My search for the finest Indian restaurant in London has ended. It is without a shadow of doubt the subtly spiced and magnificent Malabar Junction in Great Russell Street.  The setting is a high-ceilinged conservatory; the tables are well-spaced apart; the service is prompt with excellent  £10 (US$20) bottles of house wine sold in the name of General Bilimoria, whose enobled son, Karan, runs Cobra Beer; and the food leaves you smoothly satisfied, as only well-prepared South Indian food can. It re-energises you without leaving the slightest trace of being too full.

I don’t often get personal in this blog, but I found myself in a fight this week with members of London’s liberal chattering classes mockingly saying that Americans were narrow-minded, ill-read, and largely stupid. I challenged them to compare the non-fiction best sellers list of the New York Times which is dominated by big books of big ideas and the Sunday Times non-fiction list wihich is dominated by bland celebrity stories that lead to nothing.  The US has Tom Friedman and Barak Obama on their lists. Britain has comedian Russell Brand and big-breasted Katie Price.  When did Britain last produce a politician with a best-selling book of new ideas, and when did the British people last show an inclination to buy one.  

It is important, because the last big political idea to come out of the US was the invasion of Iraq and the democratisation of the Middle East. Because Britain is afraid of big ideas we did not have intellectual muscle to stop it.

On page 150 of Security Breach  Kat Polinski finds she cannot make a phone call in London without giving her ID or passport number. The Sunday Times reports today that the British government plans to extend massively its powers of surveillance by  forcing everyone who buys a mobile phone to register their identity on a national database. There are 72 million mobile phones in Britain.

So many years after writing Absolute Measure, I find this reader review from Farooq Tirmizi in New York.  

On a February evening in northern Africa, Samira and Yasin Omer watch their parents die in the cross-fire of a hostage-rescue. Samira is vivacious and sociable. Yasin is a brilliant student and a thinker. They are twins, left with no family except each other. ABSOLUTE MEASURES, chilling in its predictions, was published two years before Nine Eleven. It tracks the psychological development of a brilliant young Muslim student, Yasin Omer. He sets out to become an international banker. He ends up planning a devastating and suicidal terror attack. Why? This extraordinarily prescient novel was written two years before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The former head of Britian’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, Stella Rimington, describes the response to Nine Eleven as a ‘huge over reaction’.

“It was another terrorist incident,” she says. “I’ve lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life, and this was, as far as I was concerned, another one.” 

Talking to the Guardian, Rimington also says: “National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day. Parties tend to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, ‘We’re more tough on terrorism than you are.’ I think that’s a bad move, quite frankly.” 

Rimington describes her attitudes to civil liberties as liberal. Interestingly, within the intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, I have found this fairly common, with several I’ve met in Homeland Security actively campaigning for Barak Obama. 

I’ve just been filming at an exhibition of war photography at the Barbican in London with photographs from Robert Capa and his lover Gerda Taro from the Spanish civil war, China and the Second World War and from Geert van Kestern who has covered much in Iraq. One of Geert’s pictures is an almost exact replica to one of Capa’s and numerous images of of refugees, soldiers, politicians and the dead are eerily similar despite being taken almost 70 years apart. I asked Geert if iconic images of war had anything in common and he replied that almost all of them had something Biblical about them. 

It’s on at the Barbican until January 25th and my piece on it is on BBC Four and BBC World News Today at 19.00 Friday October 17th.

Early plans to create a giant database holding information about every phone call, email and internet visit made in the UK were last night condemned by the Government’s own terrorism watchdog.  The Independent

This is the near-future world or total surveillance through which Kat Polinski hunts the killers of her sister in SECURITY BREACH.

The Third World War  

This is an excellent novel , work of unusual range of imagination coupled with indepth knowledge in various intricacies of political regions to depict the conflicts between countries, their ideologies and the warfare due to sudden spurt in terrorist activities.  The entire story runs more than 500 pages with suspense and appears near reality and glues you to the chair. t.v.s.ramanuja rao

netsaber

Most nations have turning points in their histories, and I was fascinated that in Romania, the most quoted date I heard was not 1989 when the Ceauşescu dictatorship gave way to democracy, but 1877 when, with the help of Russia, Romania rid itself of Turkish Ottoman rule.  It marked Romania’s place as being firmly European and not Asian.  Estonia, too, has an interesting view on its modern history in that Nazi Germany was seen as a liberator against an oppressive Russia. Estonia’s definition of a war criminal is not of those doing Hitler’s bidding, but Stalin’s.

This just in from W O’Dell on Thirrd World War 

The Third World War is one of the few books that i have read cover to cover without putting it down. In honesty im not much of a reader, and it is rare for me to get through a book without loosing interest. But this was truely different. A great book, totally believable plot line, and unlike a lot of books in this genre, theres no last minute hero, no climb downs, just all out Globalthermonuclear War. Brilliant read.