Simon Ings's Blog

Reading Killing the Dead by John Blair for the Telegraph, 13 November 2025

St Cuthbert lived on the island of Lindisfarne on a diet of raw onions and died (with what sense of relief we can only imagine) in 687 CE. Four centuries later his coffin was opened, and his revealed corpse looked for all the world like a living man. Some duly proclaimed a miracle, but archaeologist and medievalist John Blair can’t help wondering: “Might his lifelike corpse have raised concerns?”

Comprehensively surveying the world’s undead was, Blair says, a project he saved for his retirement. Killing the Dead speaks to a lifetime’s storing up of mischievous treasures; also to Blair’s sheer enjoyment now, that teeters often (and who can blame him?) on unholy glee. What’s not to love about discussions of China’s “lumpen corpses and lustful hyena-women”, or about a book with chapter titles like “Lying Undead in a Ditch: England, 700–1000”?

Dullards will call “cheat”, since the title mentions vampires while the book embraces all varieties of the undead. But be patient: Blair’s global history of the dangerous dead (restless dead, undead, revenant shroud-chewers — call them what you will) is structured to address this very point.

Blair reckons that vampires, commonly conceived, are a literary invention, and comparatively youthful. Our first true vampire novel is a pamphlet from 1600, now lost, featuring the widely florid tale of Johann Kunze of Bennisch.

Everyone knows that vampires are Slavic but, says Blair, “the intensity of a phenomenon at a late date does not prove that it existed from an early one;” also that historical discussions of the phenomenon “have hugely over-emphasized bloodsucking.”

Blair’s history begins around the 8th century BCE with the Neo-Assyrians, whose remarkably laid-back attitudes towards the restless dead found their way to Greece and from there to Rome, where they cross-fertilised with some Asian ideas (“veering between pathos and bawdy comedy”) about predatory female shape-shifters. These folkloric strains twisted and darkened as they head north, giving rise to some magnificent Icelandic monsters.

Scandinavian colonisation cast these “Viking-style revenants” across northern Europe, where they shaped beliefs in northern Germany, Poland, and Bohemia (witness “an intensive corpse-killing epidemic, which erupted during 1546–1553 in a series of small Saxon towns”). This lore then intensified and spread south-eastwards, eventually linking up with more oriental-flavoured Balkan beliefs. So while vampires are younger than we think, there’s no need for disappointment: their ancestry is much richer and more various than we ever could have imagined.

Some huge questions are being begged here, and Blair is assiduous in addressing them all. (Blair’s book’s over 500 pages long, and he wastes not a single one.) First and most important: are the undead a story we tell each other, or a real phenomenon?

For the phenomenon to be real, Granpa doesn’t actually have to leap up from his bier and chase us around the parlour. It would be enough that we shared some cognitive glitch that made us susceptible to belief in the undead. Perhaps we’re all inclined to see signs of life in post-animate matter. And it is true that corpses do not say still, they groan and fart, stiffen and flex and, when they finally decay, do so at rates that are far from normative.

These days we consider death a singular event — ironic, really, given how our medicine repeatedly brings us up against the processes of death. Earlier societies didn’t have quite so much understanding of coma, anoxia, brain death and vegetative states, but they steered much closer to reality (and offered infinitely more comfort to the bereaved) in viewing death as a process, not an event. “The cessation of breath, the laying-out, the liminal stage at the wake, the burial, and the ensuing physical decay are steps along a road that must be followed precisely,” Blair observes of the rites that grow up in these societies — the only wrinkle being, “if that journey is impeded, the implications can be horrifying.”

Except when it wasn’t. After all, the most memorable resurrected body of all belongs to a much-loved and still revered religious visionary who got up and left his tomb after actually dying. Solid enough — an animated corpse if ever there was one — Jesus Christ nevertheless also managed, in true vampiric style, to pass through the stone stoppering his tomb. No wonder some of the first Christians “found the bodily Resurrection problematic”.

Blair is less interested in picking holes in what people saw; he’s more interested in how people interpreted what they saw, and what this says about their ideas of life in general. In Shamanic societies, fluid spirits flow promiscuously in and out of matter: to be animated at all is to be possessed. Christians and Muslims pack the souls of the dead off to various divine resorts, so can only explain reanimation through the mischievous activities of unearthly (presumably devilish) agents.

Generally, though — and with the notable and quite niggling exception of the Resurrection myth — the phenomenon proves too slippery for dogma to easily attach itself: “One event gives rise to multiple folkloric forms,” Blair explains, “which, when reformatted by the observer… take on forms that we may not even recognize as the original event.”

In other words, whatever psychological universals underpin our experiences of the undead, they’re ever so quickly drowed out by all the inventive stories we spin around our experiences. Are the undead psychically real, or are they just an old wives’ tale, endlessly reglossed? The answer, frustrating as this is, is “Yes.”

A more productive question: what summons the undead? They get about a bit, it’s true, but they’re hardly an everyday occurrence. In the book’s single sophomoric moment, Blair says that their appearances are “triggered by attitudes, perceptions, and fears that are not automatic, but spring from social, economic, political, religious, and cultural variables.”

Don’t anyone panic: he’s quick to put flesh on these modish bones. Wars, plagues and religious controversies unsettle us enough that the walls between the living and the dead start to shiver. There’s also the well-documented abuse and tyranny dished out by Slavic matriarchs, right up until the early 20th century, to consider. Deliciously inconvenient, politically speaking, they have also generated the most recent outbreaks. The latest undead-mother-in-law-killing — a proper stake-through-the-heart affair — took place at Vâlcea, Romania, in 2019. Most vampires are a public nuisance, but undead babushkas are worse: they come after their own.

Ultimately (and somewhat incredibly) Blair’s history of the vampire provides inspiration and comfort. Digging up the dead and decapitating them with an iron spade is a gruesome business, for sure, but a sight less disgusting than treating a living human being the same way. Blair argues convincingly that corpse killings are prophylactic against the kind of mass hysterias otherwise burn witches or throw children into ovens. “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards,” is Blair’s insouciant conclusion: corpse-killing is “mainstream”.

Blair leads us through innumerable vales of terror and out again, trembling, yet unharmed, and even enlightened, with the elan of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka (who, now I come to think of it, was another pretend retiree). No apologies — if I don’t deliver this crushingly obvious paean, who will? — Killing the Dead is a book to die for.

Watching Ed Sayers’s Super Nature for New Scientist, 29 October 2025

Ed Sayers, a director of commercials and music videos, has a passion for Super-8, a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak. He’s not alone — the dinky film cassettes depend for their continued production on the hue, cry and advocacy of a small global community of filmmakers.

What marks Sayers out is his organisational ability. His first feature is assembled from super-8 footage dispatched from 25 countries by forty collaborators. Professional filmmakers and local enthusiasts alike have sent Sayers footage of the natural world near where they live.
Reading the premise of this movie, I’ll admit I was buckling in for 82 minutes of sparrows and house cats, but, boy, was I mistaken.

Though the distributor is making much of the film’s “green” credentials (a globe-spanning documentary that racked up precisely zero air miles), worthiness is not much of a sales pitch.
Better, I would have thought, to emphasise how strange everything looks in this hand-held, lo-fi and mostly silent format. (Super-8 with sound, of a sort, arrived in 1973, but Super Nature’s vivid and engaging soundscape is mostly the work of engineers David McAulay and John Cobban.)

In voice-over, Sayers says Super-8 looks as though “someone had painted your memories for you”. The literal truth of his assertion becomes apparent very early on, as you settle into the medium’s glare, flare, shakiness, and shifts of hue and tone. The world captured by super-8 is closer to the world our eyes actually capture. It’s not polished, posed, well-lit or even perfectly focused, but then, neither is the world. It is, however, often devastatingly beautiful, and so is this film. A few of the more ambitious shots — sones featuring the smallest, fastest, most retiring creatures — are hard to read. But an animal isn’t any less of an animal because we only glimpsed it.

The one sequence that didn’t work for me, though it was beautifully shot and edited, was an aerial sequence featuring migrating geese. The whole set-up, involving microlights and two cameras, was altogether too ingenious, too “staged” (and not altogether “green”, if we want to get persnickerty about it).

Better by far to lie in a puddle in the rain with a plastic bag over your head, filming a snail.
Super Nature is a film about the natural world as people actually experience it. Big budget nature filmmaking takes the diametrically opposite approach, revealing the world as the eye cannot possibly see it, either because it’s physically impossible to see, or because it doesn’t even exist. The impulse to reveal strange new worlds is admirable – I maintain that Walking With Dinosaurs is a joy — but I can’t help but wonder why the viewer, drunk on a surfeit of perfectly lit, perfectly framed, perfectly timed visual wonders, wouldn’t become permanently jaded.

Super Nature shakes us up wonderfully well.

Structually, it’s one of those films that’s constructed around the story of its own making. Accompanying every sequence (flamingo, worm, coral, white rhino, weedy sea dragon, kangeroo…) is a voice-over from the filmmaker, explaining what their footage means to them. There are many charming moments: one filmmaker describes the sound a puffin makes as it runs (clownish, as though it were wearing outsize slippers), and tells us, “They have the kindest eyes”. Some testaments are inspiring: there are filmmakers here who took to Super-8 because they needed a new way of looking at the world, once disease or misfortune had shrunk their lives to a point. Some trot out ecological pieties; others need to stick their heads under the cold tap (in the ibex you can, apparently, see the wisdom of the mountains).

Then there’s the story Ed Sayers tells about himself: a director who sets out with a grand ambition to record the natural world in the greenest manner possible, equipping local filmmakers with vintage technology (Act One); who loses all hope as he finds himself editing footage of floods, fires, Ukrainian trenches and piled plastic garbage (Act Two); but who is ultimately cheered up and his film project redeemed (in Act Three) by the antics of a playful seal. It’s as good a narrative frame as any, I suppose, but perfectly predictable, in a way the footage never is.

Reading Nick Higham’s Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One for the Spectator, 25 October 2025

December 1917. For years the Ottoman Turks have been trying to spark a worldwide jihad of the world’s Sunni Muslims, hoping that Muslim subjects of the British empire in India will rise in revolt.

Now that Tsarist power in Russia has collapsed, the roads through central Asia are open, and the war-weary British Empire has virtually no resources left to prevent the Turkish empire from expanding into India.

Edward Noel, An aristocratic Catholic political officer who is supposed to be in Persia, sends a telegram to his betters from Baku, an oil-producing city perched on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. He wants to plug the strategic gap in central Asia by raising a force of local troops. He deems it but an inconvenience that everyone around him is fighting everyone else to the point of pogrom.

Single-handedly reshaping the geopolitics of the Caspian Sea lands Noel into a world of trouble. Captured by Persian rebels, he is falsely accused of organising a massacre of Muslims, is tied to a tree, and faces a firing squad. He won’t confess, and at the last minute, a messenger arrives with a stay of execution.

Now Even Noel, “brave to the point of recklessness,” gets the message, and he slips away in the middle of the night, forcing his way through ten miles of dense, thorny, and waterlogged forest until his legs became a “bleeding pulp”. After 24 hours of continuous marching, he is recaptured, flogged, and kept in heavy chains in a vermin-infested hut. He keeps himself sane by reciting poetry and studying bugs.

Released after five months, he straight away asks to be reposted to Baku.

It would be a crabbed and bitter heart indeed that did not swell to such a tale of British pluck and fortitude. And the stirring stories come thick and fast, as former BBC correspondent Nick Higham narrates the six-week long Battle of Baku — arguably the least remembered battle of the First World War.

Thrilling and sardonic by turns, Mavericks weaves together the stories of half-a-dozen British imperial agents and adventurers as they furiously extemporise a future for the very edges of their overstretched empire. Higham is no pushover. He knows that his heroes are all raconteurs who tended to embellish their stories. He says he has checked their accounts against official archives wherever he can, but cheerfully concedes that “sometimes I strongly suspect they made stuff up”. He highlights inconsistencies and, so far as he can, traces how such different versions of the same story emerge: how field reports turn first into anecdotes and then into family myths. Factfulness can be lost in the process; but the light of hindsight encourages other truths to emerge.

Lionel Dunsterville, whose tiny British force defended Baku against the Turks, knew all about such matters. He was fast friends with Rudyard Kipling at the United Services College, and Kipling’s, “Stalky & Co.” stories were a lightly disguised account of their schoolboy adventures. Dunsterville spends his whole time in Baku, and elsewhere, having to live up to his fictional alter-ego: it hardly needs saying that he does so splendidly.

Ranald MacDonell, an oil executive turned spy and smuggler, and Reginald Teague-Jones, an intelligence officer who spent his life under an assumed name in fear of assassination, round out Higham’s cast. And over the lot of them, Baku casts its sticky shadow. In this opulent wreck of a city, the source of half the world’s oil, minute droplets of oil escape in clouds and slowly settle on everything, and constant well fires pump thick, choking smoke into the air. “The road to hell, I thought, would be very similar to the one we were driving on”, writes one Russian revolutionary correspondent. A more down-to-earth British soldier describes the place as one gigantic and very dirty garage.

Efforts to hold Baku against Ottoman forces culminated in the North Staffordshire Regiment’s last stand on ‘Dirty Volcano’, fighting with incredible bravery while the local Armenian volunteers they were supporting “stuck to their usual role of interested spectators” (as one embittered British general would have it). The picket on the very top of the hill was completely wiped out. ”We were obliged to kill them all,” one Turkish officer recalls.

And once the city falls to the Turks, the British have to evacuate. Lieutenant-Colonel Toby Rawlinson takes command of a steamer laden with high explosives, barricades the bridge with cases of dynamite, and warns his hostile crew that one stray bullet will blow them all to kingdom come…

Higham’s stories of British soldiers demonstrating immense bravery and commitment against overwhelming odds and in appalling conditions amount to an almost Palinesque pile-up of Imperial Virtues Worth Emulating.

“Empires are out of fashion nowadays,” Higham remarks, but, thank goodness, his reasonableness and intelligence prove more than a match for all our current post-colonial posturing. He’s no especial apologist for empire, but he knows that waiting for the end of empires would be like waiting for an end to the weather. And as for those who say there’s no such thing as a good imperialist, well these half-dozen lives suggest they’re wrong.

Watching Brian Cory Dobbs’s Blue Planet Red for New Scientist, 8 October 2025

Blue Planet Red purports to be a feature-length documentary about Mars. Writer-director Brian Cory Dobbs’s red planet is not the one you and I might recognise, but it certainly has some appeal: home to an advanced civilisation of pyramid-builders who either couldn’t save their homeworld from destruction, or who blew it up in an orgiastic nuclear conflict.

Corey presents his arguments for advanced Martian life straight to camera, with many a raised eyebrow and artful stutter and hestitation. I quite liked him. But I was not in the least surprised, after watching his documentary, to discover that his showreel consists mainly of woo (by which I mean, YouTube shorts about mobile phones, electromagnetic fields, and cancer).

By intention or not, Blue Planet Red is an historical document: the last hurrah of a generation of researchers, enthusiasts, oddballs and narcissists who came to maturity under the shadow of a two-kilometre-long mesa in Cydonia. Here, where the southern highlands of Mars meet its northern plains, NASA’s Viking orbiters snapped blurry images of what looked like a gigantic human face: the Face on Mars.

Let’s not spend too much time debunking here what has been debunked, so often and so convincingly, elsewhere. Improve the image resolution, and the Face disappears. Mars’s hexagonal craters are a commonplace of rocky planets, and imply some fluid subsurface (think the patterns porridge makes, boiling in a pan). Lightning bolts cannot leap from planet to planet. The presence of the xenon 129 isotope in the Martian atmosphere will imply ancient nuclear conflict only if you ignore the well-understood process by which a now-extinct isotope, iodine 129, would have decayed to xenon 129 in Mars’s rapidly cooling and ever-more inert and boring lithosphere. Is that a rock? Yes. Even the one that looks like a bone? Yes. Even the one that looks like a tumble-dryer? For the love of God, yes — have you not seen rocks?

Ron Levin, son of Gilbert Levin, the engineer who cooked up Viking’s Labeled Release experiment, wonders why NASA ignored two clear positive results and scotched its early claim that there was microbial life on Mars. Well, NASA didn’t ignore the results. Neither did it ignore the results of Viking’s Gas Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer experiment, which found no evidence of any organic molecules in the Martian soil. Reconciling these results gave us our current understanding of Martian soil chemistry. By that measure, the Labeled Release experiment was a success: why be resentful?

More poignant, though no more convincing, are the idees fixees of Richard Brice Hoover (born 1943) who headed astrobiology research at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center until his retirement in 2011 and did more than most to establish the existence of extremophile life on Earth.

He’s convinced he’s found diatoms and other microfossils in meteorites, and such is his enthusiasm, he never quite gets around to explaining why each of these objects is lying on the top of the rock sample, instead of being embedded in its matrix.

John Brandenburg (born 1953) is a pretty well-regarded plasma scientist, if you can get him off the subject of Martian nuclear war. And what about Mark Carlotto, who’s spent forty years seeing civilisational remains on Mars where everyone else sees rocks? Drag him down to earth, and he’s a capable archaeologist, who really has traced the lines of a forgotten colonial settlement in the middle of Cape Ann – an island community north of Boston.

After the final Apollo moon landing in 1972, the initial excitement of the Space Race began to wane. The images the Viking orbiters sent back promised the next great discovery. Their blurry amalgams of groundbreaking yet ambiguous data were the perfect growth medium for fringe ideas, especially in the United States, where the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal encouraged scepticism and paranoia.

Dobbs’s flashy retread of tall Martian tales thinks it’s about what happened 3.7 billion years ago, that turned a wet, warm planet into a dustbowl. For me, it’s much more about what happened to some squirrely enthusiasts, glued to monitors and magazines in 1972. Let’s lay our scorn aside a moment and look this generation in the eye. Fond hopes will not trip up fine minds in quite this way again.

Reading Paul Mullen’s Running Amok for the Telegraph, 27 September 2025

Paul Mullen has spent years trying to understand the internal world of the lone mass killer: the sort of person who draws their weapon in a school, on a factory floor, or at a supermarket. In this pursuit, says Mullen – a forensic psychiatrist – we should remember, and admit, that everyone has the odd unpleasant impulse from time to time: it’s part of being human. So, he writes, when discussing the most sickening criminals, we mustn’t “endow perfectly normal mental mechanisms with a pathological, sinister significance”.

For example, many of us feel undervalued. Many of us feel in possession of skills and attributes that, in a better world, would surely bring us recognition. Who among us has not looked in the mirror and met a creature consumed by resentment or depression? Life can be crushing, and as Mullen says, “disappointed, egotistical, isolated and rigid men are ten-a-penny.” Pushed to the edge, they’re much more likely to put an end to themselves than go out in a blaze of vicious “glory”. (The male suicide rate in the UK last year was 17.4 deaths per 100,000 people, vastly larger than the rate of male deaths by homicide.)

Mullen is best known for his research into the link between common-or-garden jealousy and the obsessional, sometimes homicidal, behaviour of stalkers. He takes a similar tack in Running Amok, a devastating compendium of mass killings, arranged by locale and severity. Many lone mass killers, we learn, are persistent whiners – “querulants” is Mullen’s term-of-art – which led me to wonder what our burgeoning culture of complaint is doing to stoke their fires. From those who self-righteously pursue their grievances to others who seem to live fantasies of battling persecution, you wonder how thin the cognitive dividing-line can safely grow. And yet: whether or not the world is filling up with narcissistic whiners, most of them don’t turn to slaughter. So what leads a handful to make that change? Or, to put it another way, what actuates them even more than what, in truth, are the perfectly common means (guns, vehicles, knives), and motive (the desire for “a semblance of power and significance”)?

Mullen, who has met a wide range of criminals across his professional career, and was the first non-military defence expert to gain access to the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, points the finger at the availability of an incident the would-be killer can emulate: what Mullen calls a “social script”. In his experience, mass killers are invariably fixated on reports of previous massacres; also on their fictional depiction. Rambo is a fine movie, intelligently written, but there’s a reason the DVD keeps turning up on the shelves of such people.

As societies change, so do the scripts they make available to the despondent, the despairing, the rejected and the humiliated. In the 1970s and early 1980s, homicidal losers used to fixate on a belief; now they’re more likely to kill in the name of a group. The 2016 Orlando killer Omar Mateen claimed allegiance to both Isis and Hizbullah: a neat trick, given how violently these groups are opposed to each other. In this shift from ideology to tribe, Mullen detects the influence of the internet, with its pseudo-communities of extremists desperate to represent some persecuted minority.

The other essential characteristic of these scripts is that they are self-perpetuating. Killers inspire killers. It’s why Mullen won’t mention the killers he’s writing about by name, a tactic that gives the reader the initial impression – quickly dispelled – that the author is only marginally acquainted with his subject matter. On the contrary, Mullen anatomises, with skill and a certain amount of garrulousness, what seems a desperately intractable problem, noting in particular the inflammatory influence of a predominantly on-line incel culture, the depredations of the attention economy, and the addictiveness of certain videogames. The violence or otherwise of these games is not at issue: much more important is their ability to offer the pathologically lonely a semblance of social validation: “Look at me, top of the leader board!” Internet tribalisms of all sorts service the lone killer’s need to belong — and not just to belong, but to crawl to the top of some specious hierarchy. “I’ve got the record, haven’t I?” was practically the first question Martin Bryant asked after shooting and killing 35 people and injuring 23 others in the Tasmanian tourist town of Port Arthur in 1996.

So much for sociology. Mullen would sooner engage with the extreme inner worlds of lone mass killers than explain them away with platitudes. Whatever maddened these people in the first place (and let’s face it, some people are just born miserable), by the time mass homicide seems like a solution to their problems, they are, by any common definition of the term, mad, and should be treated as such.

This is where Mullen turns to discuss, of all people, Queen Victoria. Across her long reign, she was the victim of eight assassination attempts. By the time she died, entirely peacefully, the Metropolitan Police had learned that the most effective strategy for avoiding or mitigating attacks on a permanently public target was, as far as possible, to dampen down publicity. Ever since, would-be regicides have been arrested without fanfare, and often ushered into psychiatric treatment. Thus, within the bounds of law, a security issue has been turned into a public-health one.

Mullen would like to see potential lone mass killers spotted and treated in much the same way. He proposes a Threat Assessment and Response Centre (targeted on random killings) modelled on the Met’s Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, which handles the security of known targets. Faced with a credible threat, the Centre should be given access to the suspect’s police and medical records and their internet history. Why? Because identification is ninety per cent of the battle. Treatment, by comparison, is startingly simple: obsessives on the path to atrocity are, in Mullen’s experience, remarkably cooperative and frank with those who’ve managed to stop them.

At the time of writing, there have been just over 300 mass shootings in America so far, and while gun-control laws may have preserved Britain and other Western countries from that specific plague, a spate of vehicle ramming attacks in Nice, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Stockholm and other European cities have left us, and our security services, in a state of hypervigilance.

So can we do anything? Mullen wants us to overcome our reticence and take seriously the threats made by miserable obsessives. False alarms will be raised, but psychologists aren’t witch-finders, Mullen assures us — in fact much of his time is spent avoiding the false attribution of madness in the people he meets.

I fear public awareness won’t do much good, however. Now that civic society has declared war on nuance and arrests people (or, Graham Linehan, anyway) for jokes, how can any of us be expected to hear the signal over the noise?

Reading The Secret History of Gold by Dominic Frisby for the Telegraph, 22 August 2025

used to sift this soft, off-colour metal out of the beds of streams. Then, once the streams ran out of the stuff, we dug it out of the ground. These days, lest the smallest grain elude us, we gather the stuff by leaching gold out of the ore and into a solution of cyanide. Then we precipitate it back into a solid, melt it down and, says American investor Warren Buffet rather wryly, “dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

Well, not quite. Gold is useful. It’s a gift to artists: soft enough to work without fire (which is why it was the first metal we ever harnessed), and chemically so stable that it never tarnishes. No matter what we make of the stuff, though, sooner or later, as renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini and countless anonymous Inca artists will attest, someone else may come along and melt it down. “Gold may last,” says Dominic Frisby – a curious chap, part financial journalist, part stand-up comedian – “but art made from gold rarely does.”

This is Frisby’s real subject in his affable, opinionated new book, The Secret History of Gold: gold is fungible. An ounce of gold is equal in value to every other ounce of gold. Since it doesn’t corrode, rust, or tarnish, and since it resists most common acids. we can melted and recast and melt it again, and still end up with an ounce of gold. This makes the element about as honest a medium of exchange as the physical world has to offer – a point that besotted the Spanish conquistadors who melted down enough South American artwork into bullion to destroy their own empire’s balance of payments, and has been lost on few serious politicians since. “We have gold,” said Herbert Hoover in 1933, “because we cannot trust governments.”

Frisby himself is no fan of the State. His 2013 book Life After the State was subtitled “Why We Don’t Need Government”. His 2019 book about tax was called Daylight Robbery. Frisby’s is a sentimental conservatism, weaponised on stage in ditties such as the Brexit victory song “Seventeen Million F—-Offs” (a treasurable joy, whatever your politics), and reasoned out in books that offer up cogent entertainment, even if they don’t always convince.

The Secret History of Gold is another addition to that trend. As a history, his tales – whether topical, historical or mythological – are well-turned, comprehensive and occasionally surprising. King Midas’s “touch”, we learn, was a just-so story cooked up to explain the unreal amounts of gold discovered in the bed of the river Pactolus. Alexander the Great created the world’s first standardised currency by adopting consistent weights for gold and silver coins across his territories. A latter-day alchemist called Heinz Kurschildgen was prosecuted for fraud in 1922, after convincing several investors that he could turn base metal into gold; later, he convinced Heinrich Himmler that he could make petrol out of water too.
Intellectual property is now so frictionless that the business of “gathering tales” is something any fool can do by pressing a key. Frisby is perfectly entitled to rehash many of the tales from Timothy Green’s 2007 The Ages of Gold, since he recognises that debt in his end-notes. This isn’t inherently a problem – how else but by reading do books get made? – but the internet has made us all potentially that erudite. What matters, then, with books such as Frisby’s, is less how much you know than how much fun you have with what you’ve assimilated. Thankfully, Frisby entertains here, impressively and convincingly so. It’s just that it seems a bit silly for Frisby and his publishers to call a book such as this a “secret history”, when it’s simply combining accessible materials into a compelling new weave.
Each story in that weave, at least, does inform Frisby’s argument and obsession – that the world (or, failing the that, Britain) might return to a gold standard. This is the business of tying a country’s currency to a fixed quantity of gold, so that its paper money can in theory be exchanged for the metal. Pegging currencies to the value of gold certainly makes life simple, or at least, it seems to, if you don’t pay too much attention to the prospecting and the mining, the pillaging, the counterfeiting and the fraud. Frisby wouldn’t dream of skirting such a rich source of entertainment, and his tales of German and Japanese gold-hunting during the Second World War are eye-popping. In Merkers salt mine, U.S. troops discovered a Nazi stash including over 100 tons of gold bullion, but General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s treasure horde, meant for Japan’s post-war rebuilding, remains untraced and untracerable.
It’s true that the gold standard stops governments from recklessly printing money and inflating the economy. And this, Frisby argues, is exactly what has happened, pretty much everywhere, again and again. Crippled by the costs of the first world war and the Great Depression, Britain was first to abandon the gold standard in 1931. But 1971 was when the rot really set in. Saddled with rising inflation, increasing trade deficits and the cost of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s US abandoned the standard and took the rest of the world with it down the path of perdition; government after government has since then repeatedly devalued their currency on the world’s markets. Why else would houses cost 70 times more now than when I was born in 1965?
Frisby’s proposed cure is for the world to adopt cryptocurrency. Despite not being a material entity, like gold, a bitcoin is pure money – a bearer asset. When I hand you a bitcoin, its value is, as Frisby explains, immediately transferred from me to you. What’s not to like about digital gold? Well, for starters, manufacturing these magic numbers – mining these bitcoins – requires a lot of IT infrastructure and no small amount of energy, so it puts production in the hands of just a few powerful nations, rather as the gold standard put production in the hands of just a few gold-rich territories.
Frisby’s arguments for pegging currencies to a digital standard might also carry more weight if he were a little more realistic with himself, and with us, about why we left the gold one. By abandoning gold for a currency backed by empty promises – a fiat currency system – governments no longer have to manage the amount of gold they have. This means they can concentrate on stabilising prices, by controlling interest rates. They might not do a brilliant job of it, but it’s what made the difference between how we experienced the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the much bigger but infinitely less ruinous crash of 2008.
Until cryptocurrency has caught up, Frisby is inclined to pin all our current economic woes on Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. As an economic thesis, that’s not even wrong, just hopelessly insufficient. It fails to acknowledge the benefits of free trade that the fiat system has enabled, despite its difficulties, and leaves us wondering just how it is that since 1971, extreme poverty and infant mortality have dropped by more than two-thirds worldwide, while the number of children in primary school has grown from 2.3 million to over 700 million.
But Frisby is an entertainer, and the more he entertains, the more he’s likely to convince. He didn’t really need to lumber his book with the whole “secret history” shtick, and his yarns, ripping though they are, sometimes just get in the way. At its best, this book sets Frisby up as a colourful and sly adversary to contemporary financial and political pieties and sometimes – I would humbly suggest – to common sense. But even at his most eccentric, in his enthusiasm and wit, he’s a worthy adversary. I’m not sure, despite this book’s flaws, that one could really ask for more.

Reading Sheepdogs by Elliot Ackerman for The Telegraph, 18 August 2025

Hey! It looks like you are trying to shoot someone at point-blank range with a small 9mm pistol. Would you like help?

If you are going to kill someone with a 9mm pistol, it is very important that you stare at the ground as you make your approach. Next, raise your head until you are focused on your target’s centre mass. Think heart and organs. Avoid their eyes and — no, don’t draw, this isn’t High Noon — have the gun in your hand in your pocket, and shoot through the fabric of your suit. Now go and rehearse, and remember: practice makes perfect!

Elliot Ackerman knows something about skill acquisition, task analysis and work breakdown structure. He also knows about the mechanics of a SIG Sauer P938 micro-compact single-action concealed carry. In a crisis, though, hardware will play second-fiddle to the hours of practice. Sheepdogs is a bright and breezy thriller about prepared paramilitary types who know what they’re doing.

Ackerman’s background is such, even a confection like Sheepdogs begs to be read autobiographically. He served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He was also, for a little while, attached to the Ground Branch of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and he has a whole lot of fun with that institution here, as “Uncle Tony”, a Division spook obsessed with Hyatt reward points, scrabbles about the globe looking for ways to pay the wages of off-the-books armies everywhere from Iraq to Somalia, Yemen to Ukraine.

Uncle Tony looks to have inspired the mess in which our heroes are here embroiled. Cheese (as in “the big cheese”, the most versatile pilot Afghanistan’s military ever produced, now working in a filling station) and former Marine Raider Skwerl (think “squirrel” — Marines can’t spell for shit — financially and reputationally ruined for whistleblowing on an intelligence FUBAR) are being paid to steal — sorry, repossess — that most reliable of thriller macguffins, a private jet.

But the handover in Marseille goes badly wrong, the jet’s owners seem to be stealing it from themselves, and Skwerl and Cheese soon find themselves out of the loop, out of pocket and decidedly out of luck, pursued back and forth across the Atlantic by a remarkably well-connected former Afghan security guard who’s out to avenge, well, something…

Ackerman has a lot of fun with that private plane, a Bombardier Challenger 600 that loses an aileron (a control flap) in a collision with a golf cart, and not long after has its leather and mahogany interior torn out by a famished grizzly bear. The business of hiding the fixing the plane brings in a couple of well-drawn side characters, the survivalist Just Shane and Ephraim, an excommunicated Amish handyman who whittles a replacement aileron out of wood (not as daft as it sounds). Cheese’s better half Fareeda (four months pregnant) and Skwerl’s much more frightening half Sinaed (a professional dominatrix) round out a cast just kooky and diverse enough — and small enough — to tick every box at Apple TV, who’ve paid seven figures to develop Sheepdogs as a series.

Announcements of the novel’s bright televisual future make it slightly tricky to review, since what makes perfect sense for the IP doesn’t necessarily play well on the page. Ackerman is determined not to create any monsters here; he’s much more interested in telling — in the gentlest manner imaginable — broader truths about modern warfare, its commercial imperatives and human toll.

After dozing through tosh like Citadel and The Night Agent, we’ll surely lap up a TV thriller created by someone who knows guns, and better still, understands the men who wield them. That said, I can’t but deplore a literary thriller that leaves all my favourite characters standing, and not just standing, chatting, and not just chatting, understanding each other.

Well, you don’t make an omelette without cracking eggs, I suppose. I can remember when, in 1987, a fine literary writer called James Lee Burke wrote a detective novel about Dave Robicheaux. I adored Burke’s early books, but nearly forty years and over two dozen outings later, I’m hardly going to sit here and say that palling up with Dave was a backward move, now, am I?

Besides, Ackerman’s literary career has been sliding about all over the place, from brilliant memoirs of combat in Afghanistan (and don’t get him started about that catastrophic US withdrawal in August 2021) to best-selling geopolitical thrillers with James Stavridis, a retired US admiral, to clotted oddities like 2023’s Halcyon, a family drama set in an alternate Gore-led America that has cured death. The thriller genre has its limitations, but one of the very best things it can do is give writers a point of focus, who would otherwise go off like a box of firecrackers.

The trouble with Sheepdogs — a thriller that lacks excitement, a comedy without much in the way of humour, and a story about the wages of war that eludes depth — is that it shows its writer still shuffling up to the starting line and sucking on the water bottle. I know I shouldn’t second-guess Ackerman’s intentions. But I hope there will be sequels, and that Sheepdogs becomes a long project for him. Keeping up with the small screen will do him good. Remember: practice makes perfect!

Watching David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds for New Scientist, 6 August 2025

Myrna (Jennifer Dale) has likely had better blind dates. The edible flowers on her starter look funereal; her table-for-two is hemmed in by strange shrouds in tall vitrines; and as she makes small-talk with the owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel), it becomes increasingly apparent to her, and to us, that this restaurant is attached — financially, architecturally and intellectually — to a cemetery.

And not just any cemetery: its headstones have viewscreens. Because they’re swaddled in those natty (camera-riddled, internet-enabled) shrouds, you can come here to watch your dead loved ones decompose.

Over a career spanning more than half a century, David Cronenberg has mastered the art of delivering everything at the wrong speed. On paper, and in precis, his films look like satires. Their playfulness is self-evident. Just look at the characters’ surnames: Karsh’s is “Relikh”. Myrna’s is “Shovlin”, for heaven’s sake. And — again on paper — what’s to take seriously about this scenario, which takes pot-shots at internet-of-everything boosterists (who would surely network the dead if they could) and “grief tech” start-ups that, among other money-making wheezes, invite you to chat with posthumously fed, AI-enabled avatars of your deceased loved ones?

But Cronenberg does not write satires. He writes full-throated screenplays (and one novel) about what you and I might actually experience, were these oh-so-satirical scenarios to come to pass, stretching our sense of ourselves.

Karsh’s date with Myrna goes nowhere, but the tech entrepreneur does find solace — and more than solace — in Terry, his dead wife’s identical twin. Diane Kruger plays both the living sister and the dead one, and also voices Hunny, an untrustworthy digital assistant programmed by Terry’s loser ex-husband Maury (a wonderfully weasily Guy Pearce). At night the dead sister Becca turns up, without a breast, without an arm, as the ravages of her disease take hold. Are these nighttime visitations flashbacks, or fantasies? Do they humanise Karsh, because he loves his wife, however disfigured, or do they damn him, because he very clearly loves his wife’s disfigurement? Karsh is caught between guilt, anger and desire, convinced Becca was unfaithful with her old professor and first lover, and at the same time that the professor was conducting illegal experiments on her; and at the same time that all of this is a smokescreen concealing some deeper, more political conspiracy involving China, or maybe Russia, or maybe Budapest, or maybe Iceland (and all the while Terry, who loves a good conspiracy, can’t help but encourage Karsh’s mounting mania).

David Cronenberg’s wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017 after a long battle with cancer, and it’s tempting to watch The Shrouds as an act of cinematic over-sharing. All five of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — are explored in Cassel’s superb performance, weaponised by fantastical technology, or by paranoid technological fantasy, into a welter of unresolved plot macguffins. What if the strange growths on Becca’s dead bones are surveillance devices? What if the Chinese government is using our own corpses to spy on us? What if those growths are just cunningly camouflaged video assets; did Maury code them?

Imagine a restaurant full of exit signs and no exits and the maitre d’ shouting “Fire! Fire!” in your ear.

While The Shrouds may well be an expression of purely personal grief, 26 films in it’s equally clear that grief is Cronenberg’s abiding theme, and the engine that’s been driving his entire artistic output. In his movies, we make what accommodations we can with reality, but by the last reel it’s clear reality just isn’t listening.

The Shrouds is a wordy film, whose characters calmly explain ever more unlikely technologies to each other, convince each other of ever more complex conspiracy theories, and assert themselves in ever more outlandish ways. Nothing happens because, you know, DEATH. Calm, slow, relentless, The Shrouds is one of those devastating chamber pieces great directors make sometimes when they have nothing left to prove, and everything still to say.

Watching Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later for New Scientist, 18 June 2025

Here’s a bit of screenplay advice to nail above the desk: make your plots simple and your characters complicated.

We can polish off the story of 28 Years Later in a couple of paragraphs. It’s the late-coming third instalment in a series that began in 2002, with 28 Days Later. A lab-grown neurotoxic virus has spread uncontrollable, orgiastic rage across continental Europe. The infection is eventually quarantined to mainland Britain. International fleets ensure that no-one leaves Blighty.

Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, a relative newcomer and definitely a face to follow) lives in the relative safety of a small northern island, connected to the mainland by a causeway passable only at low tide. At twelve years old (rather young for the task, but his dad reckons he’s ready) Spike leaves for the mainland to be blooded. Amid trackless forests (perhaps not quite trackless enough after 28 years; otherwise the film’s mis-en-scene is superb and chilling) Spike kills a very slow zombie, misses a blisteringly fast one, and generally gives a good account of himself.

But it sits ill with Spike, once he’s home, to be cheered as a hero by all these drunken villagers, even as his mother lies bedridden with a mysterious illness, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) seeks distraction with another woman. So Spike sneaks his mum (Jodie Comer) off the island and sets out with her in search of the only doctor he’s ever heard of — a painted lunatic who spends his days in the woods burning corpses.

The twist—and let’s face it, you’re agog for the twist—is that there is no twist. Having established the rules of this world in 2002’s 28 Days Later, writer Alex Garland has simply and wonderfully stuck to his guns. There are flourishes: a vanishingly small number of zombies have survived the initial viral outbreak to breed and become an almost-viable competitor species. Some of them now grow very big indeed, thanks to the “steroid-like” effects of the original infection. But these aren’t new attractions so much as patches and fixes, and they’re delivered very much in the make-and-mend-and-keep-going spirit that hangs over Spike’s doughty little island village.

Nothing is quite as it seems — when is it ever? — and every once in a while, Boyle mischievously intercuts Laurence Olivier’s Henry V with Great War newsreel and 28 Weeks Later zombie outbreak footage to imply a deeper, darker significance to the village’s homespun defence league and its culling expeditions. There are nods to folk horror, to Apocalypse Now, to Aliens 3 and to Predator. But this is not a tricksy movie, and its intent is clear: in this world so long steeped in horror, there’s going to be this human story, about loss and disillusion, about growing up and growing apart, about when to stand with others, and when to stand alone, and all conveyed through the credible words and reasonable actions of largely unexceptional human beings. The budget is modest (somewhere between $60 and 75 million). The casting is meticulous (see how Christopher Fulford plays Spike’s grandfather with an effortless friendliness that all the while implies some harrowing backstory). And don’t get me wrong: 28 Years Later is full of invention, laden with fan-pleasing call-backs and cineastic cap-tugging. But never once does it cheat. There’s not a single fatuous macguffin pulling us through. No dumb quest. No magical grail. No grand unmasking. Only the feeling spilling from Alfie Williams’s eyes as young Spike learns, line by line and scene by scene, what he must acquire, and what he must let go, if he’s to be a man in this world.

All credit to Days, whose fast and furious “infected” shocked and delighted us all in 2002; all credit, too, to 2007’s oddly overlooked Weeks, an ingenious sequel and quite as good an expansion on its original as Aliens was to Alien. But Years carries the crown, at least for now (there’s a second instalment coming).

Watching Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later for New Scientist, 18 June 2025

Here’s a bit of screenplay advice to nail above the desk: make your plots simple and your characters complicated.

We can polish off the story of 28 Years Later in a couple of paragraphs. It’s the late-coming third instalment in a series that began in 2002, with 28 Days Later. A lab-grown neurotoxic virus has spread uncontrollable, orgiastic rage across continental Europe. The infection is eventually quarantined to mainland Britain. International fleets ensure that no-one leaves Blighty.

Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams, a relative newcomer and definitely a face to follow) lives in the relative safety of a small northern island, connected to the mainland by a causeway passable only at low tide. At twelve years old (rather young for the task, but his dad reckons he’s ready) Spike leaves for the mainland to be blooded. Amid trackless forests (perhaps not quite trackless enough after 28 years; otherwise the film’s mis-en-scene is superb and chilling) Spike kills a very slow zombie, misses a blisteringly fast one, and generally gives a good account of himself.

But it sits ill with Spike, once he’s home, to be cheered as a hero by all these drunken villagers, even as his mother lies bedridden with a mysterious illness, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) seeks distraction with another woman. So Spike sneaks his mum (Jodie Comer) off the island and sets out with her in search of the only doctor he’s ever heard of — a painted lunatic who spends his days in the woods burning corpses.

The twist—and let’s face it, you’re agog for the twist—is that there is no twist. Having established the rules of this world in 2002’s 28 Days Later, writer Alex Garland has simply and wonderfully stuck to his guns. There are flourishes: a vanishingly small number of zombies have survived the initial viral outbreak to breed and become an almost-viable competitor species. Some of them now grow very big indeed, thanks to the “steroid-like” effects of the original infection. But these aren’t new attractions so much as patches and fixes, and they’re delivered very much in the make-and-mend-and-keep-going spirit that hangs over Spike’s doughty little island village.

Nothing is quite as it seems — when is it ever? — and every once in a while, Boyle mischievously intercuts Laurence Olivier’s Henry V with Great War newsreel and 28 Weeks Later zombie outbreak footage to imply a deeper, darker significance to the village’s homespun defence league and its culling expeditions. There are nods to folk horror, to Apocalypse Now, to Aliens 3 and to Predator. But this is not a tricksy movie, and its intent is clear: in this world so long steeped in horror, there’s going to be this human story, about loss and disillusion, about growing up and growing apart, about when to stand with others, and when to stand alone, and all conveyed through the credible words and reasonable actions of largely unexceptional human beings. The budget is modest (somewhere between $60 and 75 million). The casting is meticulous (see how Christopher Fulford plays Spike’s grandfather with an effortless friendliness that all the while implies some harrowing backstory). And don’t get me wrong: 28 Years Later is full of invention, laden with fan-pleasing call-backs and cineastic cap-tugging. But never once does it cheat. There’s not a single fatuous macguffin pulling us through. No dumb quest. No magical grail. No grand unmasking. Only the feeling spilling from Alfie Williams’s eyes as young Spike learns, line by line and scene by scene, what he must acquire, and what he must let go, if he’s to be a man in this world.

All credit to Days, whose fast and furious “infected” shocked and delighted us all in 2002; all credit, too, to 2007’s oddly overlooked Weeks, an ingenious sequel and quite as good an expansion on its original as Aliens was to Alien. But Years carries the crown, at least for now (there’s a second instalment coming).