Rare as red beryl and fragile as gossamer, the truly brilliant observers of life can skewer our foibles with the precision of a champion archer.
But can they be replaced?
In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a €2 billion fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, it was just the beginning.
This season on Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, Jones investigates Wirecard’s chief operating officer, who vanished just as Wirecard collapsed. And turned out to also be a Russian spy.
From an Ibizan sting operation to an attempted takeover of the Austrian intelligence service, his reporting spirals into a world of warlords, espionage, and disinformation.
All in an attempt to answer one question: Who is the real Jan Marsalek? And what does his secret life reveal about the powerful forces he serves?
Where did all the funny, wry and witty writers go? By Alan Howe
An editor of this newspaper once asked if I could find someone to write witty, wry columns: “Our paper needs more humour!” I could not have agreed more. And he wasn’t the first editor to ask. You cannot train up such writers. The droll fiddlers of finer words are born. And not often. If you go to the unlikely named Wah Wah Mountains in Utah and start digging, there is an outside chance you could come across one of the rarest stones on our planet – the red beryl.
Inventively brilliant writers with grace and wit who can turn a phrase and a page are publishing’s red beryls.
They see the world with a shifted perspective, sometimes dislocated by alcohol. They are nervously productive as if only they can hear a foot tapping impatiently for them in another place. They don’t live long.
No day can be allowed to slip by with inconsequence. All are innately unsuited to regular employment. They see what we see, but differently: in the way that between-the-wars Spaniards saw a bullfight and Hemingway saw Death in the Afternoon; or as many gasp in wonder at a vast rocky chasm in Arizona, but Ferdinand Grofe heard the Grand Canyon Suite.
We lost a red beryl recently. Rod Liddle was a sharply acerbic, leave-no-friends observer of life who would shout out his irritation when most of us might quietly turn a blind eye to injustice or unearned entitlement.
A blind eye? Liddle once met the infamous, one-eyed, race-hate terrorist Abu Hamza, the London imam known as Dr Hook because of his prosthetic hands. He wrote: “He is, you have to say, anti-democratic, democracies being callow, man-made things, and, as a final irony, he doesn’t even agree with the concept of absolute freedom of speech.”
Liddle wrote that, when asked about free speech, Hamza’s “one good eye gets cloudy and he starts mumbling dark things about Salman Rushdie. Abu Hamza thinks Abu Hamza should have the freedom to speak his mind because, of course, it’s not really Abu Hamza speaking, but, in essence, God.”
Liddle very much liked a drink. When, ever so briefly, appointed a wine writer he conceded: “My chief criteria for judging wine is quantity.”
He was earnest in his belief that London’s buses were no longer safe and best avoided, because of stabbings on them across the capital, but particularly after young Islamists murdered 52 people and injured 800 across London in 2005: “Buses are those big red things full of poor people you see clogging up the traffic in the middle of London … you may even have ridden on one, when you were a child and both impecunious and possessed of a sense of adventure.”
On his passing, former British prime minister Boris Johnson recalled the manner in which Liddle described the one-step-forward-two-steps back travails of Africa: “If Africa is hopeless, it is because it has been ruled for the past 60 or more years by a fantastic collection of conspicuously vile dictators: gangsters, incompetents, corrupt self-serving megalomaniacs, cretinous Marxist ideologues, halfwits, imbeciles, murderous tribal warlords and, plainly, the barking mad and criminally insane.” Johnson added: “It’s fruitily put, but can you disagree with a word?”
‘Buses are those big red things full of poor people … you may even have ridden on one, when you were a child and both impecunious and possessed of a sense of adventure’
Liddle’s amusing exaggerations were taken so seriously so often he regularly clogged up the inbox of the Press Complaints Commission. He died on August 2, aged 66.
Adrian Anthony Gill was born in Scotland but moved to Hertfordshire as a child and went to boarding schools and then on to St Martin’s School of Art, alongside Bond actor Pierce Brosnan. Later, he attended the Slade School of Art. After a couple of years he realised he was no good at art. That he was surreptitiously drinking vodka through a straw from first light would not have helped. He had started smoking at 14 and drinking at 15.
Having taught himself to cook while at art school, he began giving lessons from his home, mostly to single men who wished not to be. After all, he would say, and he was famously outspoken, the preparation of food is not a science, it’s not medicine. It is an appeal to primal functions of the brain that we share with most animals. In between long stretches on the dole, he worked in restaurants which would prove to be his most important school. By then his drinking was beyond enthusiastic. He suffered blackouts and even stole money to buy more. And he was taking drugs.
On March 30, 1984 a doctor told him he would be dead by Christmas unless he gave up both. That April Fool’s Day he left London’s Paddington Station and headed to Wiltshire. He took along his father and two bottles of vintage French champagne which they polished off before arriving at a detox clinic in Salisbury.
He described it a few years later in his first published words, but did so hiding behind a pseudonym. “This is hell … like some awful parody of boarding school, the same smells, the same gloss paint, the tatty furniture; inmates being summoned by bells, books to read, homework and, worst of all, dormitories. I am sharing a room with five other poor bastards, ranging from a scholarly-looking heroin dealer who has just had his leg amputated to a cacophonously flatulent transcontinental lorry driver who couldn’t stop having one for the road.”
These cuttingly descriptive lines caught the eye of The Sunday Times where he soon found a home and a role, and within a few years would be the best-read and most feared food critic in the land.
By then he wrote under the byline AA Gill – a tribute to Alcoholics Anonymous that had saved his life. He also wrote for Esquire, GQ and Vanity Fair. He conquered an early stammer, but his dyslexia meant he always filed to copytakers. He never “wrote” his columns and he never took notes.
His reviews were never just about food. On a trip to Wales he wrote that he drove “from Cardiff to Anglesey without ever stimulating a tastebud” and infamously described the Welsh as “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”. The Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers responded with the song Little Trolls including the lyrics “happy when pissed but can’t let go”. Gill responded: “I should have added thin-skinned.”
One day in 1998, his younger brother Nicholas, who had cooked at Maxim’s in Paris and was the youngest English chef to win a Michelin star, visited Gill and said: “I’m going to go and disappear. Please don’t look for me.” He has not been seen since. On writing assignments, Gill searched for him across the globe.
Unlike Liddle, Gill was drawn to Africa: “You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off.” Asked once, before getting into an inflatable dinghy at Kangaroo Island, if he could swim, he said: “No. I do briefly postponed drowning.”
Gill wrote poorly received novels and gave stilted speeches. The newspaper column was his home, the editor’s deadline the discipline needed for his stylish lines and fearless observations.
He said of the acclaimed Theo Randall’s Italian restaurant, at a London address that on the Monopoly board is unaffordably dark blue, that “it looked as if all the ingredients had been fed through an office shredder with half a pint of water and kept under a lamp since lunchtime”.
On turning 60, he observed that ageing is not so much a physical process as “a maturing one. It’s not a feeling, it’s an experience. You are as old as you can remember.” He added that at that 60 “My experiences are now rationed … How many cassoulets … how many more summits in the Highlands? How many lunches with old friends?”
Not that many. He died at 62 in December 2016.
Christopher Hitchens referred to himself as a practising atheist and, along with his friend Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, they were the world’s best-known disbelievers.
The man who wrote the book God Is Not Great also commented that: “My favourite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.” In that book he wrote a line that has become a general rule of philosophical debate known as Hitchens’ Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
His 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, stated that the legendary US secretary of state needed to be prosecuted for “war crimes against humanity, and offences against … international law, including the conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture”. One of those crimes, he always insisted, was the CIA-sponsored coup against Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, before that date inherited greater significance. “Their president was murdered and their democracy assassinated.”
Hitchens left Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970 with a third class degree in politics, philosophy and economics, and the opinionated self-confidence that came naturally to so many of the well-educated Marxists of that era. Briefly charmed by the Trotskyists, largely because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, he soon grew up and found a job on The Times Higher Education Supplement, but his time on Fleet Street was short-lived. He showed no interest in higher education and was let go.
He steered away from the lunatic left, if ever his heart had been there. In 1973, he settled in at The New Statesman, of the left but with literary credentials that rated it as culturally significant. The New Statesman was a common meeting place for those who would island hop, sometimes across decades, to settle on conservative turf. Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis did this. So would his son, Hitchens’ university chum Martin. So too noted historian Paul Johnson, who once edited The New Statesman.
Among those Hitchens would share long lunches with back then was Clive James, then also on his (long) journey right. Hitchens needed no coercing. Almost 30 years later, his friend Lynn Barber wrote that Hitchens was “one of the few remaining practitioners of the five-hour, two-bottle lunch”. He’d have started earlier with “a decent slug” of whiskey.
But, again, he was ceaselessly productive, especially after he moved to the US in 1981, writing for The Nation and Vanity Fair. By the 1990s he was taking on revered people commonly immune to criticism, including Mother Teresa – “not a friend of the poor, a friend of poverty (and) the worst of the rich” – after she accepted donations from thieves and fraudsters and praised the regime of murderous Haiti dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. He was appalled at the international reaction to the death of Princess Diana, whom he described as a “silly, trivial woman”. Diana was killed five days before Mother Teresa died.
The events of 9/11 changed many things: the lives of those in the towers, the West’s comprehension of the threat of Islamism, our world, and Hitchens. He abandoned the last of his left leaning, resigned from The Nation and wrote: “(The terrorists) claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written, since 2001, has been explicitly or implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away.”
Hitchens died in December 2011, aged 62. Months earlier he had written a memoir, Hitch-22, in which he wrote: “For those I have loved, or have been so lenient and gracious as to love me, I have not words enough here, and I remember with gratitude how they have made me speechless in return.”
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ALAN HOWEHISTORY AND OBITUARIES EDITOR
Alan Howe has been a senior journalist on London’s The Times and Sunday Times, and the New York Post. While editing the Sunday Herald Sun in Victoria it became the nation’s fastest growing title and achieved the greatest margin between competing newspapers in Australian publishing history. He has also edited The Sunday Herald and The Weekend Australian Magazine and for a decade was executive editor of, and columnist for, Melbourne’s Herald Sun. Alan was previously The Australian's Opinion Editor.