This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Ned [THE RIP-OFF BEHIND THE RITUAL, AUG-SEPT] takes the current Lord Mayor of the City of London to task for urging pension funds to invest in the UK’s microcap market, AIM.
He needn’t worry, as the idea that legions of £3bn+ mega pension funds are going to pile into a range of little £50-100m stocks is for the birds. The maths doesn’t stack up. Accordingly, the Lord Mayor hasn’t done his homework.
As ever, self-help is the way forward. The public doesn’t invest in AIM because either most people have never heard of it or those that have are perpetually discouraged by our risk-averse Financial Conduct Authority.
The time has come for AIM’s owners, the London Stock Exchange Group, to insist on substantial regulatory reform accompanied by a sustained media campaign to inform the retail market of the attractions of equity investment as opposed to punting crypto.
The current CEO of AIM’s owner, Julia Hoggett (ex-FCA risk manager), talks a good game but remains supine. Varun Chandra, the Prime Minister’s business advisor, has some understanding of what needs to be done.
He should insist that Hoggett stops messing about. Otherwise, he should encourage others to take AIM away from Ned’s “Old City”.
Stephen Hazell-Smith
Penhurst, Kent
Asimov’s hallucinations
Robert Hutton’s refreshingly sensible demolition of the overblown claims for “Artificial Intelligence” [PLAUSIBILITY IS NOT TRUTH, AUG-SEPT] rightly credits Isaac Asimov with some early and serious thinking about the challenges posed for humans by machines which appear to think.
But he does Asimov a disservice when he asserts that the latter’s I, Robot stories don’t envisage the problem of robots “making things up”. The third published story in the original 1941 collection, entitled “Liar”, describes a telepathic robot so concerned not to upset people (which it’s been programmed to avoid doing) that it tells them emollient fibs — including about romantic matters — and as a result comes to a sticky end when the lies are discovered.
As the story makes clear, the problem is indeed the way people use the machines, not the machines themselves, which after all are only doing what they’ve been told to do. A warning indeed.
Stephen Sklaroff
London
Queen in the Car Park
I recently wrote on the destruction of the British Embassy and grounds in Bangkok by Jack Straw and Boris Johnson [BULLDOZING BRITAIN’S BRAND, AUG-SEPT], in which I claimed that amongst other crimes, the statue of Queen Victoria had been lost by this pair of clowns when the embassy was sold.
I was wrong. Mislaid and ill-used she may have been, but she is not lost: she has been found by a British journalist in some shrubs and trees opposite the exit from the car park of central Chidlom, a shopping mall in central Bangkok.
I am not sure which is worse — to have lost her or to have found her, shorn so brutally of majesty and dignity in the bushes near a car park.
Stephen Simmons
Wadhurst, East Sussex
A Durrell To-Do List
Further to Sarah Moorhouse’s generous review [BOOKS, AUG/SEPT] of the late Michael Haag’s Larry (biography of Lawrence Durrell’s first 33 or so years, 1912-1945), Durrell senior was not only a novelist and poet, he was also a letter writer, memoirist, travel writer and pornographer, often still well worth reading whatever view one takes of the literary quality of the (perennially non-Nobelised) novels.
Your reviewer mentions the Black Book and one of his main correspondents — his fellow philhellene and pornographer Henry Miller. But she does not do complete justice to the “rootless” travel writer. Durrell was enamoured of and enchanted by the Spirit of Place (title of a 1969 edited selection of his Letters & Essays on Travel published by T.S. Eliot’s Faber). His Down The Styx fantasy (1961) is specially recommended.
Professor Paul Cartledge
Cambridge
