me—in his formidable achievements and manner, his thickly armored sensitivities and yearnings—of Rilke’s remark “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” When I told him so, he stared back in absolute horror.

Last year, a programmer named Alex Payne wrote an open letter to Andreessen in which he observed, “People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands. Consequently, wherever you and other gatekeepers of capital direct your attention—towards robots, 3D printers, biotech, whatever—you’re going to detect a fearful response as people scramble to determine the impact of your decisions and whims,” which only compound “lingering structural unemployment and an accumulation of capital at the top of the economic pyramid.”

Payne addressed his thoughts to Andreessen because Andreessen represents the Valley—both in its soaring vision and in its tendency to treat people as a fungible mass. But Andreessen waved away the criticisms as the ravings of “a self-hating software engineer.” When I persisted, he said, “Ordinary people love the iPhone, Facebook, Google Search, Airbnb, and Lyft. It’s only the intellectuals who worry.” He raised counter-arguments, then dismissed them: technology would solve any environmental crisis hastened by an expanding economy, and as for the notion that, as he said, “ ‘You American imperialist asshole, not everyone wants all that technology’—well, bullshit! Go to a Chinese village and ask them.” Technology gives us superpowers, makes us smarter, more powerful, happier. “Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys?” he said. “Obviously, yes. Over the past thirty years, the level of income throughout the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And it’ll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism—it’s the Eden-collapse myth over and over again—and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it’s up and to the right. If this is collapse, let’s have more of it!”

Global unemployment is rising, too—this seems to be the first industrial revolution that wipes out more jobs than it creates. One 2013 paper argues that forty-seven per cent of all American jobs are destined to be automated. Andreessen argues that his firm’s entire portfolio is creating jobs, and that such companies as Udacity (which offers low-cost, online “nanodegrees” in programming) and Honor (which aims to provide better and better-paid in-home care for the elderly) bring us closer to a future in which everyone will either be doing more interesting work or be kicking back and painting sunsets. But when I brought up the raft of data suggesting that intra-country inequality is in fact increasing, even as it decreases when averaged across the globe—America’s wealth gap is the widest it’s been since the government began measuring it—Andreessen rerouted the conversation, saying that such gaps were “a skills problem,” and that as robots ate the old, boring jobs humanity should simply retool. “My response to Larry Summers, when he says that people are like horses, they have only their manual labor to offer”—he threw up his hands. “That is such a dark and dim and dystopian view of humanity I can hardly stand it!”

One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldn’t venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that “future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand Hill Road.” Jeff Fagnan, of Atlas Venture, which is the largest investor in AngelList, said, “Software is already squeezing out other intermediaries—travel agents, financial advisers—and, at the end of the day, V.C.s are intermediaries. We’re all just selling cash.”

Andreessen sometimes wonders if Ravikant is onto something. He’s asked Horowitz, “What if we’re the most evolved dinosaur, and Naval is a bird?” Already, more than half the tech companies that reached a billion-dollar valuation in the past decade were based outside Silicon Valley. And as Andreessen himself wrote in 2007, before he became a V.C., “Odds are, nothing your V.C. does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure.”

He still believes that—but he also thinks that a16z can cut a company’s time to success in half, and time is money. He also believes that venture will maintain its incumbency because computers can’t yet introduce you to just the right engineer or chief information officer at eBay, and machines can’t yet come to your office at midnight to future-proof your letter to perturbed customers. Indeed, venture is one of the most human businesses going. Only human beings could have created such a supercollider of contradictions: a font of innovation that pools around conformity; a freedom train that speeds toward monopoly; a promoter of transparency that shrouds its own dealings; a guild that’s dedicated to flattening hierarchies, and that rewards its leaders with imperial power.

Naturally, Andreessen had to weigh the counterargument, and consider whether he added any value at all. One Sunday afternoon, as he sat alone at the head of a16z’s conference table, he said, “Chris Dixon argues that we’re in the magical-products business—that we fool ourselves into thinking we’re building companies, but it doesn’t matter if we don’t have the magical products.” And magic could not be summoned, only prepared for. “Over twenty years,” he continued, “our returns are going to come down to two or three or four investments, and the rest of this”—his gesture took in the building full of art, the devotions of more than a hundred eager souls, even the faux-Moorish rooftops of his competitors down the road—“is the cost of getting the chance at those investments. There’s a sense in which all of this is math—you just don’t know which Tuesday Mark Zuckerberg is going to walk in.”

Yet math was no help with mass psychology. “Even if we could do perfect analysis, we just can’t know the future,” he said. “What if Google Ventures had access to all Google searches—could you predict hit products? Or perfect access to all of people’s conversations or purchases? You still wouldn’t know what’s going to happen. How is psychohistory going?” he went on, referring to Isaac Asimov’s invention, in his “Foundation” novels, of a statistical field that could predict the behavior of civilizations. “Not very fucking good at all! Which, by the way, is part of what makes this job really fun. It’s a people business. If we could revise the industry completely, we’d just dump all the business plans and focus on people—the twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.”

He acknowledged, though, that his optimism dims once human beings—with their illogic, hidden agendas, and sheer bugginess—enter the equation. “We’re imperfect people pursuing perfect ideas, and there’s tremendous frustration in the gap,” he said. “Writing code, one or two people, that’s the Platonic ideal. But when you want to impact the world you need one hundred people, then one thousand, then ten thousand—and people have all these people issues.” He examined the problem in silence. “A world of just computers wouldn’t work,” he concluded wistfully. “But a world of just people could certainly be improved.”

Anthony Bourdain on Reddit

Anthony Bourdain hopped on Reddit Tuesday to do one of the forum’s famous Ask Me Anythings. He’s fresh off winning yet another Emmy for Parts Unknown, and his “working-class joint” meal with President Obama in Vietnam will air on the show’s next episode. Now a veteran of interrogations by internet users, he happily answered questions about his turn on Yo Gabba Gabba! and the most embarrassing things that have happened to him while filming television. Here are a few of the very best bits.

On his fast-food cravings: “During the morning I get these horrendous cravings for Popeye’s mac and cheese, and, uh, I will often disguise myself to try to slip into Popeyes.”

The word that really bothers him: “[O]veruse of the word ‘artisanal.’ You know, an artisanal potato chip? What does that mean other than it’s an expensive potato chip?”

He also doesn’t want attitude with his microbrew: “Oh, I’m also no big fan of the judgmental barista and beer nerds. I mean, I like a good craft, but don’t make me feel bad about my beer choices. You know what kind of beer I like? I like cold beer.”

On his dream project: “You know the show I haven’t been able to make yet, I’d like to do a show with Keith Richards. I’m working on it. He’s an enthusiast and a voracious reader. He’s very interested in British naval history. Maybe visiting the site of great British naval battles with Keith Richards, eat bangers and mash, cooking steak and pie together would be really fun.”

Hinting at a possible wardrobe change for Parts Unknown: “It would be interesting to show up on a show with like a Trumpian Cheeto tan. Actually, I should try that.”

On the most dangerous experiences he’s had filming, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya after Benghazi, Beirut in 2006, and: “immediately after eating Nashville Hot Chicken, that was truly, truly terrifying. And if you’re considering going to Nashville, by the way, please notice that Nashvillians themselves don’t eat the extra-hot fried chicken. They know better. Unless you’ve got three or four days to spend in a bathroom, I really advise against that.”

On the guiding principle behind editing Parts Unknown: “If I’m miserable and humiliated and everything goes wrong we show you that. I would draw your attention to the notorious Sicilian octopus fishing scene as a particularly unpleasant example of that. We really don’t cut much out, if anything. Another example, Thailand. The famous Lady Boy Cabaret. It’s filled with outrageously good looking transexuals or transvestites. Who kisses me on the mouth? The one girl who looks like Ernest Borgnine.”

Discovering that Obama is super chill: “Rarely have I seen someone enjoy drinking a beer from the bottle as much as the President.”

How his daughter reacted to his guest appearance on one of her favorite shows, Yo Gabba Gabba!: “But crazy enough when my daughter saw the show and saw me doting over Tootie–who as I recall, I was helping through an illness–she became really jealous and pissed off at me, that I was being so nice and attentive to Tootie.”

Why he stopped taking every shot offered to him by a fan: “I know people offer those things with the best intentions but I’m a dad now. I’m the 60 year old dad of a 9 year old. I have to at least try to stay live long enough to get to the eye rolling stage of my daughter’s life.”

On realizing he has nowhere to go but down after Archer: “It was pretty much the high watermark of my career. After that, everything is meaningless.”

He’s still taking potshots at Guy Fieri: “Anyone who would insist on putting BBQ in a Nori roll, kind of offends me.”

What kind of restaurants he doesn’t approve of: “There is a restaurant in Vegas, I think it’s called The Heart Attack Grill, where if you are over 350lbs you eat for free. I think that should be pretty much a war crime.”

His advice for young aspiring chefs: “Look, you’re either the sort of person who likes the restaurant industry, or you’re a normal person … You’re probably not going to be on TV, you’re going to go home every night smelling of smoked salmon and garlic.”

Finally, he weighs in on the very crucial hot-dog debate: “No. I don’t think it’s a sandwich. I don’t think a hamburger is a sandwich either. The fact that it’s in between bread–the bread is a delivery system, a ballistic delivery system. It is not a classic sandwich, in my view.

“I mean, if you were to talk into any vendor of fine hot dogs, and ask for a hot dog sandwich, they would probably report you to the FBI. As they should.”      

Katherine Johnson

In 1962, the first US astronaut to go into orbit entrusted one person with his life, the mathematician and space pioneer Katherine Johnson. “She took on the key problem of calculating spacecraft trajectory”

IT WAS February 1962, and John Glenn was about to go on the journey of a lifetime. Five years before, the Soviets had shot Sputnik into space and the US was lagging badly behind. American pride and pre-eminence were riding on Glenn. And Glenn was riding on an Atlas rocket – a bomb with a seat belt, its firecracker course plotted out in exquisitely precise calculations. To make it back alive, Glenn had to put his faith in the numbers.

But Glenn didn’t trust the numbers, he trusted the “girl” who devised them. He was talking about 43-year-old black woman Katherine Johnson. Almost all her colleagues were white and male. Racial segregation was widespread and no woman was considered responsible enough even to take out a loan on their own. So how did Johnson come to be as integral to US success in space as household names like Glenn and Neil Armstrong?

From an early age it was clear Johnson was clever. Born in 1918, she was in high school by age 10 and left college with degrees in French and mathematics at just 18. Even so, for many years teaching was the only work open to her. Then she heard there were jobs on offer at the Langley aeronautical lab near Newport News, Virginia, part of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). There, engineers were turning out huge amounts of data in nascent fields like jet engine and wing shape design, and faster-than-sound aircraft. “Human computers” – all women – did the mathematical hard labour. And since the second world war, jobs in the defence industry had been open to people of colour. Johnson was hired in 1953.

Virginia was a bastion of segregation. Black people attended separate schools, had to ride at the back of public buses and were banned from “whites only” restaurants; it was a crime to marry a person of a different race. Compared with the outside world, Langley was an oasis of inclusion. But the toilets, cafeteria and computing pool were still segregated.

Johnson, however, was not one to be cowed by racism. She refused to use the “colored” ladies’ room, and ate lunch at her desk as she filled oversized data sheets with endless figures. And if she encountered racism, Johnson displayed a sort of wilful naiveté: “There was always a sense of, ‘I dare the racism to raise its head against me! I refuse, this is beneath me, and I simply refuse to participate in it,’” says Margot Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures.

Johnson’s talent was obvious from the start, and within just two weeks she landed a plum stint in the Flight Research Division, working alongside the aeronautical engineers. Her personality – generous, funny, confident – helped to defuse whatever scepticism the engineers might have had about her abilities.

Then, on 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union sent Sputnik into orbit. Alarm spread across the US. As the idea of a Soviet-dominated “Red sky” gripped the nation, the government took action. NACA became NASA and suddenly Langley was recast: it became the hub for space research, a key player in the effort to reach the moon and win the space race.

The flight engineers began a crash course in the physics of orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion and spacecraft re-entry, each taking a subject, learning what they could then giving lectures to their colleagues in closed-door sessions. Outside, Johnson carried on with her work, devouring every bit of information and piecing together the action, yet relegated to the sidelines.

She longed to be included. So Johnson asked if she could join the meetings. There were no rules against allowing women, and in any case they were using her work in those sessions. To the engineers, though, women were calculators not thinkers. It just wasn’t done. But Johnson was made of strong stuff, and confident in her abilities. She kept asking them to let her in, day after day, and also raised questions about the research, proving she was no mere calculator. In the end, they ran out of excuses. Her persistence paid off and Johnson became part of the space programme. Meanwhile, the US’s first astronauts moved into the next-door office to begin their training.

The Soviets had sent a satellite into orbit; the challenge now was to get an astronaut into orbit. Johnson and the engineer she partnered with, Ted Skopinski, took on the key problem of spacecraft trajectory. Using dozens of equations, they showed how to calculate the location directly beneath a spacecraft at every moment of its voyage. It was no small feat. The pair had to take coordinates in the plane of the craft’s orbit – tilted relative to Earth – and translate them into familiar latitude and longitude on the spinning planet, accounting for the fact the planet bulges around its equator. It took nearly two years, yet when the paper came out in 1960, it was a major advance in mission planning, enabling astronauts to know exactly when to trigger the retrorockets to splash down on target.

But while Johnson’s calculations were being programmed into new IBM computers, the Soviets struck again. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and the first to go into orbit. Still, the US pushed forward with its programme, and Johnson’s work paid off in several successful flight tests. The next big step came in 1961, when Alan Shepard rocketed into the atmosphere, becoming the first American in space. The 15-minute suborbital flight wasn’t nearly enough to catch up, but it signalled to the world that, finally, the Soviets had real competition.

Going into orbit was a much bigger undertaking and Glenn, like every astronaut, understood the risk. As the big day approached, he was worried. How could he be sure that the trajectory generated by the IBM machine would get him back home? To him, real computers were not machines, they were people – he’d seen them at Langley.

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” he reportedly said. Only then would he fly. So Johnson set to work, redoing the calculations by hand. After a day and a half meticulously working through huge piles of data, she and Glenn breathed a sigh of relief: the numbers checked out.

Glenn blasted off on 20 February 1962. It was a nail-biting journey: a warning sensor meant Glenn had to skip jettisoning the rocket pack as planned. But the calculations held, and he splashed down safely in the Atlantic after his third orbit. The mission was a success. America was back in the game and Glenn became a national hero.

The celebrations were more modest for Johnson. As an unsung hero, she watched Glenn’s parade around Newport News, then went back to work.

She went on to achieve much more, though. It was she who calculated the timings for the first moon landing. In later years, she worked on the space shuttle programme. Now 98, she has outlived all of NASA’s first astronauts, including Glenn, who died last month. Yet only recently has her work been recognised outside of NASA. In 2015, after devoting her life to furthering our understanding of space, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The movie Hidden Figures, about Johnson and the other NASA computers, is out in the UK on 17 February.

Johnson’s life has spanned a time of huge social and technological change. She was at the forefront of both.

"Poppy" Huston

If Winston Churchill had to supplant a bunch of appeasers and defeatists when he came to power in May 1940, which he did, how come that the country was equipped to win the Battle of Britain that came weeks later? After all, you can’t just whip up a superior air force overnight, or provide it with a decisive technological edge.

Somehow this question has just slipped by unasked in the Churchill-as-miracle-worker view of history that now flourishes in the wake of two movies, Dunkirk and Darkest Hour.

One part of the answer lies in the little-known actions of a remarkable woman, and it concerns the most legendary of Britain’s warplanes, the Spitfire fighter. The Spitfire came to acclaim as much more than a mere machine, it became a symbol of national bravura in desperate days that Churchill was quick to cultivate.

And yet it might never have happened but for the intervention of Lady “Poppy” Fannie Lucy Houston.

The mouthful of a name suggests an aristocrat but, in fact, Lady Houston began a vigorous social ascent as a seductive chorus girl in late Victorian London, steadily acquiring a fortune and lofty social status through the love of four men.

The first involved an affair with a one of the country’s richest brewers who left her an annuity of £6,000 a year for life when he died in 1882, aged 42. The second was the son of a baronet but she divorced him in 1895. The third was the ninth Baron Byron of Rochdale, whom she married in 1901, who left her little but the title of Lady Byron when he died, aged 63, in 1917. The fourth time she hit the jackpot by marrying a wealthy shipowner, Sir Robert Houston, whom she married in 1924 and who died in 1926, leaving her the massive fortune of £5.5 million.

But such fiduciary details give little sense of the lady’s energy and flamboyance. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes her, somewhat euphemistically, as “a beautiful young coquette with impudent speech and a tiny waist who became expert in Parisian fashion and manners.”

She was also a keen nudist, supported the suffragette movement and became a benefactress for nurses who served at the front during World War I – for which she was by royal decree given the honorary title of dame, in the first such list of exceptional women.

This was clearly someone not to be taken lightly even in her seventies, as she was in 1931, when she found another needy cause that needed her urgent attention.

The Supermarine company was one of a number of relatively small British businesses, based on little more than a hangar and a cluster of workshops, that were struggling to become significant in the development of military airplanes. They had, however, outshone all others in one respect: speed.

In the late 1920s Supermarine produced a series of hot rod seaplanes that competed in the annual races for the Schneider Trophy, the world’s most competitive event for high-speed flight. By the time the company caught Lady Houston’s attention they had won two successive races and were planning to win a third, which would mean winning the trophy outright and, probably, establishing a new world air-speed record.

Supermarine’s chief designer, Reginald Mitchell, had stripped down airplane design to a minimalist simplicity of line, decisively rendering the biplane obsolete with a knife-thin single wing and—the other essential part of a winning formula—he sculpted the sharp end of his speedster around a new generation of engines produced by Rolls Royce.

Anybody with the slightest knowledge of the future of military airplanes could see, simply by looking at the Supermarine S6, that it was a potential prototype for a powerful new generation of fighters. That kind of vision did not, however, extend to the British government in 1931.

When Mitchell went to the air ministry requesting a development grant of £100,000 (around $5 million today) to cover research and production for the racer he was turned down. The racers had all been flown by Royal Air Force pilots and the air force brass, dismayed by the political decision, saw the chances of developing their future fighter evaporating.

Enter Lady Houston, offering to pony up the £100,000 and declaring, “Every true Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not afford to defend herself.”

The government, even while trying to cope with the economic ravages of the Great Depression and embarked on a punitive austerity program, was shamed into submission and changed its mind. The Supermarine racer won, smashing the world air speed record with a run at 407 mph. Breaking the 400 mph barrier with a propeller powered airplane was akin to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier for the first time with a jet in 1947.

Lady Houston died in 1936 at the age of 79. In the same year the Spitfire prototype made its first flight. Mitchell died of cancer in 1937, aged 42.

As it turned out, there were fewer Spitfires ready to fight in the Battle of Britain than of the country’s other frontline fighter, the Hurricane. But the Hurricane was a one-battle weapon, incapable of further development, whereas the Spitfire was continually improved and it was the Spitfire that most spooked the German bomber crews who were sent to soften up Britain in preparation for invasion, a psychological triumph as much as a technical one.

The other indispensable technical leap that Churchill inherited in 1940 was the first integration of a radar network into an air defense system: the Spitfires and Hurricanes were efficiently and sparingly deployed to intercept the bombers at the most vulnerable stage of their flight over English soil through a combination of early warning radar and precise estimates of their numbers and direction made by trained observers on the ground.

Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, is still widely reviled for signing a so-called “peace in our time” deal with Hitler at Munich in 1938. But whether intended or not, Chamberlain had, in effect, bought time in which his country was able to re-arm with battle-winning technology in the air, a battlefield that had never before decided the fate of nations - or with so few combatants, the R.A.F. pilots immortalized as “The Few.”

It was a close-run thing. “We were just about able to prepare in time for Hitler’s air armada, but we got away with it only by a gnat’s eyebrow” the president of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon, has admitted.

The air force was the best led of the three services. As by far the youngest it was also more open to innovation and more alert to how quickly equipment and tactics could become obsolescent when technology was molten.

The first tentative steps to build a radar system were carried out in 1935, using a single R.A.F. bomber flying between two BBC short-wave radio transmitters. And by 1937 the Chamberlain government had authorized spending £10 million on a coastal chain of radar stations. In 1939 Churchill had been out of the government for 10 years but was pressing hard for military readiness. He was told then that all the basic problems of making radar effective in any weather conditions had been solved and he used his influence to keep the funds flowing.

In 1940, with the first and most crucial battle won, Churchill saw the charismatic value of the Spitfire as a way to engage his people in helping to fund the war. He personally promoted the Spitfire Fund, in which people were asked to make donations, no matter how small, toward producing the fighters. “Spitfire Dances” were held all over the country to boost the donations.

The results were astonishing. By 1941 £13 million in individual donations had flowed into the air defense budget, at a rate of £1 million a month, the equivalent of £650 million today. The nominal price of a Spitfire was £5,000. People were told they could buy a wing for £2,000 or a gun for £200.

This can surely be seen as an early example of crowd funding. It gave millions of people a feeling of making a very personal investment in turning around the course of the war, from the low point of the retreat from Dunkirk and fear of imminent invasion, to being able to look up in the sky and say “I bought a bit of that Spitfire.”

Nobody needed to tell Churchill the value of the Spitfire to national morale. He was also instinctively open to original, free thinking technical ideas from people often regarded as mavericks – since he was, to some extent, a maverick himself.

He knew to a degree that few members of the public ever realized that the country had been saved by the persistence of engineers and scientists dedicated to reinforcing Britain’s defenses while many of his fellow politicians, members of the aristocracy and some leaders of industry had been deluded enough to believe that they could avoid war by making a deal with Hitler.

Once in office he welcomed another breakthrough idea that had huge consequences on the future: the development of the jet engine. A much-beleaguered R.A.F. officer, Frank Whittle, had fought for years in the 1930s for funds to build a prototype engine and design an airplane around it – against others who thought that an airplane without propellers was, at best, fanciful, and, at worst, a waste of money. (Whittle’s engine and radar technology were both passed on to America after Pearl Harbor.)

But for every naysayer there was always a Poppy Houston, or a Reginald Mitchell, enablers and visionaries who, in combination, never gave up. And, eventually, a prime minister who not only inherited the achievements but knew how to use them to win a war.

James Dyson

Deep in the Wiltshire countryside, James Dyson is tinkering in his shed, but it’s not the usual garden variety. As befits Britain’s best-known inventor, he has test rigs, hoists, machine tools and other paraphernalia built into a giant aircraft hangar. In fact, he bought the entire airfield to give him the space to assemble things and pull them apart. He’s cagey about what he’s working on, as you might expect. An electric bike? The world’s first silent leaf blower? “Aha. Well, I’m not allowed to say,” he smiles apologetically.

Outside there are security guards and a high perimeter fence. Some of the buildings are so well camouflaged, they’re invisible on Google Earth. Visitors are vetted and must put masking tape over the lenses of their smartphones before they can enter. “We’ve got a lot of intellectual [property] actions going on all over the world, mostly in China,” Dyson confides. “It is a serious worry. We’re careful about security and we take a lot of precautions.”

Dyson cleaned up after inventing a vacuum cleaner that sells in more than 80 countries. From a modest start in a makeshift factory in old pigsties, he built his engineering company into a behemoth with an annual turnover of more than £5 billion and profits reaching £1 billion in 2018. It’s a success story that propelled him to the top of The Sunday Times Rich List last year.

When I finally clear all the checks to see him, he’s looking summery in deck shoes (“£20 from Amazon”), navy slacks and an open-necked shirt, with an aura of old-school charm. He removes a pair of Harry Potter spectacles when we sit down to chat. He was knighted, as the joke goes, for “services to vacuuming” but doesn’t want anyone sucking up and calling him Sir. “Just James,” he says affably.

What he can reveal is that he’s developing a power source called a solid-state battery that has the potential to store more energy than lithium-ion batteries and put even more oomph into his Supersonic hairdryer. Hitherto it has been too expensive for domestic appliances. Scaled up it could revolutionise transportation, too, though Dyson says he won’t be selling it to others. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions [setting up the production line in Singapore] and it’ll cost billions to produce the number that we need, which is why I’m not very keen to make them for anyone else.” It’s an exciting breakthrough. When will the first solid-state-powered gadget go on sale?

“Pretty soon. You have to test a battery for a whole year before you can put it in a product. We’re doing two different types, because small things [like wearables] need one type of battery and cars and vacuum cleaners need another type.” Does he have a prototype here in Wiltshire? “Yes, very much so.” When I later ask to see it during a tour of the lab my guide says it’s not possible. It’s in an exclusion zone, behind reinforced doors. More security. This is a hush-hush world of Chinese walls to thwart Chinese hackers and other industrial spies. When Dyson’s male engineers were testing a new type of hairdryer they were not allowed to reveal the reason for growing their hair long — even to their partners.

It’s fair to point out that Dyson’s ideas aren’t limited to household gadgets. He has designed and sold boats to the military and a missile carrier to the aerospace industry. When he patented a new amphibious vehicle with combat potential the Patent Office requisitioned the plans and locked them in a safe, as they did when Christopher Cockerell came up with the hovercraft. He still can’t reveal details.

Some of his projects have been duds, of course. His contra-rotating washing machine was a damp squib, despite the spin the marketing people put on it. And in 2019 he pulled the plug on his electric car before it went into production. But he’s not trying to draw a veil over those flops. In fact, that’s what he wants to talk about. He’s written a book called Invention, but that’s the publisher’s title. He wanted to call it Failure because what we’ve all forgotten in our modern-day blame culture is that no achievement is possible without foul-ups. Every successful invention is the result of trial and error, with the emphasis on error, he says. “I love failures — they’re interesting,” he laughs.

His Wiltshire research centres are shrines to this wing-and-a-prayer spirit. The airfield at Hullavington once buzzed with Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters. Built in 1937 for the Air Ministry, it was eventually decommissioned and abandoned. Dyson has spent millions restoring the buildings. He has the original jet engine, made by Frank Whittle, a British inventor and one of Dyson’s heroes.

His enviable car collection includes a classic Citroën Maserati and a beautiful Citroën DS, tributes to André Citroën, another of his heroes. The others, since you ask, are Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Soichiro Honda, the brains behind the Super Cub motorcycle, the world’s bestselling vehicle. (Interestingly, he doesn’t have much to say about Elon Musk, another inventor-industrialist and, on paper, a kindred spirit.)

He lives near by in the 300-acre Dodington Park estate in Gloucestershire, a grade I listed mansion he bought in 2003. Not long ago he withdrew plans to add a waterfall to the lake, one of many run-ins with planners, of which he has more to say later. He has a house and vineyards in the south of France and is one of Europe’s biggest farmers with 35,000 acres spread across Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset — more land than the Queen’s Sandringham estate — for which he has received millions of pounds in farming subsidies.

When he’s not at the drawing board he’s on board his yacht. After our interview he’ll be preparing to leave Britain for the rest of the summer, heading for Spain (“If you can go there,” he cautions, acknowledging travel restrictions) and his 91-metre vessel, Nahlin. It’s the largest British-flagged and owned superyacht, bought from his friend Sir Anthony Bamford in 2006. “It’s in Tarragona, but the Spanish coast is not a good yachting coast,” he observes. “The Balearics are. Greece and Italy, of course.” Confusingly, for the non-nautical, the “yacht” is actually a motor cruiser. The yacht he sails is carried on deck and lowered by crane when it reaches its destination.

He has planes, too, but they’re museum pieces: a Harrier jump jet in the car park of his Malmesbury campus, and a Lightning made by the now defunct English Electric that hangs from the roof of a huge, light and airy new cafeteria built for his local staff. He collects these things not as trinkets but because they’re examples of brilliant design, built in better days when engineers were lauded.

Britain’s glorious manufacturing past is a recurring theme of his book. He’s worried that Asian economies will take over as centres for design and excellence. In Singapore 40 per cent of graduates are engineers, he says. In Britain the figure is 4 per cent. “If you visit a British university, you see 400 students passing out in media studies and only 30 engineers,” he says. “I fear China and Korea and other countries will overtake us, if they haven’t already. Even the Philippines and Mexico produce more engineers than we do. Technology is much harder to develop now, much more complex. When I started we were a group of mechanical engineers, but now more than 50 per cent of our engineers are software or electronics specialists, plus fluid dynamics and battery experts and other scientists. If we’re not producing those people, we’re going to get poorer and poorer.”

What’s gone wrong? “I think as a country gets wealthy it tends to forget what made it wealthy, namely developing technology and manufacturing and exporting and creating wealth,” he says. “It tends to prefer cerebral activities — everything else almost, bar the job of designing and developing technology and actually making things in a factory, which I love doing. I find it very exciting and quite romantic actually, but no one else does. I’ve been at parties where people say, what do you do? I say, well, I’m an engineer and I make things. They walk away.” It’s disappointing, he sighs.

In his book he quotes CP Snow, the novelist and chemist who in 1959 warned of a fashionable attitude that had taken hold among the elite of the time: namely that a knowledge of Shakespeare was more important for status than knowing the second law of thermodynamics. If anything things are worse now, Dyson says. “Certainly in Britain to be unable to change a plug, repair a lawnmower or hang a picture is all too often seen as a mark of cultural refinement and social superiority,” he laments in his book.

He partly blames those in power, who are drawn from a narrow elite. “A lot of it has to do with the fact that no politician has been an engineer or a manufacturer. They do PPE [philosophy, politics and economics] and go on to be political assistants, PPSs [parliamentary private secretaries] or something, and end up as PM. They live inside that Oxford-Westminster bubble.”

It’s not just politicians, he warns. It’s people in the arts and media. The Danny Boyle-scripted opening ceremony of the London Olympics is a case in point. It was written for liberal Britain and had the effect of a slap in the face for industrialists who made Great Britain great. Dark satanic mills were demolished to make way for a supposedly brighter, more caring Britain filled with NHS hospital beds and pop music. “They had women with the huge hammers and these chimneys that were belching out smoke and so on. What we’re forgetting is that the Industrial Revolution took us out of serfdom. People were able to have their own house and a wage and be independent. Before the Industrial Revolution that simply wasn’t true. People were effectively serfs. A lot of them starved.”

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer and former SAS soldier, tells a story about how Dyson once offered to loan him special forces bodyguards to look after his wife, Ginny. Fiennes was on a polar expedition that Dyson was sponsoring and was worried about his family’s safety because of a book he’d written on the criminal underworld. Fiennes recalls: “I was grateful, but out of curiosity I asked, why would a vacuum cleaner manufacturer have ex-special forces people? He said he feared there were Hoover spies and he’d already spent an awful lot of money on a case against Hoover for copying his dual cyclone.” When I put the story to Dyson he confirms there was a bitter legal battle with Hoover, settled in 2002 when Hoover paid £4 million in damages, but has no recollection of employing special forces people.

He does confirm that he inadvertently made himself a potential target by selling military equipment to both sides during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He designed and sold a boat called a Sea Truck — suitable for carrying troops and vehicles — to both the Egyptians and Israelis. “It got me into a little bit of trouble,” he admits. “The Israelis said, ‘We don’t mind you supplying the Arabs, but just don’t boast about it.’ They were very nice about it.” “Were you afraid of repercussions?” “I suppose I was very young at the time,” he says. “The thought never occurred to me.”

The young Dyson was remarkable not just for his inventiveness but for taking huge personal risks. Weighed down by debt, mortgaged to the hilt, rebuffed by domestic appliance makers and forced to go it alone, often mired in litigation, all the time with a family to support, he ploughed on regardless.

The central message in his book is that there are no shortcuts to success, despite the modern illusion of instant celebrity. An example is the dust separator at the centre of his bagless vacuum cleaner. The concept was patented by the delightfully named Knickerbocker Company of Jackson, Michigan, in 1885, but only giant versions had been used, for cleaning air in factories. Academic studies suggested they wouldn’t work on household dust, which, Dyson explains, is “as fine as tobacco smoke”. He proved the studies wrong but only after more than 5,000 attempts. What saved him was prototype number 5,127, which was able to capture the tiniest particles.

Somehow in the past half century Britain may have lost this doggedness of try, fail, repeat — and it’s vital, not just to maintain our status in the world, but because we’re facing problems that can be solved only by engineers, he says. Climate change is one. Instead of a focus for radical thinking it has become a bandwagon for lobbyists. “We need more young people to study science and engineering to solve these problems rather than the daily stream of the same grandstanding campaigners,” he observes.

At 74, he’s still trying, and still failing, he says. His electric car project ran out of road because automobile giants with deeper pockets entered the race. He abandoned a medical ventilator that he developed at the start of the pandemic for use in hospitals. It hurt, he admits, not least because he’d spent £20 million of his own money on it. “The civil servants kept changing the specifications,” he explains. There’s something gloriously British about his hit-and-miss, built-in-a-shed approach that will carry on for as long as he’s boss, which, he admits, may not be for much longer. “I don’t know. We’ll see. One’s brain and one’s back don’t necessarily hold up. I’ve got a very bad back. So maybe I won’t be able to go on. But while I can, I’m enjoying it so much.”

If he hands over the reins, it’ll probably be to Jake, his elder son. Is he being groomed as a successor? “I’m really lucky because he’s in the business and has the same sort of passions that I do. I could retire. He ought to take over because it’s a family business.” Meanwhile, Dyson’s younger son, Sam, is “trying to navigate the ruins of the music industry which Spotify have managed to completely wreck”, Dyson says. “He has his own band — Ramona Flowers — and record label called Distiller. He’s a very good engineer, but music is his thing, his passion.” Dyson’s daughter, Emily, was a fashion designer at Paul Smith and now has a clothing shop called Couverture & the Garbstore in west London.

James Dyson was born just after the Second World War, a third child and “like many third children felt an almost pathological longing from early on to prove myself by going my own way”. His father returned from “sniper-infested jungles” in Burma to be head of classics at James’s prep school, Gresham’s, in Holt, Norfolk. He ran the school cadet force, coached rugby and taught a young James to sail dinghies on the Norfolk Broads. “It was all very Famous Five, Secret Seven and Swallows and Amazons,” Dyson recalls. “We did all the things that would probably be banned today for being too dangerous.”

A young Dyson had an early love of making things, including toy soldiers using molten lead, model gliders and aeroplanes powered by tiny engines. A shadow was cast over his idyllic childhood when his father was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and lungs. Dyson Sr struggled on, using a loudhailer to take school lessons but died aged 40 when James was nine. “Ever since then a part of me has been making up for that unjust separation from my father,” he says in his book. “Perhaps I had to learn quickly to make decisions for myself, to be self-reliant and to take risks.”

His mother, a vicar’s daughter, raised her three children single-handedly and Dyson may have “inherited my mother’s determination and warrior spirit”. He excelled at long-distance running because, he says, he had staying power. “Running taught me to overcome the pain barrier. When everyone else is exhausted, that is the opportunity to win the race.” She also encouraged him in acting and painting.

Money was tight and the family lived in part of a crumbling Victorian house in Holt, Norfolk. “The one motorised machine we had was an old upright vacuum cleaner with a cloth bag hanging from its handle. It was smelly, dusty and ineffective. It haunted me for many years.”

He left school with ho-hum qualifications — A-levels in art, ancient history and general studies — but with a desire to create that led him in 1965 to sign up at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, where he met his future wife, Deirdre Hindmarsh. He won a place the following year at the Royal College of Art, where “nonconformity was celebrated”. “I began to grow my hair, wear flowery shirts and bell-bottom trousers.”

There he began experimenting with new lightweight materials like Perspex, PVC, polyester and acrylic. His first commission was from another inventor-engineer, who became Dyson’s mentor. Jeremy Fry, of the Fry’s chocolate family, asked Dyson to build a pair of “Jesus floats” — floating skis — so his eight-year-old daughter could walk on water. After that the pair worked together on a flat-bottomed landing craft that could lift itself over the water riding on a layer of bubbles. “We called this an ‘air-lubricated hull’,” Dyson recalls. The craft was the Sea Truck and Dyson’s first full-time job was to make and sell it. “It seemed remarkable to me then that this young man, dressed in floral shirts, flared trousers and a purple raincoat from Just Men, should be making and selling high-speed landing craft to army brigadiers and hardened oil company managers,” he writes.

He quickly learnt to ignore sceptics, pointing out how frequently they are wrong. When Austin Morris held a focus group just before the 1959 launch of the Mini, “nobody wanted this tiny car with small wheels”, he says. Likewise the Sony Walkman was panned by critics — who’d buy a tape machine that couldn’t record? — until it became a bestseller. “You need to show [customers] new possibilities, new ideas and new products,” Dyson argues.

His first idea for a mass-market product came to him when he was restoring an old farmhouse in the Cotswolds that required shifting soil and cement by wheelbarrow. Why not use a ball instead of a wheel, he reasoned, to make manoeuvring the barrow easier and less likely to sink in muddy ground.

It was probably one of the worst times in history to start a company, Dyson reflects. “This was long before Silicon Valley start-ups. There was no help for small businesses. Loan rates peaked at 24 per cent, making it difficult to pay back the interest.” With a bank overdraft and “debt high above my eyebrows” he set up his first factory in 1974 in a row of pigsties close to his home near Badminton. The family grew their own vegetables and his wife made clothes for the children and sold paintings to make ends meet. There were no DIY chains to sell the barrows through either, so Dyson took out newspaper ads and “received a gratifying number of cheques in the post”. Finished in colourful plastic, the barrows looked fun and attractive next to drab, traditional ones.

When he moved to a bigger factory, he needed to clean the air of the powder used to coat the metal parts of the barrows so he built his own cyclonic device. It occurred to him that the same centrifugal process, scaled down in size, could be used to make a bagless vacuum cleaner. He finally came up with a working prototype in 1982 and tried to sell the idea to manufacturers. “I went to see Electrolux, Hotpoint, Miele, Siemens, Bosch, AEG, Philips — the lot — and was rejected by every one of them.”

Frustrated, he tried American companies, finally settling on Amway. After Dyson had “handed over all the drawings, prototypes, knowhow and confidential information, they decided to cancel the agreement and instigate a lawsuit to get back the money they’d paid us”. Dyson repaid the money to avoid exorbitant legal costs in the US. It was a painful lesson and the first of many run-ins with manufacturers that made Dyson assertively protective of his intellectual property, and critical of the patents system that he says “provides scant protection for the inventor”.

One reason the big companies weren’t interested is that the European market in disposable vacuum cleaner bags was worth $500 million, Dyson says, and there were vested interests in protecting it. Unmissable in pink and lavender, his first vacuum cleaner, the Kleeneze Rotork Cyclon, was launched in 1983. It was made by a little known company called Zanussi in Italy and sold door-to-door.

When he moved production to Wales, sales of a new machine, the DC01, took off. By the mid-1990s he was outselling all other brands in the UK. Hairdryers, heaters and humidifiers followed, along with a bladeless fan he demonstrated on American television by putting his head inside it to show how it could harmlessly blow-dry hair. Even the Queen bought one.

As well as fighting court cases over patents, he took the EU to task when it enforced rules favouring rival manufacturers. Makers of conventional vacuum cleaners were exaggerating their energy efficiency by testing them when they were empty of dust. In fact they were using far more electricity because of clogged filters. His own cleaners never clogged but Brussels bureaucrats wouldn’t acknowledge it, he says. This was one reason he turned against the EU and campaigned for Brexit.

Does he stand by his views? “Reconnecting with the Commonwealth, looking to the much greater markets outside Europe and being independent I think is much more suitable for the British spirit and the way Britain trades. We’re very good at trading globally. It’s something we understand. Europe I don’t think we do understand. In any case it’s a shrinking share of the global market. It’s 13 per cent now, dropping to about 10 per cent. Whereas the fast-expanding markets are really in Asia.”

Playing devil’s advocate, I suggest that even Leave voters have been underwhelmed by some of the results of Brexit. For those who wanted better border security, for example, the “take back control” promise now has a ring as hollow as a Dyson fan.

“It’s also about independence of spirit. It’s rather like being a company taken over by a much larger conglomerate. You become less reliant on your own resources and less able to do things. Whereas if you’re on your own you’re independent, you come up with your own solutions. Of course everybody quotes it, but the vaccine is a jolly good example of that.” He points out that before Brexit it took four and a half months to recruit an engineer from overseas because of European restrictions. He says that time has been reduced, though he can’t say by how much.

Two years ago he moved his manufacturing base to Singapore. Critics rounded on him, pointing out that he’d argued for Britain to go it alone, only to take his own business offshore. Was it a tax dodge?

“Absolutely not tax-saving and not cost-saving,” he insists. “Operating 8,000 miles away is not a cheap thing to do. Actually Singapore’s standard of living is much higher than here. The wage costs are much higher there, so we certainly didn’t go for any labour saving. We went because it’s an area where people want to make things, where we can build factories in four months. It’s an area that actually encourages industry, encourages manufacturing, encourages engineering. That’s the right place for us to be.”

In any case he’s taxed on his global income, he points out. Plus, the creative bit of Dyson industries stayed in Britain and he employs 4,000 people here. What drove him overseas, he claims, was the need to increase output. “We were trying to double the size of our factory at Malmesbury. They wouldn’t give us permission. It was all referred to the secretary of state. Even the local Conservative MP came out against the factory expansion.”

Another frustration was that suppliers couldn’t keep pace with Dyson’s needs. “We ended up with no British suppliers of components, except the hose maker. Then the hose maker wouldn’t expand. He said, ‘I don’t want to take on another factory.’ We had to go and find a hose maker in Asia.”

The final straw seems to have been the government’s refusal to support his electric car project with taxpayers’ money. “As a relatively small company going to the hugely expensive and complex business of making a car, we felt we should have some government support. The Singapore government offered to help us. Greg Clark, who was [the UK] secretary of state for industry, flatly refused anything, wouldn’t even consider it. After the Singapore prime minister had offered to help us with financial help, I asked to see Theresa May as a last resort. She refused to see me.”

The Brexit referendum outcome has convinced him that power should be taken from politicians and handed to the people. He would favour a broader democratic system similar to that enjoyed by the Swiss, who can vote on a wide range of issues instead of just for political parties. “I think that’s a really good idea. I think the public in general make a much better decision than politicians.”

Another of his bugbears is education. “It makes me sad and concerned that schools are failing to teach creativity,” he writes. “Yet life today demands it more and more. The advantage in the West that we have relied upon for so long is being diminished.”

Suzi Quatro

With five UK Top Ten hits in the 1970s and a unique ability to rock a leather jumpsuit, Suzi Quatro became one of the UK’s favourite adopted Americans. After playing Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days, Quatro also appeared in Minder, Absolutely Fabulous and was a regular on TV quiz shows.

She has two children from her first marriage to the guitarist and producer Len Tuckey, and two grandchildren. Now 71, Quatro lives in an Elizabethan manor house in Essex and is married to the music promoter Rainer Haas, who lives in Germany. The couple count Mallorca as their neutral zone.

Which cards do you use? I have a Visa debit, a Mastercard for personal use, and for business a black Mastercard. Are you a saver or a spender?
I was one of five kids, so my mother was thrifty. We lived great, but she wouldn’t waste anything, so I have a bit of that in me. I like a good life but I don’t like to waste.

Do you own a property?
I’ve lived in my home in Essex since 1980, when I bought it for £123,000. It’s a 15th-century, grade II listed manor house, set in three and a half acres. It has three floors, a huge patio, an orchard and a poplar-lined driveway. Every time I drive up I get an intake of breath because it’s gorgeous. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it and still love it now. It was sold as a nine-bedroom house, but I converted one room into an office for my husband, one is a guitar room, and I also have an ego room on the third floor. There’s a plaque on the door that says “Ego room — mind your head” and it’s my entire career in one room. The walls and the ceiling are covered with my posters and it’s filled with my scrapbooks, awards, bass guitars and stage clothes. I’ve had my jumpsuits made for me right from the start. You can’t get those things anywhere, so since 1973 they’ve been made for me by designers. They don’t last long because you’re soaking wet in them and they finally just disintegrate. I get a couple of new ones every five or six years, then the old ones get retired. I had the last ones made in Hamburg. They cost €800 or €900. Not that much.

Are you better off than your parents?
My dad did well, but overall I’d say yes. I grew up in a very nice four-bedroom house in a suburb of Detroit, but I was one of five, so I never knew what having my own bedroom was like until I grew up. My mother was the quintessential mother. She raised us wonderfully and, boy oh boy, you could eat off the floor. My dad was an engineer at General Motors and had a music agency, so he booked bands, and in the evening he played in them. He loved music — but it also made a good living.

Have you ever been hard-up?
I was touring in bands from 14, and there was a time when we slept on mattresses in a van. We were lucky if we got a hamburger a day. You suffer for your art, I tell you. When I first came to England in 1971 I lived near Earls Court Tube station in a small room with a single bed and no toilet. It wasn’t the best, but 18 months later I had my first No 1.

What was your most lucrative work?
In 1966, when I was 16, I would take home $1,000 a week. My eldest sister’s first husband managed the band. He had three kids to support with whatever he earnt, so he got our money up. It didn’t last long, because they got divorced, but at the time we were in New York, playing five shows a night, seven nights a week. It was real hard work but I remember he put that in my hand, and I went: “Wow.” $1,000 a week was unheard of in 1966.

What has been your best investment?
The house. I haven’t had it valued for years, but it will continue to go up. I’m constantly doing repairs. I’m conscious that I’m caretaker of a listed property, and I make sure it stays in the condition it should. At one point I was thinking of building a conservatory. Somebody from the council came and pointed out that the windows were meant to be leaded light, but somebody had taken them out before I moved in. I haven’t a clue how much that cost, but I know was angry.

Your worst investment?
I’m so careful I can’t think of one. I learnt the difference between cheap and quality quite young. I learnt that it’s not worth buying cheap jeans or a cheap leather jacket because they fall to pieces. I go to Diesel or Zadig & Voltaire and of course Levi. I have snakeskin boots with a Cuban heel that I had made at a cowboy store in Miami. I have a brown pair and a blue pair, and they each have a matching belt with a beautiful silver buckle. They are gorgeous. I paid about $2,500 for each pair. I can hear my mother’s voice, up there in heaven, disapproving. She’s saying, “Susan!” But I’ve had them since around 1998. They still look beautiful and they’ll last a lifetime. You wear them and you feel like a million dollars.

What’s your money weakness?
Vintage Krug and good wine. You can’t beat Château Margaux 1982. I have no idea how much it is, I just know it’s expensive [it’s nearly £1,000 a bottle]. I’ll have a case of it at any given time, and if I run out I buy another one because it’s my favourite red. When I met my husband he took me to La Tante Claire, which was a three-Michelin-star restaurant in London. He bought a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild. It’s one of the best you can buy and he paid over £1,000. This was back in 1993, so that was expensive. I was 43, he was 48, and when you get to that age you know what you want. He wanted to impress me and he did. It was only three months from the first kiss to the marriage.

I also have a “suite tooth” for hotel rooms. I’ve slept in a van, so when I got successful I decided I’m damned if I’m sleeping in anything other than a suite. I’ve worked all my life and I’ve got a beautiful home, so why should I stay in a small room? I hate small rooms.

Often the hotel will upgrade me. In Detroit I stayed in a suite the size of a football field. It was my 60th birthday and I’d flown everybody over and taken over the top floor of the discotheque. I’d booked a nice suite, but they upgraded it and when my granddaughter walked in she went: “Oh, Grandma! Can I be upgraded?” I said: “One day, honey.” Flying first class is my indulgence. I first flew first class in 1977, when I was living in England and filming Happy Days in LA. It was in my contract that they flew me back and forth first class and that gave me a taste for it. I’m not a great flyer, so being in first class makes it a completely different trip. And of course I like the champagne — that’s a no-brainer.

Your most extravagant purchase?
The most expensive thing I bought, at the time, was a mink coat. It was 1975, so it was allowed back then. I wanted a mink coat, so I went to a furrier with my ex, Lenny. I was earning good money, but this was £5,500 made-to-measure. It’s pretty much full-length and it’s beautiful. I still have it. It’s not politically correct any more, but I do love it.

What’s better for retirement, property or pension?
Property. I don’t think you can lose with property. It always goes up. I have the state pension. I also have a pension I took out years ago. I haven’t a clue what it is, it’s whatever my accountant recommended. This was after my first No 1, Can the Can. That record was huge. It sold two and a half million copies. Mickie Most [the producer] told us to get an accountant. He didn’t want us to ever say: “You’ve cheated us.” So we did. It was good advice.

Elon Musk

In January 2018, Tesla announced details of a new contract with its CEO, Elon Musk, that sounded less like an executive-compensation package and more like the premise of a game show. Under the deal, Musk would take no salary but could earn large bundles of stock options each time he raised the company’s value by $50 billion. If it went up by a mere $49,999,999,999, he would leave empty-handed.

The contract’s top prize could be unlocked only if the company’s market cap hit $650 billion by 2028, a 13-fold increase. Tesla was bleeding so much money — it was among the most shorted stocks on Wall Street — that growing its value that significantly in a decade, or ever, seemed hopeless. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin described the feat as “laughably impossible.” And then, in December 2020, with seven years to spare, Tesla’s value blew past the target, lifting Musk’s personal net worth to $185 billion and making him the richest person on the planet.

There were lots of reasons for Tesla’s rise, many of them concrete. The company announced it would open new factories in Austin and Berlin. It reported four consecutive profitable quarters for the first time and was invited to join the S&P 500. It grew production to build half a million cars in one year and dominated the U.S. market for battery-powered electric vehicles. It was a pioneering company with incredible potential. Yet the single biggest accelerant — a factor that, today, explains why an industrialist memelord is the dominant figure in American business and culture — was probably Musk’s tweets.

Right after his new contract took effect, Musk started tweeting a lot. He had always been prolific, but this was the point where he went from, by one count, 197 tweets per month (December 2017) to 384 (May 2018), posting Baby Yoda memes and self-produced rap songs, calling a diver who had courageously helped rescue children from a cave a “pedo guy,” and announcing bogus plans to take Tesla private at $420 a share. And then, emboldened by his victory in the defamation lawsuit over his pedo-guy tweet and his light punishment from the Securities and Exchange Commission over his $420 tweet, Musk tweeted even more — 446 times in July 2020.

Whether Musk was making dubious claims about his company’s production capabilities (“1000 solar roofs/week by end of this year”), applying reverse psychology (“Tesla stock price is too high imo”), or hyping other meme stocks on the side (“Gamestonk!!”), Tesla’s stock went up — first by a little and then, during the pandemic, by a lot. His followers spent their stimulus checks on Tesla shares, then they discovered the options market, magnifying the gains. In late 2021, Musk’s net worth touched $315 billion, prompting Forbes to declare him the richest person who had ever lived.

It’s hard to fathom how somebody could make more money faster than anyone ever has by tweeting, yet that’s pretty much what happened: A carrot was dangled, and Musk, likely figuring he would never reach it on the basis of such old-fashioned metrics as quarterly earnings, yoked Tesla’s stock to his Twitter feed and went goblin mode. A little like when Neo from The Matrix realized that reality was a mirage and therefore he could do kung fu without any lessons, Musk intuited the illusory nature of the stock market and social media and ran up a new all-time-high score. If Tesla might have been a $300 billion company under a generic Silicon Valley CEO, it was a $1.2 trillion company with the guy who turned it into a product cult.

There’s a purpose to the way Musk tweets, muscling into trending topics like a one-man bot farm. He wears our exhaustion like armor.

He had always been sui generis, but this is when he became the Elon Musk we know today — a master of atoms, bits, and bullshit who begs our awe, skepticism, and irritation in ever-shifting proportions and whose record-breaking fortune may be only the tenth-most-interesting thing about him. Musk puts a reported 80-plus hours a week into running two major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, with time left over for side projects in tunneling (the Boring Company) and brain implants (Neuralink) — and somehow even more time to host Saturday Night Live, suntan with Ari Emanuel, and spend entire afternoons explaining orbital physics and the limbic system to Joe Rogan. It’s no wonder Musk thinks we live in a simulation, because he definitely lives in one where the normal rules of the universe seem to hold less authority: Newton’s laws, financial regulations, mores of business and celebrity, and soon, he hopes, the legally binding terms of his purchase agreement with Twitter.

In April, Musk made an unsolicited $44 billion bid for his favorite social network. It looked like bad business; the company had lost money for eight of the past ten years. Musk insisted he wasn’t seeking a profit but rather to save what he called the internet’s “de facto town square” from partisan content moderators. “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” he said. “I don’t care about the economics at all.” But he cared about the economics somewhat when, amid a broader stock slide, Twitter’s value sank by almost a third from what Musk had agreed to pay for it. He then said the sale was “temporarily on hold” and accused the company of misleading him over the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform — though, he hinted, he might be willing to tolerate those extra bots at a discounted price. Twitter declined to bargain, and in July, Musk attempted to terminate his offer. (One theory is that Musk had always intended to bail on the deal and was using it only as cover to sell $8.5 billion of Tesla stock.)

Twitter sued to force Musk to follow through on the transaction, and a Delaware Chancery Court judge has scheduled an October trial. If Musk wins, it may prove he has reached escape velocity from all rules and laws; it’ll also probably decimate Twitter’s stock and leave the company exposed to another hostile takeover, assuming it isn’t incinerated by shareholder litigation first. If Musk loses, he’ll get the cosmic comeuppance of being judicially compelled to buy the stupidest company in the world at something like a $14 billion markup. Whatever the outcome, the Curb Your Enthusiasm tubaist waits in the wings.

Musk has played the troll so convincingly that it’s easy to forget he isn’t just one. Consider his offline skill set, an array of talents heretofore unimaginable outside Walter Isaacson’s most depraved fantasies. Musk’s formal education ended with bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, but his self-taught expertise spans aeronautics, solar energy, artificial intelligence, and other fields. People he has worked with say he combines the abilities of a venture capitalist who can spot and manifest funding for far-off opportunities (such as the potential to power a car with lithium-ion batteries or make cheap rockets that can be launched more than once), an engineer who can help clear the practical hurdles to those opportunities (like designing the body of an automobile or stress-testing rocketry components), a systems savant who can align complex organizational processes (as in vertically integrating supply chains so that many of Tesla’s and SpaceX’s parts are made in-house), and a leader whose warped charisma can push employees through difficult deadlines. (Musk is said to have motivated, or possibly just frightened, Tesla workers during the production of the company’s Model 3 by sleeping nights on the factory floor.)

To whom could you even compare this Musk? He makes internet moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys look like dilettantes and their products like glorified spyware. He has been called an heir to Steve Jobs, but while Jobs might have talked about putting a “dent in the universe,” Musk is actually operating at the level of interplanetary ambition. Attempting to buy Twitter as a gag and then getting pantsed in front of the entire contract-abiding world may not engender much faith in his farthest-fetched plans to spread humanity across the cosmos. But while everybody’s laughing, his car and rocket companies are on track to keep thriving into 2023 and beyond.

Tesla is the most valuable automaker in the world even though it sells only a fraction as many cars as most of its rivals. In the second quarter of 2022, it doubled profits over the same period in 2021, which is remarkable in itself but more so given COVID-related factory shutdowns and Musk’s copious personal distractions. Coming next year (maybe) is Tesla’s second-generation Roadster, and if it ships as Musk has promised, it will be among the fastest electric cars ever made, with a top speed of over 250 mph, and the fastest-accelerating cars of any kind, able to do zero to 60 in just 1.9 seconds. SpaceX’s prospects may be even greater. The company has reduced the cost to send cargo into orbit by a factor of 20. One of its rockets, Starship, the tallest and most powerful ever built, is theoretically capable of hauling more than 100 metric tons. If Musk’s engineers can figure out how to get the prototypes to stop exploding on takeoff and landing, the Starship may someday be able to transport 100 people to the moon or Mars, then, because it’s fully reusable, flip over and blast off to Earth again. Musk has said the Starship could eventually fly for as little as $2 million per launch, which would make its cost per kilogram of payload something on the order of overnighting an envelope from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Or maybe none of that will happen, because Musk can be an appallingly bad estimator. As his biographer Ashlee Vance has noted, engineers at one of Musk’s early start-ups learned that if he anticipated a coding task would take an hour, it would usually take two or three days, and if he thought it would take a day, it might take a couple of weeks. He has bumped the ETA for SpaceX’s first manned rocket to Mars from 2026 to 2029. He predicted that Neuralink would test its brain interface in humans by 2020; now he says by the end of 2022. In May, he said that Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot feature would eliminate the need for human drivers by next year, which is similar to claims he has made every year since at least 2014.

Still, Musk has delivered on enough laughably impossible goals that those who doubt him do so at their own risk. He seems pathologically bent on silencing critics — either by succeeding or making them sign NDAs — and he might have been designed in a lab to carry long-term grudges as motivation. He says he was bullied as a kid in Pretoria, South Africa, and once got a nose job to reopen his airways after he was beaten up and thrown down a flight of stairs. He’s estranged from his father, a person he has called “a terrible human being.” He was ousted as CEO at his first two companies — Zip2, a maker of city-guide software for newspapers that sold to Compaq for some $300 million in 1999, and X.com, which became PayPal and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002 — so he put his own money into Tesla and SpaceX, making him harder to get rid of. Tesla’s entire 2018–21 stock run might in part have been his revenge on the short sellers that once targeted the company, including Bill Gates, who Musk alleges still hasn’t closed a multibillion-dollar short position. And to Musk’s credit, his original visions for Zip2 and PayPal, both overruled at the time, were at least partially vindicated later. He’d wanted to turn Zip2 into a consumer hub for maps and local-business reviews years before the launch of Yelp and Google Maps. And he reportedly thought PayPal should have held out for a better acquisition offer; it’s currently worth around $100 billion.

The question is whether Musk’s attempted jilting of Twitter is just one more sideshow on a general path to business glory or evidence that he’s immolating like one of those Starship prototypes. So far, his 2022 has included multiple accusations of racial discrimination from employees; a resurfaced sexual-harassment allegation from a SpaceX flight attendant; the recall of nearly 600,000 Tesla vehicles; animal-cruelty complaints against Neuralink; the discovery of three publicly unacknowledged children; and a Wall Street Journal claim that he had an affair with Sergey Brin’s estranged wife, Nicole Shanahan, that led to the Google co-founder filing for divorce. (Tesla denies the racial discrimination, Neuralink disputes the animal cruelty, and as for the affair: A lawyer for Shanahan denies it, as does Musk. “Haven’t even had sex in ages [sigh],” he posted.) None of these scandals hung around for long enough to inflict much damage in part because he tweeted right through them, creating an endless diversion.

Lately, there seems to be something purposeful about how Musk tweets the news, muscling his way into trending topics like a one-man bot farm. A tag cloud for one of his slower weeks may include climate, COVID, free speech, the 2024 election, abortion, gun control, the Russia-Ukraine war, UFOs, crypto, Elden Ring, the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial, and more. He has spread himself through every cultural jurisdiction so that he’s always the top story no matter which news bubble you’re in. Some billionaires own magazines and newspapers, but Musk may have built something bigger, a decentralized media empire that amplifies his every utterance into a blizzard of commentary and clickbait so that all praise, honest criticism, and exasperated overreach cancel one another out and he can wear our exhaustion like armor.

Once, during the post-dot-com innovation drought that spawned it, Twitter was the soft and ridiculous antithesis of everything that Musk, a maker of hard and serious tech, stood for. “We wanted flying cars,” went the motto of his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s VC firm. “Instead we got 140 characters.” Now it’s existentially important to everything Musk does — and thanks to him, its own future has never been bleaker.

Musk’s Twitter imbroglio recalls one of his earliest vanity purchases. When Zip2 was acquired, he celebrated his first major payday by dropping $1 million on a McLaren F1, then the world’s fastest car. One afternoon, he was driving in Silicon Valley with Thiel, who asked, “So what can this do?” “Watch this,” said Musk as he stomped on the accelerator. The car hit an embankment, jumped three feet in the air, spun around, and touched down, its body and suspension totaled. “You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them,” Musk reportedly told Thiel. “But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.” And then he climbed out of the wreck without a scratch on him.

Charlie Watts

From his silver hair to his handmade shoes, Charlie Watts was approximately 68 inches of understated style. I recall once visiting him in his hotel suite in Amsterdam during a European tour, everything laid out just so and with a Miles Davis album playing gently. His fondness for wide lapels and statement cuts helped him present a more imposing figure than suggested by his modest frame. Jeans and trainers were beneath his contempt. He was the elegant uncle you never had. Backstage, he could even carry off the bathrobe with the Stones’ tongue and lips logo.

Mick Jagger explained amusingly that, at the end of a show, his bandmate would only join him, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood stage front to take a bow when he had finished fiddling with his drumsticks, arranging them into a neat row before he would leave the stool. When he went on Desert Island Discs, he said a friend had pointed out that his would be the neatest island ever.

“I always believed that he had OCD,” says Charlie’s granddaughter, Charlotte. “We would mess with him. I can remember getting home and going down to the dressing room and moving one pair of socks and swapping it over with another pair. They’d be colour-coded. You’d time how long before you heard, ‘Who’s touched my stuff?’ ”

There were times, his family admit, when Charlie’s style sense beat his common sense hands down. “He came to visit me at boarding school in upstate New York and we’d had terrible snow, several feet, freezing, and he hadn’t packed for it. I’d seen this twice – his absolute refusal to buy the right shoes for snow. He came out with Tesco bags wrapped around his shoes. And we had to walk him up the hill for breakfast. Mortifying.”

Charlie had the ability, both intentional and otherwise, to sum up a story, a situation or a life with a crisp uppercut. “Five years working, 20 years hanging around,” was among Charlie’s most famous one-liners, but there were many more. When the Summer of Love drew to a close, Charlie was on amusing form with Melody Maker about its presence in his neighbourhood. “When flower power started, it was probably fantastic,” he mused. “But now it has become a funny word, like rock’n’roll. There is even a shop in Lewes which has got ‘Herrings are flower power’ written up in that white stuff on the window. I suppose they’ll have ‘Sprats are LSD’ next.”

The first time his relationship with Bill Wyman came into our conversation in 1991, he was entertainingly forthright. “Bill’s got a wonderful sense of humour. But certain things bother him that I a) wouldn’t even think about, and b) would have forgotten about. If Bill says on August 4, 1963, we weren’t paid for playing at wherever, well, the bloke still owes us the money and it irks him. For 30 years, he’s harboured this resentment.” He added with clear affection, “He’s an angry young man, that one.”

“I don’t know why,” reflects Bill, “but then we became this great rhythm section that everybody admired and we were always on time, always ready, always available, always sober… We were the bedrock that they just went loony on, basically. If you ever see any of the videos, you can see me and Charlie at the back laughing at them, when they’re doing all that crazy stuff they used to do, jumping off beds and going through walls and things.”

“His philosophy is, ‘I only need so much,’ ” the Stones’ early manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, once said of Charlie. “He has settled for that and not digressed for the bullshit.” Even in his first flush of fame, Charlie was telling the music press, “I give the impression of being bored, but I’m not really. I’ve just got an incredibly boring face.”

Almost every time we met, Charlie would mutter something about not coming close to par with any of his percussive heroes. This might hint at a lack of self-awareness, but it was founded on a sense of English reserve and humility that was better developed than anyone’s. Brian Jones, even as he began his slalom of substance-based deterioration, described him as “probably the most detached and well-adjusted person on this whole pop scene”.

In the opening couplet of If You Can’t Rock Me, the opening track from It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, Mick sings, “The band’s on stage and it’s one of those nights…/ The drummer thinks that he is dynamite.” He certainly wasn’t talking about Charlie. To him, arrogance was simply uncouth. He knew who he was and he didn’t change, with the exception of a relatively short period of narcotic madness in the Eighties.

The nadir of the Rolling Stones usually centres on the Dirty Work album of 1986 and Ronnie Wood says that you can measure how unharmonious the Jagger-Richards marriage was at that stage by the fact that he achieved four co-writes on it. Mick is routinely held up as the baddie of that time because by then he’d signed his own deal with CBS and released She’s the Boss, the first of two solo albums in two and a half years, and toured with his own band.

An alternative point of view, one recounted by Tony King, who was a key part of the Rolling Stones machine for a quarter of a century, is that Mick felt the Stones were in no shape to tour and the new casualty, starting an unfashionably late habit in his mid-forties, was Charlie. His surprising decline into serious overindulgence came to a head during the sessions for Dirty Work. All the Stones were at the Kensington Roof Gardens for a live insert into the 1986 Grammy Awards, in which Eric Clapton presented them with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Two things stood out: one, the absurdity of the fact that the Stones had not only never won a Grammy before, but weren’t even nominated for one until 1978; the other, how skeletally unhealthy Charlie looked.

Herein lies a story that has assumed almost mythological status. The incident took place in either Amsterdam or New York. Mick either was or wasn’t wearing Keith’s dinner jacket. Charlie either laid a blow on Mick or he didn’t. Mick fell into a plate of smoked salmon and almost went out the window or he didn’t.

“Keith has invented a new idea of that,” says Bill. “He says it was in Amsterdam and he saved Mick from going out the window. Complete invention! Keith does that. It was in New York and Mick was entertaining all these celebrities in his hotel suite. I was told this by Paul Wasserman, who was our publicity guy, because he was there. None of the rest of us was there. Keith was asleep.

“Charlie came down, like he was bored, again, looking for somewhere with someone still up and awake. So he comes down, he walks in and Mick goes [to his friends], ‘Oh, it’s Charlie. This is my drummer.’ And Charlie just lost it. He went, ‘I’m not your f***ing drummer; you’re my f***ing vocalist,’ and he went whack and knocked him right across the room. Of course, all these celebs were in total shock and Charlie just walked out.”

Bill continues his received version of events. “Mick said, ‘He must be drunk,’ and the phone rang and they said, ‘Oh, it’s Charlie. I think he wants to come down and apologise.’ So there was a knock on the door again. Mick went there and Charlie said, ‘And don’t you forget it,’ and hit him again.”

To my surprise, Mick doesn’t dismiss the subject when we speak in the lead-up to 2022’s Sixty tour. “I might have said that, but it’s not really the worst thing in the world you can say about anybody, is it? It was sort of a friendly thing. And he didn’t knock me out or even hit me. I remember I was near a balcony, then the security people said, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

Keith has another memory of Charlie losing control. “Some loudmouth had said something. We were in a restaurant somewhere, I think in America… Charlie gave his order, then he stood up and walked around to this guy. He said, ‘I heard what you said,’ and bang. This guy was on the f***ing floor.”

Thankfully, and still in time, Charlie looked in the literal and metaphorical mirror. “I was personally in a hell of a mess and, as a result, I wasn’t really aware of the problems between Mick and Keith and the danger these posed to the band’s existence… I don’t know what made me do it that late in life, although in retrospect I think I must have been going through some kind of midlife crisis. I had never done any serious drugs when I was younger, but at this point in my life I went, ‘Sod it. I’ll do it now,’ and I was totally reckless.

“Some people are able to function like that, but for me it was very dangerous, because I’m the sort of person that could become a casualty quite easily. I just don’t have the constitution. This phase lasted a couple of years, but it took a long time for me, and my family, to get over it.”

Charlie refuted the idea of him as the sensible one in the Stones. “I’m not that sensible,” he said. “But I never used to indulge in anything to excess until about [the age of] 45, so the male menopause, you might say. And I very nearly killed myself. I don’t mean overdosing. I mean I nearly killed myself spiritually. I nearly ruined my life.

“Now, luckily, thanks to my wife, I’ve stopped everything. I’d never broken anything in my life and I broke my ankle, going down to the cellar to get yet another bottle of wine at my home. I was playing at Ronnie’s [Scotts] in about three months’ time. I’d booked the orchestra in there. And I thought, ‘This is it. It’s ridiculous. What have you done?’

“Looking back, it’s silly what I used to do, just over that little period. Accidents happen easily that way… You’re liable to fall down and break your neck.”

The hard-drug spiral certainly endangered Charlie’s marriage, but eventually he had the strength to recognise what he was doing to himself and his family. “My father wasn’t this wonderful person 100 per cent of the time,” says his daughter, Seraphina. “He was a man with his own demons, like every musician. Obviously, he got sober and he was sober a very long time, and there was no fuss and fanfare, no story about that. He got clean and there was no rehab. He just did it.”

Of all the people to compliment his recovery, Charlie received rich posthumous praise from Keith. Years before, talking about the collective misbehaviour of the Exile era, he admitted readily that “drugs were the tool and I was the laboratory”. But he also pointed out that in that early Seventies period, Charlie “did a good dent in the cognac industry”. Fifty years on from that record, Keith reflects, “Charlie could drink and hold it. What he hated about it was that it blew him up. He started to get chubby on it and that is unforgivable for him. A few years later, he was dabbling once or twice, in Paris. But Charlie certainly doesn’t need anything to change the vibes around him. He would make the world’s worst junkie.” On his friend getting clean, he adds with admiration, “I think he realised, ‘I’ve been through this period,’ and said, ‘Done it. Finished. Never again.’ Well done! It took me ten years.”

Charlie’s appetite for collecting was voracious. First-edition books, silverware, flatware, records, photographs… His war memorabilia included bullets that were reputedly fired at the Battle of Little Bighorn in the Great Sioux War of 1876.

“He was worse than me in some ways,” says Bill. “I collected all the [Stones] memorabilia and small bits and pieces. He collected American war stuff. He used to have 14 bloody guns and all kinds of things, all the hats and uniforms. You’d go in his house and they were all displayed, like a museum.”

For Charlie’s daughter, Seraphina, every artefact is a page from her life, just as likely to bring sadness as laughter. She recognises and remembers the stages where her father would have a particular attack of obsessive compulsiveness. “He’s had phases where I can see he’s gone completely OCD-collecting mad throughout his life.”

During the Stones’ 1976 European tour, Lord Lichfield invited Charlie and Mick to stay at his home at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. He gave the pair a private viewing of the house and when Charlie saw the collection of Paul de Lamerie silverware, he politely pointed out that the date on its caption was incorrect. It was disputed, but checked. He was, of course, proved right.

The cars that he never learnt to drive, or needed to, were another obsession. “Charlie had some old American cars, because he loved those, and also Thirties ones,” recalls Jools Holland. “He got the material from one of Edward VIII’s suits and had the car trimmed in the same material, because he had some spare and he thought it was so lovely.”

Charlie was entirely relaxed about spending large sums of money on his own diversions, in part because he also spent vast amounts doing the same for his friends.

“We always bought each other presents, birthdays and Christmas, and we still do,” Bill tells me. “I still get a case of wine from Mick, and Keith sends caviar to us. We send things to each other and we always have done.” When Bill turned 75 in 2011, the band sent him 75 roses.

But Charlie’s munificence with his old friend was another thing again. “I got into archaeology in the Nineties, in my house,” says Bill, “because workmen found something in the grounds and I thought, ‘There’s got to be other stuff here.’ They found a ceramic drinking pot from the 15th century. So I bought a detector and I found a Roman site up the road that no one knew about. I found hundreds of Roman coins and brooches, all kinds of stuff.

“When Charlie found out, he started buying these archaeological items, which were ridiculously expensive. Of course, he was earning tons of money then. I’d left before the big money, just with a small amount to get along with, and happily. The last tour I ever did, tickets were like £29.95 or something. They went into this huge money-earning situation and so he did have the facilities.

“He’d come round just before Christmas, I’d give him his Christmas present and he gave me this long thing. It was quite heavy, and he’d say, ‘Look after it, because it’s a bit special.’ So I’d say, ‘OK, Charlie,’ and I’d put it away. Then we’d go to the country and I’d put it under the tree and then at Christmas [Bill’s wife] Suzanne would say, ‘You’d better have a look at what Charlie got you.’ And I opened this thing, and it was a complete Bronze Age sword from 1000BC.”

In June 2004, Charlie had had the shock of his life – aged 63, he was diagnosed with cancer. He’d had a lump in his neck for two or three years, which was diagnosed as benign, but when it was removed, it was found to be cancerous. Then cancer was also discovered in his left tonsil. “When I first found out about it, I went to bed and cried,” he admitted to me. “I thought that was it, that I’d only have another three months. You go in there and you’re terrified. All the machines... The surgeons and nurses literally have your life in their hands.” Said Keith, “As Charlie put it, ‘One minute I’m standing at Ronnie Scott’s getting a standing ovation and the next minute I’m on a marble slab.’ ”

Doctors told Charlie that a six-week course of radiotherapy would give him a 90 per cent chance of a full recovery. He was able to walk to the Marsden for his appointments, miraculously spared the media glare, although a press release in August confirmed that he was four weeks into his medical care. In early October, Mick said in a press statement the treatment had been successful. Charlie and [his wife] Shirley celebrated a rarely seen phenomenon in rock: a 40th wedding anniversary.

Charlie later talked about his initial absence from the writing and demo sessions for the album that became 2005’s A Bigger Bang. Ironically, a frightening situation necessitated the closest songwriting relationship that Mick and Keith had had for years. That summer they enjoyed the unusual experience in the band’s latter-day history of composing songs in the same room, at the Château de Fourchette, Mick’s residence on the banks of the Loire in Pocé-sur-Cisse. “The basic stuff was done very much around the room, on a couple of couches,” said Keith. “For the first time in many years, we were just together, just Mick and me and, ‘Hey, we’ve got to come up with something.’ ”

Mick said, “When Charlie got sick, it set us back a bit, but what it meant was we [both] got to play guitar and drums and bass for a bit, just the two of us together. So when Charlie did turn up, I had a lot of the beats ready already. We changed ’em, but we had a solid basis and we used elements of the demos I’d done.” When Charlie joined the sessions, Keith said he looked the same, as if he had simply combed his hair and put on a suit.

A Bigger Bang’s lean, knowing songs befitted a band of sixtysomethings (Ronnie was only 58), but it still rocked with unique élan and anyone who expected Charlie to be diminished by his ordeal needed only to hear him fill the room with the exhilarating backbeat of Rough Justice to be proved wrong. I asked if his undiminished playing was a subconscious message to his bandmates that they shouldn’t write him off. “I didn’t want to show them; I wanted to show myself,” he answered. “That’s about the extent of my ego, really.”

Charlie turned 77 on the road as the Stones played the Ricoh Arena in Coventry in June 2018. Always a picky eater, his diet was of concern to family and bandmates. “I would always be on at him about eating,” says Mick. “Especially in the latter days, when you could eat perfectly well and I would force him to eat with me at night. You get bored sitting in your room and there’s no one going to encourage you to eat, so you eat less and less.

“Me and Charlie are probably putting out the most energy [in the show] and he was probably putting out more than I am. You don’t get to stop and you can’t f*** up. If I don’t want to run to the other side of the stage, no one’s going to tell me I have to. If Charlie stops playing, then you’re f***ed. You have to have a good diet and you have to be looked after and, for whatever reason, he wouldn’t eat properly and manage his diet.”

“The last couple of tours, he was feeling it,” says Keith. “It wasn’t just a case of, ‘I don’t feel like it any more.’ He was having to really work those shows and he’d be pretty beaten up after every one.”

The first official notification that Charlie was even one degree under came with the August 2021 announcement that he would not make the beginning of the Stones’ delayed No Filter tour of North America. He had undergone a successful operation, but needed more rest than the rehearsal schedule would allow. “For once, my timing is a little off,” he said in the press statement.

“He was reticent about going on this last tour because he wasn’t feeling very well,” says Mick. “He said, ‘But you’re the cheerleader of the group and if you say I should do it, I’ll do it. Of course I will. I’m happy to.’ ”

Steve Jordan, Keith’s longtime bandmate in the X-Pensive Winos, was the one, the only deputy. The official line that the band were anticipating Charlie’s full recovery, and for him to join the tour later, was genuine. “We were hoping for it and so was Steve,” says Keith. “He said, ‘I’ll keep the chair warm for you, Charlie,’ not expecting that it would be permanent. But Charlie always said to me, ‘If any reason should ever occur that I’m not behind the drums, Steve Jordan is your man.’ He sort of named him as crown prince.”

“I saw Charlie in the hospital,” says Ronnie, “and he was telling me that Steve would definitely be the one to hold it until he could get out on tour. We watched the horse racing and of course he loved Frankie Dettori. The last few days of his hospitalisation, he was like, ‘I don’t like this,’ because he went to a certain level of treatment, then they decided to do some extra work on him.”

Unexpected complications after surgery led to a rapid decline. Mick reveals, “I was speaking to him in hospital and, because he was so untechnical, I sent him a big iPad to watch the cricket on. I set it all up with the apps and he watched some of it on that. But Ronnie had had a similar illness and got better and that’s why I guess I was so confident Charlie was going to do the same thing. It was all so quick. That was the shocking part of it. One minute I was speaking to him about the tour and what the logo was going to be and the next minute he was gone.

“Then it was having to just carry on. Well, we didn’t have to, but it just felt like we should and Charlie said we should. He said, ‘You should do the tour anyway.’ Because it had been delayed [by the pandemic], remember. ‘You can’t cancel it again.’ ”

“We were already well into rehearsals when we got the news,” says Ronnie. “We had a day off and thought, well, Charlie doesn’t want us to sit around and mope. We’ll just get on with it. That was it.”

Extracted from Charlie’s Good Tonight: the Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton

(Guardan)

“Never do the authorised biography,” a colleague once told me. “You’ll find out where the bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking, but you won’t be allowed to publish their location.” That advice surely applies double when the act under consideration is the Rolling Stones, a group who have left in their wake a trail of outrage, depravity, misogyny, addiction and a few real-life cadavers. There has been some decent music at times, too. The group’s incendiary past gets scant airtime here – the hellish Altamont concert of 1969, for example, with its on-film crowd murder, was merely “an event waiting to go wrong”. Even the Stones’ music gets little attention. There are lists of who guested at which shows and on which albums, praise for Charlie Watts’s unerring timing and ability to hold together a rowdy, loose-limbed band (bassist Bill Wyman gets rare praise for his part too) and some commentary on drum technique, but the impact and meaning of the Stones’ music stays unremarked.

It doesn’t much matter. There are already walls of books about the Stones, including Keith Richards’s memoir, Life, and we are here to celebrate the late Watts, who, while bringing stability to their shows and inspiration to their records – the tom-tom gallop of Paint It Black, say – was always ambiguous about Stonehood. As early as 1966 he told Rave magazine: “It’s just a job that pays good money”, which remained his default position. “I have tried to resign after every tour since 1969, but each time they talk me back into it,” he tells author Paul Sexton later in his career. “It’s like being in the army,” he once told NME. “They don’t let you leave.”

He protested too much, of course. Running through the interviews here, whether by Sexton or lifted from other sources, is a strong camaraderie, along with testimony to how much Watts enjoyed playing with the band. “In the Beatle period, when people used to scream at you, girls running down the road, I hated that, used to hide. But there’s nothing like walking on a stage and the place is full of screaming girls.”

Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – jazz’s Picasso – and drummer Chico Hamilton. One of a talented pool orbiting around blues pioneer Alexis Korner in the early 1960s, Watts was headhunted by Jagger, Jones and Richards but faltered. “Should I join this interval band?” he asked his fellow travellers, relenting only after the trio secured enough gigs to match his wage in an advertising agency. Art – his only O-level – remained a passion. He sketched every tour hotel room he occupied, and later advised on the Stones’ elaborate stage sets.

The Stones’ ascent to stardom was swift, astutely overseen by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who traded on their bad-boy image. Though Watts could play along, affecting a gormless, slack-jawed idiocy for TV cameras, he remained wedded to jazz’s cool school, and to his beloved wife Shirley (nee Shepherd), an ex-art student whom he wed when pop-star marriage was considered commercial suicide. The pair prospered, moving from a Regent’s Park flat to a Sussex mansion and finally to a Devon farm, where Shirley established an upmarket stud farm of Arabian horses. Later, during the Stones’ tax exile, they added a French farm, where their daughter Seraphina grew up.

Watts’s personal life is rightly given as much prominence as his career, but it is not drama-filled. He remained a devoted husband and father (later grandfather) and maintained friendships that stretched back to childhood. He never lost his passion for jazz. The orchestra he put together in the late 1980s was internationally acclaimed, and was followed by smaller groups at London’s Ronnie Scott’s. The Stones became wealthy and in later years super-rich – the 147 shows of their 2005 A Bigger Bang tour grossed $558m – enabling Watts to indulge his passions. Always immaculately dressed and always a collector, he freely indulged his passions: endless Savile Row suits, handmade shoes at £4,000 a pop, cashmere sweaters that would be worn once or twice, the purchase of Edward VIII’s suits at Sotheby’s. Then there were the military uniforms, civil war weaponry, Napoleon’s sword, the drum kits of legendary jazzers … and a string of Arabian horses, including the $700,000 purchase of a grey mare.

Sexton, a longtime Stones chronicler, tells Watts’s story with warmth and diligence, though difficult issues are ducked – the causes of Watts’s flirtation with heroin in the 1980s remain opaque – and there are some unctuous turns of phrase. The Stones’ late career albums, mediocre at best, become “greatly underrated”, “an improbable triumph” or “undervalued delights”. Even a passing PR man is “a revered writer”. Never do the authorised biography.

Other books on Rolling Stones

Prince Among Stones
Beatles vs Stones
Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
The Stones
The Sun and the Moon

Robert Crumb

THERE’S A COMIC by Robert Crumb from 1979 called “A Short History of America.” It’s 12 panels, all portraying a single spot of land. In the first, we see a bucolic field abutting a forest, birds flying overhead. In the second, there are fewer trees and a train rolling down a track, ejecting plumes of black smoke. Soon, there’s a log cabin, then telephone poles, then asphalt and cars. Then the trees disappear entirely and the house becomes a general store, the general store becomes a gas station, the gas station becomes a used-car lot and the sky, once so big, is almost completely obscured by crisscrossing electric wires. A small box in the final panel, containing the only text apart from the title, asks, “What next?!!”

This is the work of Crumb’s I keep thinking about on the summer afternoon I arrive in a medieval village in the Cévennes region of southern France. Crumb moved here in 1991 with his wife, the comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and their daughter, Sophie, who was 10 at the time. They found a place that feels like it’s almost protected from the march of progress. Cars aren’t allowed in town; to get to the Crumbs’ house, I have to walk across a weathered bridge that traverses a murky canal. Affixed to the front door are what appear to be Catholic prayer cards though, on closer inspection, they depict Elvis Presley in a state of religious ecstasy. Inside, we go upstairs to a dimly lit office, with shelves of 78 r.p.m. records, mostly from the 1920s and ’30s (Crumb owns 8,000 of them; he’s been collecting “old music of all kinds from all over the world” since he was 16), a bulky metal drawing board, various instruments (he’s an accomplished musician), stacks of faded newspapers and books with titles like “Because Our Fathers Lied,” “UFOs and Nukes” and “Grey Aliens and the Harvesting of Souls.” (“I’m very interested in fringe things like that,” Crumb says.) I ask the couple, who have been together since 1971 and married in 1978, how they ended up here.

“Ask her,” Crumb tells me, gesturing to his wife. “It was all her doing. She comes from a long line of salespeople, and she just sold me on the idea of moving to France.”

In the ’80s, the couple lived in California’s Central Valley, in a small town called Winters nestled between Sacramento and San Francisco. “The fabulous ’80s,” Crumb says grimly. “Not a good decade in the United States.” (“It was like now,” says Kominsky-Crumb, “but not quite as bad.”) AIDS was killing their friends. A rising conservative Christian movement was accusing Crumb of being immoral. President Ronald Reagan had cut education funding, just as he’d done as governor, so there were no longer art or music classes at Sophie’s school. The Crumbs volunteered, teaching drawing, though at a certain point fewer students began showing up. A local preacher had been telling families that the Crumbs were “agents of the devil.”

“So we had to get out,” Kominsky-Crumb says. “And I guess I had some romantic idea about living in the south of France.” “Some of that romance turned out to be true,” Crumb says. Then he adds, “Maybe you shouldn’t even mention the name of the town. I don’t want people showing up here.”

Crumb used to attend comic conventions and book signings, but now he makes very few public appearances. He never really picked up French (he relies on Kominsky-Crumb for that), and his social circle is small. Crumb’s followed in the long line of artists and writers who have exiled themselves from America, but his life abroad feels far more circumscribed than most. He doesn’t even have a cellphone. (At one point, he looks at his wife’s and says earnestly, “It’s listening to us right now.”) He uses email but “I worry about it,” he says. “Any email you write goes into the N.S.A. computer banks.” He’s only voted once in his life, for Barack Obama in 2008. Yet even living thousands of miles from America, disconnected from its culture by so many moats of his own making, he is, like many of his expatriate predecessors, a dedicated and unflinching observer of home. It was his ability to capture the id of America — in all its decadence, hypocrisy and lecherousness — that established him as an artist; that ability is unmatched nearly six decades later. He’s been called an “equal opportunity offender”: For his entire career, he’s angered the left, the right and everyone in between. It’s why his work remains, more than that of perhaps any other artist today, a litmus test for how much we’re willing to put up with for the sake of art.

CRUMB BEGAN BY publishing his work in the late ’60s in San Francisco’s underground comics scene, which arose alongside Timothy Leary’s acid tests and psychedelia. (Crumb was a regular user of LSD, but he hated what he calls “hippie music.”) American comics — at least, independent, non-superhero comics — were still something of a nascent form then, arguably the era’s least corporate, most anarchic type of expression. Even the Grateful Dead had at one point a deal with a major record label, but comics artists — Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, Joel Beck — had no executives putting commercial pressures on them. Crumb published his early work in humor magazines and underground papers and sold stapled, self-printed comics out of head shops, introducing iconic characters that would become countercultural totems: Mr. Natural, a godlike imp and con man; the sex fiend Snoid; Fritz the Cat, a lampooning of the shallow hipster, who became his most famous character. (The animator Ralph Bakshi made a popular “Fritz the Cat” film, released in 1972; Crumb hated it so much that he retired the character — by having Fritz’s ostrich ex-girlfriend stab him in the head with an ice pick.) To counteract his reputation as “America’s best-loved hippie cartoonist,” Crumb made his work darker, creepier, more twisted and upsetting. By 1969, he was drawing “Joe Blow,” featuring a sweet, smiling all-American family — who fornicate with each other while shouting phrases like “I never realized how much fun you could have with your children!”

Despite such material, Crumb has always had a paradoxically grandfatherly aura. At age 79, he’s skinny and still strangely handsome, his khakis hiked above his waist. While his status as an alt legend has been secure for decades, it’s only in recent years that he’s truly transcended the comics medium to the realm of fine artist. These days, Crumb is shown by one of the largest commercial galleries in the world, David Zwirner, which also represents Barbara Kruger, the estates of Diane Arbus and Alice Neel and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. In 2015, the “Star Wars” creator George Lucas purchased Crumb’s surprisingly faithful 2009 adaptation of the Book of Genesis for $2.9 million (at least according to a 2017 comic called “Aline & Bob in Troubles With Money”). Crumb’s notebooks, which he’s saved through the years, sell for close to a million dollars each. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose father was an independent comics distributor, has said he’s “picked up a couple” of Crumb originals. At a time of increasing conservatism, there is a greater demand for an artist so monumentally lacking in shame, and so averse to self-censorship.

It helps that Crumb is, as the gallerist David Zwirner describes him to me, “an extraordinary draftsman,” one whose style zooms in on “the absurdity of social conventions, and political realities, and stereotypes and sexual fantasies and fetishes.” Early on, the artist forged a singular technique full of crosshatchings and an exaggerated realism that has left many viewers angry and uncomfortable. Everything and everyone was a gruesome stereotype: Women were sex objects with excessive curves, Black people had features that recalled an ugly history of racist caricatures and Crumb himself was frequently seen doing disgusting things like masturbating out a window.

Encountering Crumb today feels like being in a staring match with an artist who’s still almost daring the culture to eject him. “The average people out there,” he tells me, “what they know of my work ... either they love it because they are degenerates themselves or they hate it because they stand with the forces of political correctness.” His iconography includes every taboo imaginable: not only incest and racism but also sexual assault, castration, self-mutilation and murder.

Such images feel at once old-fashioned, relics of a less enlightened time, and more relevant than ever in an era when art often seems to be policed for potential sin. There has always been, and continues to be, much debate regarding Crumb’s true nature: Is he a genuine pervert or simply an artist who made perversion his subject? Is he himself prejudiced or satirizing a racist culture in which he came of age? Commentators have emerged on both sides of this debate. The curator Robert Storr has argued that Crumb points out “the extreme illogic of prejudice by mocking it,” though in the ’90s, an American neo-Nazi publication, taking Crumb at face value, reprinted some of his work without permission, much to the artist’s displeasure. In 2011, Crumb canceled his appearance at an Australian festival after an article in The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney described him as a “very warped human being,” and quoted a child abuse activist calling his work “crude and perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind.” Of “Joe Blow,” Deirdre English, the former editor of the progressive magazine Mother Jones, has said, “On the one hand, it’s a satire of the 1950s, the healthy facade of the American family, and it kind of exposes the sickness under the surface. But at the same time, you sense that Crumb is getting off on it. ... It’s a self-indulgent orgy, and a fantasy. ... It’s part of an arrested, juvenile vision.”

His defenders, who include cartoonists like Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry, have argued it is a dangerous misreading to claim that, by exploring ugly and evil things, Crumb is endorsing them. “He pushes all limits in order to bring every guilty impulse or thought pattern to light, where it can be examined in all its ridiculous, risible nakedness,” Storr wrote last year. In a 2008 interview, Barry characterized his appeal, especially to artists, most succinctly: “What R. Crumb gave me was this feeling that you could draw anything,” she said.

In drawings and in conversation, Crumb refers disdainfully to “the wokies,” even as he claims to be on their side. “The whole identity politics and L.G.B.T.Q. stuff,” he tells me, “I agree with it. These people need an equal share. I can’t argue with that. But then people get kind of intolerant about anything that could be seen as triggering.” In the fall of 2020, Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the graphic novel “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2002) and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, was accused of “curriculum-based trauma” by students in a comics course, in part because she showed them Crumb’s work. This surprised Gloeckner, who had never had this kind of problem in 18 years of teaching at the school. She started reading Crumb the way a lot of people do — by stumbling upon it as a child (her parents hid his comics under their bed). “When I was a kid,” she tells me, “I was really threatened by images of pretty girls in teen magazines and the idea that, to be taken seriously as a person, I had to look a certain way. When I looked at how he drew women, it was liberating.” Many of her students didn’t agree.

Crumb, who read me emails from Gloeckner, was clearly bothered by what happened, not because the students didn’t like his work — lots of people don’t, and he himself has dismissed his art as “only lines on paper” — but because he felt they had failed to engage with it: Trauma and discomfort were the whole point. The rot of our society is undeniable, he says, so, rather than repress the horror, he wants to make it impossible to avoid.

HE’S BEEN CONFRONTING that rot for most of his life. Crumb grew up in Philadelphia and attended Catholic schools, a scene he has revisited frequently in his work: the young Crumb, sweat dripping down his forehead, mouth agape, staring at the female students in their uniforms, looking not so much lustful as perplexed. As a teenager, he was deeply invested in Catholicism for about a year. “I remember walking around thinking, ‘If these people don’t get their act together, they’re gonna go to hell!’” he tells me. Later, his father would admit to him that he was an atheist all along.

The Crumbs are one of the most dysfunctional families in the annals of contemporary art, and their deterioration was closely examined in Terry Zwigoff’s classic 1995 documentary, “Crumb.” Crumb’s father was in the Marines for 20 years and had a temper. His mother was a housewife and an amphetamine addict. When Crumb was 15, she hurled an ashtray at her husband and missed, hitting her son in the face.

The oldest and youngest children were Crumb’s two sisters, Carol and Sandra, the only two siblings not to participate in “Crumb.” In the middle were the three brothers — Charles, Robert, Maxon — all gifted artists. Maxon began suffering from epileptic seizures as a teenager, which he has said were brought on by sexual activity. He spoke openly in “Crumb” about sexually assaulting women in the 1970s and being placed in a psychiatric ward for two weeks. Charles, who was intermittently institutionalized throughout his life, was a Disney obsessive and got Robert interested in making comics. But Charles wasn’t able to hold a job or leave home, and was treated for schizophrenia. He committed suicide in 1992.

Given his family history, I ask Crumb if he’s ever been to therapy. “No,” he says, though he once made an attempt. He didn’t attend college, and when he was 19, he moved to Cleveland. “I was profoundly, chronically depressed,” Crumb says. “I didn’t have any money for a therapist, but I went to this clinic that was associated with Western Reserve University. These students would give you therapy, practicing to be psychiatrists or whatever. So I talked to this guy for a couple of hours. He didn’t say much. And at the end, I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Eh, you’ll probably get over it.’” Instead, creating comics became “therapy, of a kind,” he says. “It just kept me alive, basically. Otherwise, I was nothing — just a cipher, a ghost in the world. I couldn’t do anything else. It maybe saved me from becoming more of a sociopath.”

The critic Robert Hughes has compared him to Bruegel, with his images of hedonism and suffering, but Crumb also evokes a painting tradition in Weimar-era Germany called lustmord, literally “sex murder,” in which artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz painted scenes of rape and mutilated female bodies that captured the nihilism in Europe between the world wars. Yet Crumb is perhaps most directly indebted to the 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who helped bring down Tammany Hall and New York’s Boss Tweed political machine. A framed Nast hangs in the Crumbs’ hallway: an 1871 drawing of a tiger (a representation of Tammany politics) mauling a woman, who stands for justice, before an enormous audience in a coliseum. “What are you going to do about it?” reads the caption.

Although Crumb’s work hasn’t softened in recent years, it has changed. He’s now gazing less directly at a bigoted, violent world and instead examining his distance from it. Now he’s a grandfather — Sophie, who has three children, lives a short drive away — and his comics from the past five years are often about that.

But he continues to test the boundaries of audiences. His newest comic is “The Crumb Family Covid Exposé” (2021), made with Kominsky-Crumb, 74, and Sophie — each drawing and writing themselves — and published as a limited-run magazine by David Zwirner. Crumb caught Covid-19 last fall but, well before that, he’d developed extreme conspiracy theories about the pandemic. He calls himself “resolutely anti-vax.” In conversation, he is fixated on his distrust of the medical community though, in his work, he doesn’t present this worldview as correct, or even necessarily valid. He seems to be dissecting a contrarian impulse in himself the same way he used to look at his twisted sexual fantasies. His wife, a cancer survivor, is vaccinated and, at one point in the comic, believing the shot has made her arm magnetic, he tries to see if a spoon will stick to her. “Is this a crazy person?” he asks of himself, drawing himself very much like a crazy person.

He’s still willing, in other words, to make himself ugly and unlikable in his work. There’s a question that recurs in a lot of Crumb’s art, which I found myself wondering about as he dismissed the Covid vaccines to me as merely a way to enrich Big Pharma. It’s some variation of “What’s wrong with this guy?” In one comic, called “Anal Antics” (1971), the byline is “R. ‘What-Does-It-All-Mean?’ Crumb,” and the plot features Snoid living inside a woman’s posterior. In the first panel, there’s a subtitle: “More sick humor which serves no purpose.”

“I guess the question,” I say to him, “is ‘what is the purpose?’” “That’s a question that I often imagine being asked of me by the tribunal that I’m in front of,” he says, “up there on their dais high above me. And I just have to stand there like this.” He shrugs exaggeratedly.

“No artist who’s honest knows why he does something,” Kominsky-Crumb adds. But what Crumb does know is that he didn’t really have a choice. He describes exploring the darkness buried within him as nothing less than a physical impulse: “I felt like it had to come out.” And people couldn’t help but look. How everybody else responded was their problem. It was never Crumb’s.

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit 'Margaritaville' in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky 'Cheeseburger in Paradise.' He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure. Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him 'Uncle Warren.' (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a 55 and better active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents - even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us - our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, Paumgarten writes, then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol. (As it happened, Paumgarten's article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet - and also thoroughly capitalist - context about Buffett's empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett's Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all. And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o'clock somewhere.

Pauline Boty

To her friends at art school Pauline Boty was “the Wimbledon Bardot”. She was “a flibbertigibbet”, said one contemporary. “Flamboyant, baroque,” said another. “Technicolor,” said a third. Mothers disapproved of this “good-time girl”. “A saucy-looking blonde with a high-jumper’s legs,” said the Sunday Mirror. “Once aptly described as an ice-cream of a girl,” reported the Evening Standard. “Beautiful”, “flirtatious”, “sensational”, said others.

When interviewed by the playwright and author Nell Dunn for her book Talking to Women (1965), Boty thought herself lucky to have been “pretty attractive to men . . . I have a, quite a sexual sort of quality, but along with a thing that’s kind of like, oh, a happy, dumb blonde, you see.”

There are two things people know about Boty — and they may know no more than those two things — that she was drop-dead gorgeous and that she died terribly young: of lymphatic cancer in 1966 at the age of 28 and just four months after the birth of her daughter, Boty Goodwin. Her beauty was a blessing — you couldn’t miss her, she lit up every room, every party, every Sixties protest and happening — and a curse — it stopped people looking at her art, or if they did look, stopped them looking at it seriously. Just a happy, dumb blonde, you see?

A new biography of Boty sets out to change all that. Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister, by the art and design historian Marc Kristal, puts Boty at the heart of British pop art and swinging Sixties London. Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney . . . and Pauline Boty.

Her star has been rising for a while. Her paintings, lost to the loft of her parents’ house after her death, were rediscovered by her daughter in 1993. Some were exhibited in the Barbican’s The Sixties Art Scene in London exhibition that same year. Many readers will have discovered her through Ali Smith’s Booker prize-nominated novel Autumn in which Boty steals the show. Last year, Boty’s painting With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962) sold at Sotheby’s for £1,159,500, setting a new record for her paintings. (When the magazine Men Only put Boty and Belmondo on their cover, they cropped the image so that the artist, wearing a strapless top, would appear to be naked.)

Boty’s The Only Blonde in the World features in the Sixties room in the Tate Britain rehang. It has often been mistaken for a memorial to Marilyn Monroe, a sad final sashay, painted after her death. But Kristal points out that Boty was working on the painting before Monroe’s death in 1962. It’s a rave, not a requiem. At the National Portrait Gallery, also newly rehung, Boty’s self-portrait in stained glass hangs in room 28. The knowingly naughty Boty reimagines herself as a saintly figure from a cathedral window.

Boty was born at home on March 6, 1938 to Albert, a chartered accountant who, according to his daughter, was rather “anti-woman” and “Victorian” in his outlook, and Veronica, an Irish Catholic who spent much of Pauline’s childhood desperately ill with tuberculosis. As a teenager she petitioned to go to Wimbledon School of Art (hence “Wimbledon Bardot”), then to the Royal College of Art to study stained glass (it wasn’t a popular course and it was thought an easy way to get in). Kristal’s chapter on life at the postwar Royal College is wonderfully evocative.

The book is a portrait of Boty and of her age. If you were to invent the cultural historian’s dream of a Sixties girl, you would come up with Boty. In an essay she read for the BBC radio program The Public Ear, broadcast in February 1964 when she was 25, Boty took on the women of England and their “ ‘don’t whatever you do look at me’ look”. Those “dreary, dreary country girls” about to be married to some colonel or stockbroker’s son. “Got your shapeless sweater on?” she asked. “Your sat-out tweed skirt, your horsy schoolgirl manner and ugly, raw, upper-class voice?” She railed against these wives, each one “a nondescript appendage, a second-class citizen”.

But the times they were a-changing and the Sixties they were a-swinging. The younger girls were leading the pack. “They’re not going to be squashed and certainly don’t intend to be wallflowers . . . All over the country young girls are sprouting, shouting and shaking, and if they terrify you, they mean to and they’re beginning to impress the world.” Goodbye to “that cold, cardigan-clad, sexless ghost traditionally known to the world as the English woman”. Hello to women like Boty, in her Mary Quant minidress, her white knee-boots, her backcombed hair and her 8ft-long feather boas. Boty the bombshell, Boty the beatnik.

After art school, trying to be a painter, but horribly hard up, she waitressed at Terence Conran’s first restaurant, the Soup Kitchen, which had the city’s second Gaggia espresso machine. (Boty and Celia Birtwell, later a fashion designer immortalised in paint by Hockney, used to fiddle the till so that Boty had money to buy stretchers for her canvases.) Boty lived in a bedsit, cooked tins of baked beans and sardines on a paraffin stove and consumed buckets of instant coffee.

There was a stint at acting, a spot of modelling and a clinch in a dry cleaner’s with Michael Caine in Alfie. She danced the twist in a documentary filmed by Ken Russell and appeared on stage at the Royal Court in a golden bra in a play for which she designed the programme. She screen-tested opposite Tom Courtenay for the part of the free-spirited Liz in Billy Liar (Julie Christie got it).

If it was the age of the sprouting, shouting, shaking young woman, it was the age, too, of the Angry Young Man. When Boty met Clive Goodwin he had just played Jimmy Porter, the original furious young man, in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Goodwin was an actor, film and TV producer and, later, literary agent who would represent David Hare, Fay Weldon, Stephen Frears and Ken Loach, among others. They married after ten days - "Don't you dare tell my parents," Boty told her sister-in-law - and were heedlessly happy. “He’s the one person I can throw saucepans at and he doesn't mind,” Boty told one friend. To another, she said simply: "Clive made me laugh." Goodwin had one of the very first Minis off the production line; Boty had her hair cut in a Vidal Sassoon bob.

What Boty really wanted to do was paint, although she found it a lonely calling, 'a terrible fight' that occasionally yielded a 'lovely bit'. She coined a phrase "nostalgia for NOW", which sums up the tone of her pictures: collaged images from the news, cuttings about celebrities, adverts, pornography and the telly. When the Profumo affair was all anyone could talk about she responded with two paintings, one of which picks up the infamous Lewis Morley photograph of Christine Keeler in that chair.

It's terribly unfair, the Boty story. She died when she was only just getting going. One of her final paintings, the very cheeky Bum (1966), is a riotous, exuberant experiment in colour, lettering and stage architecture, riffing mischievously on the shape of a woman’s naked back and bottom and a pair of theatre curtains. She ought to be a grande dame of British pop art, making interviewers quake as she answers questions through a wreath of cigarette smoke.

Like Bridget Riley (born 1931), Rose Wylie (born 1934) or Maggi Hambling (born 1945), she could still be painting. She might have switched to journalism, become a Katherine Whitehorn (1928-2021), or an author like Jilly Cooper (born 1937). Her broadcasts for The Public Ear are funny, provocative, bang on the money. Boty was paid 15 guineas for her fortnightly monologues for the BBC. (Reading the credits to one of her segments, George Harrison of that dangerously popular new band the Beatles, signed her off as "Pauline Botty . . . Botty? . . . Boty, sorry about that Pauline.")

She told Dunn that although her pregnancy was an accident, "I'm secretly more pleased about it than I could ever admit". Then the awful news. At one of her prenatal visits, tests revealed that she had lymphatic cancer or possibly leukaemia. To have the radiotherapy that might have saved her life, she would have to terminate the pregnancy, and she refused to countenance it. "I want the baby, I'll take the consequence."

She had had an abortion while at the Royal College of Art and it is possible that she couldn’t bear to make the decision again. Some friends speculated that she desperately wanted to leave something behind — a child — and wasn’t confident that her art would be her legacy. Tragedy followed tragedy: Goodwin died in 1977, aged 45, when he suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. Their daughter, Boty, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 at just 29.

This book brings Boty to life: brave, flirty and fizzing with promise. A girl of the Sixties who should have lived to see and paint the decades to come.

Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister by Marc Kristal

William Lever

You can’t write about palm oil without writing about personal care products, and you can’t write about personal care products without writing about William Lever, the “Lever” in “Unilever.” Trying to do so is like writing about social media without mentioning Elon Musk: In some sense all the important stuff was done before he came on the scene; in another sense he encapsulates everything that was important.

Lever’s great contribution to humanity was being the first person to put soap in a box, even though he didn’t invent a single goddamn one of the processes involved in doing this. He was merely a megalomaniac and a marketer, but when he died, obituaries compared him both to Napoleon and to Henry Ford. Lever was born to a Scottish grocer in Liverpool in 1851, at a time when grocery was a skilled if somewhat scattered profession. Soon after Lever’s birth, his father transitioned from retail grocery to wholesale, and Lever joined the family firm at the age of 16. Initially, he expanded the company, setting up new branches and direct relationships with suppliers in Ireland, but eventually decided to specialize in soap.

A grocer had to know everything from how to blend tea to how to cure ham, how to store each of his wares in optimum condition, and then break it down for retail sale – including soap, which was bought from wholesalers in large blocks, then sliced or flaked to order. In theory, the customer need not know or care who made their soap, since they could rely on the grocer’s advice and expertise, and the grocer himself could rely on a wholesaler. Manufacturers dealt solely with wholesalers; consumers barely entered their worldview. By wrapping pre-cut bars of soap in vegetable parchment and enclosing them in branded boxes, Lever not only created a product that a grocer could simply put on a shelf, he established a direct relationship between manufacturers and consumers.

That soap was called Sunlight. Based on a class of soaps known as “self-washers” because they lathered easily, it was originally one of over thirty Sunlight soaps – Sunlight XXX, Sunlight XX, Sunlight Mottled Brown, etc. Most of these weren’t what we’d call soap today, because we didn’t yet have a category of “detergents,” though the notion of a “toilet soap,” i.e. soap for the body, was emerging. According to the founding myth Lever propagated, he decided to make Sunlight Self-Washer his flagship product after a Lancashire washerwoman told him “I mun ha’ some more of yon stinkin’ soap” (the original formulation sweated drops of rancid oil, giving the soap a characteristic aroma, though the oil washed off during its first use).

When Lever decided to go into soap manufacturing himself, in 1884, he engaged a staff of chemists to tweak the formula of Sunlight Self-Washer (formerly manufactured for him by Joseph Watson & Sons), arriving at a blend of 41.9% palm kernel or coconut oil, 24.8% tallow, 23.8% cottonseed oil, and 9.5% resin, plus a blend of perfumes including rosemary oil.

But Lever’s soap in a box was merely the pointy antenna atop a Chrysler building of real scientific and technological development, most of which happened a few short decades before he appeared on the scene.

Here is a list of things Lever didn’t do:

He did not invent soapmaking. I’m inclined to forgive this one, because soap is older than recorded history.

He was not even the first person to commercialize palm oil soap. Palm oil soap had been in use in Africa since antiquity, and early European arrivals actually traded for the soap as well as the raw oil. Once exports of palm oil started arriving in Europe in the late 18th century, soapmakers adopted it enthusiastically. It lent an appealing yellow color to their soaps, its faint scent of violets meant they could cut back on the use of other perfumes, and palm oil’s reputation as an emollient and a medicine made palm oil soap a luxury – to the point where it was counterfeited, tallow soaps dyed yellow with other colorants. But imports of palm oil grew rapidly, so much so that by the 1820s, some soaps were made entirely with palm oil, which had become cheaper than tallow. Liverpool displaced London as the UK’s center of soap manufacturing, mostly because that’s where shipments of palm oil from Africa were unloaded, and every soap-boiler in Liverpool relied on palm.

He didn’t make any breakthroughs in chemical manufacturing. The other reason soap factories flocked to Liverpool was that a chemical plant there churned out massive quantities of soda ash, soap’s other essential ingredient. By this point, Europeans had deforested their continent to the point where wood ash was too scarce to provide all the alkali they needed. Louis XVI offered a prize (there’s clearly a pattern to technological development in France) to the first person who could synthesize the stuff, and Nicolas Leblanc came up with what sounds like a frankly bonkers process involving sulfuric acid at 900ºC. The Leblanc process came with some drawbacks – it released clouds of gaseous hydrochloric acid, and produced an almost equal weight of solid waste known as “galligu,” which was spread around nearby fields, where it released hydrogen sulfide (which gives rotten eggs their smell) as it decomposed. Fortunately, by the time Lever started his soap factory, the Leblanc process was being replaced by the somewhat less hazardous Solvay process (which, obviously, Lever didn’t invent either).

He was not the first person to make soap for sale in bars. According to Lever himself, “I was the first to advertise extensively a tablet soap although makers had produced tablet soaps prior to my commencement in 1884, but they had not pushed them and they were little known…. Then their tablets were wrapped with ordinary common paper and the sweating of the soap destroyed the paper.”

He did not invent cardboard, wrapping paper, or the use of cardboard as packaging. The first commercial use of a paperboard package is generally dated to 1817. While most references suggest the process of manufacturing such boxes was invented in England, the first product packaged in cardboard seems to have been a German board game. Flaked cereals, the killer app for such boxes, only came along in 1894.

Despite my mockery, there’s something deeply true about Lever’s story. He’s the kind of character who we’d have had to invent if he didn’t exist, because his story is the story of how the modern consumer was born.

I write this in spite of the fact that he wasn’t even the first person to create a consumer brand, or the first manufacturer to publish advertising directed at individuals. Tobacco and tea were already being sold in what we would recognize today as consumer packaging. Some of Heinz’s 57 varieties of preserved foods were already on the market. Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, among other American companies, were certainly engaged in the practice already, and indeed Lever referred to the US as “the El Dorado of commercial prosperity” and maintained scouts in the US to keep himself informed of the latest developments in advertising. In a way all Lever was, was in the right place at the right time. He stood atop not just an edifice of technology that he did not invent, but a mountain of socioeconomic change that he did not cause. Consider all these other things William Lever didn’t do:

He was in no way responsible for the exploding consumption of soap in Britain, which grew 15x between 1800 and 1900 – an approximately 5x increase per capita, from 1.6 to 7.7kg per year (much of this during the first quarter of the century), coupled with a trebling of the population. That was a result of the industrial revolution, which not only fueled demand by making sure everyone in Britain was coated in soot, but also supplied it, propagating the chemical processes, trade routes, and industrial organization needed to increase the production of soap (and many other goods) on this scale. In Britain, the price of soap fell by half between 1821 and 1846 – partly because of the falling price of palm oil, and partly because the first soda ash plant (using the Leblanc process) came online in 1824.

He didn’t shape the the great enrichment. Lever entered business at a time when large chunks of the population of Britain (around 70% by 1900) began to enjoy a disposable income. At the same time, urbanization and industrialization – both of which contributed to disposable income becoming a mass phenomenon – created conditions in which people needed to wash more often, and also uprooted them from rural communities which fulfilled most of their needs, thereby causing them to need to buy things with the cash in their pockets.

And he didn’t create the mores and obsessions of Victorian Britain (though he certainly amplified and propagated them): the belief in progress and the civilizing mission; the phobia of dirt and the working class body; the obsession with mental and physical purity; and the consequent fears around adulteration, which attached themselves to every item in the grocer’s inventory.

Swept up in the second industrial revolution, workers in Britain for the most part decided to use their newfound purchasing power to improve their lives: They bought convenience, domestic harmony, and ultimately, respectability. Convenience is in some sense a fact – there are ways of doing things that just take less effort. But respectability is a more emotional construct, and what Lever did better than any of his peers was to offer this intangible for sale. He demonstrated what you could accomplish by selling a little bit of sunlight to a lot of people.

I think Lever dominates the imagination (or at least my imagination) because everything else about this moment is so diffuse and hard to pin down. Technological developments and legal maneuverings and systems of belief, all coming together like fronts in a storm. Lever by contrast is human: a small, slightly rotund Scotsman, with eyes that look blue even in sepia photos. Even if Lever’s success owes much to historical forces, Lever himself still marshaled them, so when we look at him, all of those forces seem a little clearer.

Kaleb Cooper

On the hit series Clarkson’s Farm, he’s the sidekick who puts his boss in his place. Now he’s the one being stopped for selfies, publishing books — his third is just out — and touring the country doing live shows.

Kaleb Cooper doesn’t sleep much. Today he was up at 5am to feed his beef cattle and pigs, before meeting his seven-man contracting team to check their machinery was fuelled and greased for a day of muck-spreading. It preys on him that a lousy summer means the winter wheat still isn’t in, and there are many acres of winter crops left to plant. He works a 115-hour week, but even when he falls exhausted from his tractor into bed, his brain broils with ideas. So his office manager, Daisy, gave him a notebook and he returned it the first morning with seven pages of money-making schemes, some of them mad, “like harvesting grass for guinea pigs”, but a few rather brilliant.

Such as buying an incubator to hatch “fancy chickens like Pekin bantams, which posh people love, and I can guarantee they won’t look after, so they’ll probably die and then they’ll buy some more”. Or renting out hay bales for festivals and weddings, charging a penalty of £10 for each one broken and offering, for an additional fee, to clear up the scattered hay with his big tractor rake, which he bales up again and feeds to his cattle. His beady blue eyes gleam with mischief. You’ve really got the number of these rich London types, I say. “I’m not trying to rip people off,” he insists, all innocent. “I hate that. I’m very honest.”

Andy Wilman, producer of Clarkson’s Farm, says Cooper has “animal cunning — but I mean that in a good way. He’s far, far cleverer than people think.” While Jeremy Clarkson himself describes Cooper as “the most entrepreneurial person I have ever met”.

The graveyard in Chipping Norton is filled with the bones of Cooper’s ancestors. His uncle is buried there and his gran visits his grave three times a day. Going as far back as anyone can remember, his family has lived within a ten-mile radius. His mother is from Chippy, his dad from Over Norton. Yet the Cotswolds is owned not by people like them, but wealthy newcomers: politicians, pop stars, journalists and hedge-fund managers who buy up land with honey-coloured stone houses attached, including, of course, Clarkson at his 1,000-acre Diddly Squat Farm.

There are two ways of seeing this, says Cooper. “You can be annoyed at these people and say they’re taking over your home. Or you can have the mindset I have, which is, I am a contractor. Someone comes in and buys 50 acres; normally they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. So I say, ‘Right, if you pay me, I’ll sort it out for you.’ You get the money — it’s an opportunity.”

Cooper, 26, has been seizing opportunities since he was 13 years old. The latest of them — amazingly for a chronic truant — is publishing a series of successful books. The World According to Kaleb and Britain According to Kaleb sold 118,000 copies in total. They, like the new one, It’s a Farming Thing, were “written” by Cooper sitting in his tractor chatting his thoughts into a Dictaphone to be knocked into shape by a writer. This year, his 37-date, 6-week theatre show, which he also wrote, was watched by 59,000 people.

Kaleb — with his earthy, memorable Old Testament name — has become a brand, which transcends his role as Clarkson’s tractor driver and now farm manager. He has 2.8 million Instagram followers, fans of the show but who identify more with him than Jeremy. He appeals to the early-rising, resourceful folk who keep the world turning. Not just farmers, but the builders, plasterers (like his late beloved “Gramp”) or mechanics who seldom see themselves on TV, especially getting the better of rich chumps.

Those who leave their home towns (or home countries) to seek their fortunes elsewhere are frequently portrayed on TV. But what about those who choose to stay? “The modern cliché I’ve come to loathe most,” says Clarkson, “is when we say someone has ‘been on a journey’. Kaleb’s journey is about four miles. He has no desire to live in Monaco or Los Angeles. He just wants to buy a farm in Chipping Norton where all his family live.” But that in itself is a titanic quest in an area where 100 acres costs upwards of £4 million.

We meet at the Fox in Chipping Norton, which is the polar north of Cooper’s internal map. His tiny horizons, which amuse the world-travelled Clarkson, remind me of a character in Jez Butterworth’s rural elegy Jerusalem who says, “I’ve never seen the point of other countries … If I leave Wiltshire, my ears pop.” He doesn’t own a passport, has never been abroad, taken a plane or even a train. Waking up in Scotland on his tour, “I felt lost, I’m so stuck in my old routine.” He likes to be “where he knows how everything works”, that if he’s caught short he can go over there (he points to the public toilets) or if he has a puncture, someone will help. “So when I go away, I’m out of my comfort zone. If the fuel pump went in my car, who would I go to? I get nervous then.” Yet his natural curiosity, along with the opportunities he’s now offered, are tugging him into the unknown.

Cooper is taller than I expect — perhaps because Clarkson is 6ft 4in — and broad, with a merry, instantly likeable face. He wears a fleece advertising his business, his only vanity being his hair, which he’s anxious will soon fall out. Instead of lunch he orders olives, which having never tried until recently, he’s mad about. Prime Video (which commissions Clarkson’s Farm) sent him an olive tree as a present “but it doesn’t grow f*** all”. I tell him about the vibrating machine that shakes them from trees in Greece and he’s off talking about how apples are harvested. Then he tells me his favourite roasts in order: beef, lamb, pork, chicken. If I were in TV, I’d commission Cooper to travel the world discovering how rice or pineapples are grown and boggling at the vastness of sheep stations in Australia, where he’s adored. “Australia is calling me,” he says. “But it’s pretty far flung, isn’t it?” Well, yes. “Oh, f*** that.”

Cooper is an old-fashioned combination of unworldly and knowledgeable. To him Clarkson was just this bloke who kept having fancy sports cars delivered (to review) while Cooper worked for his tenant farmer at the time, Howard Pauling. When Pauling retired, Clarkson decided to make a TV series about farming the land himself and Cooper, who was kept on, had no idea he’d appear on screen until he was called to the office and miked up. Andy Wilman recalls his debut, where he spontaneously berated Jeremy for a badly drilled field. “Here was this 21-year-old, completely unselfconscious about bollocking the big beast of Top Gear. He took Jeremy apart with such charm and wit. We high-fived in the editing suite: it was TV gold.”

Cooper wasn’t acting. He was professionally offended: a field he’d sown and harvested for years was a mess. What if a local farmer passed by and assumed it was his terrible work? That dilettante Clarkson could cost him money.

Cooper’s parents were not farmers: his father is a carpenter; his mother broke in horses. When he was ten, they bought four acres of land, then fought the council to erect a stable block. It was a golden time for Kaleb: his parents outdoors, building and working with animals, a sense of shared purpose; him and his brother, Kieron, digging holes with toy tractors and falling off their pony, Minty. But when he was 12, his parents divorced. He lived with their mother and Kieron their father.

When he was a teenager, “My mates were all going to the pub, but farming was my idea of fun” “I was like, ‘Where am I? Who am I? What am I?’ I was in a bad place when they split up. You’re so used, as a young kid, to having your mum and dad together. Now my dad’s got a new girlfriend and my mum’s got a new boyfriend. I didn’t like this. I’m the man of the house now.”

His mother set up a dog-grooming business but struggled to pay the rent. So after she gave him three chickens for his 13th birthday, he started selling eggs door to door, buying more hens until he had 450, kept in a run he built himself. Then he added a few sheep and sold legs of lamb too. He loved taking his heavy bag of £1 coins into the bank, then checking his balance at the cash machine. “Yes, I’ve been paid! My mates were all going to the pub, but that was my idea of fun. And the more hours I worked, the more money I got to help my mum.”

This period forged his character: he says he would never burden his girlfriend, Taya, the mother of his two children, with his problems. “I never want anyone to worry about me. If you’ve got a worry, I’d rather sit here now and take that worry onto me so you don’t have it any more.”

After 13, he barely attended school. His mother was fined £50 a week, which Kaleb paid with his egg money. Eventually, he agreed to go in on Fridays, but only because that was when his teachers bought 18 dozen eggs. Meanwhile, he was working on a dairy farm, learning how to milk, tend and birth cows. He only went in full-time in Year 11 to take his GCSEs (one of them drama), so he could study agriculture at college. At 15 he bought his first tractor, then set up a contract business. Realising farmers wouldn’t trust a kid on his knackered old machine, he targeted horsey people, offering to top and chain-harrow their paddocks to improve the grass, and trimming the hedges of Alex James from Blur.

Working all day for Howard Pauling, he’d go home, put LED lights on his tractor and do more contracting work at night. He was driven by money, supporting his family and, above all, that dream of his own farm. Clarkson says he calls him Mrs Thatcher, “because he doesn’t see why he should pay his men for holidays since no one pays him if he doesn’t work. Not that he takes many days off.”

But Cooper also adores farming, which saved him not just from a meltdown during his parents’ divorce, but from a meaningless life. “I’d be doing a boring nine-to-five job then spending all my money in the pub.” The only job he ever hated was being a night-time security guard on The Grand Tour tent at Great Tew. (Clarkson still ribs him about it.)

I ask him to describe what farming means to him. “You see a cultivated field. You planted it. You watch the growth of that wheat. You harvest at the end of the year, and then you sit there and have a beer. You go, ‘I did that — now I’ve got to do it again.’ ” He writes about ploughing the soil in a certain way “so it looks cool”. Just talking about it makes him wish he was out there now on his tractor, his happy place. He understands why farmers keep working their arses off, burdened by worries, barely breaking even. “It’s because it’s a way of life to them, which is probably their downfall. Because the government and the supermarkets know that farmers will go out there and produce food to a high standard, because they love what they’re doing. So they can knock down the prices. It should be a way of life that pays you fairly.”

The farmers’ clubroom at Clarkson’s new pub, the Farmer’s Dog, was his idea. When it’s raining, farmers can claim a free pint, moan about the weather and feel less alone. “At least talking will be helping their mental health,” says Cooper. “So someone says, ‘Shit, I can’t get my wheat off.’ And the others are going, ‘How many acres have you got?’ ‘I got 20.’ ‘I’ve got 25.’ ‘Haha. F*** it. It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ ”

I ask if anything on the farm grosses him out. “Eyes,” he says. You mean dead sheep’s eyes? “No, if they’re dead I don’t mind. But a cow with an infection in its eye, where I had to get the eyelid over my thumb to inject it with antibiotics. That was awful. Makes me feel sick now, eating this.”

There’s a rather tender moment in the last series where he scratches the head of a farrowing sow and says it reminds him of “the missus” giving birth. His son, Oscar, is three; his daughter, Willa, one. Given he has watched thousands of animals, how was it different watching Taya give birth? “It was f***ing terrible, because when I’m helping that cow, I know exactly what I’m doing. I can bring the calf around to the mum and so on. Now, when Taya was giving birth, I felt useless. I’m seeing her in pain having one of my kids.” With Oscar, he ended up delivering the placenta as “they’d run out of hands because it was a tricky birth”. What animal does a human birth most resemble? Cooper ponders for a moment, then says, “You’re going to get me in the shit with Taya. But I reckon it’s somewhere between a sheep and a pig. The first one was like a lamb, where you have to give a little bit of assistance. You know, hold it and then guide it out. But Willa was really quick. Taya was helping me bale hay while she was in labour, then she went into hospital at 2.30pm and by 7pm she was back home doing the laundry. Therefore like a pig.”

He and Taya have been together for eight years, meeting at school but not hooking up until college where he bought her a pet lamb as a present. Of farming stock herself, she can drive a tractor if required, but is mostly in full-time mother mode. He says her steadiness and normality help. “If I’m watching TV and notice a bad edit, she’ll say, ‘What are you on about? Just watch the programme.’ ” She’s unimpressed by his fame, which means he’s constantly recognised and asked for selfies, which he doesn’t mind, though he hates being touched. “It’s amazing I have two kids, really.”

They are unusual in having children young, given their generation delays or even rejects parenthood. “I wanted a girl and boy, which I’ve got and am very grateful,” he says. “Then when I get older I can go down the pub with them, or out on the tractors, and I can still be energetic.” But couldn’t he be having fun now? “I’ll make all the money now, hopefully have a farm, then chill out, go partying and be in Ibiza, though I can’t think of anything worse than being in a nightclub.” Why? “Everyone’s too close to me.”

Now it’s time to head off for the photoshoot at what was his parents’ smallholding. We board Cooper’s filthy farmer’s car, the back seat rammed with gallon plastic bottles of pig urea. En route we pass Soho Farmhouse, the swanky members’ club frequented by the Beckhams and Camerons. Kaleb swears and says guests shoot onto the narrow lanes in Range Rovers, expecting him to pull over “because I have a shitter car”, but he defiantly holds the road. We reach the smallholding, a bit like Rooster’s encampment in Jerusalem: a static caravan, some broken machinery, a huge ugly hole dug in the barn floor for drainage, a half-dozen cattle, a copse where his lovely Oxford Sandy and Black pigs live, a barn where equipment is mended in winter, and Minty, his old pony. Here waiting are his kids and Taya, who has a tough, no-nonsense air.

This is a useful base for Cooper’s contracting business, but it’s not his dream farm. What would that look like? “I was told by an old farmer, ‘Kaleb, you can’t farm without an arsehole. [He meant you need manure to increase crop yield.] So I’d have 60 dairy cows, 200 beef cows, 5,000 chickens and probably 1,000 acres arable. I’d have a farm shop with a butcher. I’d make my own cheese…” And he’d buy a Suffolk Punch shire horse, just because he loves them. How much would all that cost? “About £20 million.” He laughs. “Do you want to sign up to my OnlyFans?”

But fame has put that dream within reach. While he’s taught Clarkson how to farm, Clarkson has taught him both about making TV and how to ensure his career has longevity. After the first series, he was deluged with get-rich-quick offers for adverts or appearances, which he declined. He thought a McDonald’s commercial would be OK because they pay farmers well, but was pilloried for selling out. Instead of cashing in his celeb chips, along with his credibility, he’s stuck mainly to books and his live shows.

It’s surprising someone who spends 12 hours a day alone on a tractor can speak on stage to an audience for two hours. But Cooper wasn’t even nervous. The Clarkson’s Farm team went along to support him. “Well, he didn’t set out to make Starlight Express,” says Clarkson. “It was just him chatting about farming. But there was no side, no pretence to be anything he isn’t. It was very charming.”

Wilman says while some of it — like a Wurzels singalong — was clunky, he notes how quickly Kaleb can think on his feet. When asked a question by a 12-year-old, Cooper climbed down into the audience to promise him a job. “Maybe it’s because he did some drama at school. He’s completely authentic, but there’s a bit of showman in there.”

Kaleb hated being away from home on tour, waking at 5am with nothing to do, so he put out a call on Facebook to local farmers and ended up wandering happily around their fields and yards. The best bit of the show, he says, was shaking everyone’s hands afterwards, getting thanked by a 92-year-old farmer and meeting kids who now want to drive tractors. (Cooper has set up two £3,000 agricultural bursaries.)

I say I can see him evolving like another driven, self-taught entrepreneur, Jamie Oliver. “Which one is he?” asks Cooper, who hasn’t heard of Mozart either, and when meeting the last prime minister thought he was called Ricky. Wilman notes that, “Kaleb is a hit, but he’s not yet a star.” Clarkson says they both “try to alert him to the perils out there”, but when Cooper went to London recently to present a category at the National TV Awards, “Instead of having his head turned, he came back saying it was totally shit, so I know he has a sound head on his shoulders.” Once he owns his dream farm, Clarkson thinks he could well forget TV and ride his tractor into the sunset.

The shoot over, Cooper is keen to head back to the fields and Taya is off on her hen weekend to Spain, as they’re getting married next year. Does she wish Kaleb had a passport? “No, I like going off on my own.” Cooper says Taya is doing all the organising, “But I’m going to invite every single farmer in the area to my wedding and get them really pissed, so the next day, they can’t go and jump on their tractors and make me feel bad.”

Other Resources

• Books About Individuals
• Anecdotes About Individuals
• Quotations About Individuals