Finito World Issue 17

FOUNDER’S LETTER

I have always tried to laugh more, especially as we spend so much of our working lives being so serious.

The news that Emily in Paris star Lily Collins is at the centre of a love triangle between European political powers, French President Emmanuel Macron and Rome’s Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, over the show’s relocation for its fifth season, cracked me right up.

Macron vowed that he would “fight hard” to keep the show in Paris. “We will ask them to remain in Paris! Emily in Paris in Rome does not make sense,” he said before an unexpected political twist ensued during Collins’s appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show. She told Jimmy Fallon that Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek Prime Minister, had revealed that it is his favourite too. Mitsotakis said his wife loves Emily in Paris, and that after a long day, he too enjoys unwinding by watching the programme.

I took a significant risk when hosting the latest in our series of business breakfasts with Jeremy King, restaurateur extraordinaire. When he had finished addressing eighty of our guests before his book signing, I mentioned that waiting patiently outside was a candidate seeking an opportunity to work at Simpsons in the Strand, one of London's most historic restaurants, which he is refurbishing. As I opened

the door in burst Manuel from Fawlty Towers carrying a silver tray, stumbling, and murmuring in character. He brought the house down and it turned out to be one of the funniest moments.

Robert Francis Prevost is the first clergyman from the United States to lead the Roman Catholic church, taking the name Pope Leo XIV. He has made care for immigrants and the poor key themes of his early papacy. We celebrate his vision for the future.

As a child, I remember gathering with my family around the television, watching Dave Allen, the Irish comedian, satirist, and actor. His TV shows, full of elaborate sketches, poked gentle fun at life and at Catholicism in particular. The formula of chatting to the audience from his high stool, with breaks for sketches involving other actors, was phenomenally successful. But his jokes about religion were a frequent source of controversy. A sketch in the 1970s, in which the Pope did a striptease, brought protests from many quarters, and resulted in a de facto ban on his shows by RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. Allen sketch-dressed as a priest. His satire on religion stemmed from his education. He once said: "The institution you never laughed at in Irish society as a kid was the church, whether it be the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. "It was alright to snigger at the Church of Ireland, but certainly not to laugh at the Church of Rome."

He will always be remembered when closing his show for saying: "Goodnight, good luck, and may your God go with you."

ABI INTERIORS ALEXANDER LAMONT + MILES ALTFIELD

ALTON-BROOKE AND OBJECTS ANDREW MARTIN ARTE

ARTERIORS AUGUST + CO BAKER LIFESTYLE BELLA FIGURA

BOX GALLERIES BRUNSCHWIG & FILS C & C MILANO

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INTERDESIGN UK JACARANDA CARPETS & RUGS JAIPUR

RUGS JASON D’SOUZA JEAN MONRO JENNIFER MANNERS

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DO WE WANT OPTIONAL WORK?

Elon Musk’s latest forecast – that within two decades, work will become “optional” – is the kind of statement only the world’s richest man can make without irony. Speaking at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, Musk sketched a vision of the future where employment is reduced to a hobby – as optional and pleasant as growing vegetables or playing sport. Powered by exponential advances in robotics and AI, his vision is utopian. He even went so far as to say money itself may become irrelevant. There are many who will dismiss this as a privileged tech-fantasy, a Silicon Valley mirage untethered from the stubborn realities of ordinary life. And yet, Musk’s pronouncements are rarely as far-fetched as they seem at first glance. When the man who brought electric cars into the mainstream, launched a private space company, and is now at the centre of the AI arms race speaks about the future, it is wise to at least listen.

Musk’s prediction is, at its heart, about productivity. He believes that the only path to universal wealth lies not in redistribution, nor in political reform, but in scaling machines capable of doing human work better, faster and more cheaply. This is not a wholly new idea. The industrial revolutions of the past were powered by similar promises. But unlike steam or electricity, artificial intelligence has the capacity to replace not just labour, but judgement, creativity and even care. The implications for employability are profound.

At Finito World, we are grounded in the belief that work is not simply a

means to income, but a fundamental pillar of personal development, purpose and dignity. For all Musk’s talk of optional work, what he describes is a future where work becomes the preserve of the curious and the passionate, while the rest are relegated to passive recipients of abundance.

This is not a future to be welcomed uncritically. If work becomes optional, who chooses to opt in – and who gets left behind? If currency becomes irrelevant, what replaces the economic relationships that bind us, motivate us, and allow us to contribute? Musk implies that robots will do the work, and humans will be free. But free to do what – and in what kind of society?

In fact, many of the seeds of this future are already being sown. The rise of generative AI is beginning to touch sectors previously thought immune to automation: design, law, journalism, even teaching. At the same time, labour markets are fracturing. More young people are entering insecure or freelance work, while mid-career professionals face growing pressure to reskill or risk obsolescence.

Yet, the solution cannot be to drift passively toward a post-work society. Nor should it be to declare war on technology. Instead, we must urgently begin to build the scaffolding that will allow human potential to flourish in an AI-enabled world. That means rethinking how we educate, how we train, how we value non-economic contribution, and – crucially – how we define success.

Musk is right in one sense: we are at the threshold of an extraordinary

technological transformation. But his version of a work-free future risks leaving out the very thing that makes us human – our drive to contribute, to build, and to grow through effort. Work is not just toil. It is structure, selfworth, and community. The idea that it could one day become obsolete should alarm us as much as it excites us.

There are also real dangers in the assumption that technology will lift all boats. The history of automation has always been uneven. The benefits flow to capital and to those with the skills to leverage it, while the dislocated are often left navigating bureaucratic welfare systems or casualised labour markets. As ever, Musk’s remarks glide over the political and social consequences of rapid change.

The question, then, is not just whether work will become optional. It is whether society will survive the transition intact – and whether we are willing to put in the hard policy work now to ensure that the post-work world, if it comes, is a better one.

Finito World exists because we believe in the transformational power of work. We believe that human beings need purpose, and that work – real, meaningful, rewarding work – is one of the surest routes to it. That won’t change in twenty years, no matter how clever the robots get.

Let the machines take the strain. But let us not lose sight of the fact that employability is not just about surviving in the economy. It is about thriving in our humanity. And no algorithm, however advanced, can replace that.

Plans to scrap jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases—murder, rape, manslaughter— represent not reform but retreat. Justice Secretary David Lammy is reportedly backing the creation of a new tier of jury-less courts for offences carrying sentences of up to five years. In doing so, he risks dismantling one of the most enduring foundations of British democracy. It is true that the courts are in crisis. With more than 78,000 cases pending in the Crown Court and that number forecast to rise to over 100,000, delays are stretching into years. Victims are left waiting for justice; defendants are left in limbo. But to suggest the solution lies in removing juries is to mistake cause for consequence.

The backlog in our courts is not due to the presence of juries but to long-term government neglect: years of funding cuts, chronic shortages of barristers

JURY TRIALS

and judges, court closures, and broken infrastructure. Rather than investing to repair a weakened system, the proposed reforms shift the burden onto democratic rights. It is an attempt to manage the decline of a vital institution by quietly undermining one of its core principles.

Juries are not just a procedural choice— they are the public’s voice in the justice system. They represent a civic contract: ordinary citizens taking responsibility for serious decisions about guilt and innocence. To strip them from all but the gravest of cases would be to sever the bond between community and justice.

The proposal also threatens to deepen the inequality already present in the justice system. Under a two-tier model, only the most sensational cases will be considered worthy of a jury. Other serious offences—fraud, assault, coercive behaviour—would be

downgraded, with fewer safeguards. In a time of eroding trust in institutions, this move risks alienating the public further.

Let us be clear: there is no constitutional right to a jury trial in all cases. But there is a long-standing principle that trial by one’s peers is a hallmark of a free society. Convenience must not trump that principle.

If the government truly wants to resolve the court backlog, the path is clear: invest in the system. Fund legal aid, hire more judges, modernise courtrooms, improve digital infrastructure. But do not dismantle the very values we should be protecting.

We must resist this false choice between timely justice and democratic justice. A system without juries may be faster—but it will not be fairer.

IN PRAISE OF LORD YOUNG

At a Finito event on 1 December — sponsored by Claire Cummings and the Centre for Digital Assets and Democracy — Lord Toby Young delivered a characteristically forthright defence of free expression, reminding attendees why he has become one of the most persistent voices resisting the creep of censorship in Britain. Speaking to a packed room, he traced the rapid growth of the Free Speech Union, the organisation he founded in 2020, and set out with forensic clarity the case for renewed vigilance.

Young offered a stark diagnosis of the national drift. Citing the more

than 12,000 arrests for online speech offences in a single recent year and the extraordinary rise in cases involving women punished for expressing mainstream views, he showed how the policing of opinion increasingly takes place far from the criminal courts — in workplaces, universities, and even schools. His warning about the proposed curtailment of jury trials struck a particular chord, as he argued that ordinary citizens, not officials, have proven far more reliable judges of what constitutes criminal speech. “Free speech has to be constantly defended — each generation has to fight the battle anew,” he reminded the room,

capturing the spirit of the afternoon.

Yet for all the gravity of his subject, Young’s tone was neither bleak nor partisan. He emphasised that free speech has historically been the ally of the marginalised, not an indulgence of the powerful, and that its defence must be universal if it is to be meaningful. The event underscored why his work matters: in an era of growing digital oversight and shrinking tolerance, Lord Young continues to insist that open debate is not a luxury but the foundation of a healthy democracy.

Alan

COLUMNS

Naomi

Nigel

David

Sarah

Zadie

Stephen

Lydia

THIS ISSUE

FEATURES

58 COVER STORY

How Pope Leo XIV found his voice 72 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION

What do the world’s scriptures say about work?

78 AN INDELIBLE MARK: SIR TOM STOPPARD

Our tribute to the great playwright

82 THE FUTURE OF THE MEANING OF WORK

What are our deepest reasons for our careers?

UK PLC

How do you know the state of an economy?

98 HIDDEN DISABILITY ISSUES IN THE WORKPLACE

Tamsin Aston and Aarifah Karim

100 BURSARY UPDATE

The latest on Yassen Ahmed

104 LETTER FROM CHINA

Sarah Tucker on work and life in today’s China

108 LETTER FROM JAIPUR

Nishad Sanzagiri writes from Rajasthan

Louise

Ilaria

Jeremy

p21 Nigel Farage

p30 Zadie Smith

ART, CULTURE & BOOKS

114 WITH CONSTABULARY DUTIES TO BE DONE…

John Constable at 250

118 VANBRUGH AT 300

With Charles Saumarez Smith

124 LEONARD COHEN AT TEN YEARS GONE

Reflections on the poet-singer

128 MURDER SHE WROTE

Agatha Christie and her heirs

134 BOOK PAGES

Tim Clark on Nick Gibb

136 SIX NATIONS

Lessons from a life-long rugby fan

140 ALL BEEFED UP

The effects of Trump’s tariffs

144 CLASS DISMISSED

Dame Esther Rantzen

SCAN BELOW TO SUBSCRIBE TO FINITO WORLD

ANGELINA GIOVANI-AGHA

The entrepreneur on art, research, and why she loves setting up businesses

Ilike setting up businesses that solve very specific problems. I co-founded Flynn & Giovani Art Provenance

Reach with Dr Tom Flynn in 2017 to fill a gap in the art market. I then setup the Art Market Academy to make provenance and due diligence training available to everyone. It remains the only digital resource of its kind, offering pre-recorded lessons translated into more than a dozen languages. In the two years since its foundation we have had hundreds of course completions from all continents.

The main issue we seem to constantly face is access, which is a rather ridiculous issue to have in 2026. On an everyday basis, researchers across disciplines struggle to access archival material around the world. It turns out that everything is not online, and Google is limited. Over the past few months alone, I have needed access to resources that exist only in physical form in Chile, St Petersburg and Cyprus. I am still waiting on this information.

Certain research cases have been on my desk for much longer. Twelve years ago I embarked on solving the mysterious case of a couple dozen modern British paintings sent to France on a travelling exhibition in 1940 which were never to return. Some progress has been made but the mystery has not been solved yet. And as I persist more mysteries have followed. Where has the body of work produced by British artist Christopher Bledowsky been scattered and what does this market look like? How did a lost masterpiece by Francois Gerard survive

the Russian Revolution to end up in a glitzy department store in Argentina? Happy to say, this last mystery has since been solved!

Much of the world’s knowledge still lives on shelves. Libraries, archives and private collections hold material that will never be digitised in full, nor should they be expected to. Digitisation is expensive, selective and slow. In the meantime, research continues. Claims need evidence. Students need sources. Facts need verification. The assumption that information is universally accessible has simply not caught up with reality. So how do we solve an information access problem in the era of supercomputers?

The obvious answer would be to outsource it to artificial intelligence. That answer does not work. AI is useful for pattern recognition, summarisation and prediction, but it does not replace access to primary material. It cannot retrieve a page from a book that has never been scanned. It cannot verify an archive it has never seen. And it is frequently confident about information that is simply wrong.

So in a way we had no option but to create Source. Source addresses access as a logistical problem rather than a technological fantasy. The premise is straightforward. If information exists somewhere, then someone can physically access it. Source connects people who need access to specific materials with people who can retrieve it. Requests are matched only with users who are able to fulfil them. This avoids noise and

focuses on execution. All providers get paid for their time, and all requesters get factual information.

London is the best place from which to launch a startup while juggling existing businesses and motherhood because it offers density without isolation. Being able to fit research appointments, fundraising meetings and museum visits before doing the school run is a gift. We are spoiled for options when it comes to choosing museum exhibits and shows.

From the latest rendition of The importance of being Earnest at the Noel Coward theatre featuring the inimitable Stephen Fry in the role of Lady Bracknell to the Cecil Beaton Fashionable World exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the opportunities to cleanse the palette are as accessible as they are essential.

Angelina Giovani-Agha, FRSA

Meet the Mentor: ALAN URMSTON

We meet one of our leading mentors, and quiz him about his stellar career – and advice for mentees

With a 35-year career spanning NatWest, global FX, payments brokers, and now consultancy, how have you navigated transitions across such varied environments — and what motivated those shifts?

My career at NatWest Bank proved hugely beneficial and instrumental as I navigated the transition into other sectors due to excellent bank training, the scale of the bank, and pivotally, learning about customer service and satisfaction. Both the broking firm and, language services companies I was employed at had an innate need to attract and retain customers. My experience and commercial acumen were paramount throughout my transition into language services, having no previous knowledge of this industry. Interestingly, it was at this point in my career that Ronel Lehmann and I first connected before I became a mentor at Finito Education.

My 35 years at NatWest ended after working in the City of London, Manchester, and Leeds. However, I continued my professional services career working with global language services providers whilst I established a consultancy business.

At NatWest, you rose through trading desks to senior FCA-regulated roles and even served on a sub-Board committee. What were the key milestones or mindsets that helped you get there?

The key moment was in 1992 when I was working on the world’s largest

trading room just before the Pound Sterling exited the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and “Black Wednesday” occurred, and I first encountered financial derivatives. I was fascinated how these instruments, when used appropriately, could significantly assist a UK corporate manage a financial risk that it was unable to de-risk itself during the course of its ordinary business. Following this, my career remained derivative and corporate focussed which meant that I had to be authorised and regulated by the FCA. Subsequently, towards the end of my time at NatWest I represented my unit on a sub-Board committee specifically for my expertise in how the bank should package and disseminate derivatives to corporates and how the bank itself should manage the credit risk of such products.

Leading and revitalising underperforming sales teams to award-winning performance requires both strategy and empathy. What leadership lessons from that experience resonate most with you today?

As mentioned previously, my time at NatWest provided me with a catalogue of leadership, sales, and human insight training. The leadership lessons that still resonate today are to ask an underperforming team unambiguous, non-accusatorial questions such as what is going badly and why. Furthermore, ask them for their suggestions as to how they would fix and improve matters. Finally, I would

ask what could be achieved if we made the improvements. In summary, demonstrating that I listened to them and created a strategy to improve with a self-chosen commitment from the team to succeed. This lesson still resonates as a key part of my thinking on leadership today.

In your role as a Banking Consultant, you support businesses with funding, corporate governance, debtrefinancing and FX risk. What is one complex client challenge you helped resolve, and what was your approach?

I will condense my answer as much as possible without diluting the relevance of the example. I was asked to help a UK, medium size organisation that needed to purchase USD, EUR, and CHF over an initial 12-month period with a manageable hedging strategy. My approach suggested a strategy combining a mixture of forward contracts for those orders with certainty of cashflow and a percentage left un-

Alan Urmston

hedged (whilst monitoring prevailing rates). I used two providers to ensure competitive pricing with the following three steps that formed the basis of my approach. The initial task was to establish a robust, risk management policy that defined goals that stabilised cash flow and protected profit margins from adverse currency movements. It also determined the risk appetite, and who was responsible for managing the strategy, with the board agreeing a policy mandate of hedging 75% of all known currency exposures and 25% of projected exposures left un-hedged.

The next task was to help the procurement and accounting teams to forecast USD, EUR, and CHF purchase volumes for the next 12 months, breaking this down by month to align with the purchase cycle. This also meant analysing each currency pair and identify timing and amount mismatches where cash inflows and outflows in a particular currency do not align in time and amount. This helped determine the exposure to be hedged.

The final task of the initial phase was to select the foreign exchange (FX) providers, which included both banks and specialist FX platforms. This meant clear communication of hedging requirements to each provider, including forecast transaction volumes, maturities, and specific needs for USD, EUR, and CHF. It was imperative that each provider established timely and transparent reporting cadence, including trade confirmations, markto-market valuations, and performance reports.

Given the current regulatory landscape, especially around foreign exchange exposures, what are the top three pieces of advice you’d give to a small business exploring export/ import opportunities?

It is broadly the same advice I would have offered many years ago, however, with advancement in technology now significantly assisting all parties, I would recommend that an importer or an exporter uses a provider that offers not only a customer portal that facilitates complete on-line audit trail and reporting but also human intellect to support the technology with sensible, knowledgeable market commentary. The first piece of advice would be to undertake thorough research based on the business's GBP pricing in different currencies, whether it is financially beneficial and then establish a strategy with a provider of foreign exchange services that also embeds cross border payments into its customer eco-system.

The second piece of advice would be to choose a strategy based on the need for certainty. If there that need, it would follow to use foreign exchange forward contracts to manage the exposure over a period. Of course, each business has different exposures and price points that could allow a degree of flexibility in the strategy. The final piece of advice would be to re-evaluate the chosen strategy on a regular basis and monitor foreign exchange rates as they can move very quickly, often wiping out anticipated sales margin on nonmanaged requirements.

As a Visiting Academic and Masters

Dissertation Supervisor at the University of Salford, how do you integrate your real-world experience into your teaching? How does it resonate with students?

It is a privilege to be at the University of Salford, Salford Business School supporting and guiding young people through their relevant journey leading to, one hopes, a career in financial services. I integrate real-world experience into my teaching. For

example, helping my Masters students, completing their dissertations, to consider real world events such as Black Wednesday or the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis and discuss the events leading up to the crisis, during the crisis, and post crisis. To add relevant and real-world experience we debate the causes and the lessons learned in relation to the particular module or question being analysed.

Many aspiring professionals struggle to translate academic knowledge into workplace success. What practical tips do you offer students to bridge that gap?

I agree it is a challenge for aspiring professionals to apply their academic knowledge into the workplace. I would, however, suggest these practical tips to both students and aspiring professionals. The first tip is to learn about the current issues, challenges, and latest developments (legal, regulatory, economic and environment) the target industry or a specific company in question faces and crucially keep up to date with events. This is essential when preparing for an interview or, if already in the workplace, being relevant in conversations with co-workers and more senior colleagues. The second tip would be to use as many existing support network opportunities as possible. Universities will have useful programmes to tap into and young professionals should use LinkedIn to broaden their professional network. The third tip would be to consider taking professional qualifications to enhance learning. Moreover, this is an excellent route to enhance credibility and may be a key factor for future career progression.

After decades in banking, you moved into language service providers— helping firms with multilingual

communication. What inspired that shift, and how do your banking skills apply in that new domain?

When I left the banking sector, I considered how best my banking experience, skills and commercial acumen could be used. It soon became apparent that my career was built upon many years of working alongside hundreds of customers and providing solutions to their problems. I soon realised that I could apply my financial, banking, and professional knowledge to a new industry, helping customers with different challenges. Furthermore, I wanted to maintain customer connectivity and centricity. This added to the excitement of having to quickly learn and understand a completely new dictionary of terms and to grapple with different technology.

My banking skills applied in this new domain, primarily due to many years managing customer relationships and experience of gaining and retaining new customers with integrity, trust and professionalism.

Navigating two very different industries—finance and language services—what skills do you see as truly transferable, and what new ones did you develop?

I would consider many skills truly transferable, however, for a customer facing role these key skills would apply in any industry; firstly, asking the customer the right questions with answers that illuminate their issue or problem. Secondly, sharing the solution with the customer and what impact it will have on them. Finally, ensuring services and products are delivered in a professional, competent manner. The skills I had to develop were two-fold. One was learning and understanding the format and process of undertaking a language translation project and the

other was this industry already had developed significantly new machine learning skills and artificial intelligence which were far ahead of traditional banking sector.

You’ve mentored newcomers in FX and derivatives markets. What are the most common misconceptions mentees have, and how do you help them overcome those?

I would say the most common misconception mentees have is an urgency to progress without fully understanding the products they are selling and why they are appropriate to the customer. I helped them to overcome this misconception by highlighting the consequences of an inappropriate proposal to a customer and the potential financial and reputational risks incurred by such an action. Another misconception that often features is failing to appreciate the need for accuracy and accountability where details on the customer journey and key due diligence when recording the transaction on the bank’s records are missing. To help overcome this misconception I explained that by not documenting each step and process it could cause inaccurate credit reporting, poor audit outcomes and worst of all, an incomplete picture of the customers’ banking profile.

What characteristics or habits do you find set apart successful mentees in your experience?

Successful mentees are those who listen intently, ask pertinent questions, and then take action to move forward. I would also add persistence and pragmatism in the current employment marketplace as being beneficial traits.

You’ve maintained a long and successful career alongside family

life—your daughters are pursuing distinct and exciting paths. How have you balanced professional growth with family commitments over the years?

Thank you. It was not easy to balance a career that meant navigating long hours and the occasional weekend away, with my priority of family commitments. I had a clear approach to managing my time which meant I had to be present, completely focussed, and in the moment, whether spending time with my family or in my commitment to serving employers and customers. There were times when I had to compromise, but whilst working alongside my wife, her work commitments, and family commitments, I was able to build my career maintaining the stance of proud husband and father.

If you could speak to your younger self, just starting in banking, what advice or reassurance would you offer?

My advice would be this; have the confidence to ask questions of more experienced colleagues about their role, what they do, for whom?, and why it is important to the bank. I would also advise seeking out a mentor to help steer and guide me through my early career progression. As for any reassurance I would simply say banking in its purest form will remain as the lifeblood of an economy facilitating the movement of capital and money. However, when I started my banking career in 1982, processes where archaic and labour intensive but with the rapid advancement in financial technology, the incredible opportunity artificial intelligence offers banking customers, and new entrants offering new and interesting services, banking remains an exciting and fulfilling career; it’s just a different landscape to navigate.

COLUMNS

Our regular writers on employability in 2026

38 | YOUNG SCULPTOR The Rise and Rise of Lydia Smith

MRS DOPPELGANGER

Klein on AI

PEARL OF A GUY

David Pearl on his property career

VANISHING COMMONS

Zadie Smith on the shrinking public square

Naomi

The Philosopher NAOMI KLEIN

The author of Doppelganger and No Logo on the frightening advances of AI

We are living amid an explosion of doubles—digital replicas, curated avatars, shadows we polish and present as ourselves. When I first began writing about these phenomena, I touched only lightly on artificial intelligence; ChatGPT had not yet been released, and our anxieties were still primarily about deepfakes. What I could not yet see was how quickly we would find ourselves inside an entirely new mimetic landscape, one in which the mechanisation of speech and the smoothing of expression render us more replaceable by machines precisely because we begin to behave like them. The more formulaic art becomes, the easier it is for algorithms to pass for its creators.

We are now on the cusp of a mirror world expanding with stunning speed, entering spaces we once relied on as alternatives to precisely this kind of enclosure. Universities, for instance, have moved with breathtaking swiftness from anxiety about students using AI to write their essays to actively urging professors to use the same tools to teach in their place. This rush towards the synthetic is not just cultural or intellectual—it is profoundly material and vampiric.

AI feeds on the creative labour of artists whose work has been scraped without permission, leaving them to compete not only with the endless stream of influencers recycling their styles, but with machine replicas of themselves. And it feeds, too, on the physical lifeblood of our world: the water evaporating to cool data centres,

the fossil fuels powering computational infrastructures whose scale is almost impossible to fathom. To build this mirror world, we quite literally sacrifice the animate one—and we are told not to worry, because AI will solve climate change for us.

Before his death, Pope Francis was turning his attention sharply to this

contradiction. In 2015, when I was at the Vatican for the launch of Laudato Si’, I watched a profound theological struggle unfold. Some framed the encyclical as a continuation of the Church’s longstanding environmental work; others saw it as a rupture. In my reporting, I quoted Father Sean McDonagh, who spoke with striking candour about being raised in a Church

Naomi Klein (Wikipedia.org)

that taught its followers to hate this world. He reminded us of a Latin prayer once recited after communion: teach us to despise the things of the earth and to love the things of heaven. If we are to defend this earth, he argued, we must finally confront and overturn that worldview.

“The more formulaic art becomes, the easier it is for algorithms to pass for its creators.”

In many ways, Laudato Si’ was an invitation to re-enchant the world—to find the sacred here, not elsewhere. And Francis, whose namesake ministered to plants and animals as kin, extended the notion of fraternity beyond the human realm to all living beings. This, of course, was controversial in some quarters. I remember a headline in The Federalist appearing around the encyclical’s release: Pope Francis: The Earth Is Not My Sister. The panic was telling; re-enchantment threatens entrenched hierarchies.

For me, re-enchantment is not an abstraction. I live in British Columbia, a place where sacredness was never fully extinguished, though settler colonialism tried. Eighty percent of the province remains unceded Indigenous land, with no treaty and nothing but papal bulls—repeatedly petitioned for rescission—to justify its appropriation. The sacred is present everywhere: in Coast Salish art, in the land itself, in the potlatch ceremonies that were once criminalised, in the masks that were stolen and circulated through the Western art world.

While researching a piece for Pankaj Mishra’s forthcoming journal, I found myself tracing the surrealists exiled during the Second World War who stumbled upon these Northwest Coast masks in New York secondhand shops. They recognised their power immediately. André Breton believed he had found the original surrealists in those objects. In Indigenous cosmologies, those masks are portals between worlds—yet they were portals violently taken. There has been a long, ongoing struggle to repatriate them. When the Breton family returned the mask they held, they joined a ceremony bringing it home, acknowledging the rupture and helping to mend it.

Re-enchantment, then, is often less about invention than unearthing: listening to what was always here, to knowledge systems that survived despite sustained efforts to silence them. And it is, I believe, inseparable from feminism—from the work of restoring what patriarchal and colonial systems deemed inferior, irrational, or disposable.

As we confront the loneliness of the mirror world and the seduction of its synthetic infinities, the task before us is not to invent meaning anew

but to defend the animate world—to stay connected to the living, tangible presences that have always grounded human purpose. The enchantment never truly vanished; it was suppressed, marginalised, mocked. But in every place on earth, someone held on to it.

“To build this mirror world, we quite literally sacrifice the animate one—and we are told not to worry, because AI will solve climate change for us.”

To resist the vampiric pull of AI’s extractive logic, we cannot retreat into nostalgia or technophobia. We need instead a politics—and a spirituality— capable of honouring this world as sacred, not as raw material for another. The mirror world will keep expanding. But we can still choose which world we nourish.

The Insurgent NIGEL FARAGE

The Reform leader isn’t going away any time soon. Here he outlines why Britain needs a major shift

We have to change. Not because it’s trendy. But because it’s necessary for survival. And let’s not pretend this is just about economics. It’s moral, too. When free speech is punished with prison sentences, when the justice system bends to political pressure, when we have two-tier policing that targets some while ignoring others –the very idea of British fairness dies.

I’ve always said we need to stand up for what makes this country special. Common law. Free speech. Individual responsibility. It’s not about pandering to one group or another. It’s about building a society in which everyone is equal before the law –regardless of race, religion, gender or sexuality. No one gets a pass. And no one gets scapegoated.

“We have to change - not because it’s trendy, but because it’s necessary for survival.”

That’s why I’ve spoken up on issues others would rather avoid. When Jewish families in North London are afraid to let their children out, when we see cars parading antisemitic slogans through our streets and the police do nothing – that’s a failure not just of policing, but of principle. It’s a sad irony. Eighty years after the landings in Normandy, we’re now in a Europe where Jewish families

can’t live safely in Paris, Brussels, or Strasbourg unless they’re under armed guard. I saw it as an MEP. I saw the silence and cowardice of those who prefer not to notice. We must never go down that road here.

Can we turn things around? Of course we can. We’ve done it before. Anyone who lived through the threeday week, the power cuts, the 30%

inflation of the 1970s knows how bad things can get – and how quickly they can be turned around with the right leadership.

But it takes honesty. And bravery. And the will to say: enough.

We need to tell young people the truth – that hard work leads to success. That being proud of your country is not a sin. That being

Nigel Farage (Wikipedia.org)

ambitious is not shameful. That family, stability and tradition are not relics of the past, but essential ingredients for a healthy future.

“When free speech is punished, justice bends to politics, and policing becomes two-tier, the very idea of British fairness dies.”

I’m not in this to please everyone. I never have been. If I wanted an easier life, I’d be on the after-dinner circuit talking about Brussels bureaucracy over fillet of beef. But I came back because I believe Britain can be better – and that someone has to say so. You can believe in me, or not. That’s your call. But know this: I’m not going away. Because the stakes are too

high. Because the values that made this country great are worth fighting for. And because if we don’t stand up for them – no one else will.

What pushed me back into public life wasn’t nostalgia or ego — it was witnessing, with my own eyes, a country losing its nerve. I saw it during my years in Brussels, where Jewish families in Paris, Brussels and Strasbourg were already living behind armed guards. That was nearly a decade ago, and nothing has improved. In fact, it’s got worse. Today, friends of mine in North London tell me there are evenings when they’re frightened to let their children out. We saw cars driving through London shouting antisemitic abuse on an industrial scale — and the police simply looked the other way. If that isn’t two-tier policing, what is?

And let’s be blunt: the political establishment is terrified of confronting the ideology behind

it. Ministers tiptoe around radical Islam because they’re frightened of the backlash. Well, leadership means saying what everyone else is whispering. Seventy-five percent of those who come to Britain adopt our way of life and contribute just as previous generations did — but a significant minority do not, and pretending otherwise won’t make the problem disappear.

“Leadership means saying what everyone else is whispering - pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it disappear.”

It’s the same cowardice we see everywhere. Take the economy. Every small business owner in the country can tell you what soaring employers’ National Insurance has done to hiring. Add the minimum wage hikes, the rates burden, the avalanche of regulations designed for multinationals but dumped onto corner shops — and you have a recipe for decline. I’ve lived it. I’ve run a business. I know what it’s like to pay staff more than you pay yourself, and to wonder if you’ll make payroll. The people writing the rules today have never done a real day’s business in their lives.

Government can’t create wealth — it can only clear the path for those who do. Hong Kong did it in the 1960s: low taxes, light regulation, and the freedom for people to succeed. Within a generation it was transformed. We could do the same, if only we had leaders who believed in aspiration instead of resenting it.

The Entrepreneur DAVID PEARL

The great property investor on how he made his way in the world

People often assume that if you end up owning hundreds of buildings and running a sizeable property company, you must have started life with a map — a plan, a mentor, a lucky break, something. I can tell you now: I started with nothing of the sort. I left school at fifteen with no qualifications and no job. In those days, no one asked what you wanted to do. You were told. Tea taster. Apprentice chef. Garment trade. I tried each, lasted a few days, and found myself back at square one. I wasn’t gifted, and I wasn’t guided. I was just trying to survive.

“I left school at fifteen with no qualifications and no job.”

The turning point was almost laughably ordinary. A friend said he wanted to open an estate agency in Hackney and asked if I fancied joining him. I was eighteen. I said yes. And that was it. No divine revelation. No great ambition. Just a door that opened and a decision to walk through it. Hackney back then wasn’t the fashionable postcode journalists write about today. Mortgages were almost impossible to get. Many houses were in multiple occupation. Whole areas were dismissed as undesirable. But that was my training ground — not in any formal sense, but in learning to see value where others saw bother.

Back then, people wanted quick money. Buy cheap, sell fast, head to Marbella for two weeks. I couldn’t understand it. Why part with something that would

appreciate? Why sell and hand half the profit to tax? I learned early about regearing — letting the bank lend against the rising value. No tax, no drama, just the ability to go again. That became my rhythm: buy, hold, borrow, buy again. Patience in bricks and mortar pays. It’s amazing how few people realised it. Some of the buildings I bought for six or seven thousand pounds are now worth a million or more. And yes, I still own a good number of them fifty years on.

What I did have, even then, was an instinctive love of buildings. That may sound sentimental coming from someone in property, but it’s true. Other people fell in love with fast profits; I fell in love with structures. I’d look at a house and think: *I’m never selling you*. They didn’t love me back, of course, but that didn’t matter. You have to believe in something. For me, it was London’s stock of solid, characterful buildings. Move with them long enough and they reward you.

“We’re a business, yes, but also a family. We celebrate birthdays with cakes. We tease each other.”

Partnerships shaped me too. Norman Silver and I started together. Four years later he wanted pastures new, and we did a deal that was good for both of us. I learned then that property isn’t just about bricks — it’s about people. You need honesty. You need to be someone people like dealing with. If you’re a rogue, word

gets around. If people enjoy working with you, they’ll bring you opportunities. I’m proud of the fact that if you ask anyone in this business about me, they’ll say I’m a decent bloke. That has mattered more than any qualification I never had.

Today the business is enormous. Around 800 buildings. Roughly 3,000 tenants. Staff who don’t leave — literally. Some have been here forty years; many over twenty. My PA has survived 5 years with me, which must qualify her for sainthood. We’re a business, yes, but also a family. We celebrate birthdays with cakes. We tease each other. We talk about food endlessly. I walk the office every day — not to monitor, but because I genuinely want to say hello. If someone’s got family trouble, they go home immediately. And every staff member knows I mean it when I say “family first.” People stay because they’re looked after, and because the work is varied. As Chris, who came to work for me forty years ago, says: no two days are the same.

And I’m hands-on — by choice, not necessity. I still look at every letting in a little black book. Every week. I go out visiting properties. Knock on tenants’ doors. Chat. See things with my own eyes. One moment I’m negotiating a banking facility worth hundreds of millions; the next I’m talking about a broken door lock. That mix keeps me alive. A CEO who hides from the details shouldn’t be a CEO. People ask if I worry about tax, legislation, or what Westminster might do next. The answer is: not really. If I obsessed over every rumour, I’d be suicidal. Ignorance is bliss — truly. They talk about inheritance

72 – 80 Leather Lane, EC1N – the building has recently undergone major renovation, which increased the internal footprint by reconfiguring the space in addition to a couple of extra floors. It now contains 12 flats from the 2nd – 7th floor, one office, three workshops and two refurbished ground floor shops.

60/70 Shorts Gardens, WC2H – a former electrical station with a 40ft basement which housed turbines. When the power station was no longer the turbines were removed, and it became a glider factory (around the time of WWII) – they were manufactured in the basement and then winched out onto lorries. David purchased the building from the Electricity Board in 2006 and converted it into offices and storage space for things like hot dog stands and tuk tuk’s. Work has recently finished converting it to over 25,000 sq ft of offices, 4 luxury flats with the 11,000 sq ft basement being leased to Traitors for their new immersive experience.

tax, capital gains, National Insurance on lettings. Fine. Let them talk. When you’ve been in this business fifty years, you know that some proposals happen and many don’t. And even when they hurt, they create opportunities. Always.

Take the Rent Act in 1965. It sent values through the floor. But it also let people buy incredibly cheaply — and decades later, when the regulated tenancies ended, the properties became goldmines. That’s property: cycles, distortions, corrections, chances. The trick is to stay calm.

“People are fleeing Britain in fear of taxation — Marbella, Dubai, Portugal, Israel. I’m not going anywhere. I live in Highgate and I adore London.”

People are fleeing Britain in fear of taxation — Marbella, Dubai, Portugal, Israel. I’m not going anywhere. I live in Highgate and I adore London. I love its history. I love its oddities. I’m deeply involved in the English Heritage Blue Plaques scheme, which I think is one of the great quiet joys of this city. You see a plaque for Captain Bligh or for Jimi Hendrix next to Handel, and suddenly time collapses. You feel connected to something bigger. In London every street has a story. That’s magic. And it’s why I’ll never leave.

Young people often ask for advice about entering the property world — residential or commercial. I tell them the same thing: learn the graft. Read the legislation. Understand tenancy law. Don’t chase quick money; it won’t last. And don’t imagine you know everything — you don’t. Listen to those who’ve done it. Put the work in. Residential is highly legislated and requires a cool head. Commercial is different, but the principles are the same: honesty, consistency, graft.

If you’re decent and you work hard, you’ll go far.

What’s next for us? Two major developments — one next to Bloomberg in the City, and one in Hatton Garden. Big projects. Complex ones. But exciting. At the same time, the day-to-day never ends: compliance, maintenance, tenant relationships. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real. And that’s what matters.

Looking back, if there’s a theme that runs through my life, it’s that problems can become opportunities. I’ve seen crashes, booms, reforms, disasters. I’ve seen managers panic and landlords bolt. And I’ve stayed put. You don’t plan every detail. You adapt. You look after your people. You trust your instincts. And you keep walking through doors when they open.

Fifty years on, I still love it. I love the buildings. I love London. I love the people I work with. And I love that, somehow, through luck, graft, and a lot of patience, this strange journey has worked out. I wouldn’t change a thing.

One of David's tenants; Sweetings, the famous fish restaurant.

The Polymath SARAH TUCKER

The writer and Edward de Bono biographer on why entrepreneurs must reclaim play, perception and the power of simplicity

In 1992, Edward de Bono published Simplicity , a book that should have changed the way industry, academia and politics think - but didn’t, largely because these sectors tend to read only things that confirm they were right all along. De Bono’s thesis was disarmingly straightforward: simplicity is not childish. Simplicity is power. It is the sharp tool that cuts through the armour plating of jargon, ego, bureaucracy and overthinking that “serious” adults construct around themselves like an emotional MOT test.

Instead, we treat simplicity as though it belongs in infant school - something charming, but not quite to be trusted, like glitter glue or show-and-tell. The grown-up world rewards complication. Academics write as though clarity is a dreadful social failing. Politicians speak in sentences so long and syntaxheavy that they should be sold with a safety warning. A business leader recently described a new policy as “the recalibration of multi-layered operational efficiencies in the context of cross-departmental interface alignment”—a phrase that could have been replaced entirely with: we’re trying to work better together. You could almost hear the relief in the room when someone translated.

We swim in condensed soup - dense, salty, impenetrable. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs starve for clean water and, occasionally, a spoon.

Yet when something genuinely worldchanging emerges, it is almost always simple. Steve Jobs held up an iPhone and said only, “It just works.” Jeff Bezos built Amazon around one sentence: “The customer is always delighted.” Warren Buffett famously said, “If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, don’t invest in it” - which also describes most of the FTSE 100’s annual reports. Elon Musk framed the Mars mission as: “We must become a multiplanetary species,” a line so simple it sounds like a tagline for a Netflix series. Greta Thunberg’s entire message is six words: Listen to the scientists and act. None of these required a glossary.

Simplicity isn’t childish.

Simplicity is leadership - just without the unnecessary PowerPoints.

This truth runs through Will Hayler, founder of the Blue Earth Summit, who seems constitutionally allergic to waffle. When Hayler describes the moment Blue Earth became real - a surfer sitting in the Atlantic, realising Twitter-scale outrage wasn’t producing Web Summit–scale solutionswhat he’s describing is the moment perception becomes truth long before logic finishes its coffee.

Blue Earth is built on one principle: well-being for everyone forever. Not “wellbeing within the context of multisectoral pathways aligned to the Paris Accord at 1.5°C,” which is how an academic might put it while everyone else quietly loses the will to live.

De Bono would have approved. Hayler talks about adventure, uncertainty, eating the elephant bite by bite, and the wonderfully disobedient idea that optimism is not a weakness but a fuel source. He describes solution-finding, not problem-polishing. Water logic, not rock logic. His language is so clear that at times one wonders whether he has been banned from government communications departments for lack of opacity.

Ask him why Blue Earth unites activists, artists, athletes, scientists, investors, policymakers and founders, and he avoids the usual jargon about “cross-pollination of ecosystem stakeholders.” Instead, he says, “Everyone has a voice - and everyone has a role to play.”

This is the gift of simplicity: it lets people actually speak to one another, rather than nodding politely while mentally Googling acronyms.

Sarah Tucker (Wikipedia)

Simplicity outperforms complexity everywhere:

1. Negotiations: The most effective negotiators use short sentences like: “This is what I need. What do you need?”—instead of “circling back to align on deliverables.”

2. Pitching: Investors prefer sentences, not epics.

3. Health: “Sleep. Move. Don’t eat beige food” works far better than a 900-page wellness protocol.

4. Technology: Google: one box. Enough said.

5. Diplomacy: The Good Friday Agreement did not attempt interpretive dance to make its point.

6. Teaching: The best teachers use metaphors, not migraine triggers.

7. Branding: “Just Do It” has outperformed every corporate mission paragraph ever written.

8. Policy: “Free at the point of delivery” remains unmatched.

9. Climate action: “Use less, restore more.” No need for a white paper.

10. Entrepreneurship: If you need a flowchart to describe your startup, it’s not ready.

Hayler sees simplicity not as a communication tactic but as an operating system. Young founders often agonise over balancing purpose and profit, as though they are trying to negotiate peace between warring nations. His answer is charmingly plain: Blue Earth must be commercially robust - tickets cost money, partnerships cost money, staging a festival costs approximately the GDP of a small island - but the mission does not drift because it is simple enough to survive contact with reality.

Even partnerships are simplicitydriven. Hayler is clear: no fossil fuel

sponsors. Not because of ideology, but because “they are too committed to profit above everything else.” Also, one imagines, because “Fossil Fuel–Powered Regeneration Pavilion” would look terrible on the brochure.

Instead, Blue Earth partners bring solutions. The test is simple: Do you move the boat faster? (Preferably in the right direction.) If not, the kayak is full.

Hayler’s embrace of regeneration - a word currently in its identity crisis era - is again rooted in clarity. Regenerative systems give more than they take. They don’t require you to become a monk or sell your car or memorise carbon budgets before breakfast. They simply ask: Does this restore? Does this renew? Does this make the world more alive? Entrepreneurs understand this intuitively. It is the opposite of the “less, less, less” messaging that makes everyone miserable.

And then there is optimism - a topic treated in grown-up circles the way one treats a wasp: gingerly, with suspicion. Hayler rejects this entirely. “Optimism is absolutely everything.” Without it, entrepreneurs would never begin, investors would never invest, and movements would never move. “Media kills hope,” he says. “Young entrepreneurs start full of optimism until the world stereotypes them into cynicism.” One imagines de Bono nodding vigorously from the afterlife.

Blue Earth channels climate anxiety into agency because anxiety, when simplified, becomes focus. “If you don’t like the way the world works, invent something better.” The kind of line that makes you wonder whether it should be tattooed on the wrist of every young founder who has been told to wait their turn.

But the deepest simplicity of all is play.

Adults forget that every great invention began in play: the Wright brothers tinkering with bicycles, early programmers fiddling with circuits, Einstein imagining riding a beam of light like a child trying out a new scooter. We spend years teaching children curiosity and humour, then spend the rest of their lives stamping it out. Hayler refuses this. His festival invites surprise. People don’t know what to wear, which means they arrive as themselves - possibly for the first time that week. Bankers sit with activists, find shared ground, then go home wondering why it took a festival to realise they were both human. This is not climate as scolding. It is climate as community.

In a culture so addicted to complication it practically needs a 12-step programme, perhaps the most radical thing a young entrepreneur can do is simplify. Strip an idea down to what is true. Speak plainly. Act before permission is granted. Bring hope into rooms that haven’t felt hope since 1997. Build regenerative systems that give more than they take. Laugh at the absurdity of overcomplication, then proceed without it.

Simplicity is not the opposite of intelligence.

It is intelligence delivered without the nonsense.

Will Hayler knows this. Edward de Bono knew it.

And deep down, young entrepreneurs know it too.

The world does not need more complicated adults. It needs braver simplifiers.

The Novelist ZADIE SMITH

The great writer on the vanishing commons and the novelistic imagination

The novelistic approach to the human subject begins with the premise that power is not an identity. It moves. It shifts. To imagine otherwise—to imagine fixed categories of victim and oppressor, static and eternal—is to misunderstand the political world entirely. We see this most vividly in the present moment: if your model of history presumes permanent victims, then you are wholly unprepared when those victims become aggressors. Novelistic imagination, at its best, makes such moral and psychological movement conceivable.

Over the past fifteen years, so much public discourse has insisted on permanent identities—on citizens who are forever this or forever that—that entire realities become unintelligible. I saw this in my classroom during the height of Black Lives Matter. When police violence in Nigeria erupted, my students could not comprehend it. Their mental model was fixed: white police, Black victims. Nigeria did not fit the script; therefore, for them, it could not happen. That rigidity is profoundly apolitical. Politics demands a capacity to imagine power relocating itself, inhabiting new bodies, expressing itself in new forms.

“For more than two decades I have lived without a mobile phone.”

But as I listened to this conversation about imagination, another worry

Zadie Smith Photographed by Sebastian Kim

arose: where will the readers of such imaginative work come from? What is happening to the people capable of reading? For more than two decades I have lived without a mobile phone— an accidental experiment whose results are painful. The loneliness of existing outside the dominant mediation system is overwhelming. Every train carriage, every bus, every queue: 100%

captured. People submerged entirely elsewhere. I understand the impulse; I, too, was once a reader avoiding reality on public transport. But the question now is not why we escape, but who is mediating the escape. Personally, I prefer to be mediated by Tolstoy rather than Musk.

What strikes me most, however, is the

disappearance of the commons. There has always been a space—physical, public—where human beings shared a more or less unified reality, a place of noise and irritation and ordinary life. That commons no longer exists anywhere. The most heartbreaking evidence comes from children. A British subway carriage in my youth was full of noise: arguments, jokes, mischief, children pointing at strangers and whispering outrageous things. Now there is silence. Absolute silence. Every child on every bus, every train, every street—absorbed, solitary.

If you still walk in the commons, as I do—since I live spiritually in 1992—you see the desolation clearly. It feels like Mars. I have travelled to tiny villages in The Gambia and found the same silent absorption. The same small, glowing rectangles replacing the unpredictable chaos of public life.

“A British subway carriage in my youth was full of noise: arguments, jokes, mischief, children pointing at strangers and whispering outrageous things. Now there is silence.”

visited thirty years ago—homes full of Somali families, once cacophonous with voices, siblings shouting, parents debating. Now those houses are silent too. Entire childhoods, lived in mute isolation.

“Anyone raising children will recognize the pattern: a child may read passionately until about age twelve; then the phone arrives, and the reading life vanishes.”

From such conditions, what kind of interiority can emerge?

Still, the novel must remain new; novelty is built into the form. And every so often a book appears that meets the moment. Recently, David Szalay’s Flesh struck me for this reason. Its protagonist is one of these denuded figures—a young Eastern European man with no nineteenthcentury soul, no cultivated interior life, no capacity for reflection. He might be the man at the door of a club, the supermarket cashier, the gym devotee with the thick neck and blank expression. His consciousness is stark. Time barely passes for him. He lives inside his phone. And then, through a sexual misadventure, he drifts into marriage with an extraordinarily wealthy woman. The revelation of her world comes casually: her son takes a helicopter to school.

This denuded commons does not produce readers. Anyone raising children will recognise the pattern: a child may read passionately until about age twelve; then the phone arrives, and the reading life vanishes. If you are lucky, and wealthy, and middle class, you might coax it back at fifteen or sixteen. Everyone else is lost. My mother, a social worker, describes visiting the same crowded flats she Wikipedia.org

The book’s style is equally stripped. No Tolstoyan largesse. No Carveresque transcendence. Yet it worked. When

I finished it and walked through my neighbourhood, I saw that man everywhere—at the corner shop, outside the club, driving my cab. I saw him for the first time. That is the empathetic miracle the novel can still perform, even in a world whose readers have razor-thin bandwidth. As Szalay himself said, you must work with the bandwidth you have. The modern reader cannot process indulgent expansiveness; the writer must find a new form, a new clarity, a new mode of communicating consciousness.

“The modern reader cannot process indulgent expansiveness; the writer must find a new form. ”

The commons is vanishing. Attention is collapsing. But the novelistic imagination remains one of the few tools we have left—one that insists upon the mutability of human beings, the possibility of seeing one another anew, even across the silent gulf of our mediated age.

A Question of Degree PAUL FRIJTERS

The academic and educationalist on a new model for education

Have you observed that your children’s pride in their community and history is eroded in the media or at school? Have you seen the reduced interest among the young in family life and in helping society progress, replaced by zombie-like addiction to social media and victimhood? Are you worried you will lose your children to current mainstream education, turning them barren in all ways? Are you worried your children will learn how to function in a decaying system, unprepared for the harsh realities when that system crashes?

We are. We – academics, consultants, educators, and policy advisers from LSE, Yale, the World Health Organisation, Washington, the EU organisations, and so forth – have seen it getting worse for decades. We were deeply moved by what we saw happening to our own children and the students we taught at universities –even the top UK universities. We saw bright-eyed, hopeful young students become fearful to speak their minds in a matter of months after starting their studies, taught to be ashamed of whom they were and cowed into becoming bureaucratic followers, not confident leaders. They became increasingly lonely, shallow, alienated from their family, and self-obsessed, not proud builders of their own lives and of new communities. Lockdowns made it all much worse.

Not merely did our students start to believe they were a burden to the planet rather than a blessing, but

they were also lacking vital work skills. They lacked critical thinking and realism about how the sectors of our society actually worked. They came out of universities thinking that government is purely top-down: that leaders could simply choose a bit more GDP, ‘nature’, ‘equity’, or ‘health’ when they felt like it. The ‘how’ and its costs were out of sight. Real leadership is a combination of the coal face – where the question is what is workable – and of what one values.

“We saw bright- eyed, hopeful young students become fearful to speak their minds… taught to be ashamed of whom they were and cowed into becoming bureaucratic followers, not confident leaders.”

Our students were not taught what is workable in government, the health sector, the education sector, finance, or any other sector – let alone how to reform them. They were simply educated to fit in, either as a minion doing some office job, or as a ‘leader’ versed in virtue-signalling. That is not a problem whilst the system keeps going as before, but leaves them stranded when the system radically changes. We are hence not surprised at the fear many university graduates now have that they don’t know anything that AI does not also know.

In a way, they are right: many don’t know more than AI. They are stranded, unprepared to think on their feet, view things from different perspectives, and adjust. Businesses calls for critical thinking skills and creativity that current education no longer produces. Indeed, IQ levels have dropped dramatically in the UK since the 1990s, particularly at the top end.

What did we do? We decided to build an alternative, calling it Academia Libera Mentis – the academy of the free mind.

Among the initial group of a dozen academics and thinkers, Paul and Erika were willing to take the lead. They were born in the Netherlands around 1970 and met early in their studies, building a life together. Three children, a successful academic career, and stints in four continents later, they took the plunge in setting up this new academy, backed up by Gigi, Tjeerd, Michael, Willem, Andrew, Dolf, Esther, Benno, and many others who also wanted to do more with their life than pay the mortgage and go on holidays.

Paul Frijters

Academia Libera Mentis and the castle

So, in March 2024 Paul and Erika bought a 260-year old castle in the middle of the Ardennes: Chateau de Hodbomont, once the ancestral home of an entrepreneurial Portuguese sheep-herding family, with a proud history of having sheltered Jews in the Second World War and once serving as an eye-injury sanatorium. The region has as its official motto ‘Pays de Liberte’ (‘lands of freedom’) and displays a strong streak of independence from Brussels. The stars seemed aligned: a place of refuge, of helping people see again, in a region dedicated to freedom.

Of course – given the limited funds a bunch of academics can cough up –the castle was what they call a ‘fixerupper’. Not so much Hogwarts as Stone Henge: great to look at, but just wait till you have to live there. Half the place was a ruin and the other half barely liveable. The large castle grounds had beautiful ponds and fruit trees, but it was also overgrowing with ivy and had an insatiable need to be mowed and weeded. Large spaces and many rooms also meant many things to fix. As soon as one has overcome one problem, such as a leaking roof, another is discovered, such as mouldy walls and missing insulation. Yet, since March 2024 it has become a home, full of life and beauty brought by those who came to be part of the journey. With each new group of students, the place has not only become more liveable, but also richer in traditions and emoluments.

Help came from many enthusiastic academics and professionals, each pitching in their own expertise, adding to the endeavour. For instance, whilst we are not a religious academy, we do openly value the accomplishments of

the West and the place of the church therein. Theo, a retired Catholic priest, thus found us, joined us, and renovated the chapel of the castle, which was consecrated by a bishop on September 21st. Mass can now be given at our academy for those of the faith.

Similarly, top artists and scientists added new elements to the project, ranging from the school-song ‘Minds that dare’, to a world-class curriculum, to new paintings that adorn the halls.

Gradually both the castle and the organisation became populated and connected. Professor Gigi Foster, educated at Yale and now working in Sydney. Professor Ulrike Guerot, working in Bonn and a former supporter of the EU. Dr Delsing the architect and libertarian entrepreneur. Jeffrey Tucker, director and founder of the Brownstone Institute. Dr Piers Robinson and Dr David Bell, experts in propaganda and former leaders of world health institutions. Lodewijk Regout, artist, peace activist, and theatre director. Liberals, conservatives, Marxists, Christians, libertarians, and influencers. Many sharp minds working towards a common cause: a brighter, more informed future, fuller of the various joys offered by the human experience.

Since April 2024, over 100 students from all over the world have come and joined for (parts of) the programme. This programme is intense with freeflowing discussions on economics, health, neuroscience, statistics, leadership, and the future. It combines the Socratic method of 2,000 years ago with the latest AI – as a tool that adds, not a crutch that replaces. Teachers work together to harmonise their language and arrive at an integrated curriculum, something unique in this world as atomisation among academics is the rule. Yet, our teachers want to find common ground and enjoy learning new things themselves, not just debating to dominate.

What is unusual about the academic content?

Students learn about appearances and reality. We point out this distinction in everything and help students understand both. For instance, in statistics we teach the usual (statistical tests and hypotheses), but also the less talked about art of preparing data for analysis (‘cleaning it up’, ‘weeding out inconsistencies’) and the reality of gathering data (inevitable ‘framing effects’ everywhere). Similarly, we

Chateau de Hodbomont

depict organisations dragged down by corruption not in terms of ‘evil people taking over’, but rather the way in which most organisations meet their end: as the virility and pride in the organisation fails, workers and leaders in an organisation stop cooperating to improve the organisation and instead become parasitical on the resources of the organisation. We do not moralise such parasitism but pose the deeper question of how to reform organisations to keep them virile and internally cooperative.

The typical weekday has intense academic sessions in the morning, connected over the weeks and months by leading questions, like

‘Suppose you are the lead architect of a new constitution for the country of Albiona.

How would you set up its institutions, its media, its health system, its education system, its legal system, its economic underpinnings, and so forth?

How would family life function and the relation between communities and

larger overarching institutions? How would you transition from where it is now? Who would be your allies and your enemies?’

“The typical weekday has intense academic sessions in the morning… leading questions encourage students to re-imagine their own countries and their own lives.”

These leading questions encourage students to re-imagine their own countries and their own lives. Their answers very quickly become quite intricate, with detailed transition plans on how to get from where we are to where we should be. There is steel in the classroom discussions as the students realise that the job of reforming their societies may fall on them and therefore necessitates a realistic understanding of how the world works.

In the 12-month programme, students are individually mentored and set themselves to particular tasks, like thinking of radical reforms to the legal system in their country, or reforming the property market or media sector. They learn the skills one sees in top public servants, consultants, or the founders of start-ups. They can read data and board rooms. They spot the difference between well-oiled new businesses and decaying departments overtaken by parasitism.

Community building

Whilst the mornings are led by academics, the afternoon is for student-lead activities, primarily arts and sports. This grows their emotional and social resilience and fosters a greater appreciation for aesthetic movement, creativity and beauty. A core community activity is communal eating, with cooking done in rotating teams so that everyone learns how to cook for others. To help coordination and prevent conflicts, there are sessions on attentive listening, and

Chateau de Hodbomont

group lessons where the students work through modern social challenges (atomisation, gender relations), which they then implement in their student community. We have noticed in our students that few of their generation have ever experienced true community and find the experience intensely exhilarating once they realise that – as Csenge, one of our Hungarian students put it – “community can make us stronger, freer, and more human.”

“Students become much more realistic about how organisations and sectors of the economy work, making them capable of seeing both systemic decay and opportunities for systemic reform.”

Alumni help the next group learn the ropes, but as with the academic programme, the students start as followers looking for instruction and gradually morph into leaders who take the community by the hand in their endeavours. Students organise trips to towns nearby like Aachen, the birthplace of Charlemagne. They garden together and protect each other. There is a lot of experimentation on campus: students practise leading initiatives by designing and implementing new projects and endeavours, ranging from making a list of the medicinal plants found in our forest to mapping the perimeter with a drone.

How are we preparing our students for the world of work? For one, of course, they become part of an international network of rather free-thinking but well-connected teachers and students.

That network also gives them a community to help them understand what is really going on in their society and to give them the belief that better is possible: the ALM community steadies and motivates our alumni to look for opportunities to grow and co-create, both professionally and privately. Most of all, they become much more realistic about how organisations and sectors of the economy work, making them capable of seeing both systemic decay and opportunities for systemic reform. The journey is far from over. Our first alumni are now trying to make their way in the world (with the first ones finding jobs and marriages through each other!) and our community is slowly expanding. A cat guards the stairs (and the pantry). Our aim

remains to be a place of hope and regrowth, spawning similar endeavours throughout the West. Students who want to join the journey and teachers who hope to set up their own new academies in their own countries are welcome.

What about ourselves – has it been worth walking away from a full-time ‘normal career’ that was going well and is now on the back-burner via emeritus appointments and such? We know what we have given up. We now travel less, spend less time in fourstar hotels, and eat less caviar. Life is more raw and more stressful. But the company is better and our joy in teaching is more genuine. It feels like we are doing what we were meant to.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE STEPHEN MCPARTLAND

The legendary parliamentarian on what drove him in his political career – and beyond

Italk a lot and try to listen even more, but I never really talk about what drives me; my hunger, my passion to succeed and achieve so I can help others. At heart - I am a lad from Liverpool, although I left almost 25 years ago, it has never left me and I am home (I still call it home) every other week. Home is where my family is and they have been the driving force in my life. Not one of those families that need you to overachieve, as they would be proud of me whatever I did, and they are – furiously proud. They are proud I am The Right Honourable Stephen McPartland, but they call me “our Ste” and some other familial names – my mum, dad, brother and sisters (the twins) – I am the middle child and keep trying to persuade my mum she should give me more attention, but she is having none of it. I am clearly the favourite and keep explaining that to my siblings, but they are having none of it either. What we do all agree on is that family has to be fun, being there for each other and laughing at the best and worst of times.

This is not going to be a rags to riches story, I never had rags and I was always rich in terms of love and laughter, rather than money. Another insight into what makes me the person I am – wealth is defined in terms of love, laughter, happiness, kindness and joy not money or material items. Family really is where my heart is and it has been the cause of great joy and sadness over the years, especially the last 12 months.

“This is not a rags to riches story — I was always rich in terms of love and laughter rather than money. Wealth is defined by love, happiness, kindness and joy, not material things.”

Before I go into more detail, why are you reading this and why have I been asked to write this by my friends at Finito. Yes - we share the same passion to ensure young people can identify and achieve their dreams, to change their stars like I changed mine. To inspire others that yes, they can do this, they can change that, they can be whatever they want to be, as long as they work hard and treat others with respect, but to remember to enjoy the journey – not just the destination –something I have been reminding myself of over the last five years.

My journey started in Liverpool with a lot of laughter at the heart of it. My Mum and Dad both made a lot of sacrifices to ensure we all had good educations – they left school as early as possible for work and did incredibly well as a team supporting each other. They ensured we all had a good education and myself and my siblings all have a couple of degrees – my BA(Hons)

was in History at Liverpool University and then my MSc in Technology Management at Liverpool John Moores. Even choosing what degrees to study was based on what I enjoyed doing – I am still passionate about history and love walking and visiting historical sites in my spare time. My interest in computers has evolved from building them to Cyber Security and its benefits to the world economy. My parents were very keen that I should follow what made me happy and enjoy doing rather than what would set me up on a career etc.

During my time at university, I worked part time printing passports inside the East India buildings in Liverpool and my specialist subject at university was the East India Company – so many patterns emerge when you look back...

I migrated into politics because I was passionate about helping people and my

Stephen McPartland (Wikipedia.org)

parents had enshrined a strong sense of fairness inside me, something that would become a blessing and a challenge when I was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2010.

My maiden speech in 2010 was on education being the best route out of poverty in the UK and bridging the gap between education and employment:

“There are children who have tried so hard in school. There is a cadre of dedicated and professional staff who have helped them along the way and invested so much of themselves in helping those children try to improve their life chances, but the system does not seem to work. Those children are being forced through an education system that pushes them out the other end with little chance of getting a job, as they do not have the skills that local employers want.”

I still firmly believe employability is just as key now. Over the years I learned many of the great institutions that support our society have lost their way and focus on themselves, rather than the individuals receiving the services they provide or supporting those who work so hard in them to deliver that service.

“They can be whatever they want to be - as long as they work hard, treat others with respect, and remember to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.”

I was a very rebellious Member of Parliament, as I always fought for what I believed was right. I helped lead some major national rebellions, which supported millions of people and relentlessly focused on what was fair and the impact it would

have on people going about their daily lives. My own family had instilled in me this sense of fairness I have mentioned and a desire to never be embarrassed when I looked in a mirror, that I had taken the easy choice, rather than the right choice because it was too hard. That has always driven me, a passion to make the right choice and help improve outcomes for others.

It has, to my continuing surprise led me to become a senior leader with deep experience driving commercial and governance outcomes across government and the private sector. Unique expertise in macro-economic, geopolitical, security and regulatory risk drivers of commercial performance with over 14 years Board level experience across a variety of industries.

“Family has to be fun — being there for each other and laughing at the best and worst of times. That sense of togetherness has shaped everything I do.”

A Privy Councillor, former National Security Minister, and member of Joint Committee on National Security Strategy. A senior Parliamentarian having chaired the House of Commons Regulatory Reform Select Committee and a member of the Liaison Select Committee which directly holds the Prime Minister to account. Author of the Independent McPartland Review into Cybersecurity, as an enabler of Economic Growth, on behalf of the Government.

I am currently an Ambassador for CREST, the elite cyber accreditation

organisation and a Senior Research Fellow in Criminology and Cyber Security at City University of London. I speak all over the world on cyber security, post quantum cryptography and digital sovereignty having retired from politics in 2024.

“I have always been driven by fairness: making the right choice rather than the easy one, and working relentlessly to improve outcomes for others.”

My family has been at the heart of all the choices I made, and I skipped over the sadness bit – always trying to focus on the joy. I have had so much good fortune, been so lucky and seen and done so much more than I could ever have imagined growing up in Liverpool, but I am sad. I am grieving. I lost my dad in February 2025, after a long illness, he was only 73 and we have just been through many of the firsts without him – his wedding anniversary, his birthday and Christmas were all in one week in December. My Dad was a huge part of my world and life choices; he was ill for several years with the cruellest of diseases that steals them away from you a little at a time. I chose to spend more time with him, so I decided back in August 2021 not to fight another General Election. My Mum is broken hearted but doing her best and I have travelled all over the world and still tell him about it. I know he is incredibly proud and I am going to make him and my family prouder as I embark on the next stage of my journey.

Tomorrow’s Leaders LYDIA SMITH

Finito World sits down with artist Lydia Smith who is making a name for herself for her original and daring sculpture

How did your journey into sculpture and digital art begin?

I have always been an observer, drawn to the spaces between people, and how form, balance and connection can reveal something more profound about who we are. Thinking in three dimensions has always felt natural to me, and sculpture became the medium through which I could translate this fascination into something tangible.

“I have always been an observer, drawn to the spaces between people, and how form, balance and connection can reveal something more profound about who we are.”

What began in childhood with playdough soon grew into a language of its own. By sixteen, I had decided to pursue sculpture seriously, working weekends as a lifeguard and in a pharmacy to fund my summer tuition in figurative sculpture. This training led me into the film industry, where I sculpted for large-scale productions and refined my ability to bring imagined forms into physical reality. The film world also introduced me to digital tools. I first encountered photogrammetry, and later began experimenting with distorted scans using gaming consoles. These

technologies made me think about how we bend and reshape matter and experience, extending my practice beyond the physical.

Alongside sculpture, I have always been fascinated by the intersection between technology and human behaviour. As a teenager, I explored these ideas through games like The Sims, testing out experiences I had

not yet lived. That same technological curiosity now drives my interest in blockchain, augmented reality and other digital mediums where art, technology and human connection converge.

For me, sculpture, whether physical or digital, is not only about form but about exploring the structures of experience, perception and the ways we relate to one another.

Your work spans traditional materials and new technologies — how do you decide which medium or method to use for a particular idea or project?

I begin my creative process with clay. It is a grounding and connecting experience, a way to tune out of the world and enter a flow state. I don’t have a preconceived design in mind; I let the sculpture guide me. The process is instinctive, but it is shaped by the themes I research in my practice, with human connection at the centre, and ancient history, science, technology, and spirituality as interlinking topics.

Once the clay piece is complete, I scan it using a gaming console. This process creates a warped and distorted digital interpretation of the work; the technology itself is responding to my sculpture. This dialogue reflects my view of the way our physical and digital identities are increasingly intertwined. One influences the other, a reminder for us to be mindful of how we exist within both spaces.

“Clay remains my favourite medium because it is tactile, immediate and endlessly adaptable. I work quickly and intuitively, and technology allows me to bring those works into being at scale.”

I can also utilise scanning technologies to scale my work to monumental proportions for public spaces. With the help of 3D printing and robotics, these large pieces can be made in materials such as bronze and carved into marble. Although technology enables me to work at scale more effectively, each piece is constantly refined and completed by hand. Clay remains my favourite medium

because it is tactile, immediate and endlessly adaptable. I work quickly and intuitively, and while I would not have the patience to carve directly into marble, technology allows me to bring those works into being.

In my practice, technology and human touch are not opposites but partners, working together to make sculpture across material and scale more accessible.

You’ve worked across the fine art world, the luxury industry and film — how do these different contexts shape your creative process?

Working across these industries has given me a broad education in creative production, with each context shaping a different aspect of my practice.

In film, I learned how to deliver sculpture at the highest standard under considerable pressure. The scale of production, the collaboration with large teams and the demands of tight deadlines pushed me to refine both my technical precision and my

ability to adapt quickly. It showed me that creativity can flourish within constraints, and that discipline is just as essential as imagination when bringing a vision to life.

Fashion offered me an entirely different perspective. It opened up an understanding of design that is directly connected to the human body. Working in that environment helped me explore how art interacts with movement, material and presence, and how it can be at once expressive and functional. It also encouraged me to consider detail, surface and form in a way that is intimate and immediate, where the person wearing the garment becomes an extension of art.

Collaborating with the luxury brand E P O K Woman over the last four years, and serving as their resident artist in their flagship Mayfair store, has been instrumental in developing the experiential side of my practice. Hosting events with them expanded

my skills in production, curation and the creation of immersive experiences. Together, we have regularly produced exhibitions over International Women’s Day and Frieze Week, presenting both sculpture and digital art. These collaborations taught me the importance of context, storytelling and community.

These experiences directly contributed to the founding of Fé Collective, an initiative I co-created alongside Lydia Higton to provide time and space for artists whose work we believe has the potential to shift the balance within the art world. Through Fé, I am bringing together the skills I developed in fine art, film and fashion, including precision, the sensibility of design and the ability to produce and host, into a community. It is about fostering change, collaboration and inclusivity through creativity.

How do ancient history, science, and spirituality intersect in your work?

I have always been fascinated by human behaviour and the ways we perceive reality. When I became academically aware of these subjects, I found myself drawn to them as sources of wisdom and guidance in my search to understand people better.

“Art can be interpreted in countless ways, and the beauty of it is that there is never a right or wrong response. I hope my work offers a sense of calm and reflection, inviting viewers to explore forms and ideas more deeply.”

For me, these subjects act as forms of research. They are different lenses through which I explore the same central questions: why we are the way we are, how we connect, and what shapes our shared experience. My sculptures become a way of processing this exploration. They act as portals, holding and sharing information, stories, and perspectives that may not be widely discussed.

Although technology may seem disconnected from these subjects, it is an integral part of modern life that must also be included in the conversation. I am interested in how technology can be used in conjunction with ancient history, science and spirituality, rather than in isolation. Together, these areas all feed back into my core theme of human connection, how we can better understand one another, and ultimately create a world

in which we can thrive.

Through art, I can present these complex ideas in a form that is more accessible and tangible. Sculpture becomes not only an expression of my search, but also a way of inviting others to engage with knowledge and narratives that might otherwise remain hidden.

Can you share a project that has been especially meaningful or transformative for you?

Recently, I had the opportunity to be the Artist in Residence at the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Hertfordshire, an experience that was both rewarding and transformative. During my time there, I worked one-to-one with A-Level students, teaching sculpture and helping them develop creative ideas. At the same time, I was commissioned to create four monumental sculptures for the school grounds.

The sculptures were designed to reflect the school’s motto, “Every pupil thrives and is prepared to shape their future,” as well as its values of courage and kindness, ambition and perseverance, inclusivity and integrity. The making of these works also became a community project within the school. Year 7 and Year 9 students joined me during their art lessons to assist in the creation process, giving them the chance to be part of something larger than the classroom.

Each sculpture was hand-carved by me using repurposed materials and then coated in an eco-friendly, nontoxic medium. This process was the stage where the students became most involved, helping to apply the material and witness the transformation. I then hand-patinated each piece with lacquer and bronze powders to complete the work.

This project was meaningful to me both as a sculptor and as a mentor. It was inspiring to see the students connect with sculpture in such a direct way, and it was an honour to place four monumental works in the school’s three-thousand-acre parkland.

What are you currently working on, or what’s next for you?

At the moment, I am entirely focused on creating new work in the studio. Being an artist often means moving between moments of public visibility and periods of focused solitude.

After producing my exhibitions over the past few years and working across different creative industries, this time feels like an essential period of hibernation and reflection. When an artist goes quiet publicly, it is often a sign that new work is taking shape and something significant is on the horizon.

The work I am developing is substantial, and I am allowing myself the space to nurture these ideas until the right moment to share them. It is a stage of growth and experimentation, and I look forward to seeing how the

work evolves and emerges when the time is right.

Finally, what do you hope viewers feel or take away when they experience your work?

It is important to me that each viewer has their own experience and relationship with the work. Art can be interpreted in countless ways, and the beauty of it is that there is never a right or wrong response. While I have my intentions and reasons for creating, it is not for me to decide how someone should experience my art.

That said, I do hope that on a foundational level, my work offers a sense of calm and reflection. From that starting point, viewers are invited to explore the forms and ideas more deeply, allowing their thoughts, feelings and interpretations to unfold naturally.

To hear individuals’ analysis and experience of my creations is one of the things I value and enjoy about presenting my art to the world.

Ten Thousand Hours

LOUISE HOUGHTON

Broadcaster

Louise

Houghton on confidence, culture, and 'how to shine in the spotlight'

Public speaking isn’t optional anymore, it’s essential. Whether you’re pitching a new venture, leading a meeting, or delivering a keynote, your ability to speak with clarity and confidence can shape your success. Yet, despite its importance, it remains one of the most common fears in professional life.

I’ve seen it time and again; people who are experts in their field freeze the moment they stand behind a lectern. Their voices falter, their shoulders tighten, and the message they’ve spent years refining gets lost in nerves.

As an international broadcaster and moderator, I’ve spent over two decades on stage and screen working for networks like BBC, SkySports,

Universal, CNBC and Netflix. I’ve hosted award shows, moderated panel discussions and fronted a daily live lifestyle show for eight years at DWTV. When it comes to interviews I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, Nico Rosberg or Jack Savoretti and I’ve talked to countless C level professionals from leading brands like Google, Samsung, BMW and more.

“Public speaking is no longer a ‘nice to have’ — your ability to speak with clarity and confidence can shape your success.”

Standing under bright lights in front of audiences up to 10 million at a time, I realised that the difference between a good speaker and a great one isn’t just content, it’s presence; how you carry yourself, how you breathe, how you connect. So why do so many people struggle with this skill?

Why we struggle to Speak Up

In Britain, confidence is often mistaken for arrogance. We grow up taught not to “show off,” to keep our heads down and let our work speak for itself. It’s an admirable humility, but it doesn’t serve us well on stage. In today’s smaller, more connected world, what reads as modesty to some can come across as a lack of conviction to others, especially to international

Louise Houghton

audiences who equate confidence with credibility.

Part of this comes down to what psychologists call imposter syndrome — the feeling that you don’t deserve to be where you are, that you’ve somehow slipped through the cracks and might be “found out.” It’s surprisingly common among high achievers. Add the expectation to perform publicly, and that quiet doubt can swell into visible nerves.

There’s also what Australians named tall poppy syndrome — the tendency to cut down those who stand out. If you’ve grown up in a society that portrays the message that it’s safer to blend in than stand out, it’s no wonder that standing on stage feels uncomfortable.

Other cultures have their own versions of this. In Japan, they have a proverb; “The nail that sticks out gets

hammered “down” In Scandinavian countries, “the law of Jante” — warns against thinking you’re better than anyone else. Yet in the U.S. or parts of Southern Europe, enthusiasm and self-promotion are seen as positive, even expected. The same behaviour that feels boastful in London might be interpreted as passionate in New York or Milan.

“Highly capable people freeze the moment they step behind a lectern, and the message they’ve spent years refining gets lost in nerves.”

So much of public speaking anxiety isn’t about fear of forgetting lines like actors might have, it’s about fear of judgment. Fear of being too much. Fear of being seen. When that cultural conditioning meets adrenaline, we mistake the natural surge of energy for panic. Our hearts race, our palms sweat, and we label the feeling fear. But as researcher Dr Brené Brown notes, “Anxiety and excitement feel the same in the body — it’s how we interpret them that determines the outcome.”

Adrenaline isn’t the enemy — it’s your fuel.

I shared this once backstage with an exec who was nervous, and I came to realise my experience could really help others. People don’t give dull speeches because they lack intelligence, but because no one has ever taught them how to translate their brilliance into stage confidence. Once they learn to use the adrenaline as fuel, the nerves can transform into focus, energy, and presence.

Impromptu coaching moments backstage, between sessions or before keynotes evolved into a methodology I call the Four P’s of Public Speaking, which I explore in depth in my forthcoming book, Shine in Your Spotlight.

The Four P’s of Public Speaking

The method behind Shine in Your Spotlight rests on four pillars: Personality, Presentation, Preparation, and Performance.

1. Personality

It all starts with you. Before you write a word, you need to understand your mindset and your barriers. Many of our nerves come from old stories: the time we stumbled at school, or the belief that we’re “not the type” to stand on stage.

One of the first exercises I give clients is to reframe fear as excitement. List what they think they are scared of next

to a list of reasons to give the speech. When we look at the facts rather than feelings, it becomes clear that the purpose of giving the speech outweighs the nerves and helps them to dissipate. Reframing anxiety as anticipation changes the whole experience.

2. Presentation

Once the mindset is set, we shape the message. This is about clarity, structure, and story. Whether you’re pitching investors or addressing peers, know your audience and tailor your tone. Keep it concise, conversational, and visual. People remember stories, not slides.

“The difference between a good speaker and a great one isn’t contentit’s presence.”

Passion is contagious. If you’re not excited about your subject, your audience won’t be either.

3. Preparation

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” But preparation isn’t just about memorising a script. It’s about rehearsing with intention. Focusing on your body language, your breathing, your transitions.

Record yourself, watch it back, notice where you stumble or speed up. Familiarity breeds confidence. You can’t always eliminate nerves, but you can plan for them.

4. Performance

This is where it all comes together. From how you warm up your voice to the way you walk on stage, every detail contributes to presence.

A few quick tips side stage:

Close your eyes – this lowers your

heart rate and helps you focus. Do some box breathing or long slow deep breaths.

Speak positively to yourself – your body is listening.

Smile – genuinely. It changes your tone and your chemistry.

And above all, remember this: the audience wants you to do well. They’re not waiting for you to fail; they’re hoping to be inspired.

“In Britain, confidence is often mistaken for arrogance - an admirable humility that doesn’t serve us well on stage.”

Public speaking isn’t about perfection; it’s about connection. When you

strip away the nerves, what remains is authenticity. When you find your voice and learn to use it with purpose, everything changes: your career, your confidence, your impact.

After all, the ability to articulate ideas confidently is what moves projects forward, secures funding, and wins trust. So, the next time you feel that surge of nerves before a big presentation, remember, it’s not a sign of weakness. It’s your body reminding you that what you’re about to do matters.

You don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room, just the most authentic one.

If you would like to learn more about how to truly 'SHIINE IN YOUR SPOTLIGHT', you can find tools, resources or coaching at louisehoughton.com/coaching or @louisehoughton_ on social platforms.

Those Are My Principles

ILARIA MAGAGNOLI

Why confidence and resilience should be taught early and how Inner Wings is proving early intervention works

What if every child left primary school with a practical toolkit for confidence, resilience, and authentic self-expression – tools they’d use for life? This isn’t fantasy – it’s already happening in 230+ UK schools, reaching over 33,000 children. The need is urgent. One in five children aged 8 to 16 (20%) had a probable mental disorder in 2023, up from one in nine (12%) in 2017, according to NHS England. Meanwhile, 61% of 10–17-year-old girls in the UK have low self-esteem. For parents and teachers, these aren’t statistics – they’re real faces and real pain of the children sitting in front of them every day.

My transition from a career in the City to coaching psychology came from witnessing confidence’s profound impact on the choices we make and ultimately, our life outcomes. Watching my own teenage daughters and their peers contend with pressures magnified beyond previous generations changed everything. Social media’s pervasive influence, academic anxiety and appearance pressures have all intensified the landscape in which youngsters have to find their footing. This drove me to earn an MSc in Psychology, determined to support women and young people reach their full potential through evidence-based approaches.

Yet whilst I was studying theory, a quiet revolution was already unfolding in schools across the UK –

one that’s now equipped over 33,000 children with practical “confidencebuilding toolkits” designed to last a lifetime.

Meeting Inner Wings: A Mission That Changed Everything

My introduction to Inner Wings came at their first-year fundraiser in 2021. Founded by two inspirational technology leaders – Melissa Di Donato Roos and Darren Roos – the organisation’s mission immediately resonated: fostering confidence and resilience in young children aged 6-12 throughout the UK, especially those most in need, via completely free school programmes that nurture self-worth, courage and acceptance. I jumped at the opportunity to support the charity, becoming a Trustee.

“What if every child left primary school with a practical toolkit for confidence, resilience, and authentic selfexpression – tools they’d use for life?”

Melissa, one of the Top 10 most influential women in UK Technology and inaugural chair of the 30% Club’s Technology Working Group, has spent 25+ years working passionately to make technology welcoming for everyone, especially women. Darren,

a proven technology leader now Chairman of IFS, is a committed advocate of equality and diversity who transformed female leadership there from 10% to 40%.

At that time, they were considering a new programme focussed on public speaking. I suggested adapting the communications coaching techniques we use with global leaders – methods Melissa had experienced as a CEO – into age-appropriate content for children. This collaboration resulted in our second programme, “Finding Your Voice”, and our newest initiative, “Finding your Wings”, launched in primary schools this September.

The scale of impact is already impressive: 33,000+ children reached across 230+ partner schools, with 1,100+ teachers trained to deliver the programmes, completely free of charge.

The Complete Toolkit Approach

Confidence plummets during adolescence – exactly when it’s most needed. By secondary school, many

students already believe they’re “not good enough”. Inner Wings intervenes earlier, reaching children whilst their core self-perceptions are still forming. What sets Inner Wings apart is recognising that lasting confidence requires multiple tools working together. This is why we’ve developed three interconnected programmes addressing different layers of confidence building:

Finding Your Superpower provides foundation tools. Through engaging activities, children discover what makes them unique, develop growth mindset approaches and learn to celebrate achievements. Every child finds one or more “superpowers” –whether it’s kindness, reading, sport or creativity. One teacher shared: “I had a parent say their child was calling their additional needs their superpowers.”

Finding Your Voice delivers expression tools, focusing on public speaking, presence under pressure, and authentic

communication. The impact here has been particularly striking: at one Scottish school, only 10% of pupils initially said they loved talking in front of the class. After completing the programme, 62% said they loved it. Children learn that they are “good communicators in their own authentic way.”

Finding Your Wings, launched this September, adds resilience tools to the children’s toolkit. It teaches children to find confidence in being authentically themselves and to keep flying despite life’s challenges. Using mind-body connection techniques and the “CTEAR” framework, children learn how Circumstances, Thoughts, Emotions, Actions, and Results connect – giving them practical tools for managing stress and emotional regulation.

Evidence-Based Foundation Meets Real Results

Every tool is grounded in rigorous

research – Brené Brown’s vulnerability research, self-determination theory, neuropsychology – then shaped into fun, drama and movement-based activities that keep children engaged and “begging each week to do the next session!” (Deputy Headteacher and Mental Health & Wellbeing Champion)

This scientific grounding translates into measurable outcomes: 80% of children report increased confidence after completing the Inner Wings programmes and 87% of teachers observe positive changes in students who needed support most. The qualitative feedback provides the most compelling evidence. Teachers consistently report transformations like: “Emily now puts her hand up and deals positively when she doesn’t answer correctly,” and “After delivering the programme, children are speaking out more confidently in class with increased resilience to give things a go.”

These aren’t temporary confidence boosts – they represent fundamental shifts in how children perceive themselves and their capabilities. Children own these tools, which is why the impact lasts.

“By

equipping children with confidence toolkits early, Inner Wings is addressing a critical economic pipeline –preparing resilient, confident adults who can adapt, lead and innovate in a changing world.”

Economic

Impact Through Individual Empowerment

The benefits extend far beyond individual wellbeing. By equipping children with confidence toolkits early, Inner Wings is addressing a critical economic pipeline – preparing resilient, confident adults who can adapt, lead and innovate in a changing world.

The toolkit approach ensures these benefits compound over time. Children equipped with practical confidence tools become teenagers who navigate academic pressures successfully, young adults who excel in job interviews and advocate for themselves in negotiations, and eventually confident parents who pass these skills to the next generation.

Political Recognition and Scalable Solutions

Our approach has gained recognition at the highest levels of government, business and academia. Inner Wings’ Advisory Council launched in 2024 at the House of Lords, hosted by Baroness Mary Goudie. On the 20th October this year, Melissa returned alongside Baroness Goudie, Baroness Estelle Morris and Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, to engage with peers, MPs, and supporters about the importance of building confidence and resilience in children from an early age.

"It is clear that the work you do has a real impact on those involved, both pupils and teachers, and is really making a difference." - Baroness Estelle Morris, Former Secretary of State for Education and Skills

This recognition validates what we’ve seen empirically in classrooms – this approach isn’t just an educational nice-to-have, it’s essential infrastructure for preparing resilient, capable citizens who are equipped to contribute meaningfully to national prosperity.

Our teacher-delivered model provides

crucial advantages in scalability. Rather than relying on expensive external facilitators, we train the teachers who are already familiar with their students, using comprehensive handbooks and supporting materials. The model’s flexibility allows for whole-class delivery or targeted interventions, with all programmes aligning with Personal and Social Education frameworks, completely free of charge.

The Lifetime Investment Proposition

Our “toolkit for life” vision represents prevention rather than cure, with significant economic implications. We’re front-loading confidence development – giving children tools before they need them rather than waiting for problems to emerge. The impact is both immediate and transformational: teachers empowered with approaches that work, parents witnessing positive changes at home and children equipped with practical confidence tools today who become resilient adults who learned emotional regulation early

on, and future leaders equipped with authentic communication skills.

Completing the Revolution

With the September 2025 launch of Finding Your Wings, we’ve completed our comprehensive confidence toolkit.

For the first time in the UK, schools have access to free programmes addressing foundational confidence, authentic expression and emotional resilience. With demonstrated impact across 230+ partner schools and proven training methodologies, we’re positioned to scale significantly whilst maintaining programme quality and accessibility.

Schools can implement these programmes through innerwings. org, with free teacher training and comprehensive support provided. We continue seeking partners and sponsors to expand our reach, recognising that universal access to confidence toolkits could represent

transformational social policy.

“Every child deserves practical tools for building confidence, expressing themselves authentically, and maintaining resilience.”

The Question That Matters

Every child deserves practical tools for building confidence, expressing themselves authentically, and maintaining resilience. We’ve proven these tools work, demonstrated they can be delivered at scale, and shown the economic benefits extend far beyond individual wellbeing.

In an era where children face

unprecedented pressures whilst adults grapple with mental health crises that often trace back to childhood experiences, Inner Wings offers something genuinely revolutionary: practical, evidence-based tools that prevent problems rather than merely treating them.

The question isn’t whether these programmes work – the evidence is clear. The question is how quickly we can reach every child who needs them.

From playground challenges to future boardroom presentations, these toolkits empower children to become confident, resilient adults who can maximise their potential whilst contributing to broader economic prosperity.

For more information about Inner Wings programmes, visit innerwings.org

JEREMY KING: BREAKFAST WITH A MASTER RESTAURATEUR

Just before Christmas, VIP guests gathered at the East India Private Members’ Club in St James’s Square for a Finito breakfast sponsored by the Grecian Artisan Wine Company. Hosted by Finito CEO Ronel Lehmann, the morning brought together longstanding supporters of Finito, and admirers of Jeremy King — the restaurateur whose name is woven into the history of London dining.

Greek wines, supplied by the Grecian Artisan Wine Co., were displayed around the room, and guests were

encouraged to try their “really special wines” and even take advantage of a Christmas gift code. There was an additional flourish of theatre when Charles Haslett appeared in full Manuel-from-Fawlty Towers mode, bringing well-timed chaos to the breakfast service and delighting the room.

Lehmann introduced King as “the reason we’re all here,” noting his five decades at the helm of London’s most beloved dining rooms — from Le Caprice to The Ivy, The Wolseley, and the newest openings of the 2020s. With

his characteristic grace, King signed copies of his book Without Reservation for every guest.

Here's what Jeremy had to say:

“Despite what people think, I’m actually a very positive person about the restaurant world at the moment.

I know that might sound strange, but restaurants have taught me so much — about people, about adversity, about myself.”

“I’m here today technically to talk about the book, but the book is about me in a different way. I’ve learned a lot through restaurants. There are people

Jeremy King

Tamish Aston, Eve Williamson and Alana Bralsford

Richard Colker and Janine Stow

Liz Brewer and Andre Chris

Charlotte-Sophia Boardman and Julia Carrick OBE

Jeremy King and Ronel Lehmann

Manuel

Grecian Artisan Wines, event sponsor

Maria Theologou, Jeremy King and Andre Chris

Alasdair Shaikh

Jeremy King, Manuel and Ronel Lehmann

Jeremy King, Janine Stow, Jeremy Levison

here I’ve known for years — people I’ve spent time with, people I’ve gone through adversity with. The book came out of simple things I’ve learned. I’m not the poster boy for Finito in any way, but I would have been very grateful if I’d known Finito when I was young, because I made my life decisions by the throw of a dice.”

“I would have been very grateful if I’d known Finito when I was young, because I made my life decisions by the throw of a dice.”

“I started as a merchant banker. I skipped university the first time and thought I’d go into the City and become incredibly rich. The only problem was: I was the wrong person. In 1973, a client drew down £5,000 — five times my annual salary — and put £2,000 on a horse in the Derby. He said I should back it, so I did. It won at 33–1. Gambling became part of my life.”

“I read The Dice Man — a book you must avoid at all costs — because it took me in a direction where I determined the course of my life by throwing a dice. At first it was fine: which film to see, which restaurant to go to. Then I started deciding which character I would be at work because I was so bored. One day I pretended I’d lost my voice. The next I was Long John Silver, pretending I had a parrot on my shoulder.”

“It carried on like this. I applied for Cambridge and got a place, but when the matriculation papers came through, I threw the dice. I liked danger. A gambler has to potentially lose. My gamble was: if I threw a double six and got the managership of the wine bar I was working in by the month of my 21st

birthday, I’d stay in hospitality for life. Unfortunately, that’s what happened.”

“I say ‘unfortunately’ because when my own son considered giving up his place at Cambridge, he said, ‘But you did fine.’ And I told him: yes, I did fine — but I missed out. That’s why I’ve spent my life giving guidance. That’s why the book has that element.”

“One of the first lessons in life is: don’t accept an invitation unless you’d be happy doing it tonight — because soon it will be tonight. Another lesson: give a quick ‘no’, and don’t explain. Your friends don’t require it. Your enemies won’t believe it. So just say no. Life gets a lot easier.”

“The real catalyst for the book was something Graham Norton said. Someone he was speaking with was arguing that young people today have no backbone, no discipline — that we should bring back national service. Graham Norton said: no. If you want to go in that direction, make it mandatory that everybody spends six months working front of house in a restaurant.”

“I can teach somebody how to open a bottle of wine. What I can’t teach is attitude. We all want to be loved. We all want to be recognised.”

“He’s right. Instead of looking at a screen, they would have to look people in the eye. Looking people in the eye is the beginning of a good life. Working in a restaurant teaches communication, teamwork, dispute, reconciliation — so many things. It sets you up.”

“I was once having tea with Ruthie Rogers and her granddaughter ordered

something. The granddaughter said to Ruthie, ‘Brown or black?’ And Ruthie said, ‘She’s not allowed to be served by anybody who can’t repeat the colour of her eyes immediately afterwards.’ Teach your children that. That’s the moment you start to engage.”

“When people ask what makes someone great front-of-house, I often quote Danny Meyer. He says: ‘I can teach somebody how to open a bottle of wine. What I can’t teach is attitude.’ The way you greet people matters more than anything. We all want to be loved. We all want to be recognised.”

“Working in a restaurant teaches communication, teamwork, dispute, reconciliation — so many things. It sets you up for life.”

“At Caprice, if you asked customers who the best waiter was, they’d all say Dinsey. If you asked the chefs and managers who the worst waiter was, they’d also say Dinsey. He made mistakes. Technically he wasn’t brilliant. But he had a wonderful smile and he made the guests feel good. That’s what counts.”

“And finally, tell the truth. I once gave a talk on airline hospitality and spent an hour and a half attacking British Airways — only to discover that the men I was addressing *were* British Airways. Afterwards I apologised, but I said: ‘They needed to hear it. Nobody else will tell them.’ We’re all too sycophantic. Stand up and speak out. It works.”

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FEATURES

THAT SPIRITUAL ETHIC

What do the world’s religions say about work?

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SARAH TUCKER Letter From China

LETTER FROM JAIPUR Nishad Sanzagiri

Christopher Jackson

Anyonewho has visited St Peter's is struck by its theatrical enormity. Everything about it is probably a bit too big – not least the queues, which can be so long as to make you exhausted before you've even glimpsed Michelangelo's Pietà. This is religion as public spectacle, as wealth generator –as box office. A visit there can be enough to bring out one's inner Lutheran: we sense a shininess and a splendour which seems a long way from “Blessed are the poor”. It was Goethe who noted the disparity between the finery of Catholic priests and the barefoot humility of Jesus himself.

But this scepticism only gets us so far. For a start, there really is a very good chance that Peter—the very same Peter whom Jesus himself called "the rock"— is buried here. If you book well ahead for the Scavi tour, you can enter the necropolis: to be transported downwards is simultaneously to be escorted back in time and to enter a rawness of experience which seems to have nothing to do with the bling upstairs.

And this fact alone brings you nearer to what the whole enormous claim of Christianity is about. Peter. The two syllables resonate across history because of the vivid, sometimes blundering nature of the disciple: the one who, in the Bible, always reacts so directly to the authority and strangeness of Jesus. Of all the people in the ancient world, with the possible exception of Paul, we feel him as both a recognisable human type – someone who acts from the gut – but also as an unrepeatable individual who functions as a central component of what George Stevens famously called The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Now imagine entering a role which goes all the way back to him. We ought to be able to feel the weight of that chain along umpteen Clements and Piuses and Leos, leapfrogging an especially

famous Francis, all the way to now—and then you can begin to feel why this place transformed so radically during the spring last year.

“This is religion as public spectacle — as wealth generator, as box office.”

On 8 May 2025, the Roman evening slipped out of its usual role as host to the world's tourists and back into the role which partly made it so famous: it became a stage set for providence. Inside Michelangelo's glorious Sistine Chapel, the mysterious conclave had been going on.

The announcement of a new pope is an extraordinary thing. The crowds in St Peter's Square do their part – cheering, weeping, capturing the moment with their phones. The build-up resembled a cup final: there was a feeling of something utterly exciting at stake, which seemed somehow at odds with much of what one associates with religion—the silence of prayer, the curious codes of the Eucharist, the whispers of the confession booth.

Eventually, inside, the future had been chosen, and the white smoke curled

upwards. Then the famous thrilling words: Habemus papam, and in among the Latin recitation, some Englishsounding names.

My first sense of him is how utterly American he seems. Robert Francis Prevost, born in 1955, has that same faintly imperial look which all Americans used to have—of power as a reasonably neat fit. For a moment he looks at the crowd—tens of thousands in the piazza, millions more by satellite—and smiles with the polite blandness of someone who knows he is about to be defined by others.

What he does next is interesting. Francis used to talk off the cuff – those first words, “Buona sera”, delivered like the start of a parish meeting. Leo XIV, by contrast, feels more prepared and structured. When he finally begins, it is with a phrase which could almost be a syllabus for his pontificate: “Peace be with you! Dearest brothers and sisters, this is the first greeting of the Risen Christ, the good shepherd who gave his life for God’s flock.”

He thanks Francis with an almost filial warmth. He thanks the cardinals, who have taken the historically unlikely step of choosing an American, and then places himself where he is most comfortable: "I am a son

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of St Augustine... with you I am a Christian and for you a bishop."

Some six months later, Pope Leo XIV is still not especially defined in the public imagination. He exhibits neither the oratorical thunder of John Paul II nor the Teutonic precision of Benedict. He speaks of a “missionary church” that “builds bridges and dialogue”, but it is difficult so far to think of that language as specifically his. The very geography of his speech—Rome, Peru, “the entire world” – tells us what kind of universal he has in mind, and yet this fact alone makes one also hanker after specifics.

Then there is the small but telling thing: he uses the word "synodal" from the loggia. "We must be a synodal church, one which goes forward and always seeks peace, charity, and to be close to those who suffer."

THE LIFE BELOW THE WATERLINE

Pope Leo XIV was born in 1955 in Dolton, an unshowy suburb on the southern fringe of Chicago. That sentence alone would have seemed impossible to any contemporary of the future pontiff. Dolton in the 1950s was part of that great post-war American story—a place built on the optimism of returning GIs, steelworkers with good union jobs, families who believed in the upward trajectory promised by modest lawns and dependable schools. It was straightforward Midwestern town whose population was overwhelmingly white and solidly middle-class. The Catholic presence was real but not overwhelming: mostly Irish- and German-rooted families, with a sprinkling of Poles. The real dividing line in Dolton wasn’t between Catholic and Catholic, but between Catholic and Protestant, though even that was more a matter of Sunday

geography than hostility. Lutheran and Methodist families lived on the same blocks; their children played Little League together. It was a community where religion ran deep but quietly, almost like an underground river.

The Prevosts fit this landscape exactly. Their house was typical: two storeys, modestly scaled, always tidy. It has now been bought by the city as a result of Robert's election, and it is probably in some sense the architectural opposite of the Vatican. His father, Louis, worked steadily—first in a steel mill, then in administrative roles. His mother, Mildred, travelled each day to the Dolton Public Library, that small civic temple of order and quiet. She had what librarians sometimes acquire: an air of inwardness, as though she lived partly among the books she tended.

The politics in the house were Democratic, in the straightforward New Deal sense: pro-labour, suspicious

of plutocrats, instinctively egalitarian. Kennedy’s election in 1960 was not a tribal triumph but something closer to a cultural relief – the moment when Catholics felt their faith was not a disadvantage to be quietly managed.

Robert was the third of five children and, even in childhood, the one whose seriousness marked him out. Contemporaries noticed it in church, where he followed the readings with a stillness that made other parents nudge their own distracted children. It was seen also in the questions he asked – ordinary questions, but asked with an adult’s patience, as though he believed that answers mattered.

“At the age of 16, he took on a curious summer gig as a grave-digger… the quiet kid who didn’t joke as much as the others, who lingered a little longer after funerals, who seemed to understand instinctively that grief is not to be hurried.”

At the age of 16, he took on a curious summer gig as a grave-digger. Years later he would describe grave-digging in the heat of an Illinois summer as “meeting mortality very directly” –surely an occupational hazard for that grim profession. The cemetery workers remembered him – the quiet kid who didn’t joke as much as the others, who lingered a little longer after funerals, who seemed to understand

instinctively that grief is not to be hurried. One leitmotif of Leo’s life is that people seem to like him – and to remember liking him.

It is possible to imagine him digging those graves, turning thoughts as well as earth over in his mind. Perhaps this is what first nudged him toward the Augustinians: not the drama of a Jesuit-style intellectual conquest, but the steady interiority of Augustine, the saint who understood that every life is lived half above ground and half below it—in the visible world and the hidden chambers of the heart.

Dolton is not a place that produces popes – except that here it did. His upbringing gave him a particular way of being Catholic: steady, unpretentious, bereft of theatricality, shaped by the belief that faith is not demonstrated but lived.

AUGUSTINE AND ALL THAT

Castel Gandolfo, 2025. Leo XIV appears in what feels less like a papal palace than a parlour-sized room, a cross between a hotel and an office. Behind him, walls bloom with pale green damask; a lamp glows with soft gold. He begins: “Good evening and God's blessings to all of you who are taking part in this wonderful occasion,

the celebration of the feast day of our Holy Father Saint Augustine.”

There is no papal grandeur in the voice; it is the voice of a man joining a gathering already underway. “On this solemnity of our Holy Father Saint Augustine, I'm humbled and truly honoured to accept the Saint Augustine Medal of the Province of Saint Thomas of Villanova, for contributions both as a scholar and a leader in the Church.”

The occasion is formal, even slightly stiff. But when Pope Leo XIV speaks of Augustine, you notice how everything becomes suddenly, unexpectedly alive. “On the celebration of this feast day in honor of our spiritual father, Saint Augustine, I realise, with much humility, that so much of who I am I owe to the spirit and the teachings of St Augustine,” he says. What is the essence of Augustine, who, as we shall see, has had such an influence over his life.

“Augustine, who likewise tried, through earnest toil and prayer, to understand this relationship and this passionate love of our God."

Those who know Augustine’s Confessions, arguably the first biography, will not forget the extraordinary passion of those early pages – and clearly nor has Pope Leo.

He continues: “Augustine helps us learn the right relationship with God and to understand how we must respond out of that love to others. His life was full of much trial and error, like our own lives, wrought with at times a lack of understanding and difficulties of choosing rightly. But by opening himself up more and more each often difficult day, Augustine was able to find the way to peace for his restless heart.”

The restless heart: it is acknowledgement of this restlessness which, I think, can make Pope Leo XIV’s project relevant to our time of Snapchat and Signal, AI, and fad diets. Once we acknowledge that we are restless, and that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, we then begin to cast about for peace. What makes Augustine unique is his ability to be ahead of you in admitting his own faults – and to be aware that those faults stem from a certain misplaced urgency to be sated in a transient and not a spiritual

way. In admitting all this, Augustine was going against our idea of the bishop as the person of few appetites, who is somehow not subject to the ordinary temptations. Augustine not only said he was subject to them, but that he would like to have his fill of them before he gave them up.

Of course, there are dangers in the Augustinian method: admitting to a propensity for wrong-doing can sometimes seem to rubber-stamp sin. I’m sure there are plenty of people who read Confessions and then went on to live lives which can hardly qualify as Christian at all. This will always be the objection of the traditionalist wing of the Church, which found its leader in Pope Benedict XVI.

But the benefits of Augustine’s approach seem obvious once you see Leo XIV's face while he speaks: Augustine’s candour is an unusually good basis from which to begin. And it’s beginning

which most of us feel we must do – at the level of each day, at the level of our understanding, and indeed across our whole life. It’s not a bad idea to be brutally frank about one’s desire, ambition, vanity – provided we also remind ourselves that we really do intend to move on from them. When Augustine writes the immortal line about chastity postponed –Lord, make me chaste, but not yet – he becomes the saint who understands the modern condition better than any contemporary philosopher.

Pope Leo XIV continues: “It is a powerful example of the power of God's grace that touches our human experience. It is an example I have tried to emulate these many years as an Augustinian.”

This is the first time he has said anything approaching the personal, and it lands with modest force. He is not claiming sainthood; he is admitting

Pope Leo XIV's first popemobile ride during his inauguration (Wikipedia.or)g

apprenticeship. To be Christian at all is really to admit to being perennially in short trousers. It’s good to have a Pope who understands this – and to realise how he came to that understanding we need to go back to his early decisions.

FORK IN THE THEOLOGICAL ROAD

By his teens, Prevost was already on the threshold of vocation. His summer job as a grave-digger did what such work often does: it stripped life to its essentials. When he later spoke about those summers, he remembered not the labour but the people – “the families, the moment that mattered.”

I wouldn’t put Prevost in the category of those who need a conversion, of which St. Paul is by far the most famous example. There is a sense, as you read about the boy who used to roleplay taking the Eucharist as a boy, of someone who finds Christianity to be true from the outset, and doesn’t have to struggle with it much, if at all. Such people don’t career about and then suddenly hear a thundering voice from above; they miss the drama of the Damascene moment. Instead, they tend to receive a deepening, and this seems to me the best way to read Pope Leo XIV’s unusually centred life. The danger is that we mistake this for blandness; the danger for the Pope and his supporters, is that he actually is a bit dull and therefore doesn’t bring many people to the faith.

As Prevost looked around upon reaching maturity and considering his career in the church, the Jesuits were the obvious route. He had the temperament for it: disciplined, studious, naturally inclined toward order. But Jesuits tend to be centrifugal. They expand outward into the world: universities, diplomacy, missions, intellectual life. Prevost, even young, seemed to sense something else calling him.

Augustinians, as we have just touched on, are different. Their gaze turns inward first – not out of narcissism but out of realism. Augustine knows that the battlefield is the heart, the territory contested is memory, desire, conscience. This is the spirituality of the restless heart that seeks rest in God. It is probably Prevost’s only really surprising decision that he chose the latter when seeming so temperamentally suited to the former.

“Augustine knows that the battlefield is the heart, the territory contested is memory, desire, conscience. This is the spirituality of the restless heart that seeks rest in God.”

And indeed, for years people have remarked that Prevost, with his combination of intellectual discipline, administrative clarity and quiet resolve, looks in many ways like a natural Jesuit. He studied mathematics with the sort of rigour that would not have been out of place at a Jesuit college. He has the careful, structured way of speaking associated with the Society of Jesus, and more than one Vatican observer has said that he “thinks like a Jesuit even when he is not trying to.” And yet, when the moment of choice came, he did not walk toward the outward-facing, intellectually expansive world of Ignatius. He walked inward, toward Augustine.

The key, perhaps, is the sort of young man he had already become. That summer he spent digging graves — a job taken at the age of sixteen, at exactly the age when abstract questions begin to sharpen into moral ones — may have left a deeper impression than he ever

felt inclined to dramatise. It introduced him to death before he had learned to explain life, and it confronted him not with philosophical puzzles but with bereaved families whose grief could not be tidied or theorised. It was the kind of work that presses a person inward: toward empathy, toward an awareness of the fragile self, toward the questions that accompany rather than dazzle. Augustine would have recognised the formation instantly. A Jesuit vocation often begins with a desire to act on the world; an Augustinian vocation often begins with a desire to understand one’s own heart before God. Prevost, even young, leaned unmistakably toward the latter.

His later intellectual paths only deepened that instinct. In time, Prevost would study mathematics. Even here though, set theory is abstract, but its beauty lies in its interior order, not in outward conquest. His doctoral work in canon law, examining the authority of the prior, was not a study in power but in how a community listens to itself. These are profoundly Augustinian concerns. They look administrative on the surface, but underneath they ask the Augustinian question: how does a human community discern truth together?

There were also the subtler influences of his Midwestern upbringing: the aversion to display, the suspicion of grandiosity, the sense that truth lives in steady commitments rather than dramatic gestures. Jesuit life can be brilliant, theatrical, strategically engaged with the world. Augustinian life is quieter. It asks for persistence, for community, for a readiness to do the hard work of inward scrutiny. Everything in Prevost’s formation — from the library-quiet of his childhood home, to the graveyard summers, to the disciplined inwardness of his mathematics — pointed him

toward the order that prized interior depth over public brilliance.

All of this was why at eighteen, he entered Villanova University to begin formal discernment. There he encountered a different kind of intellectual life—not the polished rhetorical certainty that some associate with Catholic academia, but a more questioning, psychologically honest mode of thought. He studied philosophy, theology, and mathematics, thriving on the triangulation: logic sharpening faith, faith grounding reason. After graduating in 1977, he continued deeper into the Augustinian formation. His solemn vows arrived in 1981; ordination the following year. At Catholic University in Washington, his doctoral work took shape – a thesis on the authority of the prior in an Augustinian community. Authority, he argued, is less an imposition than a form of obedience – not obedience to the superior, but to the collective discernment of the brothers. Leadership, in that model, is an act of listening.

By the late 1980s, Robert was teaching, ministering, helping form new members of the Order. He was on the path to a very normal Augustinian life: scholarship, community, governance. It was a clean, dignified trajectory – but another surprise was around the corner: Peru.

TESTED BY A CONTINENT

One good way of taking the measure of Robert Prevost is by looking at a photograph: the one taken in Chiclayo during the great flooding, the bishop wading into the street as though it were a river. The water reaches almost to the top of his rubber boots. He wears no cassock –just a short-sleeved collared shirt and a simple pectoral cross. His face holds a strange combination of focus and softness: the slightly

furrowed brow of a man taking in the damage, and the faint lines at the corner of the eyes that tell you he is listening.

“Authority… is less an imposition than a form of obedience –not obedience to the superior, but to the collective discernment of the brothers. Leadership, in that model, is an act of listening.”

He is not posing. Behind him, houses are half-drowned. Two men flank him –one with a shovel, another with a plastic bucket – following his gaze. They are looking where he is looking. That is the key to the image: he is not leading from in front, nor hovering as a dignitary behind; he is simply in the middle. He is present.

This is the man who arrived in Peru in his early thirties: an American priest with the earnest face of the Midwest, stepping off the plane into the unfiltered sunlight of Lambayeque and discovering almost immediately that the Church there was not an institution but a weather system. He came with that doctorate in canon law and the abstract clarity of set theory. But Peru – vast, uneven, beautiful, wounded –would not be a place for abstractions. He arrived in 1985, just thirty years old. The Peru of that period was marked by turbulence: the lingering shadows of the Shining Path insurgency, persistent inequality, political volatility. But Chiclayo – the “City of Friendship” –welcomed him with straightforward

warmth that would mark his entire Peruvian ministry.

He learned Spanish not from textbooks but from the parishioners who insisted on speaking to him quickly, impatiently. He discovered that Augustinian ideals of community acquire a new voltage when the community is under stress. And somewhere between the Masses in makeshift chapels and the evenings spent listening to families who had lost everything, the young American priest became a Peruvian bishop without ever intending to.

He taught in the seminary, worked closely with young men discerning priesthood, and quickly developed a reputation for fairness. Students recall that he listened more than he judged; staff recall that he noticed the quiet ones before the outspoken ones. Peru shaped him intellectually too. His parishioners were not wrestling with abstract sacramental principles; they were wrestling with unemployment, broken infrastructure, domestic instability. To them, the Church was not a doctrinal fortress but a place where someone would finally listen.

By the early 1990s, he was not just a missionary but a leader. In 1999 he was elected Prior Provincial – the highest Augustinian role in the region. Then came 2001, when he was elected Prior General of the entire Augustinian Order – based in Rome, responsible for friars on every continent. His Peruvian colleagues were direct. “He was one of us,” one priest said. “He belonged to Peru because he chose us.”

What Peru gave him, above all, was the confidence that his vocation could stretch. That the quiet young man from Dolton could live in a foreign land, absorb a different culture, reshape a regional Church, and still remain, at the deepest level, Augustinian: inwardly

searching, outwardly serving.

When he speaks now of “the voices of the poor and the marginalised,” he is not reciting a theme. He is remembering people whose names he can still summon in prayer. The road to Rome began in Dolton, but its decisive turn was taken in Peru.

2013 ONWARDS

By 2013, after a dozen years as Prior General, Robert Prevost had become one of those rare figures in the Church whose influence is both widely felt and barely spoken of. Vatican people would describe him in their small, exact ways. “Serious,” one said. “Not forbidding. Just serious.” Another: “He has that way of speaking as if he has already listened.”

He had finished his second term with the unmistakable look of a man who had poured himself out. His Augustinian brothers granted him a “pause” – a period of rest. But the pause did not last long.

“The truth of human person male and female is not a cultural construction but a divine gift. We must resist ideologies which confuse children and distort God’s plan.”

Francis had been elected that spring – the unexpected Jesuit with the unexpected mandate –and one of his instincts was to bring missionaries closer to the heart of things. The new Pope had little interest in careerist clergy. He wanted men formed by experience rather than ambition, men who had prayed in simple chapels and eaten whatever was placed before them.

Prevost returned to Peru in 2014 to oversee Augustinian formation. A

Peruvian priest recalls: “He arrived with an almost embarrassing humility. But then he began to arrange things –gently, but with a certain steel.”

Then came the moment that startled even those who had admired him. In 2015, Francis appointed him bishop of Chiclayo. If anything, being made a diocesan bishop clarified him. He spent hours each week in parishes, visited schools and hospitals, wrote pastoral letters striking for their absence of selfimportance. But he was also prepared to speak against certain trends he saw in society. In one he writes: “The truth of human person male and female is not a cultural construction but a divine gift. We must resist ideologies which confuse children and distort God’s plan. The family, as designed by God, is the sanctuary of life and love. No one has the authority to redefine this foundation.” Things were beginning to move rapidly. Francis had a longer plan in mind. In 2020, Francis appointed Prevost to the

Pope Leo XIV presiding over his inaugural papal Mass (wikipedia.org)

POPE LEO XIV: EDUCATION

1955

Born September 14, 1955, in Chicago; raised in Dolton, Illinois.

1973–1977

1973

Graduates from Thornridge High School, Dolton.

Enters Villanova University, an Augustinian institution. Earns a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics (1977).

1977–1981

Enters the Order of St Augustine, making his solemn profession of vows in 1981.

1982

Ordained a priest on June 19, 1982. (wikipedia.org)

Congregation for Bishops – the body that had, for decades, been one of the Church's most guarded machines. Its task was delicate: to sift candidates for episcopal leadership, assess their character, judge their suitability.

Then, three years later, the decisive act: Francis appointed him Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. One Peruvian priest said, “Rome has taken our bishop because they needed someone who will not lie.” A seasoned Vatican diplomat said privately, “He is not afraid of the powerful. And he is not dazzled by them.” The impression throughout this rapid rise is of someone who makes few enemies and many friends – and does so by learning that listening is a far more promotable quality than talking.

His appointment sent a signal that Francis wanted a particular kind of episcopal culture: less ideological posturing, more pastoral reality; less clerical defensiveness, more transparency; fewer princes, more shepherds.

Inside the Dicastery, his staff learned his habits. He asked more questions than his predecessors. He disliked jargon. He

took long walks in the Vatican Gardens when facing decisions about bishops who would shape whole nations’ spiritual futures. Again the impression is of someone who hadn’t hugely changed, who had enough spiritual room in himself to accommodate new positions without being overwhelmed. It is a rare gift: to be able to find space when the world is bearing down on you with its demands.

By 2024, Rome knew he was different. By 2025, Rome knew he was indispensable. His name shifted category. It ceased to

Childhood home of Pope Leo XIV, in Dolton, IL (Wikipedia.org)

(Mid West Augustinians)

EDUCATION TIMELINE

1985–1999

While completing doctoral work, he is assigned in rotation to Peru beginning in 1985. Works in formation, parish ministry, and later in leadership roles.

2001–2013

Elected Prior General of the Order of St Augustine — global head of the Augustinians. Based in Rome; oversees all Augustinian houses and international formation.

be the name of a Dicastery prefect and became the name of a possible pope. One Italian who had known Prevost for twenty years told a journalist: “He is not the kind of man who seeks the papacy. But he is the kind of man the papacy seeks.”

THE DRAMA OF THE CONCLAVE

By the time Francis died in April 2025, Robert Prevost had become something highly unusual in the modern Church: a man everyone trusted and no faction could quite claim. That alone made him quietly powerful. As prefect of the

2015

Appointed Bishop of Chiclayo by Pope Francis.

2023

Appointed Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and created Cardinal.

2025

Dicastery for Bishops, he had become one of the few figures in Rome who lived with a daily, unfiltered view of the Church's wounds.

What colleagues noticed in Prevost during those years was his steadfast refusal to speak the language of camps. While the Catholic commentariat organised itself into tribes –restorationist, integralist, synodalist –Prevost kept his vocabulary stubbornly pastoral. Asked what he looked for in a bishop, he would answer in disarmingly simple terms: that a bishop must be a

pastor, not a manager; a witness of hope. He was, undeniably, close to Francis. But closeness to Francis did not make him a Francis clone. Francis could be blunt, impatient, almost performatively allergic to the grand manner. Prevost was careful, introspective, almost monastic in stillness. Where Francis provoked, Prevost absorbed.

To understand the conclave that followed Francis's death, one must understand the decade-long drama behind it. Benedict and Francis had become symbolic totems for two different Catholic imaginations.

(Courtesy of Sr. Carmen Toledano)

(Diocese of Chulucanas via AP)

Vatican Media

Vatican Media

Elected Pope Leo XIV.

Prevost was caught between those worlds. He respected Benedict’s theological lucidity; he admired Francis’s pastoral courage. He was, in a phrase used by one Roman old hand, “a Francis man without the Francis heat.”

It was this mixture that made him a trusted figure among cardinals. He did not lobby; he did not cultivate journalists; he did not try to neutralise enemies because he did not seem to have any. For a Church exhausted by a decade of online vitriol, that combination felt like just what was needed: a de-escalation. Many cardinals felt the Church had spent too long performing its divisions. They admired Francis’s courage but wanted a less polarised atmosphere. They wanted continuity without the ideological fever. This was where Prevost entered the frame. He had Francis’s trust but was not a Jesuit. He defended Vatican II but did not scold those attached to older liturgies. He came from the United States but carried little of the American imperium; after three decades in Peru, he seemed culturally bifocal.

The conclave, when it began, carried a strange intensity. The cardinals entered the Sistine Chapel sensing the weight of needing to choose someone who could restore a measure of internal peace.

The early ballots scattered widely. But as discussions continued, Prevost’s name slowly gathered density. What impressed his peers was not ideology but equilibrium. One French cardinal said privately that Prevost “knew the global Church the way a confessor knows a penitent – from the wounds inward.”

On the second day of voting, the tide turned. The Francis-appointees trusted him not to dismantle their pope’s reforms. The Benedict-leaning traditionalists took comfort in his sobriety. The Italians saw a man who understood the Curia without being

devoured by it. The Latin Americans felt a filial pride.

“Prevost was careful, introspective, almost monastic in stillness. Where Francis provoked, Prevost absorbed.”

By the fourth scrutiny the decision was sealed.

When the white smoke rose, the announcement came: a name the world did not expect to hear. Leo the Fourteenth. An American Leo—a name with echoes of Leo XIII, the pope of industrial justice and modern Catholic social teaching.

When the man himself stepped onto the balcony, the contradictions that would define his papacy were immediately visible. He wore the traditional mozzetta and lace rochet that Francis had abandoned – traditionalists cheered; liberals flinched. But when he spoke, the tone was unmistakably Franciscan: “God cares for you, God loves you all, and evil will not prevail.”

Within hours, the interpretation industry got to work. The truth is simpler: Leo XIV was neither a return nor a rupture. He was what the cardinals, in their collective exhaustion, had decided the Church needed: a man of equilibrium – Augustinian interiority, Franciscan compassion, Benedictine seriousness – who might lower the temperature and restore the sense that the Church was not a battlefield but a communion.

THE PONTIFICAL DAY TO DAY

So what is his life like now? The Catholic Church is not merely a religion; it is a vast organism spread across every continent, a planetary

nervous system of parishes, dioceses, charities, schools, hospitals, mission posts, and refugee camps. It counts more than a billion adherents, making it the largest non-governmental educational and healthcare provider in the world.

And yet the Vatican itself, over which the American now presides, is shockingly small. A few thousand employees. A bureaucracy no bigger than a mid-sized liberal arts college. The pope’s immediate staff is tiny. So what is his working life like? A pope wakes before dawn to pray, to read, to celebrate Mass. Then come the audiences: a head of state, scientists, disabled pilgrims. Afterward there are meetings with the Secretariat of State, with financial officials, with the prefects of dicasteries. There are decisions about bishops to approve, decrees to sign.

A pope must balance the demands of doctrine, diplomacy, liturgy, economics, and mercy, holding together Rwandan farmers, German bishops, Filipino domestic workers, Brazilian charismatics, French intellectuals, American culture warriors, and the Ewe grandmother at the back of a random parish whose faith matters as much as any of the others.

What does success look like in such a role? History gives us clues. The great popes are remembered less for flamboyance than for clarity. Gregory the Great held the Church together in the ruins of the Roman Empire. Leo the Great faced down Attila. Leo XIII navigated the industrial age. John XXIII threw open the windows at Vatican II. John Paul II spoke across continents with the authority of a poet-statesman.

Success means the ability to read the

Leo with President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2025(Wikipedia.org)

Alamy

times without being swallowed by them; the courage to reform without factionalising; the grace to hold unity when unity seems impossible.

Leo XIV inherits a Church still marked by the double exposure of Benedict and Francis. Their two pontificates created one of the most unusually emotional decades in modern Catholic memory. The battles over Vatican II, over the Latin Mass, over synodality – these have left the Church with something between an identity crisis and a family feud.

Leo’s challenge will be to impose neither nostalgia nor revolution but a kind of interior coherence. Augustine would call it making the heart one. The modern world might call it leadership.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

And so we find him now – the gravedigger from Dolton, the Augustinian mathematician, the missionary of Northern Peru – stepping off the papal plane into the light of Ankara for his first foreign visit. Behind him, the Vatican press corps shifts; ahead, the Blue Mosque waits, and beyond that, Nicaea – or Iznik, as it is now called – where the year 325, the year of the Nicene Creed, will be celebrated, and the question of the unity of the Church looked at anew. As usual, it is all an impossible balancing act for the Pope.

He descends slowly. This is not a man who wastes gestures. On the plane, he had given what amounted to a one-sentence précis of his entire vision: that all men and women “can truly be brothers and sisters, in spite of differences, in spite of different religions.”

Turkey is a clever choice for a first journey. At Nicaea, he knows he will stand where bishops once hammered

out the Nicene Creed. The original council was a drama of unity in an empire fraying at its edges; the modern commemoration, 1,700 years later, is similarly charged. He will speak not of triumph but of wounds, the Augustinian lexicon in which healing is always slow work.

“All men and women ‘can truly be brothers and sisters, in spite of differences, in spite of different religions.”

Then to Lebanon – a country shaken again by violence. He will meet faith leaders and young people; he will pray at the Beirut waterfront, the site of the port explosion. There is something fitting about this: the grave-digger who once learned mortality in Illinois soil now standing before the scar of another city’s catastrophe.

What is striking, six months into this papacy, is how carefully he has walked the tightrope his predecessor left behind. Francis was not a pope of consensus; he governed by instinct and provocation. Leo XIV's style has been different. He has retained Francis's moral commitments –on migrants, on ecology, on the dignity of workers – but he has delivered them with a different pitch: measured, steady, almost judicial in cadence.

Progressives claim him because he speaks of accompaniment, the poor, the wounded. Traditionalists claim him because he speaks of truth, the Creed, the Fathers. Both are partly right and partly wrong – which, in papal terms, is usually a sign of a balanced pontificate.

What is more interesting is how this trip foreshadows the papacy to come. Nicaea is not merely an anniversary; it is a reminder that Christianity, at its most foundational, is a faith born of councils – of men gathering, disagreeing, arguing, conceding, refining, praying. It is synodal by birth. The pope's presence there is a kind of enacted homily: communion, not combat.

What, then, might the future look like for Leo XIV? Something quieter than revolution and more demanding than restoration. In the best case it will be a papacy of dialogue that is not mushy, of truth that is not brittle, of mercy that is not sentimental. He seems intent on neither scolding the world nor flattering it, but translating the Gospel into a language the world might still recognise as human.

This first journey – to Turkey, to Lebanon, to the very birthplace of the Creed—feels like more than a diplomatic itinerary. It is a subtle declaration of method: the pope stepping not into the centres of power but into the wounded peripheries of history, where Christianity once defined itself and where it must define itself again.

When he returns to Rome, he will be the same man. But he will have begun to trace the outline of a pontificate whose success will depend less on grand gestures than on the slow, almost monastic work of healing – a task Augustine would have understood.

In the end, he keeps returning to the same conviction: that truth is found in encounter, that the Church's task is accompaniment, and that the world, for all its rage and acceleration, is still capable of listening.

WHAT THE WORLD’S MAJOR RELIGIONS REALLY SAY ABOUT WORK

For our Pope Leo XIV issue we zoom out to ask what the religions generally say about work

We tend to talk about work in the language of economics: productivity, growth, efficiency, GDP. But for most of human history, people understood work first in spiritual terms. You rose in the dark, walked to field or workshop or market, and somewhere in your mind was the sense that your effort meant something — not just to your employer or your stomach, but to God, or the gods, or the shape of the universe itself.

If you scratch beneath the surface of the world’s major religions, you find a remarkably rich — and surprisingly convergent — story about work. It is rarely just about getting ahead. It is about service, justice, character, balance, and the art of doing things properly.

What follows isn’t a theological treatise, but a guided tour: how several of the world’s great religious traditions think about labour, vocation and the workplace — and what that might mean for how we live and work now.

Judaism: Work as Worship, Rest as Resistance

In Judaism, work and worship are inseparable. The Hebrew word avodah means both “labour” and “service of God.” To work is, at least potentially, to serve.

The Hebrew Bible opens with a God who works — creating for six days — and then rests. Humans are placed in a garden “to till it and keep it,” partners in maintaining the world rather than passive guests. Later, rabbinic Judaism insists that a person should combine Torah study with a trade; relying on piety alone is frowned upon. A rabbinic saying has it that “if there is no flour, there is no Torah” — meaning: spiritual life withers without the material support of honest labour.

“The Sabbath is a weekly refusal to treat humans as production units - a reminder that worth does not depend on output.”

At the same time, Judaism is intensely suspicious of work that consumes everything. The Sabbath — one day in seven when work is not merely discouraged but forbidden — is a weekly refusal to treat humans as production units. You down tools, you stop checking emails (or their ancient equivalents), and you remember that your worth does not depend on output. In a world of 24/7 hustle,

the Jewish Shabbat looks less like a quaint tradition and more like a radical labour law.

Judaism also cares about justice at work: fair weights and measures, prompt payment of wages, compassion for the stranger, widow and orphan. Work, in this view, is a way of contributing to tikkun olam — the “repair of the world.” The job is never just a job; it’s part of a moral ecosystem.

Christianity: Calling, Craft and the Danger of Idolatry

Christianity inherits Judaism’s reverence for honest labour and its insistence on rest. Jesus spends most of his life not preaching but working as a carpenter; the apostle Paul earns his keep as a tentmaker, refusing to be a burden. The early church saw work as an arena in which to live out virtues: patience, kindness, fairness, diligence.

Over time, Christianity developed the idea of vocation or “calling”: the notion that one’s work, however humble, could be a way of following God’s will. In medieval Europe, this was mostly applied to priests and monks. The Reformation widened the scope. For figures like Martin Luther, a mother changing nappies or a cobbler repairing shoes could

be serving God as truly as a minister preaching a sermon. What mattered was not glamour but faithfulness and integrity.

This democratic view of vocation later helped to fuel what we call the Protestant work ethic — sometimes in healthy ways (discipline, reliability, responsibility), sometimes in damaging ones (overwork, anxiety, the idea that wealth is a sign of virtue). Christianity is at its best when it remembers the other half of the biblical equation: “Consider the lilies… they toil not.” It affirms work, but warns against making work into a god.

“Christianity affirms work, but warns against making work into a god.”

The Christian vision of work is most balanced when it keeps three truths together: that work is good, that people must rest, and that the poor and exploited are of special concern. “The labourer deserves his wages,” says the New Testament — and behind that simple statement lies a whole philosophy of economic justice.

Islam: Work as Worship, Intention as the Engine

In Islam, work is not merely permitted; it is honoured. The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said that “no one ever ate better food than that which he earned with his own hands,” and that God loves a person who, when they do something, “does it with excellence.”

Honest labour — halal earnings — is itself a form of worship.

What gives work its value is niyyah — intention. The same outward act can be hollow or sacred depending on why you

do it. Supporting your family, serving your community, enabling charity (zakat) — all can turn everyday jobs into acts of faith. A mechanic fixing a car or a coder releasing a patch can, in principle, be remembering God in their work as much as someone in a mosque.

Islamic teaching is also sharp on exploitation: cheating customers, underpaying workers, hoarding wealth while others starve. Business ethics, contracts, and fair dealing occupy a significant part of Islamic law. The Prophet insists on paying wages before the sweat has dried — a vivid image of prompt, respectful treatment of employees.

“What gives work its value is niyyah — intention — the same act becoming hollow or sacred depending on why it is done.”

And like Judaism and Christianity, Islam insists on limits. Daily prayers punctuate the working day; Ramadan disrupts ordinary routines in order to reset priorities. The weekly Friday congregational prayer pulls people out of ordinary tasks into a shared space of remembrance. The underlying message is clear: work is important, but you are more than your work.

Hinduism: Duty, Detachment

and the Work You’re Meant to Do

In Hindu thought, work is woven into the concepts of dharma (duty, right conduct) and karma (the chain of action and consequence). The Bhagavad Gita — one of Hinduism’s central texts — is, among other things, a book about work.

Arjuna, the warrior hero, is paralysed at the thought of doing his duty in battle. Krishna teaches him *karma yoga*: the path of selfless action.

“You have a right to your work, but not to the fruits of your work.”

“You have a right to your work,” Krishna says famously, “but not to the fruits of your work.” The instruction is not to become indifferent, but to act wholeheartedly while letting go of obsession with outcomes. You do the best you can, guided by dharma, then release the result. It is hard to think of better advice for anyone paralysed by performance anxiety, metrics, or the fear of failure.

Hinduism also honours seva — service. Working for the welfare of others, without constant calculation of personal gain, is a path to spiritual growth. This can be through explicitly religious roles, but it can equally be healthcare, teaching, environmental work, or any field where the primary motive is contribution.

At the same time, Hindu texts recognise that people have different dispositions and social roles. Not everyone is suited to the same kind of work; confusion comes when we ignore our nature. The Gita praises those who “do their own duty badly rather than another’s well” — in other words, better to be an honest you than a brilliant imitation.

Buddhism: Right Livelihood and the Ethics of Earning

Buddhism places work within the Noble Eightfold Path, the set of practices that lead away from suffering. One of those eight is Right Livelihood

Hindu God, Ganesh Chaturthi (Unsplash.com)

Buddhist monastery Thrangu Tashi Yangtse, Nepal near Stupa Namobuddha in the Himalaya mountains (Unsplash.com)

Western Wall, Jeruzalém (Unsplash.com)

The Quran (Unsplash.com)

— earning a living in a way that does not cause harm.

“The Buddhist asks: does my job increase suffering, or reduce it?”

Traditionally, this meant avoiding professions connected to killing (e.g. arms dealing, butchery), deceit, exploitation, or addiction. In modern terms, it might raise questions about working for industries that depend on environmental damage, manipulation, or structural injustice. The Buddhist asks: does my job increase suffering, or reduce it?

But Buddhism also speaks to the inner experience of work. Mindfulness — paying full attention to what you’re doing — turns even mundane tasks into opportunities for practice. Washing dishes, writing reports, serving customers: these are not obstacles to spiritual life; they are the arena in which it’s lived.

At its core, Buddhist thinking about work is compassionate realism. Work is recognised as necessary; money is needed; life involves compromise. But the practitioner is encouraged to choose as wisely as they can, to minimise harm, to cultivate kindness even under pressure, and to remember that no job will satisfy the craving for permanent security. That insight alone could transform many careers.

Sikhism: Honest Work, Shared Wealth, Remembered Name

Sikhism, founded in 15th-century Punjab by Guru Nanak, offers one of the most straightforward slogans about work: Kirat Karni — earn an honest living. It comes paired with Naam Japna (remembering God) and Vand

Chakna (sharing what you have). The ideal Sikh life involves working diligently, refusing exploitation, and rejecting both idleness and greed. The Gurus themselves modelled this. Guru Nanak spent time as an accountant; later Gurus engaged in agriculture and other trades. Spiritual authority did not exempt them from ordinary labour; it enabled them to ennoble it.

Work, in this perspective, is a way of participating in the divine order. You earn, you share, you stay grounded. Langar — the free communal kitchen in every gurdwara — symbolises this ethic: food prepared by volunteers, offered freely to all, paid for by the community’s earnings. Your job is not purely private; it feeds the common table.

“Your job is not purely private; it feeds the common table.”

For modern readers, Sikh teaching offers a powerful corrective to careerism. It values ambition, but insists that genuine success includes generosity and fairness. The question is not only “How far can I go?” but also “Who benefits as I climb?”

One could extend the list further. Confucianism, for example, emphasises diligence, loyalty, and the importance of fulfilling one’s role in family and state. Many indigenous traditions treat work in nature — hunting, farming, fishing — as a sacred trust, an act not merely of survival but of harmony. Even secular humanism, though it has shed explicit religious language, inherits the sense that meaningful work should contribute to something larger than the self. Across all these systems, patterns quietly emerge. Work, in these traditions, is rarely understood as a

narrow economic exchange or a merely functional activity. Instead, it becomes an arena in which a person can practise virtues, serve others, confront injustice, find rhythm, and learn the art of balance. It is also a place where rest must be honoured — not as an indulgence but as part of the moral architecture of a life. And crucially, none of these traditions suggests that a person’s worth is determined by their salary, performance metrics or professional status.

The religions disagree, sometimes profoundly, on doctrine, ritual and metaphysics. Yet when the subject turns to work, they begin to speak in a surprisingly unified register. What they offer to the anxious twentyfirst-century job-seeker is a kind of collective wisdom: choose work that does as little harm and as much good as you can; treat colleagues with fairness; allow yourself rest; refuse to let your identity shrink to the size of your job title. Above all, approach whatever you do with a certain care — a willingness to do it well, to do it honestly, to do it in a way that leaves the world slightly better than you found it.

“The way we work is inseparable from the kind of person we are becoming.”

In a culture that often treats employment as a purely transactional matter, these older voices remind us of something both simple and profound: the way we work is inseparable from the kind of person we are becoming.

AN INDELIBLE MARK SIR TOM STOPPARD 1937 - 2025

Tribute to the great playwright who made thinking feel like play

Tom Stoppard died peacefully in November at his home in Dorset, surrounded by family, leaving behind what King Charles called "a majestic body of intellectual and amusing work." He was 88 – but there was always a sense that the end had come five years beforehand in the last scene of his last play.

At the end of Leopoldstadt, when the surviving characters unearth the names of those who never returned, the stage becomes a ledger of absence — a roll call of lives erased, families shattered, and stories cut short. For Stoppard, that final revelation was more than dramaturgy: it was a belated admission of the heartache that had always lived beneath his cultivated, gentlemanly exterior. The play's reckoning with Jewish identity, loss, and survival was his own long-deferred confrontation with history, a recognition that the lightness of his wit had for decades floated above a silence too deep and too painful to name. In those closing pages, as the ghosts of Vienna's great assimilated Jewish families gather invisibly around the last descendants, Stoppard allowed something profoundly private to surface — the grief of a man whose childhood was saved by a flight into exile, at the cost of nearly everyone he came from.

From there, to tell his story, we must rewind. Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, displaced first by war and later by the tides of empire, he arrived in Britain not as a prodigy but as a boy who needed a country. The 8-year-old Tom would

later say he "put on Englishness like a coat," growing up to be a quintessential Englishman who loved cricket and Shakespeare. And Britain — its eccentricities, its ironies, its appetite for argument — suited him. He adopted the UK with the steadiness of someone who understood the fragility of belonging. The English language, with all its textures and contradictions, became a home of its own. In that language he found refuge, possibility, and eventually genius. As he would later have the lead character Henry say in many people’s

favourite Stoppard play The Real Thing: "Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little."

Journalism was his apprenticeship — a training ground where he sharpened his observational instincts, learned compression and clarity, and discovered the rhythm of a sentence as surely as a composer discovers tempo. At age 17, Stoppard left school to become a journalist, saying: “I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education. I wanted to be a reporter,

Sir Tom Stoppard (Wikipedia.org)

and I had a wonderful time doing it.”

He worked for the Western Daily Press, then moved to the Bristol Evening World as a feature writer, humour columnist and drama critic. He often wrote under the pen name "William Boot," a selfdeprecating homage to Evelyn Waugh's hapless journalist in his 1938 novel, Scoop. One of his favourite descriptions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he later said, was as two beat reporters trying and failing to make a story stand up. Reporting demands speed, accuracy, and curiosity; Stoppard added mischief, philosophy and a lyrical precision that made even his earliest columns crackle. Journalism taught him how to listen, how to interrogate ideas, and perhaps most importantly, how to keep the outside world present in his writing. "I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon," he once said. When he turned fully to drama, he carried the journalist's restlessness with him — the instinct that a story is never about only one thing.

But entering the theatre in the 1960s meant stepping into a landscape dominated by two monumental shadows: Beckett and Pinter. Stoppard revered them but refused to be trapped by their gravitational pull. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966 and is in part a dialogue with them both. Compare it to Waiting for Godot: the same sense of hapless figures caught in a cosmic joke, the same looping conversations about uncertainty and meaning. Yet where Beckett pares language to bare existential bone, Stoppard multiplies it — turning circular despair into fireworks of logic, wordplay, and philosophical pratfalls. And beside Pinter’s The Caretaker, with its silence that thickens like dust in a closed room, Stoppard's silences crack open into

thoughts, probabilities, and dazzling rhetorical acrobatics. His worlds are no less absurd, but they are warmer, more curious, more alive with possibility.

“He wrote with the warmth of a man who believed that ideas are communalthat thinking together is one of the great pleasures of being alive.”

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead debuted in London and on Broadway in 1967, it was hailed as a masterpiece. At 30, he became the youngest playwright to get a staging at the Royal National Theatre. When asked what the play was about, he famously replied: “It's about to make me very rich.” In the interstices of those influences, he forged something genuinely new: drama that could be intellectually rigorous without being punitive, comedic without being frivolous, and philosophical without floating away from deeply human stakes. As one of his most enduring lines puts it: “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

From the play itself comes that perfect articulation of theatrical absurdity: “We’re more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.” And the quietly devastating meditation on mortality: “Whatever became of the moment when

one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it.” There's Rosencrantz's perfect one-liner too: "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"

From the linguistic exuberance of Jumpers to the emotional intricacies of The Real Thing, from the sprawling intellectual voyages of Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia to the historical excavation of Leopoldstadt, his trajectory was one of continual expansion. He refused to repeat himself. Each play opened a different set of doors — mathematics, politics, love, chaos theory, Russian revolutionary history, the structure of memory, the nature of truth. His curiosity was inexhaustible; his craftsmanship, relentless.

On Jumpers, Stoppard gave us the definition of tragedy as only he could phrase it: “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” And from that same play, a perfectly Stoppardian line about credibility: “How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.”

The Real Thing gave us one of his most beautiful meditations on language: “Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which

children will speak for you when you're dead.”

Then came Arcadia in 1993, perhaps his most perfect play, where he offered this vision of time and existence: “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?"

And that perfect line about science and certainty: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” And on love and fate: “It is a defect of God’s humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

When Arcadia opened in New York, Stoppard insisted his plays were always about people, not abstract ideas. “I’m not some kind of intellectual who's importing very special ideas into the unfamiliar terrain of the theatre,” he said. Yet somehow his people were always thinking — gorgeously, complicatedly, hilariously thinking.

The Coast of Utopia, his epic nine-hour trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, debuted on Broadway in 2006. Movie star Ethan Hawke gave up seven months of more lucrative work to perform in it, saying the chance to read Stoppard's lines was worth it: “We’re used to being talked down to. We’re used to very simple ideas. We’re used to people not challenging us. I feel the great thing about watching Tom Stoppard — when you watch it, it makes you feel incredibly intelligent. Because you do get it. The ideas aren’t that complicated.” From that trilogy comes this

extraordinary passage about utopia and meaning: “We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that's why it’s called utopia.”

“His defining signature remained his wit — not the brittle or exclusionary wit of the show-off, but something more generous.”

His diversification into film was no detour but a natural extension –although Stoppard often felt guilty when he wasn’t working on a play. Stoppard brought theatre's love of structure to cinema's love of image and motion. Steven Spielberg noted that for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue." His screenplays — whether the introspective elegance of The Romantic English woman, the philosophical intensity of Brazil, or the Academy Award–winning wit of Shakespeare in Love — showed an instinctive understanding of how words and visuals converse. He could compress an argument into a glance, or stretch a joke into a revelation. On writing Shakespeare in Love, he said: “Marc had broken the ice. He’d invented this very charming story, so it was much easier to

just ignore what posterity had made of him and just deal with him as a young man. The thing I like about our movie is that it’s also the agony and the ecstasy but without the quote marks. It’s a comedy.”

Stoppard, who considered himself “a theatre writer who sometimes does other stuff,” also worked as a Hollywood script doctor, adding sparkle to Sleepy Hollow, Schindler's List, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Film allowed him to reimagine his love of language for an art form where a single cut can function as a punchline, and where narrative architecture must be at once invisible and immaculate.

And through it all, his defining signature remained his wit. Not the brittle or exclusionary wit of the show-off, but something more generous — a wit that makes audiences feel clever, not belittled. The adjective "Stoppardian" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978, meaning to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — in the style of Tom Stoppard. Though Stoppard himself once joked that for him personally, it meant “another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence.”

He gave us gems like these: “We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.” And: “A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.” On art and skill: “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” On theatre itself: “Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” And the deliciously cynical: “It is better to be quotable than to be honest.”

In a Paris Review interview, he confessed: “I hate first nights. I attend out of courtesy for the actors and afterwards we all have a drink and go home.” He was self-deprecating about his process too, admitting: “I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.”

Stoppard trusted his audience. He didn't simplify; he invited people upward. His humour carried the implicit compliment that you would catch up, that you could follow him across the stepping stones of an argument, that intelligence is not a gate but a shared playground. Even at his most dazzlingly erudite, he wrote with the warmth of a man who believed that ideas are communal — that thinking together is one of the great pleasures of being alive. In 1995, he said: “Things are done well, or they're done not so well. And that's the only distinction which matters in the theatre. I think that I consider myself to be at some place in

the spectrum of entertainers.”

Yet beneath the pyrotechnics lived deeper currents. Stoppard only discovered after his mother's death in 1996 that many members of his family, including all four grandparents, had died in concentration camps. “I wouldn't have written about my heritage — that's the word for it nowadays — while my mother was alive, because she'd always avoided getting into it herself,” he told the New Yorker in 2022. “It would be misleading to see me as somebody who blithely and innocently, at the age of 40-something, thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family.’ Of course I knew, but I didn't know who they were.”

In 1998, following the deaths of his parents, he returned to Zlín for the first time in over 50 years. He expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past, but stated: “I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's

a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life.”

“His curiosity was inexhaustible; his craftsmanship, relentless.”

And that may be why his loss feels so profound. His work stretched from the comic to the cosmic, from farce to tragedy, from wordplay to wounds. But in the end, it is Leopoldstadt that frames the magnitude of his legacy: the laughter, the intellect, the virtuosity — all of it now seen against the quiet sorrow that shaped him, and which he finally allowed himself to reveal.

Tom Stoppard leaves behind not only a body of work but an entire way of thinking about theatre — curious, compassionate, restless, and luminous. He gave us plays that challenge the mind while enlarging the heart, stories that speak to history while refusing to surrender the human capacity for joy. His agents remembered him “for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language.” His genius was formidable; his spirit, unmistakably kind. And the mark he leaves is not only indelible — it is immeasurable.

As he once wrote: “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” What bridges he built. What fires he lit along the way.

Sir Tom Stoppard (Wikipedia.org)

THE FUTURE OF THE MEANING OF WORK

By Christopher Jackson

Some time in the early 1960s, Philip Larkin took a walk on his lunch break from the University of Hull library where he worked as head librarian. He wandered through Pearson Park and observed the unemployed: men shuffling between benches, searching through litter bins, staring at nothing. There were ‘the palsied old step-takers/hareeyed clerks with the jitters/waxedfleshed out-patients still vague from accidents,’ and ‘characters in long coats deep in the litter-baskets’—all, as Larkin put it, dodging the toad of work by being stupid or weak.

It is a brilliant metaphor for those who feel beaten-down by economic necessity – but it also has a sequel.

Years later, Larkin revisited it and wrote his poem "Toads Revisited," which essentially reaches the opposite conclusion. Looking again at a similar park scene, he sees those who are not working – and realises he’s not one of them, and doesn’t want to be. In fact, Larkin recoils from their freedom. The lights come on at four at the end of another year, and he finds himself saying: “Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road.”

Larkin's two toad poems — "Toads" and "Toads Revisited" — capture something paradoxical and profound about work. In the first, written in 1954, he asks himself why he should let the toad work squat on his life, whether he couldn't use his wit as a

pitchfork and drive the brute off. Yet by the second poem, he has come to realise that the toad, for all its weight and ugliness, is also a companion. Work might cause resentment in us, and yet we cling to it. We dream of escaping it, and yet we fear a world without it.

“We dream of escaping it, and yet we fear a world without it.”

This Larkinesque ambivalence runs through many people, unless they happen to be precisely what they want to be doing – unless they have found what we at Finito would always try to steer candidates towards: the

dream career. For the majority though work is probably better than nothing, but my goodness it takes up a lot of time. Many people therefore cling to it – while also wondering what it’s excluding us from.

And yet, Larkin couldn’t possibly have imagined the economy we’d be reading him in today. At this point, we stand today on the brink of an era in which artificial intelligence threatens to make major categories of human labour redundant – and indeed, is already doing so. Larkin's ambivalence feels newly relevant. If work is a toad, we may soon have to decide whether to keep it, and on what terms. And the question is not merely economic or political, but existential. What would a life be like in which most work is unnecessary? What happens to meaning when the toad hops off our backs?

To understand what work might become, we must first understand what it has been. The meaning of work has shifted many times throughout history: from necessity to belonging, from aspiration to self-expression, and perhaps now to something else altogether. Standing at the threshold of an AI-shaped future, we can

look backwards across the long arc of labour and see the shifting story of what humans thought they were doing—and why it mattered.

Necessity: Work Before We Had Time to Think About It

Before there was meaning in work, there was hunger. Work begins, for most of human history, not as vocation or identity, but as survival. The earliest humans painted the walls of the Lascaux caves with bulls, stags, and horses—and though we cannot know exactly what these images meant, we can suspect that they were tied to the central problem of every dawn: how to eat.

When I think of that far-off world, I often think of Zbigniew Herbert, who in Barbarian in the Garden wrote with rare clarity about the first artists and the societies that shaped them. In his essays on the Paleolithic caves at Lascaux and Pech Merle, Herbert insists that these images were not created “for art’s sake” but out of a deeper, almost ritual necessity. He describes a community for whom work, survival, and imagination were inseparable: gathering pigments, lighting the cave, preparing the walls, rehearsing the form of an animal — all of this was labour, but also a gesture toward meaning.

For Herbert, prehistoric art reveals a society in which work was not yet divided into the practical and the symbolic. The hunters who carved and painted did so to understand the world, to secure good fortune, and to give shape to fears that could not be mastered otherwise. The cave was a workshop, but also a sanctuary: a place where the tasks of living — hunting, making tools, protecting the group — bled into myth and ceremony. Herbert sees in these early painters a kind

of original conscience: people who discovered that shaping the world with one’s hands was also a way of shaping one’s inner life.

In Herbert’s reading, the cave is not the cradle of art alone, but the cradle of responsible work — work carried out with attention, humility, and a sense that one’s actions touch something larger than oneself. Long before the idea of “culture” existed, these societies were already forging it, stroke by stroke, in the half-lit chambers beneath the earth.

The hunter-gatherer's day was consumed by the hunt. Anthropologists tell us that early humans spent far fewer hours "working" than we do—but this is misleading. Their labour and their danger overlapped. A miscalculation meant death. There were no weekends off from hunger. The spear was not a craft tool but a lifeline. Meaning, in such a world, was beside the point. You worked because you had to; because your children cried otherwise. When agriculture arrived, it brought stability—and a new kind of burden. The first farmers exchanged the unpredictability of the hunt for the monotony of the field. Early settlements like Jericho and Çatalhöyük show signs of communal labour: stone walls, grain stores, irrigation channels. Work had become collective, and therefore, in a subtle but important way, moral. Laziness was no longer a private vice but a public threat. The community depended on the contribution of all. You can imagine a kind of emergent proto-ethics forming in these settlements. The man who refused to help repair the well was not just inconvenient; he was breaking the unwritten code. Work had become

Philip Larkin (Wikipedia.org)

something like duty. Perhaps we all feel a faint echo of this astonishing development when we fight, say, a nasty cold because we feel we should go to work. When the word ‘should’ enters our day in this way, perhaps it links us further back in time than we really understand.

But if there is a moment when work begins to acquire a richer meaning, it is with the rise of the ancient city. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and later the cities of medieval Europe, labour diversified. Some people dug canals; others made pots; others kept accounts. The division of labour, as Adam Smith would later write, is the

secret of prosperity – but it is also the beginning of identity. If you were a potter in Ur, or a scribe in Memphis, or a hoplite in Athens, you were no longer merely surviving. You were something. Work was becoming a noun as well as a verb.

When Herbert writes about caves and ruins, he intuits something essential about work's origins. His work explores how he could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology – and indeed, even the earliest workers were already trying to understand themselves. The paintings are not merely depictions of animals; they are meditations on

necessity. In the flickering lamplight, the first artists—and therefore the first workers—were already trying to understand what their labour meant.

Belonging: Guilds, Renaissance Workshops, and the Birth of Craft Identity

If the prehistoric and early agricultural eras made work necessary, the medieval world made it communal. One of the most striking developments in European labour history is the rise of the guild system. From around the eleventh century onwards, guilds governed everything from baking to blacksmithing to the intricate crafts of goldsmiths and stonemasons. To be admitted to a guild was to enter a family; to be excluded was to be adrift.

In London, the medieval guilds –the Goldsmiths', the Fishmongers', the Merchant Taylors' – formed the backbone of civic life, and you can still trace how that would have felt in the street names in the City of London. Ironmonger Lane. Shoe Lane. Friday street (where fish was sold). They regulated apprenticeships, wages, standards; they provided insurance, acted as welfare networks, and ran rituals and feasts. Work was not just a source of income. It was a source of belonging. A man might say, "I am a Mercer," with the same pride another might say, "I am a Florentine."

This sense of belonging reaches its artistic apotheosis in the Renaissance workshop. Think of Verrocchio in Florence: the master painter-sculptor whose workshop trained Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino. Leonardo's genius, often portrayed as solitary, emerged from this highly structured, communal environment. He ground pigments, swept floors, prepared brushes,

observed his master, and slowly earned the right to contribute.

Here work becomes something like a lineage. The workshop is a genealogy of craft. And Leonardo, who would later transcend all structures, begins by absorbing all of them. His notebooks reveal something essential about work: that practice comes before originality, discipline before genius. Work, at this point in history, is not primarily self-expression. It is apprenticeship. One reason I think Leonardo was so strange to his contemporaries was because of the extend to which he absorbed then transcended this structure: he was like some sort of proto-YouTuber beholden to no one – with the crucial difference that the contemporary YouTuber is in fact more beholden than they sometimes realise to YouTube itself.

“Work was not just a source of income. It was a source of belonging. A man might say, 'I am a Mercer,' with the same pride another might say, 'I am a Florentine.'”

Nevetherless, there is a romance to this period which we cannot help but feel. Imagine the noise of Verrocchio's workshop: the hiss of burning charcoal, the scrape of pumice on panel, the debates about proportion, the fierce pride in the craft. A young man dreamed of becoming a master, yes—but he also dreamed of being accepted by the brotherhood of his peers. Work meant recognition. It meant solidarity.

And yet, within this communal structure, something new is stirring: individualism. Leonardo is the hinge. In his ability to break free of the workshop model—to become not merely a painter but a scientist, engineer, anatomist—we see the birth of a new idea: that work might be something like a personal destiny.

The modern CV begins here, in embryo. The guild becomes the self. In Leonardo’s case – as with Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Raphael – the self turned out to be polymathic. This was in some ways a historical accident to do with the teeming intellectual environment of Florence: we might call it proto portfolio, and it meant that people like Leonardo and Michelangelo consorted with popes and princes. But soon this aspiration wasn’t to be confined only to men of genius. It was something that everybody with sharp elbows aspired to.

Aspiration: The Mercantile Class and the New Meaning of Work

As Europe moves into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the meaning of work shifts again –this time toward aspiration and accumulation. The rise of the mercantile class creates a new category of worker: the entrepreneur. Suddenly, labour is not only about belonging to a guild or practicing a craft; it is about upward mobility.

Cities such as Amsterdam, London, and Venice develop merchant elites whose wealth comes not from inherited land but from trade, finance, risk-taking. In this world, the Protestant work ethic takes hold. Max Weber, writing centuries later, argued that the Reformation reshaped the meaning of work by turning it into a sign of grace. Calvinists believed in predestination, and this bred deep anxiety – for if salvation could not be earned here on earth, how could

anyone be sure of their fate? The result was a kind of compensatory behaviour where believers began looking for signs of God's favour, and success in one's calling became such a sign. Hard work becomes proof – or at least a hopeful indicator – of divine approval. Success begins to look like virtue; virtue begins to look like success.

Richard Baxter, the prominent English Puritan theologian, taught that becoming wealthy was justified under the right conditions, reasoning that if you became wealthy in the course of working your calling for God's

glory, that meant God favoured you. The phrase Weber quotes – "God blesseth His trade" – became a stock remark about those good men who had successfully followed divine hints. Work acquires a double meaning: it is both toil and opportunity. The phrase "self-made man" is not yet common, but its spirit is present. The mercantile class is the first group in history to see work as a means of choosing one's destiny. If a guild system tells you, "This is who you are," a mercantile society whispers, "This is who you might become."

This shift alters everything: literature, politics, ethics. Shakespeare's plays are full of characters who work their way up through cunning or bravery or enterprise. The notion of "ambition," once sinful, becomes complicated – potentially admirable, potentially tragic. Even Shakespeare’s kings and princes can be dislodged from their apparently stable position: we think of Hamlet wondering what life is really about; Lear sent out onto the heath; Othello brought down by jealousy. It is as if Shakespeare took his awareness of the fluctuations in Elizabethan society and transferred them into the hearts of rulers, tying that psychological understanding to a longer view of the rise and fall of civlisations.

“This is who you are," a mercantile society whispers, "This is who you might become.”

The modern economy emerges from this stew of aspiration. The factory system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while brutal in many respects, is built on the idea that workers can move, learn, improve. When Charles Dickens critiques the Poor Law in Oliver Twist he is doing so from the vantage-point of having personally surmounted the injustices of the system – and because he wishes that same success on others. The Industrial Revolution introduces the idea – sometimes true, often false – that hard work alone can lift one out of poverty. It is the seed of what will become, across the Atlantic, the American Dream.

And yet, this period also contains the seeds of our modern anxieties: overwork, alienation, inequality. Marx, looking at the factories of

Freepik

Manchester, describes the worker who no longer sees his labour reflected in the product: the worker relates to the product of his labour as to an alien object; labour's realisation appears as loss of reality, objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it. The man has become an appendage to the machine. As soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, Marx writes, labour is shunned like the plague – it is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification, and the worker's activity is not his spontaneous activity but belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

At this stage, work means advancement—but it also means estrangement. A man may climb, but he may lose himself in the process. The toad squats heavier for the Victorians. The work people had to do was grimier, nastier and more repetitive – and the winners were so visibly differentiated from the losers. This divide in society runs through Dickens, but it is also there too in a novel like Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli. In fact, the work of this future Tory Prime Minister carries a critique of society remarkably similar to the Marxist view. Both thinkers state that the world is divide between the rich and the poor, and tell us how unfair it is to know the existence of the former category but to find oneself consigned for no very decent reason in the latter.

The American Promise

The twentieth century brings with it a new equation: the possibility that work might be meaningful not because it is necessary, or because it grants belonging, or because it delivers mobility – but because it expresses who we are.

This is the dream of the liberal, industrialised world: that one might

choose one’s work not merely for survival, but for fulfilment. We hear echoes of this in the post-war American optimism which fuels advertising, cinema, and self-help literature. "Find a job you love," the mantra goes, "and you'll never work a day in your life." The flipside of this dream is explored in plays like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: in that play Willy Loman, a struggling car salesman, is tragic because of all that he’s not achieving, but which the audience feels he should aspire to.

Nevertheless, in the mid-twentieth century, rising prosperity did create the conditions for this dream. The GI Bill allowed millions of Americans to pursue higher education; welfare states in Europe constructed safety nets that gave workers enough stability to think about vocation; the expansion of leisure time allowed for introspection. The American Dream, at its best, is not merely the dream of wealth but the dream of choice. A young person might imagine becoming a writer, or a musician, or an engineer, or a scientist – not because their father was one, but because they feel it in themselves.

This shift also produces a spiritual quandary. As religious structures weaken in the West, work fills a vacuum. It becomes the place where we seek meaning, community, and transcendence. The office replaces the monastery; the corporation becomes the new parish. Anthony Trollope once wrote that a man's work becomes "the gospel by which he is known," and in the twentieth century this becomes almost literally true.

And yet, as Larkin reminds us, work is often less transcendent than we hope. The post-war period sees the rise of the open-plan office, the middle manager, the corporate bureaucracy.

Today when someone is stuck in their career they feel it as a spiritual taint – a sort of existential failure, because there is nothing else. Meaning drains away in fluorescent light. The poems of that era – Larkin, Hughes, Lowell – often reflect a sense that the modern worker is spiritually adrift, failing at the essential business of being human. A medieval worker may have felt something like this – but at least some of it would have been washed away on Sunday.

What remains, though, is the idea that work can express identity – that we choose our labour to choose ourselves. This is the hinge on which the modern view of work still rests.

AI, Robotics – and the New Meaning of Work

And now, standing in 2026, we find ourselves at the strangest hinge of all. Artificial intelligence threatens to automate not just physical labour but cognitive labour: writing, law, accounting, customer service, pattern recognition, even artistic creation. Robotics promises to take over logistics, manufacturing, care work, transport.

We confront a question no society has ever had to face: What if work

Elon Musk

becomes optional for many? What if work becomes unnecessary for most?

The numbers are staggering. By 2030, thirty percent of current US jobs could be fully automated, while sixty percent will see significant task-level changes due to AI integration. The World Economic Forum predicted that by 2025, eightyfive million jobs would be replaced, and forty percent of employers expect to reduce their workforce where AI can automate tasks. In the United States, 2.4 million jobs were impacted by AI-driven automation between 2020 and 2024,

with another 1.1 million projected to be disrupted in 2025 alone. Goldman Sachs forecasts that three hundred million jobs worldwide could be affected, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.

“By 2030, thirty percent of current US jobs could be fully automated.”

Elon Musk argues that a workless world is not only possible but desirable. He imagines a future in which universal

basic income provides the foundation for creative exploration, and robots handle the drudgery. Others, like the late physicist Stephen Hawking, warned that such a future could deepen inequality: the owners of the machines may become unimaginably rich, while others drift into purposelessness.

Which future are we heading for? And what will the meaning of work be inside it?

The Boundaries of Automation

The question becomes: What can AI not do? And therefore, what work will remain for humans?

The early answers seem to be: work requiring deep embodied physicality; creative leaps grounded in lived experience; emotional care and relational labour; spiritual counsel; work requiring genuine ethical judgment; work requiring trust, not simply competence; work grounded in mortality and finitude – the fact of being human.

Installation, repair, and maintenance jobs are at lower risk from AI and remain in demand; construction and skilled trades are among the least threatened by AI automation; personal services such as food service, medical assistants, and cleaners are less likely to be replaced by AI; and healthcare roles including nurses, therapists, and aides are projected to grow as AI augments rather than replaces these jobs.

In other words, AI may take over tasks, but not personhood. The jobs that remain will be deeply human ones. The future of work may be less about skill than about presence.

If work becomes less necessary in the economic sense, its spiritual dimension may grow. Already we see people searching for purpose outside their job titles: mindfulness, volunteering, slow living, craft revivals, community gardens, urban regeneration projects. The old

guild yearning – the need for belonging – may reassert itself.

Monastic traditions, curiously, have a renewed relevance. Benedictine ideas of ora et labora – prayer and work – and the rhythm of rest and labour may hold clues for how to structure life when labour itself becomes less structured. Work will need to be chosen rather than imposed, and chosen not for income but for meaning.

“So what kind of tax system could sustain Musk’s idea of a workless society?”

So what kind of tax system could sustain Musk’s idea of a workless society? If a small minority own the machines, do we simply tax them at ninety-nine percent and wire everyone else a survival stipend? That fantasy breaks down quickly: confiscatory taxes undermine investment and encourage capital to vanish offshore. The more serious proposals imagine a patchwork – higher taxes on corporate profits and capital gains, levies on automated production (a kind of robot payroll tax), and public stakes in the great machine-owners that pay out a social dividend. In a fully automated economy, Universal Credit, basic income experiments, and welfare policy stop being auxiliary tools and become the core architecture of everyday life.

But once most citizens live from automated surplus rather than wages, the argument stops being only about revenue and turns into a question of status. If we are no longer workers first, what are we? Citizens drawing a dividend from a common inheritance? Creators and caregivers whose contributions are no longer measured in hours or output? Pilgrims with time to spend on study, devotion, or wandering?

A workless society would need not just new taxes, but a new story about what a life is for.

We may move toward a hybrid model: part paid labour, part selfchosen vocation, part community service. Countries like Finland and Canada have experimented with basic income; studies show improvements in wellbeing, reductions in stress, and no significant decrease in work motivation – suggesting that humans seek purpose whether or not compelled by hunger.

One hopeful prediction: as automation takes over drudgery, human labour may become more artisanal, more relational. We may see revivals of craftsmanship, teaching, small-scale agriculture, local repair services, midwifery, counselling – the kinds of work that require touch, intuition, patience.

Leonardo's workshop model might return: a revival of apprenticeship, communal learning, multigenerational craft. Meanwhile, the mercantile aspiration of the early modern world may shift into a desire not for accumulation but for alignment— choosing work that aligns with values.

But the deepest question is the one Larkin circles around: if we stop working, or work less, what happens to our fear of death?

Larkin feared that idleness would bring him closer to the void – that work, however tedious, kept mortality at bay. Without work, time stretches out, and the self must confront its own finitude.

If the future is to avoid the malaise of purposelessness, it must answer that fear. It must give people ways to matter – to be needed, to be connected, to be useful.

This may be the greatest challenge of the coming decades: not technological, but metaphysical.

If we look across the long history

of labour, we find four successive meanings of work: necessity – the hunter's survival; belonging – the guild's fellowship; aspiration – the merchant's upward climb; self-expression – the modern dream of vocation.

“Without work, time stretches out, and the self must confront its own finitude.”

And now we stand at the edge of a fifth: transcendence – work as chosen meaning in a world where necessity fades.

The future will likely weave these threads together. We will still need to earn. We will still need belonging. We will still aspire. We will still express ourselves. But we may do so more freely, more intentionally, with greater attention to the spiritual questions that work has always, implicitly, contained. The great irony is that a workless world may require us to work harder than ever – at knowing ourselves.

Larkin feared the freedom of the park bench, the aimless wandering, the lack of structure. But perhaps the future of work will not be the elimination of structure, but its reinvention. Work may become less of a toad, more of a companion. Less squatting on our backs, and more walking beside us.

We may finally return to something like the Neolithic caves, where labour and art and survival merged into a single enquiry: Who are we? What are we doing with our days? Why does any of it matter?

Work has always been our attempt to answer those questions in the language of action. Its future may depend on our willingness to answer them in the language of freedom.

UK PLC: HOW DO YOU TELL THE REAL STATE OF AN ECONOMY?

IRIS SPARK

There is always a moment, in the days after a Budget or the release of some new economic figure, when the two great political tribes of the United Kingdom descend into their ritualised dance. One side insists the country is an economic miracle waiting to be noticed, the other that we are a failing state one step from national humiliation. Anyone who has ever tried to decipher these competing claims may be reminded of Keynes's remark that "when the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?" In Westminster, one fears the facts could be carved in stone and the rhetoric would remain serenely unmoved.

The problem, of course, is that facts themselves have become slippery creatures in our current dispensation. A Chancellor can point to employment figures with the triumphalism of a Victorian industrialist showing off a new railway, while the Opposition gestures toward food bank usage with the grim satisfaction of a prosecutor presenting the murder weapon. Both are describing the same country, supposedly at the same moment in time, yet their Britains might as well exist in parallel universes, connected only by the tenuous thread of shared geography.

For most people, the British economy doesn't exist at the level of ministerial soundbites. It exists in the job interview that never quite materialises, in the payslip that has been shrinking in real terms for years, in the rent that seems to float upward by some mysterious inner logic, in the sense that the escalator

once promised by the British economic model has stalled somewhere between the floors. The idea that a country has an economy at all is, after all, a conceptual construction – a grand abstraction we've agreed to treat as concrete. What people really have are jobs; what they really seek are prospects; and what they really feel is whether the future seems spacious or narrow.

London (Unsplash.com)

This raises the question: how do we tell the real state of an economy – really tell it – without drowning in noise, or being swept along by the emotional tides of party politics? Is there a way to cut through, to reach a clearer view?

Adam Smith, whose phrases have become a kind of economic scripture (often quoted by people who have

never opened The Wealth of Nations and would be rather surprised by what they'd find there), once wrote that "the wealth of nations is the annual labour of every nation." In that simple line lies the starting point: an economy, in the deepest sense, is what people do. Not what they say they're going to do, not what the projections suggest they might do in three fiscal years if all variables align favourably, but what they actually, tangibly, boringly do every day.

“The wealth of nations is the annual labour of every nation.”

The temptation is always to begin with GDP, that solemn acronym which has become a fetish object in political argument, invoked with the reverence that medieval monks reserved for fragments of the True Cross. But GDP is an average, a mathematical abstraction, and its movements – up half a percent here, down a tenth there – rarely map onto lived reality. A country can be growing while its workers feel poorer; it can be shrinking while its technological change produces better long-term prospects; it can, as the UK is discovering, be neither booming nor collapsing but instead moving with the unhurried gait of someone looking at their phone while accidentally walking into a manhole. It is this state—half stasis, half motion— that we must learn to read.

Moreover, GDP has its blind spots, where important things simply don't register. The parent who leaves the workforce to care for elderly relatives contributes nothing, in GDP terms, though they may be providing thousands of pounds' worth of care that would otherwise fall to the state. The volunteer who organises community projects, the neighbour who fixes

your fence, the friend who provides emotional support through a crisis – all economically invisible, though anyone who has lived through difficulty knows their value exceeds that of many paid transactions. GDP, in short, measures a great deal, but it cannot measure the overall state of things.

If we look at the years since the financial crisis, one sees the shape of the dilemma immediately. Productivity, the mysterious quantity that determines what a worker can produce in a given hour, has behaved as though weighted down by an invisible hand far heavier than Smith's. For centuries humans have become more productive through technology, skills and organisation. The steam engine, the assembly line, the computer, the internet – each represented a leap in what a single worker could accomplish. But in Britain since 2008 the upward trend has flattened. As Robert Skidelsky has written of the post-crisis years, "we have lived through a long pause in our own progress," a line which captures something more melancholy than any statistic can show. A long pause: the sense of a nation in a holding pattern, circling the same economic territory year after year, always told that landing clearance will come soon, but never quite hearing the signal.

If you look at the UK specifically, our

economy has been struggling with productivity for more than a decade. Labour productivity is usually measured as output per hour worked, per job or per worker; in practice this means how much gross value added the economy produces for each hour of labour input. For decades after the Second World War, that number tended to rise by about 2 per cent a year, which is what supported rising wages and living standards. After the financial crisis, that pattern broke.

From 2010 to 2022, UK GDP per hour worked grew by only about 0.5 per cent a year on average, roughly a quarter of the pre-2008 trend. On international comparisons of GDP per hour worked, the UK now sits in the middle of the advanced-economy pack. It is usually estimated to be around 10–15 per cent less productive than France and Germany, and roughly 20 per cent below the United States. Officials sometimes refer to this persistent shortfall as “the productivity puzzle”: why has output per hour flat-lined when employment and job creation have been relatively strong?

A long list of explanations has been offered, but no single one fully resolves the puzzle. Some economists argue that we are mis-measuring productivity, especially for digital services. Others point to weak investment after the crisis,

A queue to a food bank

when firms held back on renewing or upgrading their capital stock. Another strand of argument stresses composition effects: employment has expanded most rapidly in relatively low-productivity sectors, which pulls down the average. Some highlight labour-market factors, such as the availability of cheap and flexible labour, which may reduce the incentive for firms to adopt labour-saving technologies. Still others emphasise the credit constraints that followed the financial crash, which held back the growth of more productive firms.

If that’s already a bewildering picture, then it may not be good news that think-tanks and external commentators have also added their explanations. They note that the UK’s infrastructure, skills system and management quality lag behind the strongest performers. They point out that weaker public-sector productivity, especially in healthcare, may be dragging down overall efficiency. Quarterly figures still show a jagged pattern of small gains and setbacks, with short spurts of improvement that fade away again.

What’s certain is that all of this matters. A society with persistently weak productivity has less surplus to

redistribute, less scope for generous universal benefits, and more political anxiety about supporting people whose incomes are no longer tied to conventional paid work. The UK’s productivity problem is not just a technical macroeconomic issue; it is also a rehearsal for the deeper question of what happens to dignity, citizenship and the tax base when the traditional link between hours worked and economic output weakens or disappears.

“The real state of an economy is best understood not by its size but by its direction.”

And yet the employment figures often look perfectly respectable. The unemployment rate bobbles around the five percent mark, which is historically normal, even healthy. There are still jobs – indeed there are millions of them. But what work: this is the deeper question, the one that statisticians struggle to capture. If one sits in a café in Birmingham or Hull or Croydon and listens to the younger workers talking, one hears often of jobs that resemble stepping stones that are not

guaranteed to lead anywhere. There is work in logistics, gig-economy delivery, hospitality, customer service – roles that are essential, dignified, but often insecure and rarely pathways to advancement. The vacancies that evaporated so quickly after the pandemic surge have not returned with the same generosity. This is the labour market as a hall of mirrors: plenty of activity, but sometimes unclear direction.

The gig economy, in particular, deserves closer scrutiny. It was sold to us as liberation—freedom from the tyranny of the nine-to-five, the ability to be your own boss, to work when you want, where you want. And for some, perhaps it is exactly that. But for many others it has become a sophisticated mechanism for transferring risk from employer to employee, creating a workforce that bears all the insecurities of self-employment with none of the autonomy of genuine entrepreneurship. The Uber driver does not set their own rates. The Deliveroo cyclist does not choose their own routes. They are managed by algorithm, rated by strangers, and dismissed without recourse if their numbers slip. This is not quite the Dickensian horror of Victorian factories, but nor is it the worker's paradise that its advocates sometimes suggest.

This reveals a great truth: the real state of an economy is best understood not by its size but by its direction. A young graduate entering the workforce does not ask whether the country's GDP is 2.3 trillion or 2.4 trillion; she asks whether she will be able to find a job that will reward her efforts, let her build a life, and offer some dignity. She asks whether she will be able to afford rent in the city where the jobs are, whether she will ever be able to buy a home, whether she will have children,

Deliveroo Driver

whether those children will have better prospects than she had. The state of the British economy, then, must be judged by its treatment of such people: its graduates, its mid-career adults trying to reskill, its older workers navigating a changing labour market, its migrants who energise the service industries, its apprentices who stand at the threshold of trades.

If we look at the UK through this human lens, the picture is more mixed, and more interesting, than either political tribe will admit. There are islands of dynamism: the tech clusters in London and Cambridge, where twenty-somethings in expensive trainers discuss artificial intelligence over seven-pound coffees; the creative industries which still glow with imaginative energy, exporting British storytelling to a world that cannot seem to get enough of our particular blend of irony and emotion; the pockets of green-tech innovation in Bristol or Aberdeen, where engineers are quietly solving problems that will matter enormously in two decades; the skilled tradesmen who can scarcely keep up with demand, the electricians and plumbers who have discovered that learning a practical skill insulates you rather well from economic upheaval; the medical professionals adapting daily to new technologies, navigating the impossible demands of an ageing population with finite resources. And yet surrounding these islands there is a sea of low productivity and low investment, an economy marked by unevenness – regions that feel left out, sectors that feel stuck, workers who feel invisible. Travel from London to, say, Middlesbrough or Blackpool or Barnsley, and you move through what feels like different economic epochs. The capital buzzes with the timeless frenetic energy of London; these

other towns have the air of places that know the world has moved on and are not entirely sure what to do about it. The high streets are pocked with empty shops, the buildings sometimes beautiful but clearly built for a more prosperous era, the young people noticeably absent because they've done what ambitious young people have always done: they’ve left.

One might say that the UK economy resembles a novel with too many plotlines and not enough coherence. There are regions of optimism – the

entrepreneurs who will always find a way, the startups that emerge from garage offices and university incubators, the inventors still tinkering in sheds — and regions of pessimism, where boarded-up high streets echo with the question: what replaced the work that left? When the steelworks closed, when the coal mine shut, when the factory moved production to Eastern Europe or East Asia, what came to fill the void? Sometimes the answer is call centres, or distribution warehouses, or care homes. Sometimes the answer is nothing.

Empty street in UK

This geographic inequality is not a new phenomenon – Britain has always had its prosperous South and its struggling North, its London and its periphery. But the gap seems to have widened in recent decades, creating a country where your life chances depend profoundly on the accident of your birthplace: as John Lanchester has observed to be born in certain parts of Britain today is to suffer ‘irreversible defeat’. It is no coincidence that the Brexit vote mapped so closely onto this economic geography, that the places which felt left behind by globalisation voted to reject it. Whether leaving the European Union will address their concerns is another question entirely –so far the answer is no, but the vote at least represented a howl of frustration, a demand to be noticed.

It may help to widen the lens. Comparison, after all, is the economist's favourite sport, though it is a game that must be played carefully. In the United States, real GDP since 2019 has grown at a pace that Britain can only regard with the wistful admiration one reserves for a more athletic cousin. American productivity continues to generate the kinds of jobs and raises that feel almost mythical to British ears. Walk into a Silicon Valley tech company and you'll find salaries that would make a British

engineer weep with envy. Yet the US brings its own pathologies: inequality so vast that the top one percent now own more wealth than the entire middle class; healthcare costs that can bankrupt families for having the temerity to get seriously ill; a polarisation which corrodes civic life and makes governing nearly impossible; a gun violence epidemic that kills tens of thousands annually; a social safety net so threadbare that a single job loss can mean homelessness.

“German engineering excellence, is struggling to adapt to the electric future, outpaced by Chinese and American competitors.”

Germany, once regarded as the unimpeachable industrial superpower of Europe, the answer to every question about how to run a modern economy, now confronts an energy dilemma and a manufacturing model challenged by global shifts. The cheap Russian gas that powered its factories is gone, replaced by expensive alternatives that erode competitiveness. Its automotive industry, which defined German engineering excellence, is struggling to adapt to the electric future, outpaced by Chinese and American competitors. Its ageing workforce and rigid labour markets create their own challenges. China, which once seemed unstoppable, the future that had arrived early, now wrestles with demographic decline, a property crisis that threatens its entire financial system, an increasingly autocratic government that stifles innovation, and the realisation that the middle-income trap is real and escape is not guaranteed.

Each of these nations has strengths, but each carries vulnerabilities, and so the international comparison serves a humbling point: perhaps there are no flawless models anymore. Perhaps the global economy itself is in a period of transition, the old engines of growth slowing, the new ones not yet fully formed. The post-war consensus that delivered rising living standards for

software

decades seems to have exhausted itself, and we have not yet discovered what comes next. This is not a comfortable realisation, but it is an important one. It means that Britain's struggles are not uniquely British – though we have our own special flavour of dysfunction – but part of a larger pattern.

Where does this leave the British worker? In a curious limbo. There is no jobs apocalypse, but neither is there a golden age. Most people are employed, yet many feel they are not progressing; wages are rising, yet inflation nibbles away the gains like mice in the pantry. Real pay has improved slightly in the past year, but from such a low base that many families still feel poorer than they did over a decade ago. The British workplace has become a theatre of subtle disappointments: the promotion delayed indefinitely because budgets are tight; the training budget cut because short-term profits matter more than long-term capability; the hopes for advancement suspended until "economic conditions improve," which is to say, forever.

There is something peculiarly British about this muddle-through approach, this refusal to embrace either fullthroated American capitalism or European social democracy, this insistence on finding a third way that too often seems to mean the worst of both worlds. We have neither the dynamism that comes from truly free markets nor the security that comes from robust social protection. Instead we have a kind of anxious middle ground, where people work hard but are never quite sure if it will be enough, where the rules seem to change without warning, where the future feels uncertain in ways it did not for previous generations.

This is not the catastrophe some would claim, but nor is it the triumph others

trumpet. It is something more subtle: a slow economy, carrying the weight of structural problems in investment, productivity and real wages, yet still fundamentally capable of renewal if choices are made with imagination rather than inertia. The question is whether we have the collective will to make those choices, or whether we will continue to postpone difficult decisions in favour of short-term political expediency – as Rachel Reeves did again in her budget in November 2025, choosing to appease her backbenchers and raise taxes rather than tackling the UK’s soaring welfare bill.

“As Rachel Reeves did again in her budget in November 2025, choosing to appease her backbenchers and raise taxes rather than tackling the UK’s soaring welfare bill.”

But how do we begin to see clearly through the fog of narratives? One answer is to return to Keynes, whose prose remains startlingly fresh despite being written nearly a century ago,

as though he somehow anticipated our current predicament. The master wrote that "the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." Much of Britain's difficulty lies precisely in this: we remain tethered to old economic ideas, old industrial structures, old forms of investment, old hierarchies of skill, old myths about what work is supposed to look like. We speak of the knowledge economy while still organising education as though we were preparing people for factory work. We celebrate entrepreneurship while making it nearly impossible for small businesses to navigate the regulatory thicket. We claim to value skills while allowing vocational education to wither in favour of academic credentials that often lead nowhere.

Consider the younger worker again. She may be told by political leaders that Britain has "record numbers in work," that "the plan is working," or alternatively that the entire edifice is collapsing and she must prepare for national decline. But her actual experience may be far more modest: she has found a job, but it isn't in the field she trained for; she is earning, but not yet enough to save; she is moving forward, but at a pace that feels glacial.

Rachel Reeves (wikipedia.org)

She watches friends from university taking unpaid internships because that's the only way into certain industries, watches others moving back in with parents because rent consumes twothirds of a salary, watches still others abandoning career ambitions entirely in favour of whatever pays the bills. This is the true condition of UK plc: a country not in crisis, but in a soft stagnation, where the machinery turns but not quite vigorously enough to generate the prosperity we've been promised.

It is worth remembering that all economies tell stories about themselves, myths that shape how citizens understand their place in the world. China speaks of rejuvenation, of returning to a rightful place at the centre of global affairs after centuries of humiliation. America speaks of opportunity, of the self-made person who can rise from nothing to everything through hard work and ingenuity: the glad recipient of the American dream. Germany speaks of engineering excellence, of precision and reliability and a social market economy that balances competition with solidarity. Britain, curiously, struggles to tell a story at all. We oscillate between nostalgia for Victorian industrial might and anxiety about the future, between pride in past glories and embarrassment at present difficulties, between the memory of empire and the reality of a medium-sized European nation trying to find its role.

Yet perhaps our story needs to be something else entirely: that of a mature economy re-imagining itself for a digital, green, globally competitive age. Not a return to former glories –that way lies only disappointment – but a recognition of current realities and future possibilities. The question is whether we can muster the self-belief for such reinvention, whether we can

move beyond the culture wars and ideological battles that consume so much energy and focus on the practical work of building a better economy.

“In such a world, employability must mean more than work; it must mean purposeful work, work that opens rather than closes futures, work that allows for dignity and development.”

A key part of that reinvention concerns education and skills – territory where employability becomes the central lens through which everything must be viewed. One cannot discuss the real state of the British economy without noting the paradox that while employers lament skills shortages, many young people struggle to find satisfying entry-level roles. The labour market feels mismatched, like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don't quite fit. Trades lack recruits just as university graduates overflow, while certain industries thrive on contract work rather than secure employment. The notion of a neat, linear career – school, university, job, progression, retirement – has given way to something more fluid, a portfolio of experiences that can feel exhilarating or frightening depending on one's temperament and circumstances.

Adam Smith believed in the power of self-improvement, but he also recognised the dangers of monotony and the moral costs of economic life. His famous example of the pin factory, where division of labour increased productivity, was not simply a celebration of efficiency but also a

warning about the deadening effects of repetitive work. The modern British economy, with its sprawling service sector, often elicits similar concerns: jobs that are technically plentiful but spiritually thin, requiring long hours but not always offering proportionate reward. In such a world, employability must mean more than work; it must mean purposeful work, work that opens rather than closes futures, work that allows for dignity and development.

There are encouraging signs on this front, if you know where to look. The green economy is quietly creating new roles that did not exist a decade ago – solar panel installers, heat pump engineers, sustainability consultants, carbon accountants. The creative industries remain a great British export of talent and imagination, from video games to television to music to design. Advanced manufacturing, though smaller than in Germany, still produces pockets of real excellence – aerospace in Bristol, pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, automotive in the Midlands. Digital skills increasingly function as a universal language, and British tech workers are respected globally. A country that struggled to define its post-industrial identity in the 1980s and 1990s may yet discover that its strengths lie precisely in these hybrid sectors, where technology, creativity and human judgment interlock.

Yet the core problem remains investment. The comparison with other nations is instructive here. South Korea invests heavily in education and infrastructure, producing a workforce that is among the most skilled in the world. Singapore focuses relentlessly on long-term planning, making decisions that might not pay off for decades. Germany has its Mittelstand, those mid-sized manufacturing companies that invest in worker training and take a long view of competitiveness. Britain, by contrast,

has often seemed to privilege shortterm returns over long-term capability, quarterly earnings over generational investment. Our financial system rewards quick profits more than patient capital. Our political system punishes governments for spending that might not yield electoral benefits for years.

“A country that wishes to lift itself economically must begin by lifting its workers professionally.”

So where does all this leave us? I would argue it returns us to the employability question. A country that wishes to lift itself economically must begin by lifting its workers professionally. That means apprenticeships that lead to genuine careers, not dead-end training schemes designed to massage unemployment statistics. It means education that prizes critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability, not box-ticking

and memorisation. It means mid-career retraining that respects experience rather than treating workers as interchangeable units to be retooled for the next trend. It means recruitment that rewards potential rather than procedural compliance, that recognises that intelligence and capability come in many forms. If the British economy feels stuck, it is because too many people feel stuck within it, unable to progress, unable to flourish, unable to contribute what they're capable of contributing.

The real state of the British economy, then, cannot be explained by a single number. It is a mosaic of contradictory realities: optimism and frustration, resilience and fragility, innovation and inertia. It is a country whose workers are capable of extraordinary things, but whose economic model needs renewal if those talents are to be fully expressed. It is a place where the future could go in several different directions depending on choices made today, and where those choices feel both urgent and perpetually deferred.

In the end, the most honest answer to "what is the real state of the British

economy?" is that it is better than the pessimists claim, worse than the optimists insist, and more interesting than either camp suggests. It is a midtable economy with elite pockets; a country where work exists but prospects feel uneven; a place still searching for its post-industrial narrative yet not without hope. It is an economy that has avoided catastrophe but not achieved triumph, that muddles through with characteristic British stoicism, neither soaring nor crashing but hovering somewhere in between.

UK plc, if it is to grow, must grow through its workers, must recognise that human capital is not a cost to be minimised but an asset to be developed. And in this lies the truest measure of our economic state: not the numbers released on a grey morning in Westminster, not the forecasts that are invariably wrong, not the rhetoric that obscures more than it reveals, but the daily ambitions of millions striving for lives of dignity, purpose and possibility. That is the economy that matters. Everything else is commentary.

EXPERIENCES FROM THE JOB SEARCH OF AN HR GRADUATE WITH A HIDDEN DISABILITY

By Aarifah Karim,Graduate and Tamsin Aston, Finito HR Mentor

Igraduated with a first-class Honours degree in Business Management and HR from Nottingham Trent University in the summer of 2025. Since the start of my final year, I have submitted a significant number of applications for HR Graduate and related entry level roles. Unfortunately, I am becoming very discouraged after receiving rejections from employers who are effectively reducing the chances of successful applications from qualified candidates with hidden disabilities.

Even my mother sometimes forgets that I am partially sighted, which is reassuring because it shows that I am able to interact well on a daily basis with my family and friends, but research into candidates with hidden disabilities who are looking for work demonstrates that they are ten times more likely to be unemployed after they graduate in comparison to their peers.

I am fortunate in that I have no need for any special technology in an office environment to be productive.

I use the standard ‘zoom’ facility on Microsoft Teams to enable me to read facial expressions during conference calls. I also increase the font size on slides, emails and documents to allow me to read them, but I cannot sit next to a window in bright daylight, as the glare on my screen makes it difficult

to read the text. None of these adjustments should present difficulties for my potential future employment.

However, I have encountered a number of examples of unrelated job requirements and additional challenges, which together have prevented me from submitting my application for some entry level roles for which I am otherwise qualified, for example:

• I have found multiple cases of companies based in a single location requiring their HR graduate candidates to have a full driving licence, or provide evidence of taking driving lessons. With my level of vision, I will never be able to drive, but I am very confident with using public transport to get to and from work, and have access to other means of transport.

“I am becoming very discouraged after receiving rejections from employers who are effectively reducing the chances of successful applications from qualified candidates with hidden disabilities.”

• Before I can apply for

a job and

in addition to the work-related requirements, I need to think about the location and how I will get there, so I have to research the public transport options. I have submitted applications for job advertisements that indicate they do not care if you cannot drive due to disability, only to be told that I have been rejected because I cannot drive! It is disheartening when companies lie about being inclusive.

• A few job postings have indicated they will interview all applicants with disabilities, however after completing my application, I have been ghosted by every single one, including one with a local city council.

• Most application processes nowadays ask their applicants to upload a CV and then type out a lot of details into their own template, repeating

Aarifah Karim

information that is already included within the CV. This is probably very frustrating to other applicants too, but as a visually impaired person, it takes much longer to fill out these forms. I get neck pain from craning my neck to read tiny font sizes in templates that cannot be enlarged.

“It is disheartening when companies lie about being inclusive.”

• Many graduate schemes, especially ones reputed to be ‘the best’, use timers to test how quickly applicants can sort through data and answer numerical reasoning questions. However, I will need a little longer to read through large sheets of data and graphs, to reach the same conclusions as my peers. It only takes me a few seconds longer, but I recognise that I am a little slower. This is not something I can hope to fix as my sight cannot be improved by equipment such as reading glasses.

• I recently applied for a public sector employer’s graduate programme, and I was invited to complete an application using their AI-based selection process. Their system’s timer was formatted using mid-blue text on a lighter blue background.

Having the two shades of blue and no facility available to increase the font size on the screen, this combination made it difficult for me to see when the timer had started. There was a two minute countdown to video my answers, and only one attempt to respond was allowed for each question, I was feeling very pressured and was concerned that this would impact the quality of my application.

• Based on my experiences with several AI-based selection processes in the past year, I have some questions for employers:

• How do I know where I should look when speaking during an AI-driven assessment step?

• Would my occasional need to squint, or move closer than usual to the screen to view the video controls to record my responses, affect how my application will be marked?

When this happened during an assessment, I felt I had to explain why I had been close to the screen and thereby, I lost time on recording the actual content of my answer.

• Is it possible to include a feedback step into all graduate selection processes?

I have invested significant time and thought into completing these kinds of assessments. When no feedback is given along with a rejection, I have no opportunity to improve myself, fill gaps, or prepare any differently for my next application. This can happen before I ever get the chance to meet a human recruiter, or achieve an invitation to an interview.

• I have found myself needing to decide when, or even whether, to disclose my visual impairment to a future employer: will I risk being treated differently during my application if I elect to share this information before accepting an offer?

“The team at Finito had already become concerned about aspects of the increasing use of AI in many recruitment processes.”

The team at Finito had already become concerned about aspects of the increasing use of AI in many recruitment processes for the UK’s employers. Now I am adding my personal experiences, Finito has more

evidence to demonstrate that there are still employers that need to adopt more considerate approaches to their recruitment, including some which should be more sensitive to candidates with diverse disabilities, both visible and hidden.

I now understand and can relate to some of the reasons behind the concerning statistic I mentioned earlier (those with hidden disabilities are ten times more likely to be unemployed after they graduate compared to their peers.) My search for an HR role remains ongoing and I am staying focused on finding the right opportunity in the right location, but we have to remind companies to reconsider that placing additional requirements into their application processes without thought can result in well-qualified candidates with disabilities being rejected, even today.

With that objective in mind, I would be delighted to work with any companies who may want an independent review of their recruitment systems or processes, from the perspective of those with hidden disabilities – please contact me via LinkedIn.

Finito Education would like to thank Richard Desmond for his generous support of this candidate.

Richard Desmond (Wikipdia.org)

YASSEN AHMED HOW CURIOSITY, RESILIENCE, AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT CAN TURN UNCERTAINTY INTO OPPORTUNITY

1. What was the moment when you first realised you wanted to pursue a career in software engineering or technology? Was there a project, a class, or a personal experience that sparked that interest?

My interest began with a fascination for computer hardware, building my first computer from scratch when I was around 16 was a thrilling experienceeven with the first attempt failing due to an issue with the power supply. The process of investigating, diagnosing

and acting on those issues by repairing them taught me a lot about the joys of creating. Naturally, I gravitated towards the computer science field given the proximity of software and hardware, it drew upon my fascination to create, but the possibilities for innovation were even greater. Given that software offered creative freedom without financial barriers, the creation of software resolved that conflict of mine as it allowed me to continuously create, deploy and refactor with

relatively minimal cost if at all. The ability to take a blank document like that of a canvas to where labouring in creating something meaningful, the collection of files becomes holistic in serving a greater purpose.

2. Goldman Sachs internships are famously competitive. What do you think helped you to stand out during the application process?

Goldman Sachs is notoriously difficult, for the 2025 summer cohort it had an

Yassen Ahmed

acceptance rate of approximately 0.7% applicants. In my personal experience, my ambitions were to apply to top places in general, so I didn’t envision that I would be interning at Goldman.

“Starting from a blank document and gradually shaping it into something purposeful felt like working on a digital canvas.”

First and foremost, being early in applying was a large part of the success I found, applying weeks before university had even started gave me the opportunity to be interviewed. Secondly, the ability to be resilient is crucial, I faced many rejections before Goldman, but I found that by coming to terms with each rejection and incorporating that back into my interview preparation allowed me to be self-critical in a way that allowed me to slowly become a more appealing candidate. Each rejection provided me with an area of mine to improve and focus on for the next interview.

3. You’ll be joining the Asset and Wealth Management engineering team in Birmingham. What are you most looking forward to learning during the 10-week placement?

Even though I have already completed my internship, a massive hope of mine coming into it was to learn and absorb as much as I can, both technically due to my interest, as well as professionally as part of a team - to ultimately contribute within a professional environment. Much of my prior experiences in developing software inside of academia and outside was relatively naïve and

informal, often pursuing a vast breadth but lack of depth and focus due to my inexperience.

I can now confidently say that the internship helped me grow leaps and bounds, from joining the firm not knowing what a financial option was to by the end of the internship setting up a financial options data pipeline within the backend of the engineering team, ultimately allowing the team to facilitate market option data from external vendors to consumer teams. It was nothing short of thrilling and the practical hands-on experience with engineering and technical discussions forced me to adapt and problem-solve constantly.

4. You mentioned the possibility of eventually moving to the London office. What attracts you to that environment, and how do you see your career developing over the next few years?

My time in the Birmingham office was fantastic, much of the people and environment made my experience immensely enjoyable. The experience was made even better given that the majority of my team was within the same office. Even so, a major appeal of the London office for me is the ability to centre myself within the financial capital of the UK, as well as the world. Taking recent news for example, JPMorgan is beginning a £3 billion expansion work in their London office is a testament to the many opportunities that can be capitalised on. On a more personal level as well, my internship began with orientation week within the London office, giving me a great sense of the office and the people where I made many friends. As a result, I naturally see myself moving to the London office as the next steps within my career.

5. You and your team won Marshall Wace’s category at ICHack25. Can you describe the project you built, and what you think made it successful?

At ICHack25, of the few tracks to choose from, we participated in the “chain of events” theme from Marshall Wace. My team and I built a project that initially began in answering, “what really happens after a major geopolitical decision is made?” From our research, traditional analysis often treats events in isolation, but global politics in reality is a web of interdependent actors whose choices and decisions ripple outward in unpredictable or unforeseen ways. Our goal was to make those ripples visible by modelling, simulating and executing on those plans.

“I entered the firm without even understanding what a financial option was, and by the end I had helped build a backend data pipeline for options market data.”

The result was an AI powered “war room” simulation platform that lets users of the software describe any geopolitical scenario and watch a cascading chain of events unfold across countries or stakeholders. The system identifies actors, models their incentives and then extrapolates reasonable outcomes.

On a personal level, the project really pushed me into a role that blended engineering with storytelling. My own personal role was designing the eventgeneration pipeline, it felt less like building a piece of software and more

like crafting a structured narrative engine. In not just what the AI could generate, but what would help users develop an intuition for causality and long-term consequences of either their or other actors’ choices.

“If a firm invites you to interview, they already believe you have the potential to succeed — that belief is based on capability, not background.”

I would certainly attribute a large portion of the success of the project to the team’s passion in building software, because of this drive for example we strived to incorporate cutting-edge technology from recent relevant research papers in both the AI and human spaces. We absorbed the latest in the literature, then extrapolated based on our research and approaches.

6. The CTO and senior engineers at Marshall Wace were present during the judging. What did you learn from interacting with people at that level of the industry?

The depth of their experience was immediately noticeable, I particularly observed this in their abilities to be effective communicators within industry. In conversing with the CTO and the senior engineers they could pick up and carry-on technical dialogue as if they had been working on it themselves, even to the point of providing large contributions via comments. The ability to be technically succinct as well as be critical of the work is a massive skill I seek to continuously hone and improve.

7. Looking back at your university experience so far, what has been the biggest challenge — academic or personal — that you’ve had to overcome?

The university experience for me really tests my ability to perform well in three demanding worlds at once, that being academia, my career aspirations,

as well as my personal life. I seek to continuously strive in these various facets of my life, but in managing these opportunities it ended up becoming formative experiences. For example, for internships and graduate opportunities, many of these open right at the start of university, some even just before, and so applying and interviewing early was paramount. In my experience of then actually applying and interviewing at some of these companies, there wasn’t the best of success given weaker prior experience, as a result, my journey became a test of attrition. Continuously improving my performance throughout the interview season to try to cultivate both career and academic success was the biggest challenge. Even so, such an experience has been invaluable, it naturally forced me to prioritise given my constraints in both time and resources at my disposal. Provided me with a stronger intuition for when to continue, act on, or drop a priority.

8. In your own personal projects (for example in Python or C++), which one

Freepik

has taught you the most, and what did it reveal about how you like to work as an engineer?

I strongly believe the project that taught me the most and was the most formative, was an imageprocessing application I built in C++ for a local business, that being my first experience developing software within a commercial setting and for a dedicated stakeholder. The business was struggling with limited storage and slow internet, which made cloud solutions impractical. Initial conversations with the business owner began the project as a simple tool to reduce file sizes and quickly evolved into a more comprehensive system for securely handling images, complete with an intuitive interface and hardware-based security.

The growth impact of this project on myself wasn’t just technical, it taught me how to think and strategies like that of an engineer, to create a product to be used beyond myself. I had to translate vague requirements into something functional, anticipate user mistakes, write clear documentation and as well as design the system so anyone regardless of technical background could use it confidently and robustly. I also had to adapt my initial ideas as the project grew, learning that engineering is less about writing code and more about solving the business problem at hand.

9. Many young people from backgrounds similar to yours sometimes struggle to picture themselves at places like Goldman Sachs. What advice would you give to someone who feels that these opportunities aren’t “for them”?

To be frank, even after obtaining the offer and eventually joining the firm I did have a feeling of imposter

syndrome in the opportunity. I feel the opportunity presented itself after continuously trying even after not hearing back from companies, rejected by many firms and the likes. However, once an interview presented itself to me I took and ran with it. As a result, one of my biggest pieces of advice would certainly be that the moment a firm invites you to interview, they already believe you have the capacity to excel. That belief is based on potential, not background. Such opportunities should empower you to do well as the firm has genuine interest in your abilities and see your contributions able to benefit the larger firm at hand. Another piece of advice is not being afraid to reach out and ask. An important growth point for me was realising that my personal industry knowledge only took me so far, and of the importance of asking and reaching out to people. Reaching out to people on Linkedin for example can help to establish whatever domain knowledge one can acquire, allowing you to better visualise reasonably how you as an applicant can end up seeing success at the end of the application process.

“What mattered wasn’t feeling ready, but committing to incremental improvement and trusting that effort compounds quietly over time.”

10. Finally, what do you hope others take away from your story? What would you most like younger students to understand about persistence, confidence, and finding the right support?

I hope younger students or readers see that progress is rarely linear. My journey began with a lot of uncertainty and limited experience, with more rejections than successes, but each setback shaped me into someone more capable and focused. Part of my confidence in aspirations didn’t come from believing I was ready, but rather from committing that little bit further work or preparation even when it seemed negligible, learning from every mistake, and trusting that improvement compounds quietly over time.

Finito Education would like to thank Judith O'Driscoll and Gemma Levine for their generous support of this candidate.

Judith O'Driscoll

Gemma Levine

LETTER FROM CHINA SARAH TUCKER

Travel writer, novelist, biographer and lecturer, Sarah Tucker reflects on a journey through China’s Anhui Province that proved more challenging, and more therapeutic, than expected.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reflecting on a recent trip to China’s Anhui Province, a place I can only describe as a kind of meditative migraine: sometimes painfully confusing, sometimes unexpectedly peaceful, always memorable. It’s a region marketed as “China in miniature,” which makes you wonder what the full-sized version is trying to prove.

Anhui is small only by Chinese standards, 350 miles from north to south, home to over 60 million people, and with more UNESCO designations than your average European country. On the surface, it offers a rich tapestry of paddy fields, misty mountains, ancient villages and artistic heritage. Beneath that, however, it offers something else entirely: a recalibration of what travel really means.

“Home to over 60 million people, and with more UNESCO designations than your average European country.”

Tourism here is a curious thing. The Chinese are famously enthusiastic domestic travellers, a high-speed, seetick-move-on kind of enthusiasm. Try finding the ‘peace’ in “peaceful beauty”

when you’re sharing a sacred site with 10,000 others brandishing selfie sticks and shrimp crackers. Still, if you choose wisely and travel off-peak, you may glimpse what lies behind the neon of Hefei or the stone courtyards of Hongcun.

Hongcun, by the way, is a painting come to life, quite literally, as there are students from local art colleges everywhere capturing its ox-shaped water system and lakeside homes. There are narrow lanes, red lanterns, elderly residents in jeans, others floating by in silk robes, often with

a smartphone where a fan should be. The scene is charming, if a little staged, like the Chinese Cotswolds, only with more rice and less cream tea.

Of course, there are moments where the modern Chinese temperament takes centre stage. The culture can be abrupt. Personal space is less a right and more a suggestion. One moment you’re bowed to politely, the next you’re barked at to move, by a security guard, a fellow tourist, or a child with a megaphone. A Portuguese ambassador in our group

Xidi, Anhui, (Unsplash)

Xidi, Anhui (Unsplash)

told me, “Shout back. They’ll respect you for it.” I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or take notes.

Then there’s Mount Huangshan. Yes, that Huangshan, pine trees growing out of rock, Avatar-style stone peaks rising from mist, clouds so low you think you can walk on them (please don’t). It’s beautiful, enormous, exhausting. Porters carry supplies up narrow steps with planks across their shoulders, rewarded not with applause

but pay-by-the-kilo. Their abs alone deserve UNESCO status.

Distances here are misleading. Everything is an hour, or two, from everything else. You’ll spend as much time on a coach as at the site itself. But it’s what you see from the window that stays with you: farmers in conical hats, hay bales in perfect symmetry, villages preserved like museum pieces… or perhaps redesigned as museum pieces. You

begin to wonder: is this recreation or reinvention?

That, in many ways, is the heart of Anhui’s contradiction. The region (and much of China) is attempting to resurrect a culture it once demolished. Museums, like the excellent Huizhou Culture Museum, house the artefacts of Confucianism and ancient dynasties with pride, though without much English signage. But there’s a sense, at times, that the culture on display is more reconstruction than revival. It’s Disneyland, but with better tea.

“Anhui is not a place to tick off, it’s a place to think in.”

Still, innovation shines in places. The Paper Museum in Langqip Town is exquisite, a building that curves and breathes like it’s made of paper itself. Visitors even speak in hushed tones,

Mount Huangshan (Unsplash)

Hefei (Unsplash)

rare in a country where volume is often mistaken for vitality. Here, at least, China isn’t imitating its past — it’s creating something new.

Tea is another revelation. The green teas, Huangshan Maofang, Lu’an Guapian, and the black Qimen are soothing, restorative, and nothing like the dusty bags you find in Western supermarkets. The food, however, divides opinion. “Stinky fish” and “hairy tofu” are local delicacies. I lived on watermelon and hard-boiled eggs, unable to brave the gloopy sauces and mystery meats that seem to accompany every dish — even the croissants.

But the real nourishment, if you’ll forgive the pun, is philosophical. Anhui is not a place to tick off, it’s a place to think in. I found myself journaling more than photographing. Not because the scenery wasn’t beautiful, it was, but because I wanted to remember how it felt.

The landscapes, the pace, the tension between past and present, they prompt a different kind of reflection. One that doesn’t end when the trip does.

And if I felt uneasy at times, I wasn’t alone. The friends I travelled with, all seasoned wanderers, admitted to moments of awe, confusion, and culture shock. That, we agreed, is the point. This isn’t a holiday. It’s a confrontation, with your own expectations, and the assumptions you carry with you.

“Try finding the ‘peace’ in ‘peaceful beauty’ when you’re sharing a sacred site with 10,000 others brandishing selfie sticks and shrimp crackers.”

Anhui, like much of China, walks a cultural tightrope. Its people are proudly innovative, yet protective of the past. The country has bulldozed its ancient spirit in pursuit of modernity and is now trying, earnestly if awkwardly, to retrieve it. Whether that can be done through glass cases and staged villages is uncertain.

But even if some of the restoration feels performative, the emotional response it evokes is not. You walk away from Anhui changed. Wiser, maybe. Grateful, definitely. Not just for the safe streets or the serene views, but for the jolt to your own perspective.

To paraphrase, or misquote, Durrell: in the middle of China’s summer heat and cultural dissonance, I felt the cool inventions of my own spring beginning to stir.

Yixian Hongcun (Wikipedia.org)

LETTER FROM JAIPUR NISHAD SANZAGIRI

How Jaipur turned symmetry into splendour and hospitality into art

Padharo mhare desh goes the famous Rajasthani folk song, a refrain that has come to define the region's instinctive warmth. Welcome to my land.

In Jaipur, that sentiment is brought literally to life, rendered in pink sandstone and performed in the daily choreography of the streets. From the first glimpse of those rose and terracotta walls, the city heaves with colour and contradiction: camels beside motorbikes, cows sidestepping rickshaws, marigold garlands swaying in narrow lanes where shopkeepers call out over one another in that particular blend of Hindi, English, and Rajasthani that marks commercial exchange in this part of India. It remains a city like no other, performing itself with the practised ease of a classical dancer, at once regal yet restless, choreographed yet spontaneous, bound by ancient principles yet constantly spilling over its own careful boundaries.

Founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who had earned his title meaning “one and a quarter times superior” from the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb himself, Jaipur was India’s first great planned city, an audacious experiment in turning geometry into geography. The young ruler, who had ascended to the throne at eleven, eventually broke free from Mughal dominance and made the bold decision to relocate his capital from the traditional hill fort of Amber to this new city built on the plains, designed not as a fortress but as a commercial nexus that could rival Delhi and Agra. Its wide streets and symmetrical facades still hold the logic of Vastu Shastra and Shilpa Shastra, those ancient architectural principles that governed not just the placement of buildings but the flow of energy

through space, even as daily life now spills enthusiastically over every boundary the maharaja so carefully drew. To walk through the old city is to feel both order and chaos existing in perfect proportion, to sense a ruler's obsession with balance being lovingly, continuously undone by the simple passage of time and the persistence of human need.

“From the first glimpse of those rose and terracotta walls, the city heaves with colour and contradiction: camels beside motorbikes, cows sidestepping rickshaws.”

I had seventy-two hours here, and like every traveller who foolishly believes that time might bend to accommodate an ambitious itinerary, I had filled my diary with far more plans than any reasonable person could execute. There were palaces to explore, markets to navigate, craftsmen to meet in those side streets where the real business of the city continues as it has for centuries, and somewhere along the way, I had promised myself a proper rest at Anantara Jewel Bagh, Jaipur's newest and perhaps most ambitious palace hotel, positioned thoughtfully on the city’s edge where the urban chaos begins to give way to something quieter. The hotel itself is a curious achievement, a modern construction that somehow feels centuries old, built as a love letter to Rajputana architecture from yellow Jaisalmer stone and Banswara marble, its surfaces carved with jaalis that scatter light like the finest lace thrown across

a morning window. Its facade, all with jharokas, jaali, and intricate carvings, deliberately echoes Amber Fort, catching that same extraordinary hue when the late afternoon sun angles across its sandstone surface. A staff member would later confide that this resemblance was entirely intentional, conceived as a way of bringing the fort’s distant grandeur closer for those guests who might never make the actual climb up those ancient ramparts.

That first afternoon, my mother and I joined one of the hotel’s Spice Spoons experiences, an Anantara signature that had been carefully refashioned here as an authentic Rajasthani kitchen encounter. In the sun-dappled courtyard, where the light filtered through carefully carved windows, the chef taught us the patient art of making Gulab ki Kheer, that rose-scented rice pudding that appears at every celebration worth remembering. We stirred and laughed and orchestrated the kind of gentle argument about sugar ratios that mothers and sons have been having in Indian kitchens for generations, watching the milk slowly thicken into something that tasted remarkably like nostalgia. It was precisely the sort of unhurried moment that cities like Jaipur, with their perpetual motion and commercial energy, rarely allow visitors to experience, and it served as a reminder that hospitality can sometimes mean nothing more complicated than granting someone permission to pause.

The next morning we rose early to visit Amber Fort itself, climbing its weathered ramparts in that blessed hour before the tour buses arrive and transform sightseeing into competition for the perfect photograph. Standing beneath the original Ganesh Pol,

with its floral frescoes still vivid after centuries and its mirrored arches creating infinite reflections of morning light, you begin to understand why architects still borrow from these forms, why they remain relevant in an age of glass and steel. The impossible balance between delicacy and power, between decoration and fortification, speaks to something fundamental about Rajput aesthetics, where beauty was never separate from strength but rather its most sophisticated expression. Inside, the Sheesh Mahal, that legendary Hall of Mirrors, was already filling with tourists craning their necks and angling their phones to capture something of its sparkle, though no photograph could ever convey the way those tiny mirrors transform even the smallest flame into a constellation.

Later that evening, back at Anantara Jewel Bagh, we discovered the hotel’s own interpretation of the Sheesh

Mahal, reimagined as a bar where 3.5 lakh pieces of glass create their own universe of reflection. There was no one else inside at that hour, only the two of us and our images multiplying infinitely across the meticulously placed glass inlays, creating that peculiar vertigo that comes from seeing yourself reflected into infinity. One of the attendants, polishing glasses and readying our drink, smiled and mentioned that they often tell guests who miss the fort’s famous hall that they’ll find its essential sparkle recreated here. For once, imitation didn’t feel like compromise but rather like an intimate reinterpretation, the way a talented musician might play a classical raga with subtle personal variations. Our final morning began in that darkness before dawn with a short drive through empty streets to Jhalana Leopard Reserve, Jaipur’s secret wilderness that lacks the international fame of Ranthambore or Jim Corbett but compensates with surprisingly

frequent sightings. The open jeep rattled through thorn forest for two patient hours, disturbing peacocks that erupted from the undergrowth in explosions of iridescent blue and green, until finally a slender female leopard whose name, I later learned, was Flora, materialised from the shadows and galloped past our convoy of waiting vehicles, her spotted coat dissolving back into the dappled shade before most of us had even focused our cameras. I thought then of how this city, too, conceals its wildness behind carefully maintained facades of civility and commerce.

“To walk through the old city is to feel both order and chaos existing in perfect proportion.”

Back at the hotel that afternoon, the

vast lawns were being transformed for what would clearly be an elaborate wedding celebration. Soon workers would climb bamboo ladders to string thousands of marigolds in precise patterns, decorators would engage in heated discussions about the optimal angles for spotlights, and somewhere a technician would be testing the sound system with the opening bars of a love song from a film that everyone's parents had watched. The Rang Mahal ballroom, its walls hand-painted over two and a half painstaking years by craftsmen who still practice techniques passed down through generations, gleamed like an enormous jewel box waiting for its moment. It was evident that Jewel Bagh had discovered its calling in this city that has long been the undisputed capital of India’s elaborate wedding industry, offering itself as the newest and perhaps most photogenic stage for those multi-day celebrations that have become their own form of performance art.

“Jaipur disarms cynicism with remarkable efficiency and replaces it with appetite for colour, for craft, for ornament, for the sheer audacity of joy made manifest.”

As we packed our bags and prepared for departure, I mentioned to Ritu Solanki, the Marketing & Comms Manager at Anantara, that they might consider adding a matchmaking service to their hospitality offerings, completing the circle of romance they had so carefully constructed. After all, I was leaving thoroughly convinced that this would be the

perfect venue for my own wedding celebration, though I admitted with some embarrassment that I had yet to identify a bride.

But then Jaipur has always had that particular effect on visitors: it disarms cynicism with remarkable efficiency and replaces it with appetite for colour, for craft, for ornament, for the sheer audacity of joy made manifest in stone and cloth and precious metal. Its beauty may have been calculated down to the last inch by that young maharaja and his architects, following those ancient

principles of proportion and harmony, but its effect on the contemporary visitor feels entirely accidental, as if the city’s charm emerges not from planning but from some deeper source. And as our car pulled away from the hotel’s sandstone arches and began the journey back toward the pink glow of the old city, that old refrain returned to mind: Padharo mhare desh. Welcome to my land, and perhaps, if you stay long enough and pay proper attention, to a small piece of your own longing made briefly, brilliantly real.

CULTURE

The lighter side of employability

LEONARD COHEN 10 YEARS ON Reflections on the poet-singer

I COULD MURDER A CAREER… Agatha Christie and her heirs

LEARNED

Alamy

LESSONS

Tim Clark on Nick Gibb

CONSTABLE AT 250 THE PATIENT REVOLUTIONARY

By Iris Spark

If we are inclined to believe that artistic revolutions happen suddenly, with a single brushstroke or manifesto, then John Constable’s 250th anniversary invites a different kind of lesson — one about slowness, apprenticeship, patience, and the long gestation of vision. It is fitting that Gainsborough’s House, in the Stour Valley which shaped him, is marking the occasion with exhibitions that place Constable in dialogue not only with Gainsborough and Turner, but with contemporary painters who still feel his gravitational pull. For Constable is one of those artists

whose influence works quietly, like weather on stone: persistent, natural, unshowy, but transformative.

The exhibition Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, opening in April 2026, will assemble over forty oils, watercolours and drawings — many hidden in private collections for decades — alongside works by Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne, Girtin, and European precedents such as Vernet and Joli. For the first time, Constable’s The Leaping Horse will return to Suffolk, the landscape that formed him. To see this painting

among the fields and skies that once surrounded the young Constable will be to understand an essential truth: he painted the landscape of his childhood not with nostalgia, but with workmanlike observation, with the patience of someone who knew the sky by heart.

Constable’s achievements can too easily be simplified: the painter of the “chocolate-box” England, the man of locks, barges, meadows and clouds. Yet he was, in his own way, a radical. Not in the manner of Turner, who dazzled with sunbursts and storms, but through

The Leaping Horse, 1825 (Wikipedia.org)

a quieter, more stubborn form of revolution: an insistence on experience as the primary truth of painting. His realism was not the sharp-edged, proto-photographic sort that artists would later pursue; it was the realism of feeling.

“His realism was not the sharp-edged, proto-photographic sort; it was the realism of feeling.”

It can be instructive, for instance, to visit in person the scenes which he painted: they’re nothing like as interesting as Constable's. Constable understood that sometimes the most revelatory depiction comes not from stating everything but from leaving something out — that what you don’t see can create a more vivid sensation

of what you do. His clouds dissolve into atmosphere; his foliage trembles with motion rather than detail. Those unfinished passages — those quick flicks of light on wet leaves, those rapid gestures in his cloud studies — are not failures of completion but triumphs of immediacy.

Martin Gayford once wrote that Constable’s smallest cloud sketch contains more weather than most artists’ grandest canvases, and he is right. Constable observed the sky not as backdrop but as protagonist. He recorded in his notebook that the sky was “the keynote” and “the chief organ of sentiment.” It was not an accessory but the emotional engine of a painting — the element that gave a landscape its inner temperature.

What is extraordinary is how long he waited for recognition. Constable was fifty-three when he finally became a Royal Academician. Today, in an age

that prizes precocity sometimes to the point of absurdity, his slow rise feels almost miraculous. There is something moving in this: a man painting his home fields for decades while London critics misunderstood him, while Turner dazzled the public with molten seas. Constable refused to adjust his palette to fashion. He would not warm his greens or prettify his mud. He would not suppress the English dampness, the intermittent sun, the melancholy that hovers even in beauty. Instead, he cultivated patience — a virtue unfashionable in the art world then and now. Constable used to say that painting was like farming: you could not force it; you worked steadily and trusted the seasons. His method was to sketch obsessively outdoors and then to rework, refine and re-understand his material back in the studio. The studio was not a place of invention so much as a place of distillation.

The Hay Wain, 1821 (Wikipedia.org)

One of the remarkable qualities of Constable’s work is how it embodies a realism built not on exhaustive detail but on suggestion. Darkness becomes a space not of absence but of possibility; an incompletion becomes a form of invitation. Light appears to arrive and vanish simultaneously. The canvases breathe. This is a realism that acknowledges atmosphere, emotion, memory — a realism that hints rather than declares, that evokes rather than catalogues. It is the opposite of photographic: it is human.

And yet, Constable could be meticulous. The patient man was also capable of ferocious industry. He maintained a cloud diary in Hampstead where he described each formation with meteorological precision. He painted quickly, but he observed slowly. He walked the fields near East Bergholt not as a dreamer but as a surveyor. There is a kind of pragmatism in Constable that people miss: those beloved hay wains and locks were not pastoral fantasies; they were scenes of labour. Constable saw that the English

countryside was not a stage set but a workplace.

This connection between labour and landscape is one of the intriguing threads of the new anniversary exhibitions. How did Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, all shaped by the Stour Valley, interpret work, nature and time? Gainsborough’s Landscape with Cattle, returning to the UK for the first time since 1952, reminds us that pastoral scenes once carried moral and social weight. Turner’s Abergavenny Bridge, unseen publicly since 1799, will reappear like a long-forgotten comet. And then there is Constable’s The Leaping Horse, in which equine muscle and human determination strain against the very edge of the canvas.

Constable’s landscapes are about effort — wind effort, water effort, human effort. They are not still but dynamic, full of energy. If Turner shows us the sublime, Constable shows us what it takes to live with it.

If we want to understand how revolutionary Constable was, we need

only compare him to his predecessors. Claude’s landscapes shimmer with golden idealism; Vernet’s seas are spectacular; the Baroque masters fill their scenes with mythological clarity. Constable does the opposite: he insists on the ordinary. He paints the exact tree outside his childhood home, the specific lock-keeper’s cottage, the precise glitter of rain on a canal. And he elevates them not by idealising them but by attending to them. The humility of his subject matter is his rebellion. There is something about this humility — this patience, this quiet devotion — that makes Constable feel especially relevant now. In our own age, which prizes speed, novelty, instant commentary and restless reinvention, Constable’s slowness feels instructive. He teaches us that the poetic dimension of art is found not in flamboyance but in attention: the careful noticing of the world. The real subject of a landscape is not always the river or the tree but the time spent looking.

His skies are not metaphors; they

Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822 (Wikipedia.org)

are meteorology. His foliage is not ornamental; it is botany. His water is not allegory; it is hydrology. And yet all of these accumulate into something profoundly emotional, as if accuracy itself were a form of devotion.

We often imagine that artists must seek foreign lands to achieve greatness — Turner in Venice, Poussin in Rome, Monet in London. Constable did the opposite: he stayed home. His greatest works are not Mediterranean fantasies but Suffolk truths. Gayford has pointed out that Constable’s refusal to flatter the English landscape, his insistence on painting it as it is, changed the course of European art. Delacroix saw The Hay Wain in Paris and marvelled at its freshness – yes his work is often dependent on Orientalist motifs. Impressionism was unthinkable without Constable’s cloud studies. Even the Expressionists found something in his atmospheric turbulence.

At a moment when modern and contemporary art often emphasise shock, speed, novelty and provocation, Constable’s patience reads almost as a countercultural gesture. He was not

impatient with the world. He did not demand a style before he was ready. He waited, like his clouds, to form.

What these anniversary exhibitions at Gainsborough’s House will reveal is that Constable belongs not only to the past but to the present. Contemporary painters such as David Dawson and Kate Giles — both included in the programme — continue to find in Constable’s work a model of how to ground the self in nature. Their landscapes, like his, are attentive to weather, to the slow changes of light, to the idea that what we see is always only part of what we feel.

“Constable teaches us that the great works of art are not explosions but accretions — built moment by moment, decision by decision, cloud by cloud.”

In the end, Constable’s art survives because it is about the experience of

living in time. The English weather shifts; the seasons turn; the river rises after rain. Constable captures that movement not with bombast but with fidelity. He reminds us that patience is not passivity but attention stretched across seasons.

And so, as Suffolk prepares to celebrate its most patient son, it is hard not to feel that Constable’s real subject was never the Stour Valley but the art of perseverance itself: the long apprenticeship to nature, the years of being overlooked, the willingness to let a painting’s completion wait until the feeling was right. Constable teaches us that the great works of art are not explosions but accretions — built moment by moment, decision by decision, cloud by cloud.

His revolution was quiet, but it lasted. And as The Leaping Horse finally returns to the county that gave birth to it, we may recognise that the spirit of Constable’s work is not nostalgia but endurance: a painter who trusted nature, trusted time, and trusted that the patient eye would one day be seen for what it was — visionary.

Wivenhoe Park (Wikipedia.org)

VANBRUGH

300: THE FORGOTTEN POLYMATH

There are figures in British cultural history whose lives are so improbably various that they seem to belong less to a single biography than to an entire era. Sir John Vanbrugh is one of them. Architect, playwright, soldier, spy, courtier, garden designer, political agent — he lived not so much a life as a set of overlapping careers. And yet, three centuries after his death, he stands half in shadow: warmly acknowledged by specialists, but far less present in public consciousness than the magnitude of his work deserves.

The year 2026 offers an opportunity to correct this imbalance. As the Georgian Group launches its nationwide VANBRUGH300 programme — with exhibitions, lectures, workshops and displays at six of his greatest surviving creations — it becomes possible to see Vanbrugh not simply as an architect or dramatist, but as something rarer: a man who embodied the breadth of early modern possibility. The sheer enthusiasm of the commemorations tells its own story: Vanbrugh was extraordinary, and extraordinarily overlooked.

The Business of Genius

Charles Saumarez Smith, whose new biography has prompted a fundamental reassessment of Vanbrugh's character, began his research with a hunch that challenged decades of received wisdom. He came to believe that Vanbrugh was far more industrious and systematic than previous accounts suggested. The revelation came from an unlikely source: correspondence with

Martin Plantinga

Henry Joynes, the Clerk of Works at Blenheim, which Geoffrey Webb had relegated to an appendix in his 1928 edition of Vanbrugh's works. These letters, Saumarez Smith explains, were considered less interesting than the wittier missives Vanbrugh sent to his Kit-Cat Club friends, yet they revealed an entirely different dimension of his personality — one of meticulous attention to practical detail and tireless work ethic.

This discovery opened onto a larger revelation. As Saumarez Smith wrote the biography, he found that the conventional narrative of Vanbrugh's career was fundamentally incomplete. The standard story emphasises his early triumphs at Castle Howard and Blenheim, then depicts a slow fade as neo-Palladianism swept the architectural establishment. But the evidence told a different tale entirely.

"The biggest revelation," Saumarez

Portrait of John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) (Wikipedia.org)

Smith notes, "was how much work he did late on in his life after he had walked out of working for the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim." Far from retreating in defeat, Vanbrugh remained vigorously productive. He continued designing garden monuments for friends at Castle Howard, Stowe and Claremont. Grimsthorpe was constructed in the early 1720s, as were Eastbury and Seaton Delaval. The orthodox narrative, Saumarez Smith argues, overemphasises the arrival of neo-Palladianism with the publication of Vitruvius Britannicus, missing the fact that Vanbrugh's generation — friends and former soldiers — still wanted the full-blooded monumentality that academic neo-Palladianism couldn't provide. They may not have cared for the more refined style being promoted by the Earl of Burlington. And tellingly,

even in his final years, Vanbrugh designed a little castle for himself.

A Theatre of Stone

At Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace, Seaton Delaval Hall, Grimsthorpe Castle, Kimbolton Castle and Stowe House, the 2026 commemorations weave together the threads of his life. They introduce us to a man whose story begins not in aristocratic privilege but in mercantile enterprise — the son of a sugar merchant — and who left his mark on English architecture with a bold theatricality that no one before him had attempted. He is, in many respects, our first "starchitect": a man whose buildings do not sit modestly in the landscape but stride across it like protagonists. And yet, he was never only an architect.

Vanbrugh's is a story of restlessness — a Renaissance in miniature. Before he ever set eyes on Castle Howard, he had served as a soldier, travelled with the East India Company, participated in the political turbulence of the Glorious Revolution, and been imprisoned in the Bastille on suspicion of espionage. As Saumarez Smith recounts, Vanbrugh was thrown into a jail in Calais in 1688 during the Revolution, suspected of being a spy. It was there, on parole in Paris, that he absorbed the city's architecture with the hungry fascination of a man who had not yet discovered his true vocation but sensed its outline flickering before him.

One cannot help but compare Vanbrugh's path to those rare figures who turn adversity into apprenticeship. His enforced time in Paris became a kind of graduate school in stone. When

Castle Howard (Wikipedia.org)

he returned to England and turned to the stage, he did so with the same brisk wit he would later apply to his buildings. His plays — The Relapse most famously — still pulse with Restoration energy: a world of masks, deceptions, desires, and revelations. He was an acute observer of human behaviour long before he observed the contours of a landscape.

The Architecture of Confidence

But it is the architecture that ultimately defines him. And what architecture it is. Castle Howard, commissioned by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle, emerges like a dream from the Yorkshire landscape — a palace of domes, arcades and theatrical gestures. Blenheim Palace, built for the Duke of Marlborough, is a national symbol of victory and an act of architectural audacity: vast, muscular, almost militaristic in its assertion. Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, where the 2026 commemorations begin, is a work of such unorthodox grandeur that even

now its broken wing and flame-scorched history only deepen its mythic quality.

“What unites all these buildings is a quality that might be called imaginative confidence. Vanbrugh was not pompoushe was playful.”

What unites all these buildings is a quality that might be called imaginative confidence. Vanbrugh was not pompous — he was playful. There is a sense, in his façades, of a man thinking theatrically: compositions that feel like proscenium arches; staircases that behave like narrative devices; interiors unfolding with a sense of timing, as if the visitor were moving through an act in a play. He understood that architecture is not only structure but experience — not just what the building is, but what it makes

the visitor feel.

Yet as Saumarez Smith observes, each of these buildings occupies a distinctly different emotional register. Castle Howard possesses an energy and light-heartedness quite unlike the monumentality of Blenheim or the austere magnificence of Seaton Delaval. Perhaps, he suggests, Castle Howard had a playful spirit missing from the later works. An early letter Vanbrugh wrote about designing Castle Howard reveals that he was enjoying himself immensely and that the project was intended to be somewhat experimental. Blenheim, by contrast, was conceived on such a massive scale and designed explicitly to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough's victory at the Battle of Blenheim — entirely different in purpose and character. Seaton Delaval was designed late in Vanbrugh's life in a bleak landscape setting. He wrote about how much he preferred the north to what he called the "Tame Sneaking South of England."

Blenheim Palace (Wikipedia.org)

Monumental Simplicity

Vanbrugh is often characterised as the dramatic counterpoint to his collaborator Nicholas Hawksmoor, but Saumarez Smith's research reveals a more nuanced distinction. Where Hawksmoor delighted in architectural complexity, Vanbrugh increasingly favoured what Saumarez Smith calls "monumental simplicity." This preference isn't immediately evident in Vanbrugh's early work at Castle Howard and Blenheim — perhaps because he was working closely with Hawksmoor at the time — but it emerges clearly in the arcades along the side of the kitchen court at Blenheim.

The tendency becomes unmistakable at Kimbolton, in the outbuildings at King's Weston, and in what Saumarez Smith describes as "the wonderful, abstract sturdiness" of the wings Vanbrugh added to his house at Claremont after it was purchased by the Duke of Newcastle. It's visible in the

new façade he added to the Duke of Ancaster's Tudor house at Grimsthorpe, and perhaps most powerfully in the "adventurous muscularity" of Seaton Delaval.

The unifying characteristic across all these works, Saumarez Smith argues, is that you never feel Vanbrugh simply consulted architectural pattern books. He was fundamentally interested in the visual and emotional effect of his buildings — in what they made people feel rather than whether they conformed to classical precedent.

The Polymath Problem

In that sense, it is fitting that the 2026 displays are called "The Rockstar of the English Baroque — Stone, Stage and Statecraft." The title captures something essential: Vanbrugh's genius was not compartmentalised. He thought in multiple registers at once — theatrical, political, architectural — and fused them

into something that feels unmistakeably his. The displays will explore these convergences through drawings, portraits, engravings and quotations from his plays: the many Vanbrughs that made the man. They will also reveal how his European influences, especially those absorbed during his Paris parole, helped shape an architectural vision that married English solidity with continental flourish.

But perhaps the most striking thing about Vanbrugh is how he managed to pivot so dramatically between disciplines. One year he was crafting Restoration comedy; the next he was producing buildings that rewrote the possibilities of the English country house. This is the mark of the true polymath: the ability not merely to change careers, but to transplant modes of thought — to take the stagecraft of the theatre and translate it into the language of stone.

Yet as Saumarez Smith candidly

acknowledges, this very multiplicity has hindered Vanbrugh's reputation. "Unfortunately," he observes, "the British are suspicious of a polymath." The concern, he notes, is quite understandable: Vanbrugh had not been trained as an architect — indeed, there was no formal architectural training available — and so many have assumed he must have been a dilettante. This suspicion has been particularly pronounced since the Second World War, when architects came to admire the work of Hawksmoor, especially after his life was dramatised by Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. By comparison, Vanbrugh has been regarded as comparatively lightweight — too frivolous to be taken seriously.

We talk often today about "transferable skills," but Vanbrugh practised them before the phrase existed. The timing and rhythm of his comedies appear in the choreography of his architectural spaces. His diplomatic nous appears in his dealings with patrons. His military experience echoes faintly in the

forthright, battlement-like silhouettes of his designs. It is as though every chapter of his life informed the next.

A Period Rediscovered

This year's commemorations aim not only to celebrate Vanbrugh's achievements but to make him newly visible. This matters. A culture is shaped as much by what it forgets as by what it remembers, and Vanbrugh stands at risk of becoming one of those historical figures filed away too neatly — "architect of Blenheim," "writer of Restoration comedies," but seldom both at once. The VANBRUGH300 programme resists this simplification. At each of the six great houses, panels, displays and guided activities reveal his layered identity: the designer who thought like a dramatist, the dramatist who imagined like an architect.

For Saumarez Smith, restoring Vanbrugh to the centre of British cultural history means restoring an entire era to visibility. In writing the

biography, he became acutely conscious that most people know very little about the period between the Revolution of 1688 and the Accession of George I in 1714 — the very period when Vanbrugh was most active. When George I arrived off the boat at Greenwich, Vanbrugh was the first person to be knighted. "I don't think it is a period that is taught much in schools," Saumarez Smith reflects, "and I (sadly) never studied it myself."

Yet it was, he argues, such an exciting period. Vanbrugh was a brilliant writer and architect. His friend Jacob Tonson published the work of Alexander Pope. Joseph Addison, with whom Vanbrugh travelled to Hanover, pioneered intelligent, long-form journalism. The Kit-Cat Club helped Vanbrugh build a new theatre where all of Handel's early operas were first performed. It was a period of wars against the French, political argument, freedom of thought and intellectual invention. Vanbrugh's life, Saumarez Smith contends, offers an invaluable insight into this period, which deserves to be studied more widely and to be better known.

Grimsthorpe Castle(Wikipedia.org)

Culture as Conversation

What is most striking is how contemporary these programmes feel. Family workshops invite visitors to design Vanbrugh-style buildings from cardboard; community groups will perform mini adaptations of his comedies. Over 3,500 primary school children will take part in free learning activities: a gesture of accessibility that Vanbrugh himself would surely have admired. One is reminded that true culture is not a museum but a conversation — one that must constantly renew itself with new participants. The Georgian Group understands this, and the scale of the educational programme — with transport funded to reduce barriers — positions Vanbrugh not as a relic but as a resource.

Alongside these activities, the intellectual architecture of Vanbrugh's legacy will be explored in depth. A corresponding display at Fitzroy Square, an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum — coorganised with the V&A — and a major Cambridge symposium will draw together historians, architects, writers and scholars. These events promise to return Vanbrugh to the centre of the conversation about British architecture and its origins. Indeed, it is astonishing that one of the founding figures of our national architectural imagination can remain so little discussed outside specialist circles. Perhaps 2026 will be the year this changes.

The Virtue of Multiplicity

There is a larger story here. England's great houses are sometimes described as monuments to aristocratic ambition, but in Vanbrugh's case they are also monuments to personal reinvention. They show us what can happen when a person refuses to be defined by a single path; when imagination is not parked

in one discipline but allowed to roam. In a modern world that often urges early specialisation, Vanbrugh's life demonstrates the opposite: that breadth can be strength, that curiosity can be vocation.

The rediscovery of Vanbrugh's latecareer productivity reinforces this lesson. Even after his very public falling-out with the Duchess of Marlborough, even as architectural fashion appeared to be turning against him, he continued to work with undiminished energy and invention. His patrons — many of them old friends and fellow veterans — valued what he offered: buildings that didn't simply follow rules but created experiences, structures that engaged the emotions as well as the intellect.

“If Constable teaches us the virtues of patience, Vanbrugh teaches us the virtues of multiplicity. He was, in the best sense, uncontainable.”

If Constable teaches us the virtues of patience, Vanbrugh teaches us the virtues of multiplicity. He was, in the best sense, uncontainable. His generation wanted full-blooded monuments, and he gave them buildings that still command attention three centuries later — not through conformity to fashion, but through their sheer imaginative force.

A Model for Our Time

As we mark the tercentenary of his death, we are invited to rediscover him — not only as the architect of Blenheim or the playwright of The Relapse, but as the English Baroque's greatest orchestrator of drama in stone. The man who brought

theatre outdoors, who turned façades into characters and landscapes into stages. The man who refused to accept that a life must have one direction.

Saumarez Smith's biography and the VANBRUGH300 programme together offer a chance to see Vanbrugh whole: not as a dilettante who dabbled in too many fields, but as a figure whose very multiplicity was his genius. The businesslike correspondence with the Clerk of Works reveals the same mind at work as the theatrical flourishes of Castle Howard — a mind that understood that great projects require both vision and attention to detail, both imaginative daring and practical persistence.

It is time we recognised Vanbrugh not just as a historical figure, but as a model: of curiosity, daring, reinvention, and imaginative amplitude. In 2026, at last, the fullness of his achievement will stand revealed — not in footnotes, but across six great houses, in exhibitions, performances, lectures, and the revived attention of a nation rediscovering one of its most remarkable, and most unjustly forgotten, polymaths.

The man who preferred the wild north to the "Tame Sneaking South of England." The man who saw that architecture could be about emotional effect rather than academic correctness. The man who worked harder and achieved more than the traditional narrative ever acknowledged. The man who, even in designing a little castle for himself, demonstrated that the architectural imagination need never retire.

Three hundred years after his death, Vanbrugh's buildings still stride across the English landscape like protagonists in their own drama. Perhaps now, finally, we are ready to see them — and him — clearly.

LEONARD COHEN

By Christopher Jackson

Tenyears after his death, Leonard Cohen remains an object lesson in how a career can evolve without a person ever losing themselves. These days we speak endlessly about “the pivot” — about rethinking one’s direction, about finding transferable skills — but Cohen lived the pivot decades before the word became fashionable. He was, first of all, not a singer but a novelist and a poet: an already accomplished literary figure in Montreal with two novels and several poetry collections behind him. And yet he found himself in his thirties living in a house without heat on the Greek island of Hydra, realising he could not make a living from literature. “I found out,” he said with his wry selfawareness, “that poetry was not a way of life. It was a verdict.”

So he made a choice. He decided that if he were ever to sustain himself, it would have to be through songwriting. But what is striking is that he did this without surrendering his voice. Most people pivot by dilution — toning down their eccentricities, turning themselves into palatable versions of what the market wants. Cohen pivoted by intensifying. The songwriter who arrived in New York in the mid-1960s, painfully shy and unsure of his singing voice, wrote songs that sounded as though they had been waiting for him all along. Years later in one of his greatest songs, ‘The Tower of Song’, he would announce with infinite confidence that he “was born with the gift of a golden voice” but I’m not sure it felt that way early on in Greenwich Village.

But an awareness of his gifts, often humourously expressed, if a leitmotif in his career. “I have the gift of the long line,” he would later say — a phrase that explains almost everything about what makes his lyrics great: the ability to let an idea unspool, clause by clause, as

though thought itself were singing. The early songs that emerged from this pivot remain among the most atmospheric and specific in modern music. Take Suzanne. It is almost a blueprint for his method: an observational exactness (“the sun pours down like honey / on our lady of the harbour”) combined with a mystic undertow. He writes with the clarity of a poet but frames his imagery with the restraint of someone who knows that revelation must be offered slowly. What makes Suzanne so good is that the specificity leads you into transcendence: a cup of tea, an orange, a river, a church — details that unlock the metaphysical. We’re never quite sure what it is about Suzanne which makes her so extraordinary and this means we continue listening to the song, thinking this time around we might just find out.

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”

Cohen once said: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” The remark is modest, humorous, and entirely sincere. His songs sound effortless, but effort was their secret architecture. He was famous for painstaking revisions — dozens of verses abandoned for a single surviving line. His life teaches us that the real work is invisible: the long struggle beneath the eventual simplicity.

There is an amusing story of Dylan and Cohen together, trading stories about the art of songwriting. Dylan asked Cohen how long it had taken him to write ‘Hallelujah’. Cohen said it had taken 10 years. Cohen asked how long it had taken Dylan to write Just Like A Woman. “About five minutes,” came the

reply. On another occasion, Dylan said to Cohen: “You’re number one, Leonard – but me, I’m number zero.” This, as is often the case with Dylan, is both true and extraordinarily arrogant. Dylan is reminding us that there are infinite possibilities with his songs – Cohen’s perhaps feel more tailored to Cohen. Perhaps that’s why Cohen’s story is also one of low points. The most famous again concerns Hallelujah, now one of the most universally recognised songs in existence. It was rejected repeatedly by Columbia Records; the label deemed the album it appeared on commercially unpromising. It took Dylan championing the song in concert, and then later Jeff Buckley’s haunting cover, to bring it properly to public attention. Cohen responded characteristically: “When I wrote ‘Hallelujah’ the only person ultimately interested in it was myself.” To be fair, his own recording remains very much an acquired taste and the suspicion remains he didn’t quite record it right the first time around. Even so, there is a lesson here for anyone labouring on work that seems ignored: if you believe in its truth, you stay with it. Sometimes culture takes a while to catch up.

Cohen is the sort of questing man who will do his own thing. For instance, there was also the monastery — five years from 1994 to 1999 at Mount Baldy in California, serving as assistant to a Zen master, waking at 3 a.m., living quietly, disappearing almost entirely from public life. Most careers cannot absorb such absences. But Cohen’s could, because he understood something profound: that pauses do not always break a career; sometimes they deepen it. A life that includes periods of retreat can be richer than one spent in constant visibility. “The less I say,” he once remarked, “the more room there is for other things.” The other things, in this case, turned

out to be the maturity and stillness that inform his later work, and which are best heard on that extraordinary late masterpiece ‘You Want It Darker’. And then the cruellest blow: discovering late in life that his longtime manager had mismanaged and depleted his finances. He was nearly wiped out. Most people would have collapsed under the burden. But Cohen returned to the stage — partly out of necessity, partly out of gratitude that his voice, though changed, could still reach people. Those late tours became legendary: a man in his seventies and

eighties bowing to his musicians, singing with generosity, wearing humility like a second suit. He said:

“I never thought I would tour again. But now that I have, I don’t want to stop.” From catastrophe came a final creative flowering. Again, the lesson is unmistakable: resilience is not merely endurance; it is the capacity to transform necessity into grace.

Cohen never lost his poetic self. If anything, he grew more himself with each passing year. His lyrics remain some of the finest ever written, not because they are clever but because

they are charged with atmosphere and honesty. Famous Blue Raincoat might be the perfect example — a song structured as a letter, so intimate it feels almost intrusive to listen to. The specificity is extraordinary: “the music on Clinton Street,” “so what can I tell you my brother, my killer?” The song never fully explains the triangle it describes, yet it feels complete. Cohen once said the song still troubled him:

“I don’t know if it’s a good song or a bad song. It’s just the best I could do.”

That is an artist’s truth: you aim for completion, not perfection.

“When I wrote Hallelujah the only person ultimately interested in it was myself.”

His lyrics, at their best, combine the sacred and the profane, despair and humour, sensuality and transcendence. “There is a crack in everything,” he wrote, “that’s how the light gets in.” The line has become almost aphoristic, but it contains the central belief of his life: brokenness is not the end of meaning; it is its beginning. Over the years I’ve come to love the raw edge of his voice, the sense in which the guitar could fumble a little if it wanted to and not change the essential nature of what is being offered.

And so we return to Hallelujah, the song that has travelled further than any other he wrote. Why does it cross over so powerfully between genres, generations, and contexts? One simple answer to this is because Jeff Buckley ended up singing it like an angel. But the real reason is because it balances the divine and the human with absolute clarity. “Love is not a victory march,” he sings, “it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” Few lines

better describe adult life: the mixture of hope, fracture, tenderness, wrongdoing, persistence. The song patiently acknowledges the complications of desire, faith, and failure — and yet insists on praising life anyway. It teaches us that dignity is not the absence of wounds but the willingness to continue singing with them.

“I don’t know if it’s a good song or a bad song. It’s just the best I could do.”

What we learn from Leonard Cohen, ten years after his death, is that identity and career need not be opposites. He changed direction, but he never changed substance. He moved from page to stage, from monastery to tour bus, from obscurity to acclaim

— but always remained a writer first, attentive to words, faithful to craft. He also teaches us to honour the long path: to embrace slow breakthroughs, delayed recognition, and the occasional necessary disappearance.

Above all, he teaches us that artistry is not about being loud, but about being

truthful. “I’m not a very good singer,” he once joked, “but I can hold a tune for a long time.” And he did — longer, deeper and more steadily than almost anyone. That long tune, ten years on, is still teaching us how to work, how to endure, and how to pay attention to beauty with the seriousness it deserves.

ekathimerini.com

C IS FOR CAREER, BUT M IS FOR MURDER

100 years since Agatha Christie’s disappearance, there’s a whole industry flourishing around salacious crime, writes George Achebe

It is one of the neatest ironies in literary history that the world’s most famous crime writer once went missing herself. In December 1926, Agatha Christie left her Berkshire home, abandoned her Morris Cowley on the edge of a chalk pit in Surrey, and vanished for eleven days. The police brought in dogs and planes; Arthur Conan Doyle consulted a spirit medium; thousands joined the search. She was finally discovered, apparently amnesiac, at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband’s mistress.

One hundred years on, that disappearance feels like the natural starting point for an essay on “careers in murder.” Christie was already a published novelist and a nurse turned apothecary’s assistant, with a working knowledge of poisons picked up in a wartime dispensary. Those long hours among bottles and powders proved decisive: scholars estimate that at least 28 of her 66 mystery novels – and many of her short stories – hinge on poisoning. Kathryn Harkup’s A is for Arsenic and Michael C Gerald’s The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie both make the same basic point: Christie didn’t just sprinkle arsenic around as a plot device; she used real toxicology, so accurately that pathologists have been known to consult her fiction in real cases.

Here is our first lesson in the labour market of murder: Christie’s crime career is grounded in work. She is not simply a genius at plotting, but a former hospital worker whose shift patterns and pharmaceutical exams gave her the technical literacy to kill with plausibility. She once joked, “Give me a decent bottle of poison and I’ll construct the perfect crime,” and in a sense that is what she did

for the rest of her life. Her detective fiction is a model of vocational crosspollination: nursing plus pharmacy plus a taste for Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, repurposed as a sustainable profession.

“Give me a decent bottle of poison and I’ll construct the perfect crime.”

This is why her 1926 vanishing continues to fascinate. It is as if the author briefly disappeared into her own backlist, becoming a case study for the idea that crime – even fictional crime – is a kind of work. Christie, who once wrote that “very few of us are what we seem,” understood that better than most.

If Christie is the matriarch of murder as a career, the current patriarch of “light” homicide is Richard Osman. When The Thursday Murder Club appeared in 2020 it looked, at first, like a charming side project by a quizshow host. It has since sold well over ten million copies worldwide, with the four books in the series breaking UK sales records and total sales topping fifteen million. Osman’s retirees in Coopers Chase have effectively turned late-life sleuthing into an international growth sector. Netflix has filmed a star-studded adaptation; Steven Spielberg is involved; lemon drizzle cake has become an economic indicator.

Publishers, naturally, have noticed. Crime has been the most popular genre in UK fiction for several years. More recent international figures suggest that fiction overall is propping up the global book market, even as non-fiction slips; within fiction, crime remains one of the most dependable

engines, with cosy crime singled out as a particularly buoyant sub-genre. It is in this context that you can place a small, stubbornly literary outfit like The Black Spring Press Group. Founded in 1984, Black Spring made its name reissuing Leonard Cohen’s novels, publishing Anaïs Nin, Nick Cave and Patrick Hamilton, and reviving the reputations of overlooked writers like Alexander Baron and Julian Maclaren-Ross. Recently, though, it has also moved into crime with the Black Spring Crime Series, guided by writer-editor Luca Veste. Lee Child has called Veste “our genre’s best talent spotter,” predicting that Black Spring “will be one to watch,” while Ian Rankin praises the indie as “the perfect fit for these fresh new voices and ways of seeing.”

“Publishers, naturally, have noticed. Crime has been the most popular genre in UK fiction for several years.”

Behind those blurbs sits an entire micro-economy of murder. Editors, publicists, cover designers, copyeditors, typesetters, sensitivity readers, audiobook producers and social media managers make their living from a crime list that, in turn, feeds readers’ appetite for fictional wrongdoing. Christie once did her plotting on index cards at a kitchen table. Now, a single mid-list crime novel can support freelancers from Maida Vale to Mumbai. Murder, at least the invented kind, is a jobs programme. Move from page to pavement and you hit a less comfortable manifestation of murder as livelihood: the Jack the Ripper Museum in Whitechapel.

Opened in 2015 in a former women’s history site, the museum rapidly became a lightning rod for protests. Critics such as Sian Norris in The Guardian argued that “this London exhibition celebrates a sexually violent murderer,” and that in a society where women are still being killed by men, turning a misogynist killer into a tourist brand is indefensible.

“The Ripper industry raises a question that Christie… managed mostly to avoid: who, exactly, is being centred? The

murderer, or the murdered?”

Historians and activists have been equally blunt. The Leeds Trinity historian Kate Lister described the museum as perpetuating an “acceptance of violence against women,” while Sarah Jackson pointed out that the museum had been marketed locally as a celebration of East End women’s lives only to

reopen as a spectacle of their deaths – complete with a mannequin corpse, “Ripper cupcakes” and an audio loop of women’s screams. Protesters’ placards in 2015 read: “We will not end men’s violence against women by celebrating murderous misogyny,” noting that 76 women had been killed by men in the UK that year.

Here, the murder economy brushes up against ethics. There are genuine public-history jobs in this space –curators, archivists, guides, exhibition designers – but the Ripper industry raises a question that Christie, with her polite poisonings in drawing rooms, managed mostly to avoid:

who, exactly, is being centred? The murderer, or the murdered? Carol Ann Duffy, writing about Ripper lore, once observed that “the victims are always the missing text.” The museum row is, in its way, a workplace dispute about narrative: whose story gets you paid?

If the Ripper Museum is commercial true crime, then universities are its cooler, more cautious cousin. There has been an explosion of criminology as an academic subject: by the late 2010s, over a hundred higher-education institutions in the UK offered criminology degrees, and the field now sustains journals, conferences, research centres and

professional associations. The student who once read Murder on the Orient Express under the desk in double maths can now major formally in the study of crime.

Criminology today ranges from statistical modelling of crime patterns to the sociology of gangs, from forensic linguistics to studies of online hate. One recent academic paper examined the odds of firstyear criminology students failing to progress, finding complex links between prior attainment, social background and retention. Even this, tangentially, is a “career in murder”: working out how to make sure the analysts of tomorrow do not drop out before they can contribute.

Alongside criminologists in sociology or law departments sit literary scholars who have turned murder into a specialism. There are academics whose careers rest partly on close readings of Christie, Conan Doyle or

Chandler – analysing, for example, how Christie’s poisons map onto interwar anxieties about science and gender. Others examine the cultural afterlives of cases like Jack the Ripper, as Judith Walkowitz once did in her study of how the Ripper story crystallised “sexual and gender politics in the contest for the city.”

“The glamour of TV detectives – lone geniuses in good coats – bears little resemblance to the team-based reality.”

If you are looking for employability lessons here, they are oddly heartening. A fascination with detective fiction that would once have been dismissed as a hobby can now power a PhD, a teaching career, a consultancy role with police or

NGOs. The murder-obsessed teenager is not necessarily lost; they may simply be pre-professional.

And then there are the people whose careers involve real murder. Police detectives, forensic scientists, criminal barristers, judges: all of them work with the phenomenon that Christie and Osman safely fictionalise. Their world is not structured into neat chapters with denouements at page 295. It is made of statements, phone records, CCTV, pathology reports, family liaison visits and, often, grief.

In England and Wales, police record around 600 homicide offences per year – a tiny proportion of all violent crime, but each one a universe of devastation. A large share involve knives or sharp instruments. If you work in homicide, that is the backdrop: a steady, stubborn trickle of lethal violence that refuses to respond neatly to policy cycles.

The glamour of TV detectives – lone

geniuses in good coats – bears little resemblance to the team-based reality. Modern murder investigations rely on analysts, digital forensics, forensic pathologists, family liaison officers, scenes-of-crime officers, prosecutors and, eventually, defence barristers. The employability picture is one of intense specialisation. A forensic toxicologist, for example, might have more in common with Christie than they realise: a chemistry degree, knowledge of pharmacology, and the ability to

explain complex mechanisms of action in plain English, not to an eager reader but to a jury.

Criminal barristers and solicitors, meanwhile, live at the narrative end of the chain. Their job is to sew the messy fabric of witness statements, CCTV gaps and forensic uncertainties into a story that satisfies the legal tests of proof. They are, in some ways, professional anti-novelists: they work to ensure that real cases do not collapse into implausibility. For every

aspiring Christie, there is an advocate whose work consists, in part, of showing that life is not a puzzle with only one elegant solution.

A century on from Agatha Christie’s disappearance, murder is a quiet giant of the labour market. It keeps the tills ringing in bookshops; it sustains small presses; it drives tourism and heritage debates; it fills seminar rooms; it sits at the core of whole professional sectors in law and policing. It is, paradoxically, an industry dedicated either to imagining death or to preventing and understanding it.

“A forensic toxicologist, for example, might have more in common with Christie than they realise: a chemistry degree, knowledge of pharmacology, and the ability to explain complex mechanisms of action in plain English, not to an eager reader but to a jury.”

What can we learn from this as we think about careers more broadly? First, that the boundaries between “morbid interest” and “legitimate work” are thinner than they seem. Christie’s war-time hours in a Torquay dispensary became the foundation of a crime empire. The current boom in cosy crime – from Osman’s Coopers Chase to Black Spring’s new crime list – suggests that curiosity about wrongdoing,

Christie as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross. She is pictured in 1915 outside her childhood home of Ashfield in Torquay in Devon. (wikipedia.org)

handled with care, can lead to entirely respectable livelihoods.

Second, that ethics are not optional extras. The Jack the Ripper Museum controversy is a warning that there are ways of “working in murder” that trivialise real suffering, and others that insist on remembering victims as more than bodies on a tour route. The same goes for academia and publishing: which stories we commission, frame and teach is itself a moral act.

Third, that the skills involved in these careers are surprisingly transferable. The detective’s pattern recognition, the criminologist’s data literacy, the barrister’s narrative control, the curator’s sense of context, the novelist’s feel for motive and character – all are versions of looking hard at human behaviour and asking: why did they do that? In a job market obsessed with “soft skills” and emotional intelligence, few training grounds are richer than the careful study of crime.

“Pay attention as you go, to notice the clues in your own working life that point, quietly but insistently, towards what you might do next.”

Christie’s line – “very few of us are what we seem” – applies both to people and to work. A “career in murder” might sound like something you confess in a dock. In practice, it might mean a PhD on Victorian policing, a night shift in a forensics lab, a small indie press in Maida Vale betting on a new crime writer, a detective in a windowless incident

room, or a barrister on a late train with a lever-arch file and too little sleep.

The centenary of Christie’s disappearance is an invitation to pause the narrative just before the end, as she did, and look around. In that suspended moment, the car abandoned, the search underway, all outcomes seem possible. A life can still pivot: from nurse to novelist, from reader to researcher, from undergraduate criminology student to homicide detective. Careers, like whodunnits, are constructed in hindsight. The trick – and Christie knew this – is to pay attention as you go, to notice the clues in your own working life that point, quietly but insistently, towards what you might do next.

Christie as a young woman, 1910s. (wikipedia.org)

Daily Herald, 15 December 1926, announcing that Christie had been found. Missing for 11 days, she was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

BOOK REVIEWS

Uplifting Books For Challenging Times

Nick Gibb's

Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved

BY TIM CLARK, MA, PGCE, FRSA

Nick Gibb graduated in law and worked for KPMG as a chartered accountant before entering Parliament in 1997. Despite never having worked as a teacher, he has had a long parliamentary connection with education: he was appointed Shadow Schools Minister in 2005, was Schools Minister from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to 2021 and again from 2022 to 2023. He was knighted in the 2025 New Year's Honours List.

The book is detailed and, in places, persuasive, and I have considerable sympathy with both his aims and some of his arguments. However, there are three specific aspects with which I take serious issue. The whole premise of the book is

that between 2010 and 2014, educational standards significantly improved in England as a direct result of Conservative education policy. Evidence to support this premise largely comes from England's improved performance in international comparative tests, with Gibb arguing that immediate, extreme caution is required when interpreting such data.

The DfE's own official analysis of the latest PISA tests, conducted by the University of Oxford, openly admits that the sample of English pupils tested was almost worthless. The analysis states that England tested pupils who were academically brighter than the national average, meaning that any attempt to compare England's published results with those of other countries is almost pointless. Particular caution should be taken when considering the rank order of countries. Some of the performance data is shocking: in science, for example, England's actual results have dropped with every exception, every year. England achieved a score of 515 in 2009, 516 in 2012, 512 in 2015, and 507 in 2018 and 2022, yet Gibb argues that ranking in science has improved. The focus on ranking is telling: there is little correlation between comparative ranking and real performance. In maths, for example, our ranking has improved over time, but our actual performance was higher in 2006. We now live in a country where less than half of 10-year-olds feel confident in reading, where less than a third trust in more than half the curriculum, and less than a third actually like reading. The latter has nothing to do with social media or modern communications: enjoyment of reading is much higher when government reading policy is sensible. In the same year the government

introduced its new phonics check because it claimed existing reading standards were so poor, the proportion of children who said they enjoyed reading fell from 51% to 35%. These figures, based on a survey of some 60,000 children annually, are an extremely serious cause for concern.

England now has what amounts to a two-tier system in secondary education. Around half of all secondary school children attend a school that Ofsted rates as either Outstanding or Good with Outstanding features. However, in 44 local authorities, fewer than one in five secondary pupils attend such a school, and in twelve authorities, the figure is fewer than one in ten. This educational inequality tracks almost exactly the pattern of wealth inequality. Whether a child attends an Outstanding secondary school depends almost entirely on the income and postcode of their parents. Employers now actively seek out employees who went to Outstanding schools, in much the same way as they once sought Oxbridge graduates. White working-class boys are now the group in society least likely to attend university.

Despite Government claims about rising standards, there is clear evidence of significant grade inflation at A-level. Since 2010, the proportion of students achieving A* or A grades has risen from 27% to 36%, and the proportion achieving at least a C grade has risen from 77% to 84%. Yet employers and universities consistently report that students arriving with these grades are less well prepared than those of previous generations. Grade boundaries have fallen so far in some subjects that students can achieve an A grade while correctly answering fewer than half the questions.

There are, to be fair, several genuine achievements that the book rightly celebrates. The expansion of the academies programme and introduction of free schools gave parents more choice and allowed innovative approaches to education to flourish. Some of these schools have been transformative for their communities. The curriculum reform raised expectations in many subjects and removed some questionable content from previous iterations, with the emphasis on knowledge-rich education having considerable merit. The systematic teaching of phonics has helped many young children learn to read more effectively, though the phonics screening check has created its own problems. Teacher recruitment programmes like Teach First have succeeded in bringing high-quality graduates into teaching, though retention remains a serious problem.

However, these achievements must be weighed against significant failures that receive insufficient attention in Gibb's account. Real-terms funding per pupil fell dramatically between 2010 and 2019, leading to larger class sizes, fewer support staff, and reduced subject options. Many schools have been forced to cut provision in music, art, and drama entirely. Teaching has become an increasingly difficult profession, with approximately 40% of teachers now leaving within five years of qualification. Workload pressures, pay freezes, and constant policy changes have created a genuine retention crisis. Student mental health problems have increased dramatically, yet schools struggle to provide adequate support with limited resources and long waiting lists for CAMHS services. The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has widened in many areas, despite the Pupil Premium.

Gibb's book presents a partial and selective picture of English education

since 2010. While some Conservative education reforms have had positive effects, the central claim that English schools have dramatically improved is not supported by robust evidence. International test scores are too unreliable to bear the weight Gibb places on them, domestic measures show mixed results, and serious problems relating to inequality, funding, and student wellbeing have demonstrably worsened. The book would have been considerably stronger if it had acknowledged these complexities honestly.

Education policy requires nuance, intellectual humility, and genuine willingness to learn from mistakes. Cherry-picking data to support a predetermined conclusion serves neither students nor the teaching profession. A more accurate assessment would recognise that education improved in some respects, declined in others, and that establishing clear causation between government policies and educational outcomes is extraordinarily difficult. The factors that determine educational success are numerous and deeply interconnected. Attributing changes to any single government's policies therefore requires far more caution than Gibb demonstrates.

Gibb deserves credit for his longstanding commitment to education and for some genuine achievements during his time as Schools Minister. However, this book ultimately fails to provide the balanced, rigorous, evidence-based analysis that such an important topic demands. The selective use of data, the downplaying of serious ongoing problems, and the unwillingness to engage seriously with contrary evidence all undermine what could have been a valuable contribution to debates about education policy in England.

New Year

By Raymond Warner-Allen

Most of what we will imminently do lies in months not called January. The year will unfurl for me and you along our designs and surprises, pitfalls wearing their disguises. Your success is waiting patiently.

It may feel slow. The verdict seems to waitweaving through emails and calls, and bumps we have to navigate. Success is not a trumpeterinstead it’s a kind of grafter, a multitasker, juggling many balls.

There are those who know how to be silent; who turn up each day, and work. If ever they’re down, they don’t vent; if tired, keep going in their way, waiting on the fruits of the given dayand never opt out, or sink, or shirk.

They don’t boast at the latest party; they have no need to put on that act. Instead, they know opportunity lies always reasonably nearand that the happiest new year belongs to those who take that as fact.

SIX NATIONS: LESSONS FROM A LIFE-LONG RUGBY FAN

Robert Golding

If I had to select my favourite sporting moment since I’ve been alive, I’d probably have to select that drop goal in 2003. If I close my eyes, I can still see it: the disorganisation of the scrum, moving towards the Australian line, and the commentator’s explosive: “And Dawson now!” On the replay you can see Jonny Wilkinson hovering, just where he needs to be — waiting for the ball. And the ball comes to him.

Let’s let the ball pause mid-air and remind ourselves of everything which brought Wilkinson to that moment: how he always wanted to be a rugby player, how he would train on Christmas Day. Let’s imagine that too — how no day for Wilkinson, for as long as he could remember, had ever been entirely rugby-free. And for what? For this precise moment, when the scores are level, and the World Cup is on the line – and the ball comes towards him.

We can’t say for sure that any particular practice session made the difference, but we can say with precision that the desire to commit absolutely to rugby is impossible to divorce from what happened next: Wilkinson catches the ball, and he drop-kicks it, and it sails through the posts — and like that, in a moment shored up by thousands of days of unseen endeavour behind the scenes, and even those Christmas Days, England are world champions. I think of this moment as we come up

again to the Six Nations and England will compete once more. Wilkinson’s story is a perfect metaphor for those who want to succeed in any walk of life — sometimes it can seem remarkably simple. Identify what you’re good at — and then go for it.

But rugby itself is now an industry, and a rapidly evolving one. It is a sport of tradition, yet it has also become a

sophisticated employment ecosystem. People often make the mistake of thinking that the only way to “work in rugby” is to lace up a pair of boots and run onto a pitch. In truth, rugby today is a global, multi-layered professional environment. Behind every match lies a vast network of analysts, medical staff, nutritionists, logistics teams, marketers, broadcasters, community officers, data specialists,

Six Nations England V Wales At Twickenham. Jonny Wilkinson Scores The Last Points (Alamy.com)

groundskeepers, commercial strategists, psychologists, events planners, and more.

So the question becomes: what does Wilkinson’s moment teach us, and how might this year's Six Nations illuminate a world of work opening up from grassroots to the professional game?

Let us step back from the 2003 final and take a broader view of the sport — a view that sees rugby not just as a game, but as a workplace with hundreds of potential doors.

The Modern Rugby Landscape

Rugby in 2026 is not what rugby was in 2003, or even 2015. It is a sport balancing on a tightrope: deeply rooted in tradition yet pushed towards reinvention by financial pressures, player-welfare concerns, and the relentless need to compete in a saturated entertainment market.

The Six Nations itself remains one of the crown jewels of world sport. Its mixture of old rivalries, national pride, winter sunlight on cold pitches, and the satisfying feeling that one match can tilt the course of a season continues to draw millions. But behind the scenes, the tournament is supported by a quiet army of professionals whose roles barely existed when Wilkinson first caught that pass from Dawson.

The modern rugby economy requires people who understand business development, bio-mechanics, sponsorship negotiation, international logistics, mental-health support, social-media management, digital broadcasting, hospitality, and community engagement. Just as every scrum requires eight bodies moving in harmony, modern rugby requires an industrial pack working behind the frontline.

This is a sector that has professionalised at speed. And with that professionalisation comes jobs.

Careers

on the Pitch

Let’s begin with the most visible layer: the players. They remain the sport’s most recognisable ambassadors, and playing professionally is a career path first mapped by dedication similar to Wilkinson’s own. But the path is far more structured now, with academies acting as training grounds for future internationals and offering opportunities for coaching, mentoring, physiotherapy, and talent development.

“Identify what you’re good at - and then go for it.”

In the past, academy roles were few; now, every major club runs a comprehensive system, requiring development officers, conditioning coaches, youth-engagement managers, pastoral support officers, and educators. The emphasis on welfare — mental and physical — has created entirely new categories of work. Few realise how many jobs now cluster around the single task of protecting a young player’s body and mind.

There are nutritionists, performance chefs, data-driven diet planners, and sleep coaches. There are analysts who track GPS metrics from training sessions, generating detailed reports on workload, fatigue risk, and sprint profiles. There are recovery specialists who manage cold-water immersion, compression protocols, and soft-tissue interventions.

And then there are the medical teams: sports doctors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, trauma specialists. Rugby unions increasingly employ concussion fellows and neurospecialists. These roles simply did not exist thirty years ago.

For those who wish to work close to athletes without being athletes themselves, the pitch is now surrounded by a cluster of rewarding, intellectually demanding professions.

Business Machine

Off the pitch, the commercial landscape has grown rapidly. Rugby may not generate the television revenue of football, but the Six Nations remains one of the most lucrative annual tournaments in world sport, producing more than £430 million in revenue and drawing TV audiences

exceeding 120 million each year. Globally, rugby’s financial footprint has expanded as well — World Rugby reported £493 million in revenue for the latest cycle, participation has grown to over 9.6 million players worldwide, and the sport’s fanbase now exceeds 500 million. Women’s rugby, in particular, has surged, with registered players increasing more than 60% in the last decade.

Sport has always relied on storytellers, and rugby now has many: content creators, writers, broadcasters, archivists, media-producers, live-streaming specialists. The digital revolution has opened posts for people who can manage online communities, cut social clips, produce insight-driven analytics, and market players as personal brands.

Working in communications in a modern rugby environment bears little resemblance to the press-release-driven past. Now it demands fluency with algorithms, image management, fan engagement, and crisis prevention.

Commercial teams manage sponsorship portfolios worth millions. A shirt sleeve, training ground naming rights, grassroots programme sponsorship — each requires contracts, activation, measurable KPIs, and brand storytelling. A sponsorship manager in rugby today must be both strategist and diplomat, translating sporting identity into commercial value.

Events management within rugby requires even more. A Six Nations match is a logistical symphony involving security, catering, hospitality, travel, ceremonial protocol, dignitary management, fan engagement, merchandise, ticketing, queueing strategy, and sustainability compliance. Entire companies specialise in stadium operations, and each match day employs thousands.

Someone once said that to work in rugby is to work in a small city: because

everything a city needs — safety, organisation, power, communication, atmosphere — a rugby match needs too.

Growing Workforce

One of the less glamorous but profoundly meaningful areas of rugby employment is community development. In many towns across England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy, rugby clubs function as civic anchor institutions. They need administrators, coaches, safeguarding leads, fundraisers, inclusion officers, referees, groundskeepers, and volunteers — increasingly supported by part- and full-time staff.

“Someone once said that to work in rugby is to work in a small city: because everything a city needs - safety, organisation, power, communication, atmosphere - a rugby match needs too.”

For readers of Finito World, who often look for roles with impact, the community game is a quiet treasure. These jobs blend sport, education, mentoring, social work, and youth development. Rugby’s values — respect, teamwork, resilience, discipline — lend themselves naturally to programmes for young people, and many rugby foundations work closely with schools, prisons, charities, and youth centres. There are opportunities for teachers integrating rugby into PE; for programme designers structuring after-school clubs; for referees climbing

development ladders; for administrators overseeing competitions; for grounds staff becoming environmental specialists managing sustainable pitches.

If Wilkinson stands for dedication, the community game stands for something equally valuable: continuity.

New Frontier

There was a time when match analysis involved a coach with a clipboard and a VHS tape. Now rugby is a data-driven sport. Every professional squad employs analysts who interpret video systems, drone footage, AI-powered metrics, and GPS trackers. Software companies produce detailed heat maps of where a match was won or lost.

This technological evolution has created work for coders, statisticians, machinelearning specialists, graphic designers, and systems engineers. Broadcasters too rely on these insights, generating demand for on-air analysts, production researchers, archive statisticians, and visualisation designers.

Rugby today is as much about information as collision. The young graduate capable of turning match data into insight is every bit as valuable as a classical rugby thinker.

Global Dimension

The Six Nations is part of a wider international calendar which includes the Rugby Championship, the World Cup, sevens tournaments, and an increasingly global club ecosystem from Japan to South Africa to the United States. That means jobs in international travel logistics, tournament operations, compliance, customs, team-liaison, and multilingual management.

Rugby is no longer confined to its traditional heartlands. The US is

investing heavily. Japan continues to expand. South American rugby has strengthened since Argentina’s World Cup heroics. Even nations with no historical connection to the game are beginning to see its educational and cultural value.

This globalisation mirrors the wider employment trend of international mobility. Working in rugby can mean working anywhere — a fact that should encourage any young person with ambitions beyond their home country.

As we approach the Six Nations once again, the stories of the players on the pitch will dominate the headlines. But behind them lies a vast workforce whose stories rarely make print. And yet the essence of their work — commitment, excellence, craft — mirrors Wilkinson’s journey to that drop goal.

Wilkinson did not succeed because of one magical moment; he succeeded because he did the unglamorous work relentlessly. Rugby as an industry rewards the same quality. The analyst poring over footage at midnight; the

physio easing an injury in the cold; the community coach organising Saturday morning drills; the commercial manager structuring a sponsor’s activation plan — all of them are doing their version of training on Christmas Day.

“Rugby, like life, rewards those who find what they are good at and then go for it — fully, relentlessly, courageously.”

That is what the rugby workplace teaches: that excellence, in sport or any profession, is cumulative. It is built not from heroics but from habit.

And perhaps that is why that 2003 moment still lodges in the British imagination. It is not simply triumph. It is a collective vindication of thousands of hours of work done by hundreds of people — coaches, family, teammates, medics, administrators, teachers — whose efforts converge on

one act executed under pressure. As England prepare for another Six Nations campaign, it is worth remembering that Wilkinson’s kick was not just a sporting moment; it was a career moment. It showed what happens when skill and preparation collide with opportunity.

And so the Six Nations this year will offer us more than matches. It will show us again the power of teamwork, specialisation, craft, and dedication — not just for the players, but for anyone seeking their place in the world of work.

Rugby, like life, rewards those who find what they are good at and then go for it — fully, relentlessly, courageously. And if a drop-goal sails through the posts every now and then, that is merely the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence written by years of unseen effort.

In that sense, rugby remains one of the great teachers. And Wilkinson, running onto the ball in Sydney two decades ago, remains one of its finest lessons.

Six Nations 2026 Launch

COSTEAU WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON IN THE BEEF SECTOR?

It’s not often Donald Trump admits that the world is anything other than very wonderful under his leadership. That is why Costeau hooked an eyebrow when, in an interview before Christmas, the President conceded that “the price of beef is a little high.” What looked like a throw-away line in a larger economic monologue was in fact a signal: the beef sector is wobbling, and when the top of the chain mentions it, the workforce beneath begins to shift in its chair.

Beef isn’t just steak on the plate. It’s a chain of jobs, logistics, feed lots, slaughterhouses, cold-stores, transport, restaurants, and supermarkets. When tariffs, droughts or trade-spats upset one link, the tremor propagates. In today’s environment, beef is facing a perfect storm: tariffs and trade disruption on one side, shrinking cattle herds and rising input costs on the other. Combined, they’re sending margins into retreat and employers into uncertainty.

“What looked like a throw-away line in a larger economic monologue was in fact a signal: the beef sector is wobbling.”

According to recent data, beef prices in the U.S. rose nearly 15 % year-onyear, largely driven by higher tariffs on imports from Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. At the same time,

trade-sources note that when the U.S. imposed a 50% levy on Brazilian beef, Brazilian meat-packers paused new shipments, literally re-routing freight and recalculating which markets to serve. For the person looking for work or rethinking a career in any of the connected sectors, that means we are in transition: not collapse, but change. Start at the source: ranches. The U.S. cattle herd is now at its lowest level since the 1950s. Droughts starved grassland, feed prices soared, and producers pulled back. Ranch-hands working in livestock operations feel that daily. One agricultural economist put it plainly: “The economics and the biology of it are really a tough nut to crack.” Fewer cattle means less volume, means processing plants run tighter shifts, means less stable hiring. If you’re pondering whether to work in feedlot operations or ranching, this matters.

Then move along to the feed and finishing stage. A calf may start in a pasture, but to become steak it needs feeding, veterinary care, transport, admission into a feedlot, then finishing. Feed, machinery, labour costs – all have surged. Tariffs on fertilisers and machinery from overseas add to this squeeze. Comments from trade-economists show that while tariffs on beef imports get headlines, the real hit is sometimes issued silently via rising mechanical costs and constrained inputs.

Once cattle arrive at processing, you hit the meat-packing plants. These are job hubs: line staff, equipment

engineers, logistics planners, maintenance crews, inspectors, packers. However, closures are looming. News reports say one major beef plant employing some 3,200 people in Nebraska will shut, removing one of the largest local employers in its town of 11,000. When a plant like that goes quiet, the ripple extends across transport firms, suppliers, refrigeration services – the entire ecosystem of jobs.

“Beef isn’t just steak on the plate. It’s a chain of jobs, logistics, feed lots, slaughterhouses, coldstores, transport, restaurants, and supermarkets.”

And think of logistics: cold-chain trucks, refrigerated warehousing, rail and port freight – beef travels from plains to plate under strict temperature control. A supply-chain delay doesn’t just add a day – it adds cost, waste, margin pressure. Economics analysis shows that this structure has frictions: regional price convergence in U.S. beef markets remains incomplete, meaning some regions bear the brunt of disruption more than others. For anyone with supply-chain skills – data-analytics, operations management, cold-logistics expertise – this sector is throwing up opportunities.

Finally, the retail and hospitality end. Restaurants are squeezed. A steak importer or restaurant manager now juggles menu cost volatility like never before. One detailed report noted steakhouses on both sides of the Atlantic cutting staff, shrinking portions and raising prices under the weight of beef-cost inflation. So if you are considering a career in foodservice management, sourcing or costcontrol, beef trends matter: because when the prime-cut price leaps, job descriptions shift.

Trade-commentators say the tariffs ripple through the workforce. One U.S. industry group argued against the plan to import more Argentine beef, warning that “the cattle markets only let value flow in one direction” and that the jobs of ranchers and packers depend on stable trade flows. Likewise, international governments have expressed concern: Australia’s Prime Minister described new U.S. tariffs on Australian goods – including beef – as “unjustified … not the act of a friend.” Here’s the punch-line: trade policy looks abstract, but under its hood are real jobs in real towns.

For job-seekers and career changers this means the beef sector is not just about working the farm or the grill. The smart career plays lie at the intersections: export-compliance and customs specialists who understand beef quotas and tariff codes; supplychain pros fluent in cold-logistics and lean-meat traceability; dataanalysts who monitor cattle-tocarcass conversion rates and inflation indicators; food-service buyers and menu planners who can pivot when rib-eye becomes too costly.

The current economic environment shows this in motion. When Trump publicly urged ranchers to lower prices and threatened an influx of Argentine

beef in order to force domestic supply to behave, the industry responded with fury, saying the logic was flawed and that long-term supply won’t pivot overnight. “An expansion of beef imports from Argentina, which accounts for only 2% of U.S. beef imports, will do very little to lower grocery store prices,” said experts. The lesson: in beef, you can’t fix the chain overnight – and careers in the chain must be built for resilience.

“When a plant like that goes quiet, the ripple extends across transport firms, suppliers, refrigeration services – the entire ecosystem of jobs.”

With tariffs removed, some relief is coming. In late 2025 the U.S. announced an executive order removing a 40% tariff on Brazilian beef and coffee. That might ease imported volume, but herds cannot expand overnight, and feed-cost shock doesn’t reverse overnight. One analyst warned that meat-packing capacity reductions alone will keep upward price pressure for some time. So employees entering the sector should expect volatility – but also the chance to shape how it adjusts.

From an employment viewpoint, here are how things might play out: ranchhands may see fewer new hires until herds rebuild; but as herds rebuild they will need skilled operators to manage higher-yield systems, veterinary technicians, grass-management specialists. Feedlots may invest in automation, creating roles in robotics supervision, sensors, data-input.

Packhouses may consolidate, making fewer but more skilled jobs. Logistics firms may invest in resilience – coldchain analytics, dynamic routing – producing demand for operations and analytics roles. Food-service will demand buyers who understand supply-chain risk and chefs who can work with flexibility, sourcing cuts that maintain margin while pleasing diners.

It is, in short, a sector under strain –but a sector full of latent opportunity.

For the work-minded person thinking: “Where next?” beef offers an ecosystem wide enough to pivot into. If you can combine domain knowledge with supply-chain understanding and policy-awareness, you’ll find yourself ahead.

The beef sector may look like an oldschool commodity, but in 2025 it reads more like a technology trend-line: tariffs, supply-chain analytics, labourmodelling, data-flows, restaurantmargin control. And when Donald Trump publicly mentions that beef is a little high, he is — wittingly or not — pointing us to the shifting ground beneath the plate.

For the readers of Finito World, the beef story is not about steak. It’s about jobs. It’s about logistics. It’s about careers forged in the interplay of agriculture, trade-policy and hospitality. The question is not whether the price will fall, but what skills will ride the adjustment. And for those who like to watch where the plates move before the prices adjust: this is one to track.

CLASS DISMISSED DAME ESTHER RANTZEN

FINITO WORLD TALKS TO THE LEGENDARY BROADCASTER ABOUT HOW SHE MADE HER WAY IN TV, AND WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW BEFORE STARTING OUT

HOW DID YOU FIRST GET YOUR START IN BROADCASTING?

I was recruited by the BBC when I was in my last year at Somerville College, Oxford. They used to send staff to Oxford who were looking for studio managers, the ones who make sound effects and are in charge of balancing mircrophones in the radio. I was producing, directing, writing and performing in the Oxford Experimental Theatre Club and at the Edinburgh Festival, so they hired me, but I was a hopeless studio manager.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING AT THE BBC IN THOSE EARLY DAYS?

Women were employed as researchers and handmaidens to the male producers, but not given much responsibility creatively. I was browsed upon by several actors and directors.

HOW DID THE IDEA FOR THAT’S LIFE! COME ABOUT?

The actor and presenter Bernard Braden came to the BBC in 1968, he had invented consumer programmes on television. I became one of his two researchers, the other being John Pitman. When Bernie left to make the same programme for a new television station in Canada, we Braden's Week with a very similar programme That’s Life! on which I was one of the presenters.

DID YOU EVER IMAGINE IT WOULD BECOME SUCH A NATIONAL INSTITUTION?

No. But I believed in the concept, it was great fun and very rewarding.

WHAT WERE SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS FROM THE PROGRAMME?

The talking dog, the revelation that Sir Nicholas Winton had saved a generation of Czech Jewish children from the Holocaust, the investigation of a boy’s boarding school, Crookham Court, which was owned by a paedophile who employed paedophile teachers who were convicted of sexual abuse and sent to prison as a result of the programme. I handed out bat stew to passers-by in the North End Road, Constable A Herbert arrested me for obstruction and I was driven away in a Black Maria to the delight of the barrow boys.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO CREATE CHILDLINE – AND LATER, THE SILVER LINE?

We broadcast an item on That’s Life! about child abuse and opened a telephone helpline for children after the programme, which was jammed with calls from young people who had never been able to ask for help before. That made me realise that the anonymity of the telephone made them feel safe to disclose the abuse they were suffering. The success of Childline gave me the idea for the Silver Line Helpline as a way of reaching out to lonely and isolated older people.

WHO HAVE BEEN THE BIGGEST INFLUENCES OR MENTORS IN YOUR CAREER?

Ned Sherrin, Bernard Braden and my late husband, Desmond Wilcox.

HOW DO YOU THINK TELEVISION HAS CHANGED SINCE YOU BEGAN?

The plethora of programmes and broadcasters alongside social media means there’s much, much more to watch. But, sadly, more does not mean better.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO YOUNG PEOPLE HOPING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE THROUGH THE MEDIA TODAY?

It’s very hard work, it can eat up your whole life, but it’s fun and rewarding, so I wish you the best of luck.

LOOKING BACK, WHAT ARE YOU PROUDEST OF – AND WHAT LESSON WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO PASS ON?

Whenever I hear from someone who tells me that Childline saved their lives when they were children, I feel extremely proud of all the staff and volunteers who have done so much amazing work, for almost 40 years now. And the wonderful lesson that I have learnt is that the more you give, the more you get back.

Dame Esther Rantzen (Alamy)