Cricket interview: Glenn McGrath

Courtesy: Abhishek Purohit in Cricinfo

"When I was bowling well, I had already worked out the next two overs - what I was going to bowl and where I was going to bowl" © Getty Images

There is this line in your autobiography: "I can't ever remember having a bad dream about bowling. When I dreamt about cricket, I just bowled the ball I wanted to."
That is positive reinforcement. I used to call it visualisation. The night before a game, I'd think about who I was playing, and then how I'd bowled against those guys, if I had got them out previously. While I was playing, I could recall nearly all my wickets and how I got the batsman out.

If you continually watch yourself do something well, it has a positive effect. If you sat down and watched yourself bowling, batting or fielding badly, it will probably have the equal effect. I just found that worked for me. Even when I played I'd visualise at the top of my mark the ball carrying through and what I wanted to deliver.

Was that how you had always been, or did you have to work on it?
I don't know, I think it is something that came pretty naturally. I am quite a positive person. I always try to see the good in every situation, the good in everybody. My wife has a go at me every now and then that I can still see too much good in people sometimes, when they probably do not deserve it. I have always been the glass-half-full person. Even if we lost a game, I'd work on the positives and then think about where we could improve.

Early into your career, you had a major injury and you had to work hard on your fitness. Everyone talks about physical fitness for a fast bowler. You were probably one of the strongest bowlers mentally. How important is mental strength for a fast bowler?
I came back from the West Indies in 1995. I'd torn my intercostal, one of my side muscles, where you get your power from for a fast bowler. I weighed 77 kilos, which is about 25 kilos less than what I am now. I was injured, and I thought that if I want to stay playing at this level, which I was absolutely loving, I was going to have to do something differently. So I found a trainer, who was one of the toughest, and worked with him. He made me nearly unbreakable. That was my attitude with what I wanted to do. I think being physically fit and strong is hugely important for a fast bowler.

On the other side of things, you have to be mentally strong as well. My strength was probably more the mental side of the game rather than the skill side. I always had that self-belief that I was good enough. You have got to believe you are good enough, otherwise there is no point to it. I was prepared to work as hard as I could. The old saying: "The harder you work, the luckier you get" is very, very true. I would never give up. I was never satisfied. I'd always want to improve and do better next game. I felt we could win from any situation no matter how bad it was. I'd say I never gave up. I loved what I did, and if you have a real love and passion for what you do, you can't help but be successful.

	"I probably sledged myself a lot more than I sledged the batsman, because I had such high expectations of myself"

I always had a game plan, what I was looking to achieve. When I was bowling well, I had already worked out the next two overs - what I was going to bowl and where I was going to bowl. It is just that mindset - knowing your game and yourself, how you work at your best and what you are looking to achieve. I never had any doubts when I was playing. I never worried about another bowler coming in and taking my position. All the focus was on what I wanted to achieve, and how I was going to go about doing it, and I just went out and did it.

Where would you say these values came from? Is it an Australian way or from the farm, from your early years?
I'd like to say it is a little bit of an Australian attitude. There were some batsmen in the team who did not like it when I made predictions and targeted batsmen of the other team. Maybe it was my upbringing - the country attitude. When you grow up on a farm you are instilled with a certain work ethic from a young age. We were driving tractors, working on the land, from a young age.

Everyone has a conscious decision to make from any situation. They can either look at it from a negative perspective and let it affect them or look at it from a positive one and use that. I love life and I want to make the most of it. I try to live in the now as well. Don't think too much about the past - just experiences that have taught me things. Growing up on a farm and having that freedom as a young fellow and what my parents instilled in me - it all led me in that direction.

Shane Warne called your bowling method the torture technique. Drips on the forehead till the batsman gives up. Did you think of it that way?
The old Chinese water torture. Just drying them up, not letting them get any easy runs, slowly building the pressure until they got out or were shot mentally. I'd like to think I did a little bit more than slowly torture them, but it is an interesting comment from Warnie.

How did you zero in on that method, coming at the taile-end of an era where fast bowlers looked to intimidate batsmen? Yours wasn't physical intimidation, it was more mental.
If I could have bowled 160kph or 100mph, I would have definitely been bowling that fast. Physically, I could not. But what I did do well is, I could land the ball. I had pretty good accuracy and I could get good bounce. I was not that quick, I did not swing the ball a great deal, but what I could do, I did very well. That was my strength.

I only looked to get a batsman out one of three ways: bowled, lbw or caught behind. I thought it is pointless bowling middle stump because it would take all my slips out and it makes it easy for batsmen to score runs on the leg side. So off stump, or just outside, was where I wanted to bowl.

I had that mental strength and I loved the challenge of bowling to guys who were classed the best. I loved bowling in pressure situations. If I miss anything in cricket, it is being in those pressure situations, where it comes down to you having to perform for the team to win. That is what I loved.

"I only looked to get a batsman out one of three ways: bowled, lbw or caught behind" © Getty Images

People saw some of your qualities in Mohammad Asif. He said that line was mandatory and that he hated giving runs off the pads. How important was line to you?
I hated giving the batsman even a single. If the batsman hit me for four, it wasn't because he hit a good shot. It was because I had bowled the ball where he could hit me for four. So I was a bit annoyed with myself. It is all about control. Bowling the ball in the right area, hitting the deck, top of off stump, where the batsman is not sure whether to come forward or go back. A lot of people call it the corridor of uncertainty. That is what I try to stipulate when I speak to young bowlers at the MRF Pace Foundation - that it is about control.

You look at Mitchell Johnson. He is still bowling 150kph, but he has got control now, and that makes him a lethal bowler. If the bowlers have control, they can bowl it where they want to. They are going to be a lot more effective, be able to build pressure, and are going to get a lot more wickets.

I do not like to see guys substitute pace for control. You just need to work harder on getting that control without giving up something else. If you have got control and pace, you are a pretty dangerous bowler.

That length seemed irritating even on television. What do you do with that length? Do you come forward or go back? Was that length natural?
It was pretty natural. I never looked at the spot on the wicket where I wanted to bowl. It was always sort of locked in at the top of my mark that this is the type of delivery I want to bowl and it is all about feel. The last thing I wanted to do was bowl it where the batsman wanted it to come. It is that in-between length where they cannot really come forward or go back. If they go forward it is not quite there, if they go back it is not there and they nick. That length is a different length on every wicket. You have to assess the conditions, the bounce, the seam, and then you have to adjust accordingly. I think that was one thing I did. I could adjust to the wicket very quickly, find out that length in that corridor of uncertainty and try to capitalise on that.

They used to call you the Metronome. How hard is it mentally to stick to control? You had decent pace. Didn't you ever feel like indulging yourself?
I look at those things as a compliment. Precision is something I look upon fondly. My goal was to bowl what I classed as the perfect game, where every ball I bowled went exactly where I wanted to bowl it. That is what I was striving for. That does not mean I have to bowl every ball on the same spot. You can still intimidate them with short-pitched bowling, with aggressive fields, set a person up for an inswinging yorker, but it is just about being able to land the ball where you want to land it. Being a fast bowler at the end of the day is an aggressive thing. It is just not being aggressive with sledging. It is about body language, attitude, field placements. It is about the way you bowl. You have got to be the whole package.

How important was bounce to you? Ricky Ponting has said that it is more bounce than pace that gets batsmen out.
Speaking to the guys who were classed the best batsmen in the world - you mentioned Ricky there, [Brian] Lara, [Sachin] Tendulkar, [Rahul] Dravid, guys like that, they said they would rather face someone bowling at 150kph who skidded the ball on rather than someone who bowled mid-130s and got that bounce.

That was one of my weapons. If I tried to bowl too fast, I'd probably go a bit low and I lost that bounce, which I felt was a more dangerous weapon than an extra 4-5kph in pace. That was my strength. I could bowl good areas and I got bounce and a bit of seam movement and that brought all my catchers into play.

	"If I had had coaching when I was younger, they would have probably tried to get me side-on. My body just found the most natural way to bowl and it worked for me"

What was your attitude to sledging? Was it an additional weapon?
Yes and no. Some batsmen, if you have a bit of chat to them, they went to water. Someone like Lara, if you had a chat to him one day, you'd get him out because he'd go to water. Next day, if you have a chat to him, that's it, you are never going to get him out. So it worked against some batsmen, for some it didn't.

It is not something where you went out and said, "We're going to target this guy. We are going to sledge him." For me, personally, I probably sledged myself a lot more than I sledged the batsman, because I had such high expectations of myself. And half the time if I said something to the batsmen it was probably more out of frustration that I didn't achieve what I wanted to with that particular delivery.

It is part of the game. Test cricket is a test physically, skill-wise and mentally. And probably the mental side of the game is bigger than the other two.

How did you succeed in the subcontinent? Did you modify your approach, because not many overseas fast bowlers have done well here?
I tried to adjust to the conditions as quickly as I could. What are the positives of being a fast bowler in India? To me, the new ball is hard. It will carry through okay, so you have to use the new ball. Then the ball gets a bit soft, it stops swinging. Just got to keep it tight, work on the ball, then you are going to get reverse swing and all of a sudden it comes back into the bowler's favour. That is all I concentrated on. Use the new ball when it is hard and when it is old, look after it, get reverse swing, and set fairly straight fields and bowl a lot straighter than what you would in Australia.

That is all I tried to do, and again, I was trying and looking at the positives, or what the game plan was on these wickets, in these conditions, and how to best succeed. I still did not want to go for runs. I never set a batsman up by giving him runs. I could not bring myself to do that.

Did you have to be more patient in Asia?
It still comes back to execution and control. My stats in India were not too bad compared to the rest of the world. I did not worry that I was bowling in India compared to Australia and the UK. It was just a challenge that I enjoyed. To be classed a good bowler or a great bowler, you have got to be able to perform in every condition, every country, on every type of wicket. Patience, working to a game plan, bowling in partnerships - they were all part of the game. But ultimately my motivation was taking wickets. The end result was that I was looking to get that batsman out.

There were reverse-swing exponents like Wasim and Waqar. And guys like you and Curtly Ambrose made seam bowling famous at that time. Was it always seam for you?
Pretty much so. When I first got selected to play for Australia, a lot of people were saying you have to bowl a consistent outswinger to be successful at Test cricket. And I wanted to be successful at Test cricket so I started swinging the ball. I remember a Test I played against England at the Gabba in the 1994-95 series and I was swinging the ball quite a lot. I ended up with match figures of none for 101 at the end of that match and did not play the next three games. I went back and thought, "Well, I got picked for a reason. I got picked because of the way I bowl. So I am just going to stick to that. That bounce. That seam movement. And building pressure." That was a good learning experience. Listening to other people did not work for me. I tried it and I learned from it.

My strength was hitting the deck, coming from fairly high, using that bounce and hitting the seam. Sometimes that would carry straight through, sometimes it would come back in off the seam, predominantly more so than away, but that natural variation there was enough to unsettle a lot of batsmen.

That fast incutter. Was that an effort ball? 
It was more a natural delivery. Looking at my action - because I jumped in a bit at the end - I had a strong core, which allowed me to stay tall without falling away. But it meant I had to go across myself, which lent itself to hitting the wicket and going in to the right-hander or going away from the left-hander.

Did you always have a repeatable action?
That is the way I bowled. I didn't have any coaching. The first coaching I'd ever had, I was 22. And I did not model myself on anyone else. That held me in good stead, because back when I was growing up, it was all "get side-on". Dennis Lillee had the classical side-on action and he was my hero growing up. So if I had had coaching when I was younger, they would have probably tried to get me side-on. Who knows where I could have been? I may not have ever played. My body just found the most natural way to bowl and it worked for me.

Nowadays we know a lot more about coaching. There is front-on and side-on, even somewhere in between. As long as your hips and shoulders are in line, it does not matter where you are within that range. Your back will be fine. It is when your shoulders and hips get out of line that you have problems.

"With Warnie, the partnership we had was quite amazing. Two totally different styles of bowling but two very similar bowlers in the way we went about it" © Getty Images

You lost a bit of speed towards the end. How did you make up for it?
It wasn't a conscious thing to lose speed. That is the way it happened. But then it is all about control and bowling where you wanted to. Look at Jason Gillespie, who was a similar style of bowler to me but a little bit quicker. A lot of batsmen would play and miss because though they picked the line, it bounced and seamed and was past the bat before they could adjust. Whereas when I hit the deck and it did something off the wicket, the batsman would see it and had time to adjust and maybe just follow it. I got a lot more edges because of that. The fact that I was not express sometimes worked in my favour.

Those legendary partnerships - McGrath-Warne, McGrath-Gillespie - which one was dearer to you?
They were both equally important. I loved bowling with Jason at the other end. We still have a great friendship and I always enjoyed that. With Warnie, the partnership we had was quite amazing. Two totally different styles of bowling but two very similar bowlers in the way we went about it. He and I had very good control. We could build pressure from both ends and I can definitely thank Shane for a lot of my wickets, and he has come out and said he thanks me for some of his wickets as well. To bowl with Shane at the other end was something pretty special. We won the majority of the Test matches we played in and took over 1000 Test wickets between us. They are not bad stats.

Were you and Curtly Ambrose similar bowlers?
I think similar in what we delivered. Curtly just did it so easy. He was so loose: just come up and hit the deck and he could really get bounce and seam. He was one of the bowlers I admired from among those I played against. Curtly had two or three gears where he could crank it up. He was always pretty relaxed but if you got under his skin or fired him up, all of a sudden he could bowl another 5 to 10kph quicker and then he was a real handful.

Probably a good example is our results of bowling to Michael Atherton. I got Athers out 19 times in Tests and Amby got him 17 times. So the fact that we were similar bowlers was unfortunate for Athers. Probably a style of bowling he did not enjoy the most.

Did it get too easy against Athers as it went on?
You'd never say it was too easy. There was only one time where I got him out where I felt it was probably a bit too easy. And that was his last Test. I wasn't bowling that quickly, it was gun-barrel straight as the batsmen say. And I was outside off stump, and he just kept playing and missing. So I thought I'd get one a bit straighter, he just nicked it to Warnie at first slip. And I thought, "it should not really be that easy." But I think probably Athers was a bit shocked. Definitely had a mental edge over him at that stage.

One of my childhood memories is Lara trying to defend against you off the back foot and a bail going up in the air. What were those battles like?
I enjoyed bowling against guys who were classed the best. That really tells you how good you are. I loved bowling to Sachin, Brian. That wicket you are mentioning there was in the 1999 World Cup, at Old Trafford. We were under the pump, we had to win every game to stay in the World Cup. Lot of people say it was an amazing delivery. I think it did just enough to beat Brian's bat and just clipped the top of off. Mark Waugh said it was gun-barrel straight, that Brian just played the wrong line, and it wasn't anything special.

How quickly you remembered that dismissal. Do you still remember most of your dismissals?
Some dismissals I remember. Back when I had 360-370 Test wickets, I could sit here and write them all down in order and picture how I got them out. I guess that was my motivation, and my goal was taking wickets. Bit long in the tooth now and the brain does not work as well as it used to, but I can still remember certain series, certain Tests and what have you.

Did it ever change for you under different captains? Or were you always the same?
No, the game plan was pretty similar as it went on. It was only the West Indies series in 1995 where our game plan was to bowl aggressively to their bowlers, to bowl lot of short-pitched stuff to intimidate them, to show them that we were here to win.

He's now in prison, but Max Clifford's macho culture lives on

Max Clifford may be in prison, but the culture he sold and espoused lives on

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Saturday 3 May 2014 19.30 BST

A police photograph of disgraced PR guru Max Clifford. Photograph: /PA

In 2005, I found out, quite by chance, that Max Clifford was having an affair with a married woman. I say, "quite by chance", but it was only chance on my side. It was entirely intentional on his. He had arranged a press trip to Galway – a typical Clifford hybrid affair, an opportunity to promote a number of his clients, Club 328, a private jet charter club, the boy band singer Brian McFadden and, most importantly, Clifford himself – and he'd invited along a journalist.

If you want to know how Clifford controlled the media, or the kind of power and influence he wielded for decades, consider this. Two minutes into the trip, he sidled up to me and explained the presence of the attractive 40-ish-year-old woman at his side: "By the way, Carole," he said. "For the purposes of this article, Jo is my PA."

A year later, I interviewed him and revealed in an article the story of the affair: "The girls from his office got drunk and told me what every tabloid diarist writer and showbiz reporter in the country apparently knew. And, for an ugly lesson in how the media works, here it is: none of them wrote about it because none of them could afford to offend one of the prime sources of quality scandal."

This was 2005, when Rebekah Brooks was the editor of the Sun. And Andy Coulson was the editor of the News of the World. They did not print a story about Clifford, of course. Nor did Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror. The choice I was left with, I wrote, was "an unappetising dilemma: collude with Clifford and the entire tabloid press establishment or potentially wreck someone else's marriage".

It's nearly a decade ago, but I've thought about Clifford relatively often since then. I thought about him when Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were arrested. When various witnesses stood in the box and talked about the ways he had tried to impress and manipulate him.

When the issue of the size of Clifford's penis became a matter for the jury, I went back to the story I wrote in 2006 to check what he'd told me on the subject. Clifford is "impervious to criticism", I wrote. He doesn't even attempt to justify himself "because I know I can't". The only thing he'd really mind, he tells me is if someone said he was rubbish in bed. Or "that I had a small willy".

It's a measure of the desperateness of his situation that Clifford allowed his penis, his "willy" as he'd have it, which his doctor claimed was "within the average range for a Caucasian male of Mr Clifford's age", to be one of the main lines of defence. This was a man well and truly on the ropes. But then, Clifford had proved that he would say anything to anybody at any time. He was a hopeless witness for his own defence: a self-confessed, bare-faced liar.

During the trial, witnesses talked about Clifford's office as his sexual fiefdom, but it was the press that was his real fiefdom. It was the expectation of control. Of obedience. But this wasn't solely down to him. He was part of a wider media landscape that regarded human nature as base, people as corruptible, public figures as grist to the scandal mill.

A media landscape that has bequeathed to us: the idea that public life is a testing ground for whoever has the most testosterone; that everybody is out for whatever they can get; that distrust and betrayal and contempt are everyday aspects of the human condition.

"Nearly everybody I've ever known has affairs," Clifford told me. "Nearly every journalist I've ever met has affairs. I haven't met one, in 40-odd years, who hasn't. It's not that I think they are, I know they are!"

Well, no, Max, you don't, actually. At the time, I wrote about how depressing it was to be in his moral universe: "A world where men are men and women are trollops." But this was what he truly believed. And for years, this was the bedrock of the culture that permeated our press, our world, our lives.

I remember one year, during these times, when the News of the World won newspaper of the year at the Press Awards. I was at the awards at the Observer table, sitting next to an American journalist, Sarah Lyall, who was writing for the online magazine, Slate. The evening, she wrote, was "like a soccer match attended by a club of misanthropic inebriates"; the tone set by Sir Bob Geldof, there to present a prize to the Sun. "I've just been down at the bog," he said. "And it's true that rock stars do have bigger knobs than journalists."

Knobs, willies, cocks. There's been a turbocharged masculinity at the heart of British newspaper culture for decades. At the heart of public life. Max Clifford has gone, undone by his need to assert himself, to dominate, to brag, to boast of his affairs, his power, his influence.

And, so it turns out, to abuse the trust not just of the British public, but of vulnerable underage girls too. It all seems so much of a piece.

Some things have certainly changed. Clifford is in jail. Leveson has come and gone. But this competition, the pissing competition that is British public life, the need to prove the size of your cock, the expectation that public figures are corruptible, contemptible, that all people, everywhere, are simply out for themselves, this idea that life is, at its core, a willy-waving contest, this has not gone. This is still here.

This is Max Clifford's world and we live in it still.

How Jeremy Paxman tamed the spin doctors

John Humphrys in the Telegraph

Poor old Paxo. They got to him in the end. All those politicians with their lying ways. Their glib, shallow, facile, sanctimonious, self-serving failure to answer perfectly straightforward questions. Their ignorance and incompetence and wilful refusal to agree that they are always wrong and we, the interviewers, are always right. Their pathetic self-pity when they are finally exposed.

Jeremy just couldn’t take it any more. I knew the end was near when I arrived at Broadcasting House to present Today one morning, and found him in a dark corner whimpering quietly to himself: “Just answer the question, minister. Please answer the question!” 

Yeah, right. It’s far more likely that he’d be begging them to stick to their old ways. Imagine the interview in which the politician never ducks or dodges a question, never misses an opportunity to attack the opposing party or praise his own leader, and always answers every question, no matter how leading or tendentious or ill-informed, and no matter how much damage an honest answer might do to him and his party. People like us would be out of a job more quickly than an MP can fill in an expenses claim.

Who needs a rottweiler when a poodle would do just as well? The more serious question is whether politicians behave the way they do because we behave the way we do. And the answer is: it depends. Contrary to the widely held belief, all politicians are not the same. Indeed I suspect the majority do their damnedest to answer the question. Where I take issue with Jeremy is his often quoted remark that when we interview a politician we should always ask ourselves: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” 

A few years ago The Times printed a story across two pages with the headline: “Humphrys says all Labour ministers are liars”. It wasn’t true. What I’d actually said was that there are three types of MP: those who never lie under any circumstances and tend not to get promoted because the Whips are a bit nervous of them; those who make it into the top ranks and must observe the rule of collective Cabinet responsibility (or do what Robin Cook did over Iraq and resign); and those who don’t give a damn and either don’t or even can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood.

Based on my own experience, I happen to think there are precious few in that last category. Probably no more than in any other large organisation that is made up mostly of highly intelligent, ambitious individuals.

At the risk of being drummed out of the Cynical Old Hacks Club, I’d go further. I’d suggest that most of them are there because they genuinely do want to make a difference. God knows, the life of an MP is not an easy one. There are other ways of making at least as much money for rather less effort, and not be forced to apply for your own job all over again every five years.

So why are they held, by and large, in such low esteem? You may well say that’s obvious. Greed. When this newspaper ripped open the expenses scandal it tainted every one of them – even the innocent. The other reason takes us back to where I started: how they come across when they are being interviewed.

Some say it’s never been worse. I disagree. It was worse when they mostly refused point blank to answer questions from grubby hacks at all and, when they did condescend to do so, their interviewers treated them like deities. “Have you anything else to say to a grateful nation, minister?” is a parody – but only just. All that changed when broadcasting giants such as Robin Day, Alastair Burnet and Brian Walden challenged the old order and won.

But then the spin doctors arrived. This was a new religion for a new broadcasting age, and Alastair Campbell was its prophet. The approach was simple: to control the message it was necessary to control the messenger. MPs and ministers were not only told what to say and what not to say; they were also told precisely how to say it. And if they strayed, they paid – sometimes a heavy price. It works up to a point, but listeners and viewers are not fools. Sooner or later they spot what’s going on. And Paxman helped them spot it. That’s why he will be missed.

How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states

What began as a means of retaining individual freedom can now be used by smaller states to fend off the ambitions of larger ones

• 
• • Julian Assange
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 July 2013 12.45 BST

'Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by China. Will the internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century?' Photograph: Mao Siqian/Corbis

The original cypherpunks were mostly Californian libertarians. I was from a different tradition but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography was our secret weapon. It has been forgotten how subversive this was. Cryptography was then the exclusive property of states, for use in their various wars. By writing our own software and disseminating it far and wide we liberated cryptography, democratised it and spread it through the frontiers of the new internet.

The resulting crackdown, under various "arms trafficking" laws, failed. Cryptography became standardised in web browsers and other software that people now use on a daily basis. Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression. That is the message in my book, Cypherpunks. But the movement for the universal availability of strong cryptography must be made to do more than this. Our future does not lie in the liberty of individuals alone.

Our work in WikiLeaks imparts a keen understanding of the dynamics of the international order and the logic of empire. During WikiLeaks' rise we have seen evidence of small countries bullied and dominated by larger ones or infiltrated by foreign enterprise and made to act against themselves. We have seen the popular will denied expression, elections bought and sold, and the riches of countries such as Kenya stolen and auctioned off to plutocrats in London and New York.

The struggle for Latin American self-determination is important for many more people than live in Latin America, because it shows the rest of the world that it can be done. But Latin American independence is still in its infancy. Attempts at subversion of Latin American democracy are still happening, including most recently in Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador and Venezuela.

This is why the message of the cypherpunks is of special importance to Latin American audiences. Mass surveillance is not just an issue for democracy and governance – it's a geopolitical issue. The surveillance of a whole population by a foreign power naturally threatens sovereignty. Intervention after intervention in the affairs of Latin American democracy have taught us to be realistic. We know that the old powers will still exploit any advantage to delay or suppress the outbreak of Latin American independence.

Consider simple geography. Everyone knows oil resources drive global geopolitics. The flow of oil determines who is dominant, who is invaded, and who is ostracised from the global community. Physical control over even a segment of an oil pipeline yields great geopolitical power. Governments in this position can extract huge concessions. In a stroke, the Kremlin can sentence eastern Europe and Germany to a winter without heat. And even the prospect of Tehran running a pipeline eastwards to India and China is a pretext for bellicose logic from Washington.

But the new great game is not the war for oil pipelines. It is the war for information pipelines: the control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland. The new global treasure is control over the giant data flows that connect whole continents and civlisations, linking the communications of billions of people and organisations.

It is no secret that, on the internet and on the phone, all roads to and from Latin America lead through the United States. Internet infrastructure directs 99% of the traffic to and from South America over fibre-optic lines that physically traverse US borders. The US government has shown no scruples about breaking its own law to tap into these lines and spy on its own citizens. There are no such laws against spying on foreign citizens. Every day, hundreds of millions of messages from the entire Latin American continent are devoured by US spy agencies, and stored forever in warehouses the size of small cities. The geographical facts about the infrastructure of the internet therefore have consequences for the independence and sovereignty of Latin America.

The problem also transcends geography. Many Latin American governments and militaries secure their secrets with cryptographic hardware. These are boxes and software that scramble messages and then unscramble them on the other end. Governments purchase them to keep their secrets secret – often at great expense to the people – because they are correctly afraid of interception of their communications.

But the companies who sell these expensive devices enjoy close ties with the US intelligence community. Their CEOs and senior employees are often mathematicians and engineers from the NSA capitalising on the inventions they created for the surveillance state. Their devices are often deliberately broken: broken with a purpose. It doesn't matter who is using them or how they are used – US agencies can still unscramble the signal and read the messages.

These devices are sold to Latin American and other countries as a way to protect their secrets but they are really a way of stealing secrets.

Meanwhile, the United States is accelerating the next great arms race. The discoveries of the Stuxnet virus – and then the Duqu and Flame viruses – herald a new era of highly complex weaponised software made by powerful states to attack weaker states. Their aggressive first-strike use on Iran is determined to undermine Iranian efforts at national sovereignty, a prospect that is anathema to US and Israeli interests in the region.

Once upon a time the use of computer viruses as offensive weapons was a plot device in science fiction novels. Now it is a global reality spurred on by the reckless behaviour of the Barack Obama administration in violation of international law. Other states will now follow suit, enhancing their offensive capacity to catch up.

The United States is not the only culprit. In recent years, the internet infrastructure of countries such as Uganda has been enriched by direct Chinese investment. Hefty loans are doled out in return for African contracts to Chinese companies to build internet backbone infrastructure linking schools, government ministries and communities into the global fibre-optic system.

Africa is coming online, but with hardware supplied by an aspirant foreign superpower. Will the African internet be the means by which Africa continues to be subjugated into the 21st century? Is Africa once again becoming a theatre for confrontation between the global powers?

These are just some of the important ways in which the message of the cypherpunks goes beyond the struggle for individual liberty. Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.

What lies beneath the mask of marriage

The dynamics of any couple - like that between Charles Saatchi and his wife Nigella Lawson - are hard to fathom, but conflict can be deceptively subtle

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson: their row has ignited an important debate Photo: Alan Davidson

By Kate Figes in The Telegrapg

6:20AM BST 19 Jun 2013

The photographs were indeed shocking. Charles Saatchi’s large hand around his wife Nigella’s Lawson’s throat as they sat having an alfresco lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair, London. It’s the haunting look of deep fear in Nigella’s eyes that suggests this is more than just a “playful tiff”, as Saatchi subsequently said, hours before receiving a police caution for assault. Nigella, who has moved out of the family home, temporarily at least, is nowhere to be seen.

The media storm surrounding these photos has highlighted what those helping the victims of domestic abuse have known for a long time – that it can affect couples of every social strata, even seemingly confident and successful women who have the means to leave. Domestic violence is one of the most unreported and misunderstood crimes. Two women a week are killed by someone they know well. Countless others live silently in fear for years of what their partner might do to them should they leave.
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But perhaps what these pictures prove best is our confusion around what domestic violence actually is. In the past two days there have been mountains of speculation around the Saatchi-Lawson marriage: Saatchi’s temperament (he’s “explosive”) and Nigella’s troubled past (her mother would “shout and say 'I’m going to hit you till you cry’ ”) have been cited in an attempt to explain what must surely have been an exception rather than the rule. We don’t want to believe otherwise from such a golden couple.

But a celebrity union is no different from any other marriage, and is just as prone to the wielding of power and control, which is of course the substance of most abuse. The black eyes, the woman beaten about so badly that she is forced to seek refuge with her children in an anonymous safe house is just the thin end of the wedge.

Within all relationships there is the potential for abuse because it can be so subtle. Most domestic abuse is emotional or psychological long before it becomes physical, with men and indeed women chipping away at the other person’s sense of self and self-confidence in small but significant ways. Over time, with enough undermining day after day, one makes the other feel so bad about themselves that they believe it when their partner says that nobody else could possibly want them, or love them like they do. 

Victims of abuse are often blamed for everything, shamed or humiliated in public. Their partner makes all the decisions or they find themselves increasingly isolated from family, friends or other sources of support. “It’s the insidious level of control, the petty enforcement of rules – anything from how you wrap up the cheese when you put it back in the fridge to how you close the car door,” one married woman told me for my book Couples: The Truth. “And you think this is just a small thing; OK, I will do that because it doesn’t matter. Now I can see that what I was giving him was power. That was before he started smashing up the furniture when he got angry, and then hitting me.”

Domestic abuse can be economic or financial as spouses (usually men, because they earn more) withhold money or credit cards, make a woman account for every penny she spends, or prevent her from having a job or pursuing her own career. And abuse can be sexual, not just in the form of marital rape or pressurising someone into sexual practices they would rather avoid, but also by withholding sex.

I will never forget one young woman I interviewed whose husband refused to have sex with her for four years. “He has killed my self-confidence because I feel completely unacknowledged as a woman, and humiliated, too, dressing up for him in sexy underwear and still being rejected. If he had been knocking me about for four years that would be acknowledged as unacceptable controlling behaviour, but this isn’t.”

Affairs, too, are often a form of abuse, taunting a spouse with the evidence but denying that anything is going on. Instead, accusations of paranoia are hurled back at the victim, dismantling their psyche still further.

Abuse builds when one person in a couple consistently tries to exert that dominance, through intimidation, threats, anger and violence against furniture and walls. There are arguments in every relationship. But there is a fine line between healthy, constructive disagreements that allow people to air resentments and express what they want, and destructive rows full of character assassination and blame.

When a strong man has an anger-management problem, women understandably feel compromised about standing up for themselves. Arguing back could make matters worse. Nigella has been quoted as saying about her marriage: “I’ll go quiet when he explodes and then I am a nest of horrible festeringness.”

No one can really understand what goes on in another person’s relationship. One’s own is enough of a mystery. But if I were to turn back the clock seven years and write my two books on relationships again, I would probably structure them differently around the subtleties of abuse because of what I now know.

What is clear to me is that we find it so hard to understand the very fine line between common relationship difficulties and abusive patterns of behaviour when we are in love with someone, and when there are so many other ties that bind us such as children, reputation, lack of money and not wanting to be alone.

“Why doesn’t she just leave?” is a naive statement and one that won’t help Nigella, or any other woman in a relationship with an “explosive” man whom she probably still loves.

Our ignorance about abuse is also compounded by the taboos surrounding relationships and family life. We believe our private lives should be kept private. We shouldn’t interfere in other people’s problems. People took photographs of Charles and Nigella, but nobody approached the table to ask if they were all right. And it is this hidden nature of family life that makes abuse harder to live with and 

harder to talk about. For a successful woman, just admitting that there have been abusive situations is tantamount to failure. And so, so shaming.

I wish them both well. Perhaps the most hopeful legacy from this whole sorry affair will be greater transparency about how common abuse can be. But I also believe that too many people lack the key tools to help them build their relationships from the inside, which in turn allows abuse to flourish. We can’t trust everything to love.

When Brian Eno met Ha-Joon Chang

Brian Eno has a new album out. How best to explain it? By hooking up with radical economist Ha-Joon Chang to debate everything from finance to free jazz and dogs in parks. Caspar Llewellyn Smith joins in

• Caspar Llewellyn Smith
• The Guardian, Sunday 11 November 2012 19.00 GMT

‘Let’s find a place in between’ … Eno and Chang in conversation. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

It's a very Brian Eno notion: rather than submit to a normal interview, the 64-year-old polymath wants to talk about his new album through a conversation with the economistHa-Joon Chang. Inevitably, the discussion, which takes place in Eno's office in Notting Hill, London, barely touches on the record, Lux; instead, it ranges over another of his new creations (an app called Scape), the value of art, and why numbers are like sausages. We also cover the real reason why rightwing Americans won't admit that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

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Eno met Chang through an editor at the latter's publisher. The 49-year old economist is something of a star in that increasingly starry calling, ever since the publication of his 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism – a book described by the Guardian as "a masterful debunking of some of the myths of capitalism". Born in South Korea and now teaching at Cambridge University, Chang admits to being a fan of early Roxy Music – but, as soon becomes apparent, he and Eno have more in common than that.

Brian Eno: There's an issue we're both interested in – this middle ground between control and chaos. Some economists say you can only have a control model or a chaos model, that you're either a socialist or it's all about the free market. Whereas you say: "Let's find a place in between."

This happens to be an issue with the music I make. It's made for a place somewhere between architecture and gardening. It's not a situation where I'm finessing every tiny detail. I basically set a process in motion and then watch it happen. A lot of the design work is prior to the thing starting, rather than trying to keep control of it once it has started. You try to design the process carefully enough so you get the results you want and don't have to intervene.

Ha-Joon Chang: That's the approach I use in my economics. Central planners thought they could control everything, but there are always elements of uncertainty and surprise. But they then try to control even those. At the other extreme, we have those free-market economists who think there need to be no rules – even that it's OK to kill your competitor. Then you have a system that runs amok because everyone is cheating everyone in trying to beat them. The illusion that this rule-less system can organise itself has been proven completely mistaken – but we still have people wanting to believe in these extremes.

BE: And people saying, well, if you don't believe in that one, you must believe in this one.

HJC: I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, "Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning." I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking – which has really been harmful.

BE: One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right. What gets the results you want? And for me, it isn't top-down architecture that does that – but it's not chaos, either. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do. It turns out that anything that is called free anything isn't really. It's just constraints that you don't recognise.

HJC: It's a point I make in my book, when I say there's no such thing as a free market. The argument being that in all markets, there are some rules about what you can trade, how you can trade. We think some markets are free only because we totally accept those underlying rules. We just don't see them any more.

BE: You talk about child labour, don't you?

HJC: That's right. In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: "These children want to work, these people want to employ them ... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them ... " But today even the most rightwing economists don't advocate bringing child labour back, because they've got to accept the idea that children have the right to enjoy their childhood and a proper education.

BE: This turns out to be something that happens a lot. Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer. We don't even think that not employing children is anti-free market.

So whenever you talk about the free market – or free jazz! – what you really mean is "constrained by rules that we've stopped thinking about". This seems a long way off music, but when you set out to make something, you might just inherit all the ways of making it. If you're a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, you don't question the fact that there are 84 notes on the piano. You're not bothered by the fact that you can't get in between two of them – these are just the ground rules of the working situation. But I did want to question something about composition, and not just because I am a disagreeable sort of person, but because I noticed I liked music that wasn't made by either of these sets of rules. It wasn't command-economy music and it wasn't free-market music. It wasn't top-down architecture, and it wasn't free jazz. I'm referring in particular to things in the mid to late 60s like Terry Riley's piece In C. Have you heard of this piece?

HJC: No.

BE: It's a very interesting example of some very simple rules that produce something very rich. There's a score, and there are 52 bars, and each bar is a slightly different phrase in the key of C. It can be played by any number of musicians, and the rule is that they all start together, all playing to the same tempo, and they keep playing the first bar as many times as they want – each one. But then when you want – say you're playing clarinet – you can move on to bar two, and then you keep playing bar two. And then when you want to move on to the third bar ... well, the piece starts to separate out, and if there are 20 musicians, they might all be playing a different bar, but on top of one another, and it's all in C, so everything works together. So the piece has this beautiful characteristic: it starts out in unison, and gradually it becomes richer and richer and richer. And then they all have to end together, so they gradually converge back.

To make that piece by top-down writing would be impossible … but it's very beautiful.

HJC: And it's different every time?

BE: Yes. That's important. So this is one of the things that the composer has to accept: he or she can't precisely predict the outcome. This is what command economy people have trouble with.

HJC: Exactly.

BE: They're not happy with uncertainty.

Caspar Llewellyn Smith: You talk about a top-down process, and I can imagine what you mean with a composer – someone like Mozart, or even Riley … but where does something like folk music fit into this?

BE: Closer to Riley, I would say. There you have certain musical memes that get passed around, and never faithfully copied. That's the interesting thing. He hears a tune of mine, and thinks, "Oh, that's good, I'll play that." But his version is going to be different from mine. It's very genetic, actually. Whereas classical music was supposed to be perfectly replicable: the score was the ultimate authority.

CLS: Ha-Joon, presumably every economist has their own idea of how the world should be organised. So isn't it a very real problem when politicians come along, with their own agendas, and screw everything up?

HJC: Oh yeah, but my view is that we don't live by bread alone. We have to accept political considerations, and cultural and social considerations …

These days, economics has become such an all-encompassing way of thinking that everything is supposed to justify its existence by how much money it makes. Are you making enough money as a university? Are you making enough money as a classical orchestra? I think it's a fundamentally wrong approach to life. Because economics might be the foundation, if you like … but if you try to create a world in which everything is driven by money and the market, the world will be a much poorer place.

Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music … we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to "waste time" is a miracle – but that's exactly what art is for.

BE: Ha-Joon came up with a good title for a book that I might write: "A Total Waste of Time"!

CLS: Are these questions increasingly urgent, because over the course of the last couple of decades, that rightwing mindset has won out – we have rightwing figures now who, 20 years ago, would have been beyond the pale?

HJC: Absolutely. These ideas have penetrated so deeply into our society, it's poisonous.

BE: It's not only money, it's also other forms of accountability. Look at education in this country. I've just had two daughters go through the system here, and nothing mattered at all, as long as they could get through their A-levels. It doesn't matter if you don't actually understand a word. I could see some of their friends who were good at remembering things, but had no clue at all about what they were talking about, who got A stars.

HJC: In that system, curiosity is actually a great disadvantage. Which means that any creativity gets lost.

BE: It's to do with the act of quantification. It's part of the money thing: something that you can put a figure to immediately assumes a sort of authority, even if it doesn't deserve it.

What is the value of a park? You can't quantify it. We keep them because we've inherited them. But I'm sure there'll be a rightwing movement in the future that says, "Parks? What are they for? People just wander about in them – and there's dog shit all over the place. What's the point of that? A great big piece of real estate in the middle of London that could be generating income – we can quantify that." Quantification is a big temptation for society because it looks like control.

HJC: People tend to think that numbers are quite objective, but numbers in economics are not like this. Some economists say they're like sausages: you don't know what they really are until you cut into them. Once you know, you become very sceptical ...

I'm not against numbers. You need some numbers, to work with. Life would be impossible otherwise. But we've made these numbers into fetishes.

Of course, the more obscure a number is, the more people tend to think it is objective. If you say that the average American goes through three tubes of toothpaste a year, they kind of believe you. But if you say it's 3.72 tubes, they think: "Wow – that must be correct."

Art is not the only area affected by this quantification – education has been affected, family relationships, too – but I think art is the most endangered area of life. It's not obvious how something makes money. Sometimes, you have an artwork that you think is terrible, but then some billionaire is prepared to pay a huge amount for it, and suddenly it becomes valuable. And you are supposed to like it because it's expensive, and it must be expensive because it's worth it. So even the values within the art world are distorted.

BE: When I went to art school, the choice was to enter the art world or the pop world, and a lot of my teachers were disappointed I took the pop route because they thought I was a promising fine artist. But one of the reasons I did is because I thought it was inherently healthier. It had a quasi-democratic basis that the art world doesn't have at all. Tom Wolfe says something in his book The Painted Word about how four curators, 12 collectors and six critics determine an artist's career. Something like that.

This is why the art world has such incredible inertia, because once those people have invested their highly important opinion in something, they're very unwilling to change it. Whereas if you've bought an album by a band but then you don't like their second one, you just say, fuck it, the second one isn't any good.

CLS: And of course, today, you wouldn't even buy that record, you might just stream it.

HJC: Once again, you have to strike a balance between control and the market. Without some very rich guys a lot of great art would never have existed – so control isn't necessarily bad. But if you have only that, then art stagnates; it rots, if only a few powerful people are in charge. So you need a combination.

Your way of encouraging people to make their own music with your new app, Scape, is a good example of a different sort of approach to working.

BE: You drag shapes on to a screen to create a picture, and each shape has its own sound, with its own set of hidden rules. For instance, "when a lot of things are happening at once, I'm going to default into another mode of playing"; or "I only play in the evenings" – that sort of thing. Each piece of music becomes a little musical ecology.

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HJC: I've been a big fan of your music over the years. When I was growing up in South Korea in the 70s and early 80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged. The sound would be terrible: we used to call them tempura shop records – it sounded as if someone was deep-frying them.

This new album, Lux, was originally created for a specific space in Turin [the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria]. It's very interesting to think of a building as something more than just a physical structure: it's also about its surroundings, its light, and its sound. People don't tend to think of this, but our sense of a building can really be affected by its sound.

BE: Especially with this building, because it has the longest reverberation you can imagine. You snap your fingers, and the sound goes on for 11 seconds. It's a gallery connecting two palaces, actually. It's about 100 metres long, 15 wide and 10 high and any sound you make in there just spreads ... Treating sound as a physical material was only really possible from the time of recording onwards. As soon as people started making recordings, they took sound out of time and put it into space. It goes from being transitory and ephemeral to being something you can almost handle. I call that the materialisation of music. So everything I've been doing, really, has been to do with realising sound can be a material: if you're now thinking about a building, this can be one of the materials you can consider.

CLS: Ha-Joon, what do you make of the success in the west now of Korean pop: K-pop?

HJC: Gangnam Style! Initially a lot of it was really bad imitation of what was going on in Britain and America, but now they've found their own voice. Watch this space, because I think there'll be more interesting stuff coming out of it.

BE: Nearly everything good starts from imitation.

HJC: It's actually a good illustration of how art can be done in a very non-hierarchical way. The success of this guy, Psy, is because he didn't try to protect his work too much: he let everyone copy and create their own versions. So you have versions with Voldemortfrom Harry Potter ... my children are hooked on finding Matrix versions. Some are actually brilliant!

BE: It's a brilliant idea to make something that, like a module, can be plugged into any part of the culture.

CLS: Ha-Joon, in your book you write about different varieties of capitalism.

HJC: One of the general themes is that there are many different ways of organising the system. Different countries do things in different ways. Types of capitalism have different strengths and weaknesses. The problem is that in the last 30 years, we've been told there's only one way of organising capitalism, and it's the American-style free-market way. Countries are put under pressure and they have to rely on, especially if they're poor, foreign aid from rich countries, or they have to borrow money from the IMF. It's one of the reasons this crisis has happened.

There have been a lot of discussions about what needs to change, but there's been a lot of resistance, and popular sentiment hasn't been as coherent as it would have been in an age with strong trade unions and so on.

I'm not too hopeful. But if not now, when? If you can't learn the lessons from the biggest financial crisis in three generations, then we have a problem.

CLS: Ought culture try and shape the debate, or is that not its role? Brian, you've taken a stand on a number of political issues.

BE: I think the way culture changes things is slightly different from that. I've always disliked propaganda and shied away from artists' using their ability to manipulate emotional triggers – which is what artists do - in support of a political message, because I think it's a trick. I would like people to agree with me because they agree with my arguments, not because I'm good at music. So if I take a position publically, of course I get attention because I'm known through my music, but I don't try to support the position in that way.

Culture does change the way we think, just not in the propagandistic way. Art can be a model of how otherwise something could be done. How else it could be? When you see a piece of art, and you think, "Wow, that's wonderful", part of you wants to know, "And how did it get to be that way? Ah, it got to be that way by that mechanism. This is how it's done."

To give you an example of something I don't particularly respond to myself: Jackson Pollock was the expression of a philosophy, and that philosophy said, "If I just let it all come out of here and I'm not going to try to control it all, that's going to work." I don't particularly agree with it. But that picture is a way of thinking about that idea. And very often a work of art is a way of looking at the outcomes of an idea. It's very clear in novels – in fact, the most clear example is in science fiction: you describe a world, and you try to describe how if things were like that, they would turn out. That "what if?" question is a central question that makes human beings successful creatures. We are capable of saying what if this, and what if that, and comparing those outcomes. We love that question, and art is one of the ways we keep rehearsing our ability to answer it.

HJC: It's a great point. The problem is more with the way people think and not the content of it. Human beings are very prone to this black-and-white dichotomous thinking, so if you're a socialist country you allow no market and squash any dissent, if you're a capitalist country you're supposed to – although in fact, many countries don't – you're supposed to put profit and economic growth before any human values. But paradoxically, these two ways of thinking are the same, in the sense that they have this one grand principle to which they are willing to sacrifice everything. This is why when many communists give up communism, they become ardent free-market supporters.

BE: It's a cliche: the ex-Trot.

HJC: I know quite a few ex-Trots who work in the IMF. So if you understand art in the same way Brian does, it gives you the ability to think about alternatives, think about possibilities.

BE: It allows you to think about uncertainty. One of the characteristics of people, whether on the left or the right, is that they can't tolerate uncertainty. They don't want a system with any leaks in it. They want to think they're capable of battening everything down – and if only people would fucking stick to the rules, it would work. When those systems don't work, it's always because, in their opinion, somebody didn't play the game correctly.

HJC: Yes, it's never their principles that are wrong, it's the people who are the problem.

BE: This is why so many rightwing Americans still say Iraq would have been a good war, if only we had sent in more troops in the beginning, if only we'd done this or we'd done that … They will not admit that Iraq wasn't a good war.

CLS: There is explicitly political art – look at the case of Pussy Riot at the moment, for example. So there's a range of ways of going about things.

BE: Well, of course there's a complete spectrum. Although I do often wonder how much of the politics of Pussy Riot the people who support them understand.

HJC: As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you. I like all kinds of music – classical, pop, rock, electronic. Somehow, as a consumer, you know when something is good and when something is bad.

CLS: It's interesting that you use the word "consumer" – that we live in a world now in which art is something you consume, not something you practise. Art becomes a ready-made lifestyle.

HJC: Yes, but I took two years of piano lessons when I was seven and eight, and that was it.

BE: That's more than I took.