In the decade or so since I won Mastermind, not one soul entering the quiz has ever asked me for a word of advice on how to do well on it … even feckers I know.
And I have opinions! They may not be plentiful but, in case of use for anyone, here they are.
Do your favorite subject first, because you may never get another chance.
Study your specialist subject like your whole future depends on it. Because in Mastermind terms it does. It is the only subject area where you know the sort of questions that might come up, so you have to endeavor to max this round out.
Questions usually have one or two word answers so try to spot likely candidates as you revise.
If you don’t know the answer immediately, give yourself a moment to think. In my first round I passed on about 4 questions in the general knowledge which I recalled the answer to immediately on saying the word “pass”. I had thought it was better tactics to pass and move on rather than dawdle trying to recall an answer. It’s not. Fortunately I had done enough work on the specialist subject round to carry me through.
Before sitting in the black chair I would have said that winning depended on hard work and luck, and that, in accordance with most things, about any one of 20% of the entrants could win the whole thing. I still think that is more or less right. But as Gary Player, I think, said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
Winning also depends on staying calm when the chips are down. It takes as much energy to panic as it does to think, so try to think.
And so, as with life, the rules are simple: work hard, hope for some luck, and try to hold your nerve at the moment of truth.
Here endeth the lesson.
PS, from the legend that is Mr Dave McBryan:
4a Even if you know you aren’t going to know the answer to something, a speedy wrong answer is usually a better tactic than a pass.
And one more to add: Listen. Focus for the entire question. It’s all too easy to zone out at the beginning because you’re still thinking about the previous q, or to to miss something crucial late on because you stopped paying attention once you thought you had the answer. Any thoughts about other qs or how well/badly you’re doing are distractions to be avoided – in the moment, nothing matters except the current q.
I caused some surprise recently when, speaking to a group of anti-trafficking professionals, I mentioned that female genital mutilation can be a form of human trafficking. I was somewhat surprised at the surprise so I thought it might be useful to set out the basis for my statement.
But, put most simply, human trafficking may be thought of as the process of rendering a person into a situation of exploitation, that is, at minimum, “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”
The list of exploitative purposes in these instruments should not be read as exhaustive. The language is expressly framed as a minimum. The question, therefore, is not simply whether female genital mutilation is named in the conventions. It is whether, in particular factual circumstances, the acts and means required by the trafficking definition are present, and whether the purpose is one of exploitation. My argument is that, in many cases, FGM does meet that test.
Many forms of female genital mutilation involve the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans – the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is itself a larger organ extending internally. So, when a child has been recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for that purpose, then the Convention elements of child trafficking may be satisfied.
Where those same trafficking acts are carried out in relation to adult women, and where FGM is imposed by trafficking “means” such as force, coercion, deception, abuse of power, abuse of vulnerability, or payments to a person exercising control over them, then the Convention elements of trafficking may also be satisfied.
The absence of FGM from the usual examples of trafficking should not be mistaken for its incompatibility with the legal concepts of trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. And the trafficking argument is only part of the issue. FGM should also be understood as a slavery-like practice of coercive sexual control.
The 1926 Slavery Convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
The World Health Organization notes that “FGM is often considered a necessary part of raising a girl, and a way to prepare her for adulthood and marriage. This can include controlling her sexuality to promote premarital virginity and marital fidelity.”
Where individuals or groups within a community claim the power to impose permanent control over such a fundamental aspect of a girl’s or woman’s humanity as her sexuality, they are, in effect, exercising powers attaching to the right of ownership. Put bluntly, this is the sort of power human beings more commonly claim over livestock: the power to alter bodies, control sexuality and regulate reproductive capacity in the interests of those claiming ownership-like powers over another body.
Hence female genital mutilation is not simply a harmful traditional practice or an assault on bodily integrity. It is a coercive process by which adults exercise permanent control over a girl’s sexuality, marriageability and social status. At minimum, the omission of FGM from the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery – produced by the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration, and focused on forced labour and forced marriage – exposes a serious gap in how ownership-like control over women and girls is counted.
Summary: Recovering a forgotten Jewish history, vital for our times
At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism emerged both as a response to European antisemitism and, in a fundamental way, as an acceptance of one of antisemitism’s central claims: that Jews could never truly belong in Europe. Its answer was a Jewish “homeland,” ultimately to be established in Palestine, with catastrophic consequences for the people already living there. After the briefly entertained East Africa scheme, the Balfour Declaration gave imperial force to this idea, helping to condemn Palestinians to dispossession in the name of Jewish refuge.
Among the earliest and most strenuous opponents of this idea were European Jews themselves. For example, Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s British government, while perhaps not an opponent of colonialism per se, was a fierce opponent of Zionism, viewing it as an antisemitic concept that would jeopardize the status of Jews in Britain.
In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple focuses on a different group of Jewish anti-Zionists: the Bund – the name translates from German or Yiddish as “union” – a Jewish social democratic movement that grew in Eastern Europe, particularly in the old Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The Bund, as Crabapple shows, was fiercely opposed to colonialism and rejected Zionism’s plain implication that Jews should answer European exclusion by displacing others. Instead they insisted that their culture, including the Yiddish language and literature, should be nourished and respected in the countries in which they lived. For decades they organized to achieve this.
There is an echo of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World in Crabapple’s gripping work. Both books show how a people often treated as peripheral profoundly shaped wider political history.. In the case of the Bund, Crabapple traces their influence from the Russian Revolution, where they allied with the Mensheviks, to resistance against the Nazis alongside the Polish Socialist Party, and finally to the radical Jewish politics of New York City that formed part of the coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty..
Like Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, it is also a book that made me rethink large portions of history that I had previously thought myself relatively familiar with. For example, no other history of Eastern Europe that I have read – even Timothy Snyder’s superb Bloodlands – has quite so forensically itemized the scale of antisemitic atrocity that plagued Eastern Europe from the end of the First World War to the destruction of Warsaw.
But, in describing all of this, Crabapple’s purpose is not special pleading to show antisemitic atrocity as something unique. Rather she strives to show, as Seamus Heaney reflected, that all “Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.” And so, Zionism was born as a result of European violence and, as the Jews suffered in Europe, so the Palestinians now continue to suffer at the hands of the state and settlement project that Zionism produced. Palestinian armed groups have also committed atrocities, sometimes with comparable levels of cruelty, though without comparable power. This will inevitably continue until the cycle of violence can be broken.
The Bund sought to break this cycle through solidarity. That they lost, in the face of the monstrousness of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany does not negate their message. As Crabapple writes, “solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us. There is no other earth after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to us all as an inheritance and prison.” The alternative is the morality of the bully with the strong doing what they wish, while the weak endure what they must.
Molly Crabapple’s book is an outstanding work of narrative history, elegantly written, compelling and deeply moving – it made me cry more than once. It is a fierce assertion that another world is possible in which we all try to take care of each other instead of honouring the worst instincts of the cruel and the greedy.
Summary: “… in this great future we can’t forget our past, so dry your tears I say…”
Perhaps not quite as arresting as his Shortest History of Germany, but James Hawes Shortest History of Ireland is an exquisite thing.
Rather than allow himself to lose narrative momentum, Hawes does, perhaps, skip over a few historical controversies – notably the impact of the Invincibles’ atrocity on the Kilmainham “Treaty”, and Collins role in the assassination of Henry Wilson. But the overall coherence of that narrative, his rigorous attention to evidence, the entertainment of his storytelling and the elegance of the prose are exceptional.
It is refreshing to see proper attention given to the role of Hume in the peace process. This has become something of a rarity in recent accounts which tend to emphasise the parallel squalid spooky shenanigans that some English writers (yes I do mean Peter Taylor!) like to dubiously assert were central.
This is immediately the best concise history of Ireland available anywhere. So, it is nice that it concludes on a hopeful note albeit one that must be underpinned by caution: Irish reunification is now inevitable.
To grasp the full potential of this demands careful planning, perhaps aiming for a new federal constitution based on the four provinces. The current Dublin-centric model of government hordes power in the very way the English did during their colonial exploitation of the island to the continuing detriment of those living “beyond the Pale.”
So, if this book has a moral it’s that if today’s Irish politicians don’t rapidly reconvene the New Ireland Forum to gather evidence and plan for the future, then they will deserve every iota of historical ignominy that will inevitably be heaped upon them.
On turning 60, I thought I should take stock to ponder if have spent my years usefully.
So what have I actually achieved?
Tick tock
I started my professional career working for a couple of years organising hand dug wells for water, and check dams for soil conservation, in rural Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Then I designed a piped water system for a quarter of a million war-displaced people outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
After pushing papers in Oxford for a year or so I led a water, sanitation and public health programme for a quarter of a million war-displaced people in the besieged cities of the Angolan interior for the best part of five years.
During that time I caught a sailfish off the coast of Angola. Tagged and released it.
After Angola I learned to dive.
Then I earned a PhD.
I was appointed director of Anti-Slavery in 2006 and immediately had to organise its financial turnaround.
I successfully advocated for making slavery eradication a post-2015 development goal.
I found a woman who’d put up with me.
I contributed to the introduction of a new statute in British law proscribing forced labour.
I ran a marathon, very slowly.
I helped expose slavery in the manufacture of garments for Western high street brands.
I won Mastermind with the specialist subjects Michael Collins, the novels of Dennis Lehane, and Abraham Lincoln.
I helped develop the jurisprudence around “abuse of a position of vulnerability” as a means of trafficking in the case of Chowdury et al v Greece at the European Court of Human Rights.
I helped obtain inclusion of victim protection and supply chain transparency measures in the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015).
I achieved recognition of forced marriage as slavery in the International Labour Organization’s 2017 estimates of global slavery.
I published my 1st novel – The Undiscovered Country about the investigation of a murder during the Irish war of independence.
I learned how to take a better photograph.
I played a key role in mainstreaming anti-slavery in a major UN migration and livelihoods programme in Myanmar.
I published Ethical Leadership: moral decision-making under pressure
I published my 2nd novel – Some Service to the State about the damage caused by partition on modern Ireland.
I worked out how to end slavery. Wrote it down in a book chapter called “Justice against Power: Marshalling a credible response to slavery eradication.”
I’ve been an expert witness in over 200 trafficking cases.
I began writing a play on the life of Frederick Douglass.
I’ve started writing my fourth book on the Irish peace process… which has given me the idea for another play.
I think, on reflection, I have not led a life of quiet desperation. But that doesn’t mean it’s been without crushing disappointments.
Ambrose Bierce defined politics in his Devil’s Dictionary as “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”.
As Trump, Netanyahu and Putin continue to use this as their platonic ideal, here are a few more commonly used terms to better understand this brand of politics in the 21st Century.
Absence – The hardest thing to hide.
Accountability — A principle once thought central to democracy, now regarded as the bad manners of social inferiors.
Apocalypse — For losers, the end of the world; for tech-bros and ‘merican Evangelicals, the realisation of all their hopes.
Austerity — A political philosophy that insists that the poor must pay for the yachts on which the rich snort their cocaine from the bum cracks of supermodels … which the poor must also pay for.
Betrayal — The dispatch of Caesar by his own signature methods.
Caste — Real discrimination based on imaginary distinctions.
Children — Small humans, cynically manufactured by the enemy in an attempt to taint wholly justifiable collateral damage.
Mikaeil Mirdoraghi on his way to be killed
Climate change — A process that doesn’t exist by which plutocrats manufacture migrants.
Coincidence — Why money, power and the privilege to indulge in any vice remain in the same families for generations.
Collateral damage — The price paid by others so that Caesar can be Caesar.
Colonialism — A system that profoundly shaped the history and geography of the modern world but whose continuing influence is, apparently, not worth talking about.
Complex situation — The choice between doing the right thing and upsetting a rich sex trafficker.
Conscience — Why you can’t keep your fucking gob shut.
Consolation — The knowledge that nits become lice.
Conspiracy — No … nothing to see here … move along.
Context — The reason a “tragic mistake” was all the enemy’s fault. Not to be confused with history, which can lead to a complex situation.
Cooking — How grumpy humans show kindness.
Craic — From the outside, a moment of apparent forgetting; from the inside, the recharging of the pen.
Decency — An elusive quality discovered in Caesar only after the knives have safely done their work.
Democracy — An ancient Athenian idea that important questions of war and peace should be decided by privileged men; two and a half millennia of refinement have preserved this essential character.
Doubt — The most dependable motivation for doing better.
Economic realism — A touching belief in the stories told by plutocrats.
Empathy — An existential threat to plutocrats arising from the dastardly impulses of fellow feeling and compassion.
Enemies — People who may not share your values but recognise your worth.
Enough — What plutocrats never have. (After Joseph Heller.)
Entitlements — The upside of austerity.
Evil — A quality of our own souls that we recognise most readily in people we’ve never met but really want to kill.
Exceptionalism — The conviction that accountability and responsibility are admirable principles, provided they don’t apply to us.
Expatriate — An entitledmigrant.
Forgetting — What plutocrats and genocidaires depend on most.
Free speech — A universal right, provided it doesn’t upset plutocrats or certain genocidaires.
Friends — The ones that tell you to get back up.
Genocidaires — Human beings who act on the proposition that not all human beings are human beings.
Genocide — Perhaps not a Western invention, but certainly a Western tradition; a realpolitik solution to geopolitical complexities arising from colonialism.
Geography — A branch of moral philosophy that explains why inhabitants of one part of the earth are entitled to more than inhabitants of another.
Geopolitics – A way to blame geography whenever realpolitik is really troubling your conscience.
Great power — Living the Nietzschean dream, far above the morality of loser human beings.
Great power ally — We’re special!
“Hardest week of my life” — For multi-millionaires, a couple of days in which their privilege is threatened.
Hatred — The inexplicable, unfair and irrational resentment felt towards us by the relatives of those we have killed or dispossessed.
Heroes — Not necessarily saints.
History — An explanation of the present best avoided lest it threaten the privileges to which one has become accustomed.
Home — To some, a place of warmth in which to raise children and nurture adult love; to others, real estate of variable geopolitical value.
Human moment — A politician’s self-pity.
Human rights — Rights universally acknowledged until someone inconvenient claims them.
Human trafficking — The squalid and evil trade in human beings as if livestock … unless it is found necessary to cut costs in international supply chains or to supply billionaires’ sex parties with children.
Hypocrisy — The art of applying opposite principles with identical conviction.
Impunity — A reasonable privilege accorded to the exceptional.
Inconceivable — A word frequently applied to stuff that’s right bleeding there.
Independent investigation — A process for discovering that a “tragic mistake” was unavoidable.
Kindness — A tendency to be on the lookout to remove thorns from lions’ paws.
Lessons learned — The process by which wisdom is obtained if you cannot afford impunity.
Literally — If you ever use this word to mean “figuratively”, you are actively contributing to the downfall of human civilisation.
Love — For plutocrats, something that property deserves but humans don’t. For everyone else, it’s reason enough.
Lovers – People you empower to hurt you.
‘mericans — US citizens who have surrendered their judgement to people who barely regard them as useful cannon fodder.
Migrants — Eternally plausible scapegoats for austerity.
Moderation — Appropriate deference to the feelings of plutocrats.
Moral cowardice — Losers being squeamish about genocide and the other essentials of realpolitik.
Passion — When the rest of the world falls away with your armour and only your lover remains.
Pen — Can be a keyboard, so long as you use it like a sword.
Plutocrats – the best humans … even though they don’t really like other humans.
Political realism — An absolute conviction that plutocrats and genocidaires have a point of view worthy of respect.
Pragmatism – An unshakeable basis upon which inconvenient moral principles must founder.
Privilege — Entitlements bestowed by wealth and history, therefore considerably more important than those rights ordinary humans keep bleating on about.
Racism — The colour grading of human beings by idiots, even when no colour is apparent.
Racists— Idiots sufficiently selective in their empathy to serve as useful ones for plutocrats
Realpolitik — A posh name for complicity in atrocities
Responsibility — An elusive quality, once thought central to professionalism, now applied only to those without sufficient privilege.
Rule of Law — An antiquated idea, dating back to Aristotle and Sophocles’ play about that loser Oedipus, that even the privileged should be accountable.
Self-defence — Violence committed by ourselves.
Silence — The promised price of the yacht in trickle-down economics.
Smugness — The quiet satisfaction of knowing your power guarantees impunity.
Special relationship — How vassals describe their vassalage.
Spouse / Partner — The one that puts up with your dirty underwear and still lifts you up.
Strategy — A long-term plan for success founded on sufficient ignorance to guarantee immediate disaster.
Stupidity — Telling truths that the smug find unsettling.
Sugar Daddy — An older man who would be really attractive even if he didn’t have all that money … REALLY!
Tech-bros — Plutocrats intent on ending the world because they still don’t know how to talk to girls.
Terrorism — Violence committed by the enemy.
Tough choices — Caesar’s difficulty in deciding which of the vulnerable to smite first.
Tragic mistake — Violence committed by ourselves against civilians after we got caught.
Transatlantic slave trade — I’m still not sure you’re grateful enough that we stopped that particular genocide that we started.
Trickle-down economics — A fairy tale told by plutocrats in which you too can one day own a yacht.
Untouchability — The art of declaring other human beings filthy so they can clean up after you, thereby exposing the state of your own soul.
Villains — Often think themselves saints.
Vulnerability — Not just an opportunity to exploit losers, but also the way humans make other humans fall in love with them when they are not rich.
War — A magical term that transforms our perpetrators of atrocities into the real victims here.
War criminal — A genocidaire without geopolitical value.
Wealth — The safest substitute for wisdom and expertise in policy discussions.
Whataboutery — A system of morality for those with no morals.
Wisdom — The consolation losers derive from losing; rendered obsolete by wealth.
Worst — Never the absolute you might hope it to be.
