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INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR SATURDAY 4 DECEMBER / SUNDAY 5 DECEMBER 2021

Gift guide
Jewellery, beauty and the home
SEPARATE SECTION

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay

China’s Didi to drop NYSE listing

has Lunch with the FT
LIFE & ARTS

3 Taxi app plans switch to HK 3 Beijing accelerates US decoupling 3 Tech shares decline
RYAN MCMORROW — BEIJING
SUN YU — SHANGHAI
TOM MITCHELL — SINGAPORE
Chinese ride-hailing group Didi Chux-
ing is delisting from the New York Stock
Exchange, accelerating China’s decou-
pling from US capital markets as Beijing
cracks down on the country’s leading
technology groups.
The company, which has been hit by
increased regulatory scrutiny in China,
yesterday said it would begin delisting
and prepare to go public in Hong Kong.
Didi said that its board had authorised
the delisting in New York of its Ameri-
can depositary shares while ensuring
they would be “convertible into freely
tradable shares . . . on another interna-
tionally recognised stock exchange.”
Didi’s shares fell nearly 17 per cent by
midday in New York yesterday. Hong
Kong’s Hang Seng Tech index fell as
much as 2.7 per cent after the news and
Alibaba by as much as 5.4 per cent.
“This is the nail in the coffin for
decoupling in equity markets between
the US and China,” said Andrew Collier
at Orient Capital Research in Hong
Kong. “[Regulators] are being pushed to
do this because Xi Jinping has clearly
taken a very nationalist tone in terms of
capital flows, particularly from the US.”
Didi launched its $4.4bn New York
initial public offering in June, making it
the biggest listing by a Chinese company
in the US since Alibaba in 2014.
Days later, regulators ordered Didi’s
app to be taken off Chinese app stores. It
was also banned from signing new users
and subjected to a government investi-
gation into its cyber security practices.
The group’s shares have nearly halved
from the June IPO price of $14 to $7.80 at
the New York close on Thursday.
While big Chinese state-owned enter-
prises listed in the US have been tar-
geted by the Biden and Trump adminis-
trations with investment bans, New
York remained an attractive destination
for China’s private-sector tech groups.
In the immediate aftermath of Didi’s
IPO, Chinese regulators signalled that
other companies hoping to follow suit
would be subject to more stringent pro-
cedures, especially if they managed data
that was deemed sensitive by Beijing.
Didi’s IPO, which was completed the
Didi Chuxing week before the Chinese Communist
launched its party celebrated its centennial, angered
$4.4bn New party and government officials who Festive wines
York IPO in June
and days later
believed the group had brushed aside
concerns related to national security.
Jancis Robinson’s best whites
Beijing ordered “After this high-profile listing turned LIFE & ARTS
its removal from out to be a huge mistake, all Chinese
Chinese app companies will think twice about going
stores to New York,” said Chen Long at Ple-
num, a Beijing-based consultancy.
Lex and The Long View page 18

Learning curve
Hunt is on for
Omicron data How To Spend It
Pupils line up at the Kgololo Academy
on “Spirit Day” in Johannesburg’s Alex-
Fashion special
andra township this week. The Omicron SEPARATE MAGAZINE
variant of coronavirus, first discovered
in South Africa, has been linked to a
substantial rise in reinfections in the
country compared with previous waves,
according to the first detailed study into
the heavily mutated strain.
Policymakers and the public around
the world are still desperate for more
information about the new variant and
whether vaccines will still work.
Rise in reinfections page 2
Big Read page 6
FT View page 8
South Africa diary Life & Arts
Jerome Delay/AP

US job growth slows sharply as Fed

considers a speedier end to stimulus
COLBY SMITH — NEW YORK “With this report, we get more books.” The US president also said the
evidence that the economy has re- recent drop in oil prices was a sign that
US job growth slowed in November accelerated from a bit of a slowdown in cost pressures would start to abate.
while the unemployment rate fell to its the third quarter,” said Ellen Gaske, an The data released by the Bureau of
lowest since the pandemic began, economist at PGIM Fixed Income. Labor Statistics yesterday, which
Maxwell’s lawyers adopt a painting a complex picture of the work- She pointed to the discrepancy in the included substantial upward revisions
risky strategy in MeToo era force’s recovery as the Federal Reserve two surveys that comprise the jobs to September and October’s job gains for
considers whether to speed up its with- report, with one measuring households a combined 82,000 additional positions,
Pulling no punches i PAGE 3 drawal of stimulus support. and the other employers. The “estab- showed modest improvement in the
lishment” survey suggested a sharp number of people looking for a job.
Employers in the world’s largest econ- slowdown in hiring, while the “house- The latest jobs report, which showed
Australia A$10.00(inc GST) omy added just 210,000 jobs for the hold” survey showed a gain of 1.1m. 3.9m more Americans still out of work
Brunei B$8.00 month, a steep drop-off from the President Joe Biden yesterday said the than before the pandemic, came days
China RMB30 546,000 positions created in October unemployment rate’s decline was a sign after Fed chair Jay Powell said the cen-
Hong Kong HK$45 and well below economists’ forecasts of that the job market was rebounding, tral bank was assuming a more aggres-
India Rup260
Indonesia Rp48,000
550,000. Since the start of the year, despite slower job creation. But he also sive stance to combat inflation.
Japan ¥650(inc JCT) monthly gains have averaged 555,000. noted the anxiety across the US about He signalled this week that he may
Korea W5,000 Despite the slow pick-up last month, the cost of living amid high inflation. support speeding up the central bank’s
Malaysia RM12.50 the unemployment rate fell signifi- “It’s not enough to know we’re making withdrawal of its enormous stimulus
Pakistan Rupee 450 cantly, dipping 0.4 percentage points to progress,” Biden said. “You need to see it programme — a process it began just a
Philippines Peso 150 4.2 per cent. Less than six months ago, it and feel it in your own lives around the few weeks ago at a pace that would end
Singapore S$7(inc GST)
hovered closer to 6 per cent. kitchen table and in your cheque bond-buying altogether in June.
Taiwan NT$150
Thailand Bht160
Vietnam US$5
World Markets
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2 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

INTERNATIONAL

South Africa

WORLD|
Omicron linked to rise in reinfections
WEEK IN REVIEW| Health ministry says The higher reinfections detected were rose to more than 4,800 as of this week, The While either the Beta or Delta waves
“consistent with the timing of the emer- compared with just a few hundred cases were not associated with an elevated
new cases are increasing gence of the Omicron variant in South in mid-November, scientists said yester- findings risk of reinfection, the risk of reinfec-

Zambia agrees $1.4bn bailout with

faster than other waves
IMF after defaulting on its debts JOSEPH COTTERILL — JOHANNESBURG
OLIVER BARNES AND
DONATO PAOLO MANCINI — LONDON
Zambia has agreed the terms of a $1.4bn bailout with The Omicron variant has been linked to
the IMF, a crucial step towards ending a debt crisis in a substantial rise in coronavirus reinfec-
the copper-rich but near-bankrupt nation. The deal tions in South Africa compared with
has been years in the making and is a step forward for previous waves, according to the first
a country that last year became the first African detailed study into the heavily mutated
nation to default since the start of the pandemic. strain.
Yesterday’s deal for a three-year extended credit “Analysis of routine surveillance data
facility will still need approval from the IMF’s board from South Africa suggests that, in con-
but is a landmark for President Hakainde Hich- trast to the Beta and Delta [variants],
ilema’s government months after he unseated Edgar the Omicron variant of Sars-Cov-2 dem-
Lungu, who dragged out talks with the fund even as onstrates substantial population-level
Zambia’s debts spiralled. Africa’s second-biggest evidence for evasion of immunity from
copper producer is struggling under about $15bn of prior infection,” South African epidemi-
external debt, including arrears. ologists concluded.
Africa”, they added in a paper that is yet
to be peer-reviewed. The study did not
examine the strain’s effects on vaccine-
induced immunity or whether the rein-
fected cases were more likely to become
severely ill.
The findings by South Africa’s
National Institute for Communicable
Diseases will alarm global health
experts, who have been watching the
surge in cases linked to Omicron, amid
fears that its unusual genetic make-up
could allow it to evade immune protec-
tion from prior infection or vaccination.
It was released as South Africa’s
health ministry said that new infections
driven by Omicron were increasing at a
faster pace than previous waves.
The seven-day average of daily cases
day in a health ministry briefing. Cases
linked to Omicron were progressing
from outbreaks among younger people
to older South Africans as infections
increased.
In Gauteng province, the centre of the
Omicron outbreak that includes Johan-
nesburg, about one in three virus tests
were returning positive. The local
reproduction rate of infections, or how
many others one infected person was
likely to infect, has risen to above 2.
The NICD study, based on analysis of
test results recorded up to November 27,
looked at people who were first infected
at least three months earlier. It com-
pared the risk of reinfection during the
first wave of the pandemic with subse-
quent waves of different variants.
will alarm tion from Omicron was 2.4 times higher,
the scientists concluded. Prior infection
global was previously estimated to provide at
health least an 80 per cent reduction in infec-
tion risk. This suggested Omicron’s
experts “selection advantage is at least partially
who have driven by an increased ability to infect
previously infected individuals”.
been Hospital admissions are also rising in
watching Gauteng. Some 788 people were admit-
ted to hospital in the week to November
the surge 28, more than double the figure
in cases recorded a week earlier.
The World Health Organization,
which has designated Omicron a “vari-
ant of concern”, has said it would take at
least two weeks to understand the
effects of the variant on vaccines.
See FT Big Read and FT View

Saudi Arabia to keep boosting oil

output after US charm offensive
Saudi Arabia has agreed to keep increasing monthly
crude oil production following a charm offensive by
the Biden administration that included an effort to
Merkel leaves divided legacy for ‘Ossis’
reframe the relationship between the two countries.
The decision by Saudi Arabia, Opec’s de facto
leader, comes after a high-level US delegation held Outgoing chancellor said little
meetings in the kingdom this week, said officials about time in communist east
briefed on the talks. The outreach signals a shift in
Washington’s approach to relations with the king- that helped guide her actions
dom, as the price of petrol at US fuel pumps has
soared.
ERIKA SOLOMON — TEMPLIN
The move by Opec+, which includes Russia, to
increase crude supply next year by 400,000 barrels a In one of her final speeches as chancel-
day was a surprise to traders. lor, Angela Merkel did something she
had almost never done in her 16 years in
office: she talked about herself, and her
east German past.
IMF chief economist Gopinath to Merkel was hurt by a recent essay
replace Okamoto as first deputy MD about her Christian Democratic Union
party that described her history as “bal-
last”. Quoting from a dictionary, the
chancellor said ballast was cargo used
for balance, then discarded.
“A personal life story of, in my case, 35
years of state dictatorship and repres-
sion — ballast?” she asked on the Octo-
ber anniversary of reunification. “I say
this as a citizen of the east . . . who went
into German unity with this life story,
and who continues to experience such
evaluations — as if their life before Ger-
man unity didn’t really count.”
It was a subject Merkel avoided in
public. She is the first chancellor from
socialist East Germany, a past that
The second-highest ranking official at the IMF, weighs on those who grew up in it.
Geoffrey Okamoto, will step down early next year and Three decades since the fall of the
be succeeded by the fund’s chief economist, Gita Berlin Wall, east-west divisions still res-
Gopinath, pictured. Okamoto was appointed first onate, particularly for east Germans,
deputy managing director in March 2020. who feel Merkel neither promoted their
history nor worked to heal the divide
still felt with the west.
Many east German Ossis say her eco-
Germany’s coalition tipped to pick nomic and immigration policies exacer-
Nagel as president of central bank bated schisms that created fertile
ground for the far right. And despite
Merkel’s own status as one of the world’s
Joachim Nagel, an executive at the Bank for Interna- most powerful democratic leaders,
tional Settlements, is in pole position to head Ger- many easterners feel Wessis continue to
many’s central bank in one of the first major appoint- dominate their reunited nation.
ments by the incoming coalition government, East Germans still earn less and work
according to a person with knowledge of the matter. more. According to a study by the
Nagel, 55, who spent most of his career at the Bun- Allensbach Institute, 40 per cent see
desbank before joining the BIS as deputy head of its themselves as “east German” rather
banking unit last year, has emerged as the preferred than “German”.
candidate to succeed Jens Weidmann, who has said In Merkel’s childhood home of Temp-
he will step down as president at the end of the year. lin, her newfound embrace of shared
Other contenders were said to include Isabel historical grievances felt bittersweet. It
Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank came just weeks before Olaf Scholz, of
executive board, and Jörg Kukies, a state secretary in the centre-left Social Democrats, takes
the finance ministry. the reins of Europe’s largest economy.
“She was a bit late,” joked Erika Benn,
83, who was Merkel’s Russian coach for
Germany. Culture gap
Equality praise: school district language competitions.
Detlef Tabbert, The white-haired, bespectacled teacher
the mayor of and staunch leftist never voted for Mer-
Templin. Below, kel but appreciates that “she has real-
Erika Benn, who ised she has to talk about her life here”.
was Merkel’s Today, Templin gets as many visitors
Russian curious about the aloof chancellor as
language coach about its medieval walls. Unlike much
Jan Zappner
of eastern Germany, emptied by eco-
nomic westward migration, the town
has flourished as a retreat for nearby
Berliners, who in summer flock to the
picturesque town and its lakes.
Merkel was born in Hamburg, in then
West Germany, but her family was
moved east by her father, Horst Kasner,
a left-leaning pastor. The future chan-
cellor grew up in a two-storey house in
Waldhof, a Protestant seminary, nestled
among trees and rolling pastures.
Her childhood was one of privilege
and burden, said Wolfgang Seyfried, a
retired Waldhof director who knew the
family. Many priests were suspected to
be western spies who enjoyed material
advantages such as items including
washing machines and cars sent from
churches in the west.
“It was not only an east German
upbringing but a unique one, easy to
stigmatise,” Seyfried said. “That
becomes who you are for life, for better
and for worse.”
Merkel’s reticence might have been a
missed opportunity for healing divi-
sions, but was also probably something
she needed to maintain, said Hans Vor-
länder of the Technical University at
Dresden. “She did not politicise it
because it could have been used to
mobilise against her,” he said.
Behind the scenes, he said, Merkel did
more for east Germans than she gets
credit for. Her government’s decision to
spend billions of euros to subsidise the
closure of coal mines was, Vorländer
said, probably done for the sake of east-
ern miners who would soon be jobless.
“A lot, a lot of money has been trans-
ferred from west to east German states,”
he said. “She has always had the inter-
ests of eastern Germany in mind.”
Yet traumas linger from long before
Merkel’s time as chancellor. Eastern
Germany suffered in the 1990s from
deindustrialisation, when western com-
panies shut countless factories and
thousands lost their jobs. The migration
of younger, skilled east Germans has left
small towns empty until today.
The far-right Alternative for Ger-
many tapped into that anger, building a
strong following in the east.
A decision by Merkel that Sigmar
Gabriel, an SPD politician, said was
motivated by her experience in the east
and her Christian values deepened that
faultline. Her acceptance of nearly 1m
mostly Syrian refugees in 2015 sparked
a popular backlash, used by the AfD to
become the first far-right party to enter
the Bundestag since the 1939-45 war.
In September’s elections, the
AfD became the strongest party in the
eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia.
One of Merkel’s greatest contribu-
tions, some Templiners said, may have
been to Wessis — by changing the con-
servative treatment of women.
Detlef Tabbert, Templin’s mayor, said
women in the east enjoyed the same
rights, pay and opportunities as men.
“So women raised in the east were more
self-confident,” he said. “She never
thought, ‘I’m a woman, I have to get in
line’.”
At Thursday’s farewell event, Merkel
nodded to her roots with a request that
the band play an East German punk
rock song, Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen
— “You forgot the colour film.” A veiled
critique of the drabness of east German
life, its famous chorus is: “No one will
believe how beautiful it was here.”

Military contract Islamic republic

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Subscribe to the FT today at FT.com/subscription France warplane deal with Europeans warn Iran time is
FRIDAY 31 MARCH 2017 WORLD BUSINESS NEWSPAPER UK £2.70 Channel Islands £3.00; Republic of Ireland €3.00
UAE cements Gulf alliance short to rescue nuclear accord
Trump vs the Valley A Five Star plan? Dear Don...
Tech titans need to minimise Italy’s populists are trying to woo May’s first stab at the break-up
political risk — GILLIAN TETT, PAGE 13 the poor — BIG READ, PAGE 11 letter — ROBERT SHRIMSLEY, PAGE 12

HMRC warns Lloyd’s of Brussels Insurance market

to tap new talent pool with EU base
UK £3.80; Channel Islands £3.80; Republic of Ireland €3.80
Briefing
SATURDAY 1 APRIL / SUNDAY 2 APRIL 2017

customs risks THE END

i US bargain-hunters fuel Europe M&A

SARAH WHITE — PARIS try. Relations between France and the ANDREW ENGLAND — LONDON Iran resumed EU-brokered talks in
Europe has become the big target for cross-border
dealmaking, as US companies ride a Trump-fuelled
equity market rally to hunt for bargains across the
HOW DRIVERLESS
OF THE TECHNOLOGY IS
Atlantic.— PAGE 15; CHINA CURBS HIT DEALS, PAGE 17

being swamped i Report outlines longer NHS waiting times

A report on how the health service can survive CHANGING AN
ROAD ANDREW ENGLAND — LONDON HENRY FOY — BRUSSELS
more austerity has said patients will wait longer for
AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE

UAE have strengthened as Macron and Vienna this week with the E3, China and
non-urgent operations and for A&E treatment while

by Brexit surge
some surgical procedures will be scrapped.— PAGE 4 Censors and sensitivity
i Emerging nations in record debt sales Warning: this article may be
FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY 4 2017

Developing countries have sold record levels of

government debt in the first quarter of this year,
upsetting — LIFE & ARTS
taking advantage of a surge in optimism toward
emerging markets as trade booms.— PAGE 15

Credit Suisse
3 Confidence in IT plans ‘has collapsed’ Art of persuasion Mystery deepens

Sheikh Mohammed have been aligned Russia — two other signatories — that
i London tower plans break records
3 Fivefold rise in declarations expected
A survey has revealed that a
record 455 tall buildings are
over disputed painting of Jane Austen How To Spend It

France has secured its biggest overseas The UK, France and Germany have
planned or under construction

JAMES BLITZ — WHITEHALL EDITOR
A computer system acquired to collect
duties and clear imports into the UK
may not be able to handle the huge
engulfed in
adjust its negotiation position with the in London. Work began on
EU, a Whitehall official said. “If running almost one tower a week
our own customs system is proving during 2016.— PAGE 4
much harder than we anticipated, that
ought to have an impact on how we i Tillerson fails to ease Turkey tensions

fresh tax probe

surge in workload expected once Britain
leaves the EU, customs authorities have
admitted to MPs.
on many issues in the Middle East. are aimed at securing an agreement that
press for certain options in Brussels.” The US secretary of state has failed to reconcile
In a letter to Andrew Tyrie, chairman
of the Commons treasury select com-
tensions after talks in Ankara with President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan on issues including Syria and the Chic new lodgings

order for its Rafale combat jet with the accused Iran’s hardline government of
United Arab Emirates as President In Libya, the two states have sup- reneging on agreements they reached leads to the US rejoining the deal that
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4 December/5 December 2021
Maxwell lawyers
pull no punches
in attempt to
vilify accusers
Defence approach in sex-traffic case is
not novel but carries risk in MeToo era
JOSHUA CHAFFIN — NEW YORK
There was a moment of seeming levity
this week in Ghislaine Maxwell’s other-
wise grim trial on sex trafficking
charges. It came as her defence lawyer
was recounting all the roles one of Max-
well’s accusers had played in her career
as a soap opera actress: car crash victim,
cancer patient, prostitute and someone
stalked by a serial killer, among others.
“I forgot about that one,” quipped the
woman, now in her early 40s and identi-
fied pseudonymously as “Jane”.
Then the attorney, Laura Menninger,
got to the point: Jane was, she said,
essentially a trained liar. Her testimony
about the sexual abuse she suffered,
beginning aged 14, had been a perform-
ance. “You are an actor who convinc-
ingly portrays someone else for a liv-
ing,” the lawyer stated. “You are able to
cry on command.”
The exchange revealed the ugly con-
tours of the Maxwell trial: to prevail, the
British socialite’s lawyers will have to
destroy the credibility of Jane and three
other victims, who are expected to also
testify that Maxwell lured them into Jef-
frey Epstein’s clutches and sometimes
participated in his sexual abuse of them.
‘It’s certainly a risky
strategy. It’s also
probably the only strategy
Ghislaine Maxwell has’
Ghislaine Maxwell has consistently
denied any wrongdoing.
Attacking an accuser’s credibility in
such a case is hardly a novel legal strat-
egy. What may be changing is how it
plays in a MeToo era in which much of
society is revising ideas about how to
receive and respond to women’s com-
plaints of abuse.
“It’s certainly a risky strategy,” said
Elie Honig, a former prosecutor who has
handled sexual abuse cases. “It’s also
probably the only strategy Ghislaine
Maxwell has. If the jury credits and
believes these women, she’s cooked.”
Maxwell is one of two high-profile
women on trial this week in a case that
touches on issues of gender and justice.
In San Jose, California, Elizabeth Hol-
mes, the once-vaunted founder of failed
blood-testing company Theranos,
attempted to fend off fraud charges by
telling jurors she had, in fact, been
under the control of a domineering boy-
friend and business partner.
In Manhattan, another of Maxwell’s
lawyers, Bobbi Sternheim, also cast her
client as a victim, arguing in a biblical
opening statement that Maxwell was
being made the scapegoat for Epstein’s
sins. “Ever since Eve was accused of
tempting Adam with the apple, women
have been blamed for the bad behaviour
of men, and women are often vilified
and punished more than men are,”
Sternheim declared.
To an extraordinary degree, the Max-
well trial is a contest of accomplished
women.
The formidable Menninger and
Sternheim are leading the defence
against an equally distinguished prose-
cution team that features Alison Moe,
Council of Europe
Rights body acts over Turkey jailing
LAURA PITEL — ANKARA
Europe’s top human rights body has
launched disciplinary action against
Turkey for its refusal to release a jailed
businessman and philanthropist, strik-
ing a fresh symbolic blow to the coun-
try’s relations with the west.
The decision caps a difficult week for
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
marred by the resignation of his finance
minister against the backdrop of a cur-
rency crisis that has seen the lira lose
40 per cent of its value against the dollar
in the past three months.
The Council of Europe voted narrowly
in favour of launching “infringement”
proceedings against Ankara over the
detention of Osman Kavala, who has
remained behind bars even after an
order by the European Court of Human
Rights for his release.
The infringement process, likely to
take at least 18 months, according to
★ FTWeekend 3
INTERNATIONAL
‘In this country, usually —
but not always — victims of
sexual abuse sort of become
the villains in these cases by
defence attorneys’
Lara Pomerantz and Maurene Comey.
The presiding judge is the no-nonsense
Alison Nathan, nominated last month
by President Joe Biden to the federal
appeals court.
Then there is Maxwell herself.
The Oxford-educated daughter of the
late British press baron and embezzler
Robert Maxwell sliced through the
Manhattan social scene when she
arrived in the early 1990s. She became A sketch of Ghislaine Maxwell entering
Epstein’s close confidante and the man- court in New York, followed by court
ager of his luxury properties. She was marshals, on Thursday. Above, Maxwell
arrested in 2020, a year after he was with Jeffrey Epstein in 2005 — Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
found hanged in a Manhattan prison cell
awaiting trial on charges that he abused
dozens of underage girls.
Prosecutors claim she was instrumen-
tal in Epstein’s scheme because she ena-
bled him to win the trust of vulnerable
young women such as Jane, who
recounted to jurors this week how the
pair struck up a conversation with her
while she was eating ice cream on a pic-
nic bench at a summer arts camp in
Michigan in 1994. Her father had died of
cancer months earlier and the family
had lost their house, Jane recalled.
Weeks after that first encounter,
Epstein sent a chauffeur-driven car to
bring her and her mother to his Palm
Beach estate for tea.
She began to return by herself about
every other week, Jane testified. There
was fun by the pool with Ghislaine, who
seemed to her like “an older sister”, and
trips to the movies and shopping.
Then one day Epstein led her into his
pool house and assaulted her, Jane said.
Later, she testified, Maxwell showed her
how to perform sexualised massages on
Epstein that sometimes turned into
orgies.
By testifying, Jane said, she was hop-
ing for closure: “This is something I’ve
been running from my entire life.”
But first she had to endure a cross-
examination by Menninger, who spent
most of a day attacking every part of
Jane’s story. The witness, she claimed,
had exaggerated her family’s hardship,
was motivated by money (she won a
$5m financial settlement from an
Epstein victims fund that apparently
became $2.9m after lawyers’ fees), and
should have come forward years earlier.
“You have come up with that memory
in the last two years,” Menninger
demanded at one point, after confront-
ing Jane with a document from a 2019
meeting stating she had “no specific
memory” of her first sexualised mas-
sage with Maxwell.
To Barry Salzman, a Florida attorney
who specialises in sexual abuse cases
and has represented Epstein victims, it
was standard fare.
“So many years have passed that the
defence has a lot to play with in terms of
faulty memory,” Salzman said.
More broadly, he observed: “In this
country, usually — but not always — vic-
tims of sexual abuse sort of become the
villains in these cases by the defence
attorneys.”
Salzman does not expect Maxwell’s
lawyers to pull their punches when the
other women take the stand. “They’re
going to just throw everything they can
at this. She’s facing 70 years [in prison],”
he said, asking: “Who would put them-
selves through this?”
diplomats, could result in a suspension
of Turkey’s voting rights at the Council
of Europe, which oversees the ECHR. It
could even lead to the country’s expul-
sion from the Strasbourg-based institu-
tion that it has been a part of since 1950.
Kavala has been detained for four years
without any conviction.
The decision came as Turkey saw
mounting public discontent over the ris-
ing cost of living. Kemal Kilicdaroglu,
leader of the main opposition party, yes-
terday visited the statistical agency as
official data said inflation rose 21 per
cent in November. The figure was higher
than analysts’ forecast of 20.7 per cent.
But Kilicdaroglu, who was refused a
meeting with TurkStat officials, accused
the agency of manipulating the data.
The lira has suffered its worst plunge
since a 2018 currency crisis after the
central bank, acting under the orders of
Erdogan, began cutting interest rates in
September despite rising inflation.
4 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

INTERNATIONAL

Monetary policy US military

Lagarde calls EU inflation a passing ‘hump’ Pentagon

Central bank president
believes rates are ‘very
unlikely’ to rise in 2022
have peaked and would decline next
year.
“I see an inflation profile that looks
like a hump . . . and a hump eventually
economic recovery and on inflation.
“We have to wait for the scientists to tell
us [more about the variant],” she said.
“But equally, we need to very clearly
However, Lagarde said 55 to 60 per
cent of recent inflation came from soar-
ing energy prices and there was “reason
to believe that by the end of 2022 it will
chief warns
and the spread of the Omicron variant adversaries
against
have made some ECB policymakers
reluctant to commit to maintaining its
stimulus for a long period when they

MARTIN ARNOLD — FRANKFURT

The president of the European Central
Bank said it was unlikely eurozone
interest rates would increase next year,
calling the current rise in inflation a
passing “hump”, but added that the ECB
would act swiftly if needed to stanch the
increase in prices.
Despite eurozone inflation hitting a
record high of 4.9 per cent in November,
well above the ECB’s target of 2 per cent,
Christine Lagarde said it was likely to
declines,” she said at a Reuters virtual
event. Lagarde also repeated her asser-
tion that the ECB was “very unlikely” to
raise interest rates next year.
Her comments contrast with a recent
policy shift at the US Federal Reserve,
whose chair, Jay Powell, this week said it
would speed up the withdrawal of its
bond purchases to fight soaring infla-
tion, fuelling expectations that it was
likely to raise rates next year.
Lagarde said it was too early to say
what impact the Omicron coronavirus
variant would have on Europe’s recent
Coup fallout. Power sharing
indicate that we stand ready [to act] in
both directions.”
Once inflation was on track to stay
above 2 per cent for the next few years,
fulfilling the conditions set by the ECB
for rates to rise, she said the bank
“would not hesitate to act”.
Some economists have said the new
variant could mean inflation stays
higher for longer as fresh restrictions
disrupt trade and shift demand from
services to goods, worsening supply
chain bottlenecks that have pushed up
prices around the world.
have declined significantly”.
Given the rising uncertainty over the
economic impact of the pandemic,
Lagarde also said the central bank’s pol-
icymakers were unlikely to make any
long-term policy pledges when they met
in two weeks.
“There are ways to give clarity with-
out making long-term commitments
and I would err on the side of not mak-
ing very long-term commitments
because there is too much uncertainty,”
Lagarde said.
The recent surge in Covid-19 cases
meet on December 16, especially after
inflation consistently overshot their
forecasts this year.
Some conservative hawks at the ECB
said it could end all asset purchases next
year, much earlier than many investors
expect. Klaas Knot, head of the Dutch
central bank, said yesterday the ECB
could raise rates in 2023 if inflation
stayed higher than expected next year.
Lagarde said new bond purchases
under its flagship €1.85tn pandemic
emergency purchase programme were
still expected to end in March.
complacency
DEMETRI SEVASTOPULO — WASHINGTON
General Mark Milley, chairman of the
US joint chiefs of staff, has warned US
adversaries not to assume that the
country was weak or unwilling to take
military action to defend its interests
in the wake of its withdrawal from
Afghanistan.
Critics have argued that US rivals
interpreted the Afghan exit as a sign of
weakness and lack of appetite for con-
flict after two decades of war. That
debate has continued as Russia has
deployed about 100,000 troops on the
border with Ukraine.
Asked if Russian president Vladimir

Sudan premier defends pact with military
Hamdok in defiant mood
during FT interview as street
protests mount over accord
ANDRES SCHIPANI — KHARTOUM
In the early hours of October 25, secu-
rity forces showed up at the residence of
Sudanese prime minister Abdalla Ham-
dok in the capital Khartoum.
They said “there is a change, you will
be staying under house arrest”, Hamdok
recalled in an interview with the Finan-
cial Times about the military coup that
knocked Sudan’s democratic transition
off course and caused a global outcry.
More than a month later, the soft-spo-
ken economist has been reinstated
through what he called a “workable
agreement” with the army to avoid “a
catastrophic situation”. Dozens have
been killed in mass protests against the
military takeover. But far from quelling
anger at the coup, Hamdok’s deal with
the generals jeopardises support for the
technocrat.
Although protests have lost some of
their intensity since the agreement was
made, “the streets are saying ‘there’s
no bargaining, no negotiating, no mili-
tary in government’”, said Duaa Tariq,
co-founder of CivicLab, which promotes
civil and political rights. “Hamdok has
lost the street. He has lost a historic
chance to get the people on his side.”
Signed on November 21 by Hamdok
and Abdel Fattah Burhan, Sudan’s top
general and the coup leader, the pact
restored the civilian element of the
country’s transitional government, sup-
posedly paving the way for elections in
July 2023. The 14-point plan falls short
of the agreement that brought both men
to power during the 2019 revolution as
part of a hybrid government. Under that
agreement, the military and civilians
shared power after the fall of longstand-
ing dictator Omar al-Bashir.
Under the deal signed by Hamdok,
the military has tightened its grip, bar-
ring politicians from Sudan’s cabinet at a
time that the $30bn economy is crum-
bling. The battle for democracy in
Sudan — a country that has suffered 17
coups since it became independent in
1956 — is far from over.
Protesters, politicians and activists
are pushing back on the presence of the
military in the transitional government.
“Whoever sheds blood is a criminal
who has no legitimacy to rule, and who-
ever drags the country into violence
stands against the slogan of the peaceful
revolution that was once raised,” said
Street anger: Amjed Farid, a former assistant chief of
an anti-coup staff to Hamdok. “It is not possible to
protester in build the country, solve its problems, or
Khartoum move forward through threats and
carries a poster intimidation. A country is built on hope,
bearing the not violence.”
portrait of a Two key players behind the deal are
woman killed in Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as
a crackdown last Hemeti, Sudan’s vice-president and
month. Below, commander of the Rapid Support
Mohamed Forces militia, and his brother, Abdul
Hamdan Dagalo, Rahim Hamdan Dagalo. While formally
right, is greeted deferring to Burhan, Mohamed Ham-
by Abdel Fattah dan has come to the fore as the military
al-Burhan has tightened its grip. “I am very happy
AFP/Getty; Sudan Presidential
Palace/Anadolu Agency
indeed, I was part of the agreement
along with anyone else,” he told the FT.
Thousands of protesters took to the
street in anger at the coup, in an echo of
the 2019 demonstrations that spurred
the military to topple Bashir. At least 43
people have been killed, according to a
Sudanese doctors’ committee.
Hamdan and Burhan claim neither
the military nor the RSF are responsible
for killing protesters, but, possibly,
some elements within the police.
“Armed” people linked to certain politi-
cal parties may be responsible for some
the deaths, Burhan said, an allegation
that have been dismissed by Sudanese
politicians. Just 10 people were killed,
he said, not dozens, citing a preliminary
investigation by the attorney-general.
“Peaceful demonstrations are already
protected by law and the constitution,
we have no objection, all the security
forces — army, intelligence, police, RSF
— all of them have very strict instruc-
tions to protect the peaceful protesters,
the civilians,” said Hemeti.
These words ring hollow to the
mother of Mohammed Abdarhamim, a
27-year-old computer science student,
who she says was shot in the head by
security forces on the day of the coup.
“Our son died in the pursuit of civil gov-
ernment, and this agreement between
Hamdok and Burhan changed nothing,
so unless we have the civil government
that our son died for we are not
acknowledging this agreement — those
‘Those who who murdered my son cannot rule my
country,” said Amel Abbas.
murdered The loss of popular support is partly
my son because the deal Hamdok signed com-
pels him to form a government of “inde-
cannot pendent technocrats” and not politi-
rule my cians. Hemeti justifies this by pointing
to the dysfunction of the past two years.
country’ The economy is in crisis and inflation is
running at more than 360 per cent.
But without a political presence in the
government, it is unclear how long it can
last. Siddiq Mohamed Ismail, deputy
chair of the Umma party, one of the
country’s largest, said that “politicians
should be part of the government”. Even
Hamdok strikes a note of scepticism on
how feasible would it be to form a gov-
ernment without politicians. “There is a
saying that the Sudanese are either
poets or politicians and there are very
few poets,” he said.
For many, the deal quite simply is not
enough. “All the people here do not
believe in the deal, the deal is not
accepted by the streets,” said Imad
Hashim, 40, a mechanic and protester,
pointing to where a fellow protester was
recently killed. “We won’t listen to
Hamdok, Hamdok should fight for the
people, not for the military. We are
going to keep protesting until we have a
full civilian government with no mili-
tary in it. Never again the military.”
Putin might be preparing for an inva-
sion, Milley declined to single out Rus-
sia, but he warned adversaries not to be
complacent and make faulty assump-
tions about US resolve.
“It would be a mistake for any country
to draw a broad strategic conclusion
based on the US withdrawal from
Afghanistan and then take that event
and automatically apply it to other situ-
ations,” said Milley during a flight from
Seoul to Washington. “The United
States is a difficult country for other
countries to understand sometimes.”
Milley’s comments came as US-Rus-
sian tensions soar over Ukraine. Antony
Blinken, US secretary of state, held
tense talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Rus-
sian counterpart, on Thursday, a day
after he said an invasion would trigger
“severe” consequences, including “high-
impact economic measures”. Russia
denies it has plans to invade.
On Ukraine, Milley declined to spec-
ify on options the US was considering,
but said the “full range of diplomatic,
economic information and military
activities are certainly out there,
depending on what and if Russia does
something”.
“It remains to be seen whether that
military activity that we’re seeing on the
Russian side of the border is going to
turn into something very aggressive,” he
said. “We don’t know yet. But it is signif-
icant, and it’s real.”
Concerns about an invasion rose in
April when the Russia positioned tens of
thousands of troops on Ukraine’s east-
ern border and in Crimea, which Mos-
cow annexed in 2014. But Milley said
the build-up, coupled with other devel-
opments, suggested that Russia was
more serious about military action.
“Last time, it turned out to be a series
of exercises. One of the most noticeable
differences between now and April is
the rhetoric,” he said. “The public rheto-
ric coming out of Russia seems to be a
little bit more strident than it was
before.”
The Pentagon had prepared for
numerous contingencies but did not
provide any details related to Ukraine,
said Milley, who stressed that diplo-
macy was going to be the most impor-
tant channel to resolve the crisis.
“The issues that are at stake in
Ukraine . . . can and should be resolved
diplomatically in a way that doesn’t lead
to violence or armed conflict.”
Lloyd Austin, US defence secretary,
who with Milley met their South Korean
counterparts in Seoul on Thursday,
declined to say if the US would threaten
military retaliation to deter Moscow.
“I don’t care to speculate on potential
responses. I would just say that we’ll
continue to use the best methods to
address whatever the situation is that
occurs,” Austin said.

Libya Art mystery

Gaddafi given go-ahead to run for presidency China sells missing entrepreneur’s painting
HEBA SALEH — CAIRO
A court in Libya has said Saif al-Islam
Gaddafi, a son of Libya’s overthrown
dictator, can run for president, adding
to the uncertainty and chaos surround-
ing the forthcoming poll.
Last week the electoral commission dis-
qualified him from the December 24
election that western governments
hope will unite a fragmented country.
On Thursday, the court in Sebha, south-
ern Libya, accepted Gaddafi’s appeal
against his exclusion from the race,
according to multiple reports citing his
lawyer.
The electoral commission had
declared Gaddafi ineligible because he
had been convicted of a crime. He was
sentenced to death in 2015 in absentia
by a court in Tripoli for war crimes dur-
ing the 2011 uprising in which his father,
Muammer Gaddafi, was overthrown
and later killed. The junior Gaddafi was
captured in 2011 by a militia from the
north-western town of Zintan and held
captive there until 2017, when he was
freed. He is still wanted by the Interna-
tional Criminal Court for alleged crimes
against humanity during attempts by
the former regime to suppress the Nato-
backed uprising.
For many years his father’s heir
apparent, Gaddafi cultivated the image
of a moderniser who wanted to bring
human rights to Libya. But when pro-
tests erupted in 2011, he warned of riv-
ers of blood and was filmed brandishing
a machine gun and vowing to crush
insurgents.
The UN and western governments
hope the elections will help turn a cor-
ner in a country where militias have
held sway for most of the past decade
and foreign governments have engaged
in proxy wars by sending arms and mer-
cenaries. Some 98 candidates have reg-
istered for the poll, but the electoral
commission disqualified 25 last week.
TOM MITCHELL — SINGAPORE
A famous painting originally owned by
a missing Chinese businesswoman has
been sold in Beijing by a state-owned
auction house for Rmb38m ($6m),
raising questions about whether her
assets were being forcibly liquidated.
Duan Weihong, an entrepreneur also
known as Whitney who was close to the
family of former premier Wen Jiabao,
originally paid $5m for Prayer, a 2012 oil
painting by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi,
according to a book recently published
by her ex-husband.
In Red Roulette, Desmond Shum
described Duan as “one of Zeng’s
patrons” who competed against rival
collector François Pinault, the French
magnate, for his art. Duan had intended
to house the painting and other works
by Zeng in a luxury hotel development
in Beijing, according to Shum.
“She did not only buy Zeng’s works,”
said a person close to the artist. “She was
also one of his biggest supporters.”
The artwork was sold to an unidenti-
fied buyer on Thursday night by Beijing
Poly International Auction, a unit of
state-owned China Poly Group, at a
price far higher than the auctioneer’s
initial estimated value of Rmb8m-
Rmb16m.
Poly described the seller as an
“important institution” but declined to
State-owned auctioneer
declined to comment on
the provenance of the
artwork sold for $6m
comment further on the provenance of
the painting. Shum, who lives in the UK,
said he was “very sorry” to learn that
Prayer was up for sale. “It’s a great paint-
ing,” he added.
Duan disappeared in 2017, ostensibly
as part of an investigation into Sun
Zhengcai, another senior politician she
had cultivated. Sun, once the youngest
member of the Chinese Communist
party’s 25-member politburo, was
viewed as a potential successor to Presi-
dent Xi Jinping until he was arrested in
2017. He was sentenced to life in prison
for alleged corruption a year later.
It has never been confirmed by gov-
ernment or party investigators that
Duan was detained. She resurfaced
briefly in September when she phoned
Shum urging him not to publish his
book about their dealings with the Wen
family, Sun and other party elite.
Shum said at the time that he believed
Duan was forced to make the call under
duress and was not free.
Zeng did not respond to a request for
comment.
Demand for his works has cooled over
the past decade. But on Monday the Bei-
jing-based artist was ranked by the
Hurun Report, which tracks the wealth
of China’s richest entrepreneurs, as the
world’s 10th hottest artist, based on
sales of his works in 2020 totalling
$39.3m. On Wednesday, another of his
works, This Land So Rich in Beauty No 2,
sold for HK$40m ($5.1m).
Additional reporting by Emma Zhou
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 5
6 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

FT BIG READ. CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Little over a week after it was first identified, the public and policymakers are desperate for information
about the new variant and whether Covid vaccines will still work. Scientists are scrambling for answers.
By Clive Cookson, Oliver Barnes and John Burn-Murdoch

I
t was goosebumps for me,” says
Sikhulile Moyo, laboratory director
at the Botswana-Harvard Aids
Institute Partnership in Gaborone.
On November 19, Moyo observed
“certain patterns of mutations that
we’ve never seen” in four samples
among 95 Covid-positive swabs ran-
domly selected for genome sequencing.
“We saw something very strange,”
says Moyo. Puzzled by the set of muta-
tions, he double and triple checked the
tests for contamination and to ensure
they had captured more than 95 per
cent of the viral genetic code — the
benchmark of a good sequence.
Scientists in South Africa and Hong
Kong were puzzling over the same per-
plexing constellation of genetic changes
detected in their labs — far more than in
any previous variant of Sars-Cov-2.
After alerting Botswana’s minister of
health on November 23, Moyo uploaded
data about the variant to Gisaid, the glo-
bal repository of viral genomes. “We
really didn’t imagine the impact,” he
says. “We saw the next day that South
Africa had seen the same thing and
Hong Kong too. We chatted and we real-
ised . . . these mutations were in a class
of their own.”
Meanwhile, South African epidemiol-
ogists were becoming alarmed by a
rapid rise in Covid cases in Gauteng
province, including in Johannesburg
and Pretoria. They immediately linked
this sudden surge to the appearance of a
hyper-mutated new variant, which sci-
entists called B.1.1.529 and the World
Health Organization then named Omi-
cron.

The race to decipher Omicron

Jeremy Kamil, a virologist studying
Sars-Cov-2 evolution at Louisiana State
University Health Shreveport, describes
his shock when its genome was released.
“It was like coming home from vacation
and seeing that someone hasn’t just
planted a few flowers in your garden.
They’ve remodelled the whole land-
scape,” he says.
Labs around the world are scrambling
to answer three fundamental questions:
Is Omicron more transmissible than
previous variants? Can it evade the
immunity conferred by previous Sars-
Cov-2 infection or vaccination? And
does it cause more severe disease?
Peter Openshaw, a professor of medi-
cine at Imperial College London, says
preliminary evidence suggests the
answers to the first two questions are,
“Yes, but no one knows to what extent”.
Though Omicron seems to transmit
faster than previous variants in South
Africa, it is less clear that it can outcom-
pete Delta across the world.
As for symptoms, “there’s just not
enough information about how severe
Omicron is”, he adds. “My assumption is
that for now we treat it as if it is about as
severe as Delta.”
The medical and scientific world
responded to news of B.1.1.529 far more
quickly than to any previous variant.
Just three days after learning of its exist-
ence, on November 26, the WHO desig-
nated it a Variant of Concern — the fifth
after Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.
Although scientists have been work-
ing on Omicron for little more than a
week, the public and policymakers are
desperate for information — which can
lead to the overinterpretation of anec-
dotal evidence and small scraps of data.
Ran Balicer, head of Israel’s national
Covid advisory committee, says he had
“no clue” where early estimates of Covid
vaccine efficacy, published in Israeli
media this week, had come from. “We
will experience in the coming week or
two . . . an abundance of opinions, dis-
parate pieces of data and additional
inferences by many people . . . and I
‘There’s just would suggest everyone just holds tight
and wait,” he says.
not enough Early evidence of vaccine efficacy
information against Omicron will come within days
from “virus neutralisation tests”, says
about how Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at
severe the University of East Anglia. “Essen-
tially you grow the virus in a tissue cul-
Omicron is. ture and then see whether you can stop
My it growing with blood from people who
assumption have been vaccinated.”
At the same time epidemiologists will
is that for be searching for evidence by comparing
now we rates of infection and serious illness
caused by Omicron in vaccinated and
treat it as if unvaccinated people of similar age and
it is about as demography. The UK Health Safety
Agency expects to release preliminary
severe as findings very soon.
Delta’ A bad sign came from a study released
by South African scientists on Thursday,
showing that Omicron was much more
likely than Delta to reinfect people who
had earlier been infected with the Beta
variant. They concluded that Omicron’s
“advantage is at least partially driven by
an increased ability to infect previously
infected individuals”. (This research
has not been peer reviewed.)
While waiting for firm data, vaccine
developers have been issuing informed
opinions — with differing emphasis.
Moderna said Omicron would cause a
“material” drop in efficacy, while
Oxford and BioNTech signalled that the
vaccines could continue to work well
against severe disease.
Such statements got short shrift from
the WHO. Soumya Swaminathan, the
health body’s chief scientist, says it
would be “premature to draw any con-
clusions about the efficacy of vaccines
against Omicron”.
Research would take “a few weeks”,
she says. “We need to be patient” while
waiting for “clinical effectiveness stud-
ies to truly understand if this variant is
able to overcome the immunity gener-
ated by existing vaccines”.
Antibodies vs mutations
The human immune system relies on
both antibodies (protein molecules)
and T-cells (white blood cells) to fight
infection. Looking at Omicron’s muta-
tions — about 50 altogether, including
more than 30 in the spike protein that
binds to human cells — “the bets are on
this being quite resistant in terms of
antibodies, but we don’t know yet how
much T-cell immunity will attenuate or
shorten disease”, says Openshaw.
“I think there’s good reason to believe
that the T-cell immunity will continue
to hold,” says Penny Moore, a virologist
at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg. “T-cells target many
more regions on the spike than the anti-
bodies — while mutations can knock off
antibodies more easily.”
The most recent data show that
booster jabs enhance immune protec-
tion substantially against other Covid
variants in people who have already
been doubly vaccinated. Scientists
expect them to do the same for Omi-
cron, prompting western countries such
as the US and UK to offer third doses to
all adults. But WHO officials say the pri-
ority should be to vaccinate everyone in
the world, rather than giving boosters to
healthy young adults in rich nations.
Among the drugs that have been
designed to treat Covid, one category
uses antibodies aimed at specific targets
on the virus. Scientists expect the anti-
body treatments made by Regeneron
and Eli Lilly to lose efficacy when faced
with Omicron because their target — the
spike protein — has changed, however
early tests suggest that GSK’s antibody
sotrovimab will be better able to tackle
the new variant.
GSK and its partner Vir Biotechnol-
ogy chose to base sotrovimab on an anti-
body derived from a survivor of the Sars
outbreak in 2003, caused by Sars-CoV-1,
because they thought if it could tackle
both coronaviruses, it was more likely to
be effective against future variants.
“What you are looking for is a part of
the virus that doesn’t change much in
subspecies,” says Amanda Peppercorn,
medicine development leader for GSK’s
Covid antibody programme. Most anti-
body treatments target an area at the
top of the spike protein, but GSK’s drug
hooks into the side of the spike.
Another drug type — antiviral pills
made by Pfizer and Merck of the US — is
expected to work just as well against
Omicron because, unlike the antibod-
ies, these treatments disrupt enzymes
that all coronaviruses need to replicate.
When it comes to transmission, the
speed with which Covid cases are surg-
ing in South Africa — faster than the first
three waves caused by the original Sars-
Cov-2 strain, Beta and Delta — suggests
that Omicron is indeed more infectious
than other variants. The country con-
firmed more than 11,500 new cases on
Thursday, a sharp increase from the
hundreds of daily infections being
recorded just weeks ago. Testing con-
firms that Omicron is driving South
Africa’s fourth wave.
Elsewhere in the world, reports of
Omicron are increasing fast. Most cases
A changing map: so far have a history of travel to south-
the Omicron ern Africa, though there is community
variant of transmission too. The European Centre
Sars-Cov-2 has for Disease Prevention and Control said
many more on Thursday there had been 352 con-
mutations than firmed cases in 27 countries.
previous Initial reports from South Africa
variants, which about the severity of the disease were
has alarmed the mildly encouraging, with the vast
scientists who majority of cases showing few or no
study the virus
FT montage
symptoms. But the country’s health
ministry told a briefing on Friday that
hospitalisations were now increasing
rapidly in Gauteng, with “a particularly
sharp rise” in admissions of children
under five years old.
Waiting for more to be known about
the Omicron variant is itself taking a
psychological toll. Stress from this sort
of worry could affect wellbeing through
“elevated levels of anxiety and depres-
sion, as well as disrupted sleep,” says
‘The fact Kate Sweeny, professor of psychology at
that we keep the University of California, Riverside.
“The fact that we keep having our
having our attention drawn to Covid and new vari-
attention ants is bound to be negative and harm-
ful for us both physiologically and
drawn to psychologically,” agrees Paul Dolan, a
Covid and professor at the London School of Eco-
new nomics.
But Hunter urges people not to fall
variants is into excessively gloomy moods. “Most
bound to be credible people who understand virol-
ogy say that Omicron is not going to
negative and bring Armageddon,” he says. “Most of us
harmful for would be very surprised if Covid
became nearly as bad as it was last Janu-
us both ary. I still believe we have lived through
[physically the worst months of this pandemic.”
Additional reporting by Donato Paolo
and Mancini, Sarah Neville and Hannah
mentally]’ Kuchler

Obituary In the early 1960s Italian stockbroker

Alberto Foglia was given the job of sell-
Alberto and his brother Giambattista
with substantial financial assets and
through thick and thin,” Soros told the
Financial Times. “Our families became
Unassuming and reserved, Foglia did
not seek a high profile. In 1959 he mar-

Pioneering
ing a block of shares in the typewriter their father’s brokerage firm to run. friends and we shall mourn his passing.” ried Maria Pia. The couple had three
maker Olivetti. As the stake was so large They decided to try and win more exter- In the mid-1980s, as Quantum grew in sons and a daughter.
he worked with a little-known broker in nal clients, such as wealthy investors size, Foglia, who was already sitting on During a time of political turbulence

chair of Soros’s the US called George Soros. The encoun-

ter birthed a life-long friendship and
and institutions, and wrote early
research reports in English about Italian
the fund’s board, suggested a more for-
mal board structure that would better
in Italy during the 1970s, and fearing the
possibility of kidnap, he moved to

Quantum fund
one of the hedge fund industry’s most
productive partnerships.
Foglia, who has died at the age of 93, is
best known for being the longstanding
chair of Soros’s Quantum fund, one of
the most famous and successful hedge
funds of all time. He was also a very
early pioneer of hedge fund investing,
Alberto Foglia helping the nascent industry grow in the
Hedge fund manager 1960s and 1970s and attract capital
1928-2021 from European investors.
Foglia was born in Milan in 1928, into
the heart of the Italian financial world.
His father, Antonio, a stockbroker, had
made large profits after visiting the US
in the early 1930s during the Depression
and investing in its stock market near its
lows. During the second world war,
Antonio helped the Italian resistance,
letting its leaders meet in secret in his
house. After the war he became presi-
dent of the Milan Stockbrokers’ Execu-
tive Committee.
Antonio’s death in the 1950s left
stocks for foreign investors.
Foglia’s encounter with Soros, with
whom he spent the afternoon on the tel-
ephone finding buyers in the US and
Europe for the huge block of Olivetti
shares, proved pivotal. Spotting the
talents of the Hungarian broker, who
was at that time years away from
launching his eponymous hedge fund,
Foglia gave Soros a trading account to
manage. The portfolio yielded returns
of 50-150 per cent a year — a sign of
things to come.
Foglia went on to become a large seed
investor in Soros’s early First Eagle and
Double Eagle funds and then the famous
Quantum fund, run by Soros Fund Man-
agement, which launched in 1970.
Meanwhile the pair became close
friends and would enjoy holidays
together, such as deep powder heli-ski-
ing in Canada in the late 1970s.
“Alberto Foglia was my very first cli-
ent and he remained faithful to me
represent investors and act as a sound-
ing board for Soros’s investment ideas.
With a high-powered line-up including
Nils Taube, an adviser to financier Jacob
Rothschild, and the heads of a number
of Geneva private banks, the board
needed a strong but neutral chair, and
Foglia was the obvious fit.
Foglia and Soros would speak fre-
quently, often weekly, about invest-
ments. Ahead of Soros’s most famous
investment — his bet against the pound
in 1992 — the pair discussed a similar,
much smaller trade against the lira.
The trade worked, helping to convince
Soros to bet against sterling, a trade
that entered folklore for making $1bn
on what became known as Black
Wednesday.
As a trusted adviser, Foglia was also
one of the few people to receive break-
downs of the Quantum fund’s portfolio
on a weekly basis. He eventually retired
as chair in 2003.
Alberto Foglia helped change the
nature of active investing
‘He was my very first
client and he remained
faithful to me through
thick and thin,’ said Soros
Lugano in Switzerland, where he and his
brother had set up Banca del Ceresio
years earlier.
He was also instrumental in develop-
ing the wider hedge fund industry in the
early 1960s and 1970s, when it was still
in its infancy, and was a backer of rising
stars such as Michael Steinhardt and
Julian Robertson. His business, which
ran money for family and clients, was
eventually merged into Haussmann
Holdings, one of the first funds of hedge
funds.
“He did not just develop the hedge
fund industry, he was one of a few select
European bankers who initiated it,” said
Rick Sopher, chair of LCH Investments.
“He encouraged Soros and a handful
of others to launch hedge funds in the
late 1960s and was part of a pioneering
movement that would eventually
change the nature of the active investing
industry.”
Laurence Fletcher
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 7
8 ★
SATURDAY 4 DECEMBER 2021
Vaccine passes are a vital
weapon against Covid
A touch of paternalism is now justified to contain the pandemic
Little by little, more countries are mov-
ing towards making Covid vaccines
mandatory. Austria is doing so from
February; Germany’s Bundestag is set
to vote on whether to do likewise. US
president Joe Biden wants inoculations
to be obligatory for healthcare work-
ers, but courts are blocking that for
now. Except in such frontline profes-
sions, it should not be governments’
place to decree that citizens undergo
what amounts to a medical procedure.
But with the risky-looking Omicron
variant spreading fast and vaccines
available for almost a year now, gov-
ernments are justified in encouraging
take-up — by demanding much more
widespread use of vaccine passports.
Digital passes proving the holder is
vaccinated or has Covid immunity
after an infection should be seen as part
of a suite of steps that might yet avoid
the most economically damaging
option: further prolonged lockdowns.
Even with Omicron, thought to be even
more contagious than the Delta strain,
experts say containment measures
should meaningfully slow the spread.
Making mask-wearing compulsory
in public places and on transport, for
example, is simple good sense with an
airborne virus. It imposes limited
inconvenience for most people —
though medical exemptions should be
available and consideration given to
the special needs of the deaf. Social dis-
tancing, working from home when
transmission rates demand it and lim-
its on size of gatherings all make sense.
Vaccines allowed developed coun-
tries to make big steps towards a return
to normality this year, but have not
been enough to end the pandemic. The
immunity they confer, it is now clear,
wanes over some months. Existing ver-
sions are already being challenged by
the Delta variant and, experts say, are
likely to be less effective against the
Omicron strain. But scientists and
Eating bugs: a culinary
idea with legs
Insects are an efficient and environmentally friendly source of protein
According to Britain’s Royal Entomo-
logical Society there are roughly 1.4bn
insects on earth for every single one of
its 7bn or so humans. That is testament
to how successful creepy crawlies are at
converting nutrients into protein.
Evolving at the same time as plant life,
long before the dinosaurs, this biologi-
cal class must count among the most
energy-efficient of animals. Indeed,
compared to more traditional live-
stock, it is distinctly environmentally
friendly, producing less carbon and
using less land than cows and pigs. That
is a decisive reason why the humble
bug should play a greater role in feed-
ing animals — as well as humans.
The utilitarian argument is not
enough. Eating insects should not be
seen as a hardship, a selfless act to save
the planet. Rather, it is a chance for
culinary exploration. Billions of people
worldwide already happily munch on
bugs. Grasshoppers dressed with a mix
of chilli and lime and known as
chapulines, are a popular snack in Mex-
ico, while escamol, the pupae of ants,
are a delicacy sometimes called “Mexi-
can caviar”. South Korean beondegi,
silkworm pupae, are steamed or boiled
— sometimes candied — and served as a
street food. Colombian hormigas culo-
nas, fat-bottomed ants, are fried or
toasted to make a seasonal treat.
Consumers in rich, developed coun-
tries, however, are reluctant to join in.
At least, that is, knowingly — the fresh-
est fruit and vegetables come with the
possibility of a little “bonus” protein.
That resistance should be overcome.
To combat global warming and feed the
ever growing ranks of the world’s
human population, the rich world
should turn away from pork, beef and
chicken and embrace scorpions,
spiders and beetles.
Squeamishness about bugs is under-
standable — with multiple legs, eyes
and hard shells, they hardly look appe-
pharma bosses say people with two
jabs, and especially those who have had
a booster, are still likely to enjoy good
protection against serious illness and
death caused even by Omicron.
Health authorities are right, then, to
step up vaccination and booster pro-
grammes even with existing jabs — and
to do all they can to coax people into
taking them. Requiring vaccine passes
to enter any public environment where
people gather for social or entertain-
ment purposes reduces the likelihood
of highly infectious individuals being
present, and ensures everyone has
some protection. Medical exemptions
should be available, with production of
a negative test result as an alternative
— but these should be carefully policed
to guard against abuses of the system.
Several countries have used vaccine
passes as tools of persuasion. France
and Italy introduced mandatory passes
for entertainment venues, restaurants
and long-distance trains — and Italy for
the workplace. Germany will soon
allow only those who have been jabbed
or have acquired immunity to enter
shops and cultural institutions. Experi-
ence has shown such approaches can
encourage the hesitant, though are less
effective against determined vaccine
refuseniks. They are less likely, how-
ever, than government-demanded
compulsory vaccinations to provoke a
widespread backlash.
“No jab” should not mean “no job”—
indeed, trying to impose such a rule
may fall foul of employment and anti-
discrimination laws. But employers
have a right, too, to ask for vaccine
passes in the workplace, with exemp-
tions as needed. Some will rail against
such suggestions as infringements of
liberties. But, two years after coronavi-
rus emerged, a touch of paternalism is
warranted if it can ward off new home
confinements — and help, finally, to
bring the pandemic to heel.
tising. But that sense is ultimately irra-
tional. Their aquatic cousins — mol-
luscs like scallops or crustaceans such
as lobsters — are already a staple of
western diets. French diners rave
about snails in garlic butter. Cambodi-
ans who eat fried tarantula report they
taste just like crab. Most insects might
be smaller, and served still in their car-
apace, unlike shellfish, but crispy, sour-
spicy chapulines can be every bit as
rewarding as salty, slimy, oysters.
For those who still cannot get over
the “ick” factor, there is another option
to take advantage of insect’s biological
success. Morrisons, a British super-
market, is working with an “agritech”
start-up to replace the predominately
soya diets of its egg-laying chickens
with insects. Feed is the most carbon-
intensive part of rearing poultry, esti-
mated at around 85 per cent of the total
emissions embedded in a fresh egg, and
soy farming has been linked to defor-
estation in Brazil. Chickens would eat
insects in the wild anyway, but some
entrepreneurs are looking at farmed
insects as an alternative to fishmeal,
which is often the product of unsus-
tainable overfishing.
Another option might be to take the
same path as many parents of fussy
eaters: disguise the offending food.
Earlier this year yellow mealworm
became the first insect judged safe for
human consumption by the EU food
standard’s agency under a new “novel
foods” regulatory regime. The snack,
the larval form of a type of beetle, can
be enjoyed deep fried and, reportedly,
tastes like peanuts. Alternatively, for
those who do not want a bowl of worms
on their dining room table, it can be
dried, powdered and used in baking.
Insect farmers say that the ground-up
worms can replace some of the flour,
adding an extra dose of protein as well
as a slight nutty flavour. Let’s enjoy a
slice of mealworm cake.
FTWeekend
Letters
British politicians need to defuse the war of megaphone diplomacy with their neighbours and try to restore trust, writes David Manning — Ewan White
Three-letter word strikes chord for lovers of ‘la langue française’
I’ve just read the article by Anna Gross
about the outrage in France caused by
official recognition of the gender-
neutral pronoun “iel” (“Inclusion of
gender neutral ‘iel’ in French
dictionary stirs row”, Report, FT
Weekend, November 20).
The champions of gender politics
have inevitably since been unleashed
on FT online — francophiles and
francophobes alike. But from a non-
political, purely linguistic perspective
Sino-US divide is akin to
a conflict over religion
In discussing the potential for war
between the US and China, Gillian Tett
refers to Professor Graham Allison’s
familiar Thucydides Trap analysis of
the likelihood of war between rising
and established world powers
(Spectrum, FT Weekend, November
27). In three quarters of cases cited,
war ensued. But he did not look for
potential causes of war other than the
challenges over global standing.
In the case of China and the US, there
is a more or less complete opposition of
values and systems. The dictatorial
Chinese Communist party openly
opposes the concepts of universal
human rights, elected parliaments, rule
of law and uncensored speech.
Were China a “responsible
stakeholder in the liberal, rules-based
global order” there would be no
conflict between China and the US or
the free world. The difficulty is that the
present US and free world differences
with China are more akin to those of
religious wars, which Allison’s
framework does not address.
Clyde Prestowitz
Former Trade Negotiator with Japan and
China for the Reagan Administration
President, Economic Strategy Institute
Potomac, MD, US
How kitchen
culture is
evolving for
female chefs
Notebook
by Wendell Steavenson
this issue strikes an old chord for
anglophone lovers of the French
language. French words are either
masculine or feminine. Point final.
The structure, not the subject of the
word determines its gender: la
masculinité, for example, doesn’t sound
at all odd to French ears. And when a
foreign word is appropriated it’s given
the gender of its French equivalent. So
a star of stage or screen is une star
regardless of whether it’s a man or a
Cold war quote was handy
in the Berlin airport saga
I enjoyed Frederick Studemann’s Berlin
Diary (Life & Arts, November 27)
mentioning the repeated delays in
opening the city’s new airport. It
reminded me of a tourist postcard on
sale at the time which depicted a
photograph of the late Walter Ulbricht
with the caption: “No one intends to
build a new airport”.
This was an echo Berliners would
have understood to the East German
leader’s assertion in 1961, just before
construction started, that “no one
intends to build a wall”.
Robert Hopkins
Müstair, Switzerland
Massacre, not monuments,
led to India’s independence
Rohan Fernando’s letter cannot be
allowed to pass without comment
(November 27).
He posits that a “Grateful Britain”
thanked her Indian colonial subjects
for their contribution to the first world
war by erecting monuments and
allowing a token “transfer of power”
following the Montagu declaration in
1917. This, writes Fernando, fired the
starting gun for independence for the
country.
A couple of years ago, I interviewed
Ana Ros, the self-taught chef of the
double Michelin-starred restaurant
Hisa Franko in the Slovenian Alps. I
asked her about the controversy that
sprang up when she was named Best
Female Chef in the World in 2017.
People complained the award was
discriminatory. Ros pointed out that
society as a whole was discriminatory:
male chefs she knew didn’t have to
find time to ferry kids to sports games
or endure the condescension of peers
saying, “Oh, your food is much better
than I thought it would be”. Maybe the
award was a way of recognising a
particular female struggle, she said.
Ros’s dilemma described the classic
feminist conundrum: all chefs being
equal, women wouldn’t need to be
judged in a separate category. But all is
not equal. Restaurant kitchens are
predominantly male; the percentage
of female head chefs in the UK has
been hovering at about the 20 per cent
mark for the past decade. And,
according to the Office for National
Statistics, women in the UK still
prepare home meals twice as often as
their male partners do. Despite this,
however, the cultural and culinary
landscape is changing, and the past
few years — with #MeToo, Black Lives
Matter, the global pandemic — have
accelerated progress.
“Chef” and “cook” evolved as
gendered terms. One designates work
outside the home, paid and
celebrated; the other carries a
domestic connotation. But the
distinction is more recent than you
If you are not satisfied with the FT’s response to your complaint, you can appeal
to the FT Editorial Complaints Commissioner: complaints.commissioner@ft.com
woman. Ètoile is feminine, voyez-vous?
I once read a French newspaper
report about a man who had been
badly injured in a road accident. An
ambulance rushed to the scene to
attend to the poor man but sadly, by
the time “he” got to hospital “she” had
died, as le monsieur had morphed into
la victime en route, thus changing
gender in the last moments of life.
French friends were baffled by my
confusion.
Perhaps he should be reminded that
soon after the war the British
introduced the infamous Rowlatt Act
that suppressed political expression
and allowed detention without charge
for activists fighting for independence.
The protests against this act
culminated in the massacre of peaceful
protesters at Jallianwala Bagh in April
1919. It was at Jallianwala Bagh — also
known as the Amritsar massacre —
that the starting guns were fired that
led to Indian independence, not the
monuments erected by the British.
Izhar Khan
Aberdeen, UK
Try telling a nurse or actor
that society rewards talent
I have generally admired the
contributions of Camilla Cavendish but
I find it hard to believe that she
seriously correlates the talent required
to be an MP with the level of salary
they could command elsewhere (“The
row over MPs’ second jobs has Johnson
on the run”, Opinion, FT.com, FT
Weekend, November 20).
That would imply that society
generally rewards the talented with
high salaries. Tell that to our teachers
and nurses, musicians and actors.
Jenny Hoffmann
Cirencester, Gloucestershire, UK
might think. Chef comes from “chef de
cuisine”, meaning head of the kitchen,
a term that belongs to the grammar of
the restaurant. Women have always
run eateries: pubs, cafés, diners,
trattorias, taverns. But the restaurant
is a relatively modern invention,
appearing in Paris at the end of the
18th century.
Women did not fare well in these
male preserves, but there have always
been exceptions. Eugénie Brazier,
known as La Mère Brazier, in 1933 was
the first chef to be awarded six
Michelin stars, three each for her two
restaurants — a feat not repeated by
any chef for more than 60 years.
Shut out of male kitchens, women
established their own restaurants on
their own terms, launching new
trends in the process. In the 1970s,
Alice Waters pioneered farm-to-table
at Chez Panisse in California; Ruth
Rogers and Rose Gray of the River
Cafe reimagined Italian food in
London in an office canteen; more
recently Asma Khan gained success at
the Darjeeling Express in London,
employing an all-women team.
In home kitchens, things have been
changing for a while. Twenty years
ago, Jamie Oliver showed men that it
wasn’t sissy to cook nice nosh for your
family. Trace the trajectory of cookery
books from the domestic authorities
of Mrs Beeton through Julia Child and
Delia Smith to the present day, where
our weekday dinners are as likely to
be inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi as by
a contemporary domestic goddess.
And as a growing band of female
4 December/5 December 2021
Email: letters.editor@ft.com
Include daytime telephone number and full address
Corrections: corrections@ft.com
There is one glorious exception to the
French binary rule for nouns: an
afternoon can be either masculine or
feminine. If one orders some wine to be
delivered in the afternoon, it’s un après-
midi; when then spending an afternoon
quaffing the wine under the figtree, it’s
une après-midi.
All I can say is: “Vive la différence!” Or
is it le?
Michael Poynor
Coustouge, Occitanie, France
Recalling Hamilton’s great
insight about borrowing
For pretty much my entire working
life, the dollar has been, apparently,
under threat as the global reserve
currency and John Plender sets out the
case afresh in The Long View (Opinion,
November 27).
He rightly rules out the renminbi
and suggests no other alternatives. So I
was surprised by his conclusion that
markets need “to wake up and
recognise that US government IOUs are
very unsafe assets”. Those are strong
words implying a rush for the exits. Yet
not even the Great Financial Crisis of
2008/09, the epicentre of which was
the US, put a dent in the dollar’s status.
If anything it was strengthened, in
what might be viewed as a Hamiltonian
effect (the larger the borrower, the
greater the lenders’ dependence on it,
the more power wielded by the
borrower).
Faisal Sheikh
London W1, UK
Correction
c The name of artist Kaitlin Martin was
misspelt in an article in the Collecting
section on November 27. We apologise
for the error.
chefs began jostling the men at the top
off the best-of lists — Hélène Darroze,
Clare Smyth, Anne-Sophie Pic — the
#MeToo movement effectively put an
end to head chefs yelling, leering and
throwing pots about under the cover
of machismo camaraderie. The cult of
the male restaurant chef indulged as a
badly behaved rock star has gone the
way of, well, the cult of the badly
behaved rock star.
There is still plenty to do. But post-
pandemic labour shortages have
meant that restaurants are having to
pay attention to workplace culture in
a way not seen before. Over the past
five years, the number of female chefs
in the UK has risen by a third, but
they are still under-represented in
senior positions. Women in restaurant
kitchens are no longer novelties, and
books, associations and awards are
growing in number to support
diversity in all kinds of cooking.
Crucially, the French idiom of the
fine dining experience has given way
to a more informal way of eating out
taken from many different cuisines —
small plates of tapas, sharing platters
from Chinese banquets, Mexican
street food. The absolutism of the
toque has been replaced by a far
greater democracy.
All this matters, in part, because
food is the ultimate soft power. It has
always been an instrument of cultural
expression and exchange. It has
always broken down barriers. Because
food is not just a metaphor — pressure
cooker, casserole, Dutch oven, tagine,
wok, cauldron — it is a melting pot.
4 December/5 December 2021
David
Manning
W
e were promised an
amicable Brexit. Boris
Johnson said that while
the UK might be leaving
the EU, we would still be
a positive part of Europe. Instead we
risk a series of cross-channel crises
turning into permanent confrontation.
But there is a model for better rela-
tions right under our noses. After a dec-
ade of strain between France and Italy,
President Emmanuel Macron and
prime minister Mario Draghi recently
signed a new bilateral treaty undertak-
ing to co-operate closely on a range of
issues. We should sit down with the
French and do the same, while setting
up a new systematic structure of consul-
tation with the EU as a whole.
But first we have to stop pretending
The scion of a Spanish
business dynasty is set to
take over as chair of the
clothing giant Inditex,
writes Daniel Dombey
O
ne big question has hov-
ered over Inditex, the
world’s largest clothing
retailer, for at least a dec-
ade: what happens when
Amancio Ortega goes?
The 85-year-old founder of Spain’s
biggest and best-respected company
stepped down as chair 10 years ago, but
comes in every day to its headquarters
on the Atlantic coast and still holds a
majority stake in the €89bn giant, mak-
ing him the country’s richest man.
Now the question has an answer: the
Inditex board announced this week
that, as of April 1, Ortega’s 37-year-old
daughter Marta will take over as chair of
the Zara owner.
The contrast is stark with her reclu-
sive father, who started work as a shop
assistant at 13, has never given an inter-
view, rarely wears his company’s prod-
ucts and refused to be photographed
until just before Inditex listed in 2001.
Marta’s appearances at fashion shows,
on the French and Italian Rivieras and
at society weddings have become a sta-
ple of ¡Hola! and other celebrity maga-
zines.
“She loves fashion, the world of the
image and combining them,” says a
company insider of Ortega, who was
educated at Swiss boarding school and
Regent’s University in London. “It’s
something she lives very intensely.”
After working discreetly at the group
for 15 years, Ortega announced herself
to the public in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal in August, wearing
clothes from the Zara and Massimo
Dutti ranges for an accompanying photo
shoot. “I will always be wherever the
company needs me most,” she said on
that occasion.
Inditex staff and analysts say Ortega
has followed her father closely where it
matters. Like him, she eschews an office
in Inditex’s headquarters in an indus-
trial estate in A Coruña’s outskirts, pre-
ferring to confer with colleagues at a
communal desk. And like him, her pri-
mary interest is the Zara Woman collec-
tion (Zara accounts for almost 70 per
cent of Inditex’s sales).
“It’s a very natural process for a father
to hand over to a daughter in this way:
clearly the time has come and she’s been
a lot more involved in the business than
we realised,” says Anne Critchlow, an
analyst at Société Générale, of Ortega’s
ascension. “She’s been under the radar.”
But critics see a familiar tale: an impa-
tient scion of a business dynasty elbows
aside a professional who has success-
fully managed the group — in this
instance Pablo Isla, the outgoing execu-
tive chair, under whose watch Inditex’s
market capitalisation multiplied six-
fold and who has been acclaimed by
Harvard Business Review as the world’s
top performing chief executive.
“It’s the typical story of Spanish fam-
ily companies — a moment comes when
the second generation, which has felt
under-appreciated, convinces itself that
it can run the business better than the
professionals,” says Lorenzo Bernaldo
de Quirós, president of Freemarket, a
Madrid-based consultancy.
The company fiercely rejects any
Britain needs to reset relations with France — here’s how
that the Indo-Pacific region is more
important than Europe to the UK. The
integrated review of defence and secu-
rity policy published earlier this year
argues that Britain should pivot to the
Indo-Pacific in recognition of China’s
emergence as an increasingly dominant
great power, and in response to the
growing importance of Asia economi-
cally. We should certainly take account
of these new realities, but our engage-
ment in Asia is not a substitute for
defence co-operation in Europe.
Nor does it change geography. China
is 5,000 miles from Britain; France is 20.
The immediate threat to the UK and its
European neighbours is from Russia,
which has murdered people on British
soil and seeks to undermine western
cohesion in both Nato and the EU.
If we are serious about making “Glo-
bal Britain” more than an empty slogan,
we cannot pretend that we are an Indo-
Pacific power while ignoring the conti-
nent to which we belong. It is not a ques-
tion of choosing either Asia or Europe;
we must choose both.
Person in the News | Marta Ortega
A retail heiress steps
into her father’s shoes
such characterisation, arguing that
Inditex will be run more along Anglo-
American lines, with a new CEO taking
on the leading executive role and its
management committee gaining more
powers.
“It isn’t really a case of Marta taking
over from Pablo,” adds Critchlow.
“Marta’s role is not executive, while
Pablo was executive chair.” She says the
shares fell because of Isla’s replacement
by “a relatively unknown person”, not
Ortega’s arrival.
Óscar García Maceiras, the new CEO,
has been with Inditex only since March
and his principal experience is as a law-
yer. It will be him investors will look to
as Inditex seeks to increase digitalisa-
tion and its operations’ sustainability.
But Ortega’s rise remains a story of
family ties, two marriages that shaped
Inditex and the futures of Spain’s biggest
fortune and its leading brand. Indeed,
just as her appointment this week her-
alds a shake-up of the group, so did her
birth in 1984.
★ FTWeekend
Opinion
We need to defuse the war of mega-
phone diplomacy with our neighbours
and try to restore trust.
First, we must rebuild confidence
with France so that the two European
nuclear powers, with the strongest mili-
tary forces, can work closely together.
We should consider a new bilateral
treaty as a framework for relations, pull-
ing together existing agreements.
The two Lancaster House Treaties of
2010 remain in force. The first commits
the UK and France to joint exercises and
training, to work together on military
doctrine, to the exchange of military
personnel, access to each other’s
defence procurement programmes, and
to the pooling of military resources in
military operations.
Some bilateral co-operation contin-
ues: France contributes 300 troops to
the Nato force in Estonia of which the
UK is the framework nation. The crisis
in Belarus has increased the threat in
the Baltic area and eastern Europe. Lon-
don and Paris could work together with
Germany, the Nato framework nation in
When Marta was born, Amancio was
still married to his first wife, Rosalía
Mera, who helped him start the clothing
business that prefigured Inditex, mak-
ing gowns and lingerie. According to a
biography of Mera, until the birth she
was unaware of her husband’s relation-
ship with Flora Pérez, Marta’s mother.
‘She loves fashion, the
image and combining
them. It’s something she
lives very intensely’
Today, Pérez — Amancio’s second wife
— represents the family’s 60 per cent
shareholding on the Inditex board and
two of her brothers, both of whom have
worked for the group for decades, run
Zara and Massimo Dutti. Marta’s hus-
band, Carlos Torretta, also works for
Zara.com.
By contrast, Ortega’s older half-sister,
Lithuania. An enhanced tripartite
approach by London, Paris and Berlin,
compatible with our respective Nato
commitments, would send a strong sig-
nal of joint intent.
There is also scope for further nuclear
co-operation. The second of the Lancas-
ter House Treaties provides for bilateral
co-operation on nuclear issues, includ-
Existing mechanisms for
co-operation between
the EU and other states
would not suit the UK
ing a 50-year commitment to share the
same facility to check the safety and
security of our nuclear warheads. As the
threat of proliferation grows, there is
more that we can do together.
We should develop the Combined
Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF),
which provides for a joint UK/French
force to deploy rapidly for high-inten-
Sandra, plays no role in Inditex’s
management, but on Mera’s death
in 2013 acceded to Spain’s second larg-
est fortune after Amancio himself —
estimated by Forbes at €6.3bn to his
€67bn.
The company says Ortega will retain
her role at Zara even when she takes her
place heading Inditex’s board, on which
her mother and father remain.
“These two things are very compati-
ble,” said one person close to the com-
pany. He adds that Inditex’s top man-
agement — including family members —
is “a professional team with a lot of
experience who have been there for
many years”.
Others are not convinced. “This com-
pany is like a fantastic ocean liner,” says
Bernaldo de Quirós. “It’s been handed
over in the best condition possible. The
problem is that in 10 years’ time, you
might look at it and see that it isn’t the
Queen Mary any more.”
daniel.dombey@ft.com
sity operations, as well as peacekeeping,
disaster relief and humanitarian assist-
ance. And there is a case for revisiting
the 1998 St Malo agreement on Euro-
pean defence co-operation. This pro-
vides for European autonomy of the
kind that Macron wants, and for the
increased burden sharing that succes-
sive US presidents have been demand-
ing. It also offers the basis for a new post-
Brexit UK-EU security relationship.
Second, the UK should take up the
EU’s offer of a new framework for our
relations on foreign policy and defence,
which we turned down during the Brexit
negotiations. The integrated review
claims we can be more nimble now the
UK is no longer in the EU. But the truth
is we are also easier to ignore.
Existing mechanisms for co-opera-
tion between the EU and other states
would not suit us. We need a specially
tailored set of arrangements that pro-
vide for regular meetings at ministerial
and official level to co-ordinate policy
and convene emergency meetings when
faced by a crisis. We need to be able to
Quebec’s maple syrup
cartel should be sweeter
John
Gapper
All Consuming
T
here is nothing that tastes
quite as good on a pancake
or a waffle as maple syrup,
so this week’s action by
Canadian farmers to ensure
their national product keeps flowing
provides seasonal good cheer. Millions
of pounds of “liquid gold” — half of Que-
bec’s strategic maple syrup reserve —
are on their way.
It is irresistible to laugh at the fact that
the province of Quebec not only domi-
nates the global maple syrup market but
operates a cartel that rivals Opec, the
organisation of oil-producing countries,
in effectiveness and aggression. But if
you make syrup that has fetched up to
25 times the price per gallon of oil, it
needs careful handling.
Quebec had a poor harvest last spring:
the temperature was too warm for the
cycle of night frosts followed by daytime
thaws that push sap out of maple trees
to be boiled for syrup. Faced with a fall
in production and a pandemic urge to
stock up, the Federation of Quebec
Maple Syrup Producers is unsealing
thousands of barrels it keeps in a ware-
house for such a day.
“People of the same trade seldom
meet together . . . but the conversation
ends in a conspiracy against the public,
or in some contrivance to raise prices,”
the economist Adam Smith observed in
The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The feder-
ation has managed to contrive gently
rising prices for its 11,300 producers
over the past two decades by controlling
syrup supplies.
When spring is fine and more syrup is
refined than the quotas set by the feder-
ation, threatening a fall in prices, pro-
ducers have to hand over their excess.
The reserve is stored away in 45-gallon
barrels in a 267,000 sq ft warehouse,
closely guarded since an improbable
$18m syrup heist in 2012.
No matter how neat this arrange-
ment, it is a clear restraint of trade,
albeit one that is backed by law and
enforced with fines, rather than being
blocked by antitrust bodies. Since Que-
bec’s 34m sugar and red maple trees are
the source of 72 per cent of the world’s
maple syrup, most economists would
frown on such blatant price-fixing.
But my objection to the syrup con-
spiracy is not that it defies the free mar-
ket. I sympathise with Quebec’s sugar-
ers, and not just because I acquired a
maple syrup habit while living in New
York. Sure, they operate a supply
monopoly, but who are we kidding? In a
world of supermarket chains and dis-
counters such as Aldi, tree-tappers are
hardly the most fearsome force.
Jeremy Clarkson called his British
farm, made famous in an Amazon
Prime series, Diddly Squat, for that is
what small farmers often earn. Prices
Top reads at FT.com/opinion
3 Artificial intelligence is making applying
for jobs even more miserable
Video interviews are bad for employers and
would-be employees, writes Sarah O’Connor
9
take joint and co-ordinated action with
our European allies when we deal with
crises in Hong Kong, or over the
Uyghurs, or Taiwan, or the Sahel or the
threat to Ukraine. Such a relationship
would not impinge on our sovereignty
or autonomy. Europe and the UK are
better able to deal with these threats
when we are united.
Any British government of the past 40
years would be considering these ideas
now and developing a plan. But the cur-
rent government appears not to be
doing so. Instead it is escalating the ten-
sion across the Channel. The UK will be
paying the costs for many years to come.
So let’s put down the megaphone, pick
up the telephone and start building a
new relationship with Europe that can
be the basis of a strong Global Britain. If
this government doesn’t do so, the next
one will have to.
The writer was UK ambassador to Wash-
ington, Nato and Israel. Jonathan Powell,
chief of staff to Tony Blair from 1995 to
2007, also contributed to this article
for agricultural products are set in
global markets, and producers face con-
stant price pressures. The price that
Aldi pays for bananas, for example,
determines the livelihoods of many
Latin American farmers.
We do not throw up our hands in hor-
ror at Fairtrade International, but it is a
pricing scheme, designed to set a floor
on the price that commodity farmers
gain for their output. Apple growers use
patents and trademarks to brand their
produce, such as the Cosmic Crisp pro-
duced in the US state of Washington,
and combat the supermarket squeeze.
Climate change and the volatility of
weather patterns also means that the
strategic syrup reserve, amusing as it
sounds, could become a model for other
commodities. Global warming has
altered wine harvests, and the price of
huckleberries has doubled in the past
two years because of extreme heat in the
west of the US. If only there were a huck-
leberry reserve.
No, the problem with the syrup con-
spiracy is that it enforces compliance
too rigidly and inflexibly. It is, as an offi-
cial report pointed out in 2016, “a sys-
tem that encourages deviance, which
the federation never fails to punish
heavily”. Woe betide the black market
sugarer who tries to sneak maple syrup
across the southern border to Vermont
without approval.
Storing huge quantities of syrup in big
barrels draws attention to the fact that it
is fungible — there is no difference
between one Quebec syrup producer
In a world of supermarket
chains and discounters,
tree-tappers are hardly the
most fearsome force
and another. This presents a difficulty
for the enterprising sugarer who wants
to market something distinctive, like
single malt whisky from just one distill-
ery, or craft beer from a hipster brewery.
The report found it was “perfectly
normal and defensible” for syrup pro-
ducers to crave greater identity, and
suggested one compromise: bulk syrup
could still be subject to quotas while
producers sold their brands freely in
smaller quantities. It sounds sensible to
me, but the federation responded furi-
ously that lifting quotas would “lead the
maple syrup industry to ruin”.
Really? Opec manages to be quite
powerful although it controls only 40
per cent of global oil production, and
other agricultural collectives work well
on a voluntary basis. US syrup produc-
ers have been growing faster than Que-
bec’s, and the province has to keep up
with the consumer.
Still, we should give thanks for the
strategic syrup reserve. As global supply
chains snarl, computer chips run short
and huckleberry prices soar, maple
syrup keeps pouring smoothly. O Can-
ada, that is sweet.
john.gapper@ft.com
3 Lessons from the Basque country
in ‘levelling up’
The success of this old industrial region is
worth examining, writes Martin Wolf
10 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Tourist trap Google leaves travel industry Volatile mix New virus variant and jolt from
searching for fair play — ANALYSIS, PAGE 12 the Fed put markets in a spin — ANALYSIS, PAGE 13

US regulator sues to halt Nvidia Evergrande chair faces

officials amid debt crisis
purchase of chip designer Arm ELEANOR OLCOTT — LONDON

Evergrande chair Hui Ka Yan was

summoned by Chinese government
grande’s plight would not affect wider
market stability. The China Securities
Regulatory Commission, the country’s

3 Deal could ‘stifle’ innovation 3 FTC echoes UK fears 3 Rivals raise objections officials yesterday after the embattled
property developer warned that it may
not be able to meet its financial obliga-
tions and that it planned to restructure
its offshore debt.
The decision by officials in Guangdong,
the southern province where Ever-
grande is headquartered, came hours
after the property group disclosed that
it had received a demand relating to a
$260m guarantee, without providing
any further details.
In a series of developments, the local
government in Guangdong agreed to
parachute a team of officials into the
indebted company whose financial
woes have deepened as Beijing has tight-
ened restrictions on the country’s once-
booming property sector.
The provincial government did not
provide any further information.
In a Hong Kong stock exchange filing
yesterday, Evergrande said that “there
is no guarantee that the group will have
sufficient funds to continue to perform
its financial obligations”.
Shortly after the filing, the People’s
Bank of China stepped up its criticism of
the company, accusing it of “poor man-
agement” and pursuing “blind expan-
sion”.
The central bank insisted that Ever-
stock market regulator, also told report-
ers that risks coming from the devel-
oper were controllable.
However, the scale of Evergrande’s
borrowing — the group has more than
$300bn in liabilities — has already led to
a sectorwide liquidity crisis that has
swept up rival developers such as Kaisa.
Evergrande’s outsized role in China’s
property sector has also left global
investors tracking its fate.
Evergrande chair
Hui Ka Yan is likely
to be grilled by
state officials over
the group’s
$300bn debt load
Although Evergrande has missed sev-
eral interest payments on offshore
bonds, it has not formally defaulted
because it has met its obligations before
the end of 30-day grace periods.
In the Hong Kong filing, the company
said that it “plans to actively engage
with offshore creditors to formulate a
viable restructuring plan of the com-
pany’s offshore indebtedness.”
Advisers to Evergrande’s interna-
tional bondholders have complained of
no “meaningful engagement” from the
company.

Travel & leisure

AmEx Global Business Travel

to list in NY after Spac merger
Arm’s length: Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, has so far failed to reassure regulators over the deal for the chip designer — Patrick T Fallon/Bloomberg

PETER WELLS — NEW YORK holders American Express; online

STEFANIA PALMA — WASHINGTON
RICHARD WATERS — SAN FRANCISCO
JAMES FONTANELLA-KHAN — NEW YORK
US regulators have sued to block
Nvidia’s multibillion-dollar acquisition
of UK chip design company Arm from
SoftBank, one of the most serious
threats yet to a deal that has already run
into scepticism from EU and UK
authorities.
The Federal Trade Commission said
in a statement late on Thursday that the
cash and stock transaction — which has
a valuation of $82bn and would be the
largest takeover of a semiconductor
group — would give one of the world’s
biggest chip groups control over com-
puting technology and designs that
competitors rely on to create their own
chips.
The issues echo those flagged by UK
regulators when they first expressed
concerns about the deal earlier this year.
Nvidia will have both “the means and
incentive to stifle innovative next-gen-
eration technologies”, the FTC alleged,
pointing to concerns about automated
driving systems, networking chips
found in data centres and the large-scale
facilities of cloud computing
companies.
Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s
bureau of competition, said the regula-
tor was acting in order “to prevent a chip
conglomerate from stifling the innova-
tion pipeline for next-generation
technologies”.
The regulator pegged the value of the
chip deal at $40bn, although Nvidia’s
soaring share price in the 14 months
since it was announced has more than
doubled the amount SoftBank would
realise from the sale. Nvidia will have to
pay the Japanese company a $1.25bn
break-up fee if the deal falls apart.
Nvidia said in a statement it would
“continue to work to demonstrate that
this transaction will benefit the industry
and promote competition”, adding that
it would invest in Arm’s research and
development, maintain its open licens-
ing model and ensure that its intellec-
tual property was “available to all inter-
ested licensees”.
Arm’s designs for low-power chips
already dominate the smartphone
world and the technology is being
adopted more widely, particularly in
data centres, which are the focus of
Nvidia’s latest growth push.
The prospect of Arm’s intellectual
property falling into Nvidia’s hands has
drawn objections from some rivals,
including Qualcomm. However, other
chip companies such as Broadcom that
do not compete directly have been more
supportive of the deal.
Nvidia disclosed last month that the
FTC had “expressed concerns” about
Nvidia will have both ‘the
means and incentive to
stifle innovative next-
generation technologies’
the Arm transaction and that it was in
discussions with the agency about
“remedies to address those concerns”.
The UK’s Competition and Markets
Authority in August rejected a proposed
compromise from Nvidia designed to
head off antitrust concerns. The pro-
posal involved a guarantee that Nvidia
would not block other companies from
licensing Arm’s technology or limit the
number of products they would have
access to, according to one person famil-
iar with its position.
The CMA and the European Commis-
sion have begun in-depth investigations
into the deal, pushing the potential
completion of any merger beyond
March, when Nvidia and SoftBank ini-
tially said they expected the transaction
to be finalised.
Over the past decade, almost $700bn
worth of deals have been agreed in the
chipmaking sector, about $250bn of
which were ultimately blocked, accord-
ing to Refinitiv data.
The Nvidia-Arm deal is also the latest
significant antitrust move by the Biden
administration, which has committed
to curb the power of big business by
stamping out anti-competitive
practices.
Among the deals that have been chal-
lenged by US authorities were a tie-up
between publishers Penguin Random
House and Simon & Schuster as well as a
$30bn deal between Aon and Willis
Towers Watson that would have created
the biggest insurance broker in the
world.
American Express Global Business
Travel announced it will go public in a
merger with a New York-listed blank-
cheque company backed by Apollo
Global Management in a bet on a recov-
ery in post-pandemic business travel.
The corporate travel arranger was spun
off into a joint venture in 2014 by Amer-
ican Express, which retains a 50 per cent
stake. After combining with Apollo
Strategic Growth, a special purpose
acquisition company, AmEx Global
Business Travel (GBT) will be renamed
Global Business Travel Group and listed
on the New York Stock Exchange.
The deal is expected to rake in up to
$1.2bn in proceeds, comprising about
$817m of Apollo Strategic Growth’s cash
held in trust and $335m through a pri-
vate investment in public equity (Pipe),
giving it a pro forma market capitalisa-
tion of $5.3bn.
Contributing to the Pipe component
will be new investors including Zoom;
travel technology company Sabre; pri-
vate equity groups Apollo and Ares
Management; and investment adviser
HG Vora. They will join existing share-
booking company Expedia; and bou-
tique investment firm Certares, which
recently helped lead car rental group
Hertz out of bankruptcy.
The commitments from those new
investors were “a massive vote of confi-
dence” in the company, the future of
business travel and the opportunities in
the sector, Paul Abbott, GBT chief exec-
utive, said.
The $1.4tn business travel industry
has been hit hard by the pandemic, and
has been so far slower to recover than
leisure travel. A plan for private equity
firm Carlyle Group and Singapore’s sov-
ereign wealth fund to take a 20 per cent
stage in AmEx Global Business Travel,
which would have valued the company
at about $5bn, fell apart in May 2020.
GBT, with $39bn of travel sales, is the
biggest player in the corporate travel
industry and 40 per cent larger than its
nearest competitor, giving it “a tremen-
dous runway for growth”, Abbott said.
The company is basing its financial
forecasts on business travel reaching 70
per cent of its pre-pandemic level by the
end of 2023.
See Lex

Inflation. Petrol pain

Rising fuel prices put the squeeze on car drivers in US gig economy
Ride-hailing workers are
cutting their hours or being
forced off the road, poll shows
AMANDA CHU — WASHINGTON
The surge in fuel prices across the US
has hit gig economy drivers, forcing
many to overhaul the way they work or
give up their jobs.
Drivers for ride-hailing and delivery
apps and analysts covering the sector
say that on top of changes in payment
algorithms, the 59 per cent rise in the
cost of petrol over the past 12 months
has sent chills through the industry.
Uber and Lyft, the two biggest ride-
hailing apps, are trying to ease the bur-
den by encouraging a switch to electric
vehicles, but many drivers are frus-
trated.
“Drivers seem to be driving less,” said
Melissa Berry, editor at The Rideshare
Guy, an industry blog.
This change in the way they worked in
response to fuel prices “has no doubt
exacerbated the driver shortage Uber
and Lyft have been periodically finding
themselves in”, she said.
Petrol prices posted at corner stations
have been among the most visible indi-
cators of accelerating inflation in the US.
A retreat in oil markets over the past
week may bring down retail petrol
prices, but so far drivers have experi-
enced little relief.
And the reason for the oil market
reversal — fears that the Omicron coro-
navirus variant could reduce mobility —
will hardly cheer drivers on ride-hailing
apps.
To cover extra fuel costs, many gig
drivers have adapted with changes
including rejecting more customers
who are far away. Others are quitting.
“Some drivers have been decreasing
the amount of hours that they do. Some
drivers have gone looking for other
jobs,” said Beth Griffith, a former Uber
and Lyft driver who heads the Boston
Independent Drivers Guild.
An online poll conducted this week by
The Rideshare Guy found 91 per cent of
ride-share drivers were worried about
petrol prices and about half were driv-
ing less. Twelve per cent said they
stopped driving entirely as a result of tistics collected the data. Some esti- is a top expense for many drivers, espe-
high prices. mates put the number of active Uber cially as prices are on the rise,” Uber
The population of gig drivers is hard and Lyft drivers in the US at 1m. said.
to estimate. Many sign up for multiple Last month, Uber partnered with the But drivers are sceptical that the com-
apps or work for food delivery services. apps GasBuddy and GetUpside to offer panies will provide enough relief.
About 1.6m Americans participated in fuel discounts in an attempt to help “There is a true cost associated with gig
app-based work in 2017, the most recent drivers. Lyft said it had a similar part- work. That cost continues to be handed
year in which the Bureau of Labor Sta- nership in the works. “We know that gas down to gig workers by gig companies,”
said Willy Solis, lead organiser for the
Gig Workers Collective, who also works
for delivery groups Uber Eats and Shipt.
Solis drives a 2018 Nissan Sentra in
Denton, Texas, normally putting 40
hours on the clock each week. He says
he now spends 50 per cent more on pet-
rol than five months ago and is driving
an extra hour each day to compensate.
While payment models vary across
platforms, ride-share and food delivery
drivers typically get paid a base rate for
how long and far they drive, and can
receive bonuses and tips.
But the vast majority of these workers
are classified as independent contrac-
tors, not employees, so they must cover
their own expenses, including fuel.
Those who deduct these costs from
income taxes say the savings do not
Getting a Lyft: the app says it is trying to help its drivers — David Paul Morris/Bloomberg amount to much. “Platform-based gig
work shifts economic risks to workers.
As gas, car and other expenses go up,
workers are left to cover them out of
pocket. At a time when wages need to
rise, gig work is getting more expen-
sive,” said Shelly Steward, director of
the Future of Work Initiative at The
Aspen Institute.
Eventually, high petrol prices might
speed electrification of the gig econ-
omy’s vehicle fleet, say analysts.
Last month, Uber announced plans to
provide 50,000 Tesla electric cars for
drivers to rent. Lyft has a similar rental
programme and both companies have
plans to go all-electric by 2030.
Rentals for Uber’s Teslas start at $344
a week, almost double the American
Automobile Association’s average cost
of owning a new vehicle.
Luke Thompson, a full-time Uber and
Lyft driver in Seattle, said he had
planned on buying an electric car — but
then car prices jumped above his
budget.
“I’d actually be economically better
off flying across the country, buying the
car there, and then road-tripping back,”
Thompson said.
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11

COMPANIES. WEEK IN REVIEW

Technology. New CEO BEST OF

Twitter successor Agrawal sets out

BUSINESS

to win over disgruntled investors

Meta deal blocked
3 The UK’s competition regulator ordered Meta,
Facebook’s parent company, to sell online image
platform Giphy, the first time it has unwound a com-
Dorsey’s longtime ally under pleted Big Tech deal. The Competition and Markets
Authority said the $315m takeover would have put
pressure to revive growth Meta in a position to “increase its already significant
market power in relation to other . . . platforms”.
and innovation in top job
3 Shares in Inditex fell after the world’s biggest cloth-
RICHARD WATERS ing retailer picked Marta Ortega, the 37-year-old
For anyone expecting a new broom at daughter of its
Twitter, this week’s elevation of Parag founder, Amancio
Agrawal to the role of chief executive Ortega, 85, as its new
may have come as something of an chair, in a move
anticlimax. intended to resolve
Monday’s abrupt announcement that doubts over the com-
co-founder Jack Dorsey had quit with pany’s future.
immediate effect — his second sudden
departure from the company — 3 Moderna chief
suggested that deeper change might be executive Stéphane
afoot. Dorsey may have had some con- Bancel predicted that
trol over the timing, but after agitation existing vaccines
from activist shareholders, including a would be less effective at tackling Omicron than ear-
call for his head two years ago, the man- lier strains of coronavirus and said it would take
ner of his exit left the distinct impres- months to manufacture new variant-specific jabs.
sion of an untidy compromise.
Agrawal, however, has all the hall- 3 David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs,
marks of the consummate insider and warned New York City’s leaders that they could not
has been a close ally of the outgoing take its position as a global business centre for
granted, after the pandemic prompted some resi-
dents to quit for lower-tax states such as Florida.
‘He’s very data-driven, he
can be intense. He has a 3 Shares in Singapore-based Grab fell sharply in
their Nasdaq debut after the south-east Asian super
low tolerance for things app closed a record $40bn merger deal with a New
that are suboptimal’ York-listed blank cheque company.

CEO. He has spent 10 years rising
through Twitter’s engineering ranks,
becoming chief technology officer four
years ago, and is closely associated with
many of the initiatives that have been
closest to Dorsey’s own heart.
“He’s part of the building, basically,”
said one former Twitter colleague, who
warned against expecting any signifi-
cant changes at the company.
Another noted that having Dorsey’s
ear had earned Agrawal a special place
in the Twitter hierarchy. If you wanted
to feed an idea up to the CEO, the best
start was often to plant it first with
Agrawal, this person said.
Yet despite this, Agrawal’s elevation
to one of the tech industry’s hottest seats
could be a turning point. Former
employees describe a company that
struggled to regain its confidence after
several product failures, and which lost
a hunger for the kind of constant experi-
mentation and product iteration of Sili-
con Valley’s most successful companies.
Agrawal’s fans claim he is already on the
way to fixing these problems.
Little known outside the halls of Twit-
ter, his record as an engineer and prod-
uct head have earned him a solid repu-
tation among colleagues and some Twit-
ter investors. He came to the US in 2005
as a graduate of the Indian Institute of
Technology in Mumbai and much like
the Indian-born CEOs of Microsoft and
IBM, his appointment was also seen as
an attempt to bring stronger engineer-
Meet the new ing leadership to companies in danger of
bosses: Twitter losing their technical edge.
chief executive His first years at the company
Parag Agrawal, involved helping to revamp its technical
left, who infrastructure, laying stronger founda-
replaced Jack tions for the faster pace of product inno-
Dorsey, below; vation and growth Wall Street was agi-
and new chair tating for. He came to Twitter after a
Bret Taylor PhD at Stanford University, and stints in
FT montage; Ellian Raffoul/
Courtesy of Twitter via AP;
research at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T.
Bloomberg That work brought him recognition as
Twitter’s first “distinguished engineer”,
a title with huge status in Silicon Valley’s
elite engineering circles, but which sel-
dom paves the way to a CEO position.
Since taking on the top technology
job, Agrawal has also had a hand in try-
ing to speed up Twitter’s new product
cycles. The result has been an increase
in the pace of new product introduc-
tions, including, over the past year, an
audio chatroom service and Twitter’s
first subscription offering, though nei-
ther has been a game-changer.
Doubling down on engineering and
product development, Twitter also this
week picked one of Silicon Valley’s top
product managers as chair. Though only
just out of his 30s, Bret Taylor’s record
includes helping to create Google Maps,
serving as chief technology officer at
Facebook and founding two start-ups.
More recently he has emerged as the
top product guru at Salesforce, a rise
capped the day after the shake-up at
Twitter by the news that Taylor had also
been appointed co-CEO at the business
software company.
Even among the close-knit personal
networks of Silicon Valley, this may be a
first. Five years ago, Salesforce founder
Marc Benioff tried to buy Twitter, before
bowing to pressure from his own share-
holders and backing off. Now, his new
co-CEO is inside Twitter’s boardroom.
A pure engineering mindset at the top
could overcome the indecisiveness that
crept into Twitter under Dorsey’s lead-
ership, said Alex Roetter, a former head
of engineering. Engineers “tend to look
at data and get on with things”, he said,
adding of Agrawal: “He’s very data-
driven, he can be intense. He has a low
tolerance for things that are suboptimal.
But he has a way of getting people to
want to work with him.”
Whatever his technical achieve-
ments, Agrawal’s lack of experience in
the public eye could prove a hindrance
for a company that has played an out-
sized role in the cultural zeitgeist, and
which is often at the centre of political
storms over alleged social media bias
and the spread of misinformation.
Dorsey’s personal connections helped
to make Twitter a cultural phenome-
non, one former employee says. “They
were always a little star-struck”, to meet
the founder-CEO, this person says, leav-
ing Agrawal with big shoes to fill.
With Wall Street pressing for results,
the new CEO cannot expect much of a
honeymoon. Twitter’s growth targets
call for it to raise its number of active
daily users by half by the end of 2023,
and investors are impatient for its busi-
ness to reach a scale that matches its
influence in the social media world.
“This can become a $200bn company
by leaning into the product road map
and monetising this huge and growing
user base,” insists one shareholder.
Recently, however, the valuation has
dropped below $35bn. Its stock price
has fallen by nearly half from its Febru-
ary high, to roughly where it was at the
end of Twitter’s first day as a public
company, eight years ago.
Dorsey quit after failing to convince
investors he could make a real change to
Twitter’s growth trajectory. To avoid the
same fate, Agrawal will need to come up
with some quick results.
Additional reporting by Antoine Gara and
Hannah Murphy
Nissan announced a $17.7bn
vehicle electrification plan in a bid
to ‘democratise’ battery-powered
cars and dominate the industry
3 Commonwealth Fusion Systems secured nearly
$2bn in funding from investors that include Tiger
Global Management and Bill Gates, as the US nuclear
energy group looks to develop its promising but
extremely complex nuclear fusion technology.
3 Credit Suisse chair António Horta-Osório vowed
to overhaul the bank’s pay policy after a succession of
crises, including a $5.5bn trading loss from the
implosion of Archegos Capital, angered investors.
3 Nissan announced a ¥2tn ($17.7bn) vehicle electri-
fication plan in a bid to “democratise” battery-
powered cars and assert its dominance over rival glo-
bal carmakers and newcomers such as Tesla.
3 SS&C Technologies, a US provider of financial
services software, proposed a £1.2bn offer for British
robotics software maker Blue Prism, as a bidding war
with US buyout group Vista Equity Partners steps up.
3 KPMG has told its 6,000 UK auditors that they will
be expected in the office or at client sites four days a
week after Covid-19 restrictions were eased this year.

Under the hood Online estate agency struggles to cash in on purple patch for property
UK house prices have hit new highs and sales are buoyant, but the upstarts that threatened to disrupt the industry have seen their market share slip back

This has been a blockbuster year for the branch network, Purplebricks spent Share prices have fallen for Purplebricks and Foxtons
UK housing market. Average prices heavily on marketing. Share price (pence)
have smashed through previous highs The Aim-listed group remains the Savills and LSL have more diversified revenue streams, with LSL running
and look set to end 2021 at least 10 per largest standalone agency brand, Both companies rely on a large surveying business and mortgage intermediary network, while
residential property sales Savills has commercial property businesses around the world
cent up from where they started it. accounting for almost one in 20 UK
Total sales will reach 1.5m, according sales last year. Purplebricks Foxtons Savills LSL Property Services
to estimates by property platform But the expansion of Purplebricks 500 100 1400 500
Zoopla, more than in any year since and its online peers has run aground.
2007 when the housing market was From a high point of just over 8 per cent 1200
running hot ahead of the financial crisis. of exchanges in late 2018, online agents 400 80 400
So why has Purplebricks, the biggest have slipped back to less than 7 per 1000
online-only estate agency, not fared cent of the overall share, according to
300 60 800 300
better during this frenzy? Listed in 2015, TwentyCi. Costs have increased too.
the company promised to disrupt the Purplebricks has historically relied on 52-week high
tired world of property sales. With no workers it regards as self-employed — 200 40 600 200
high street presence, it deploys roving local experts who could set their own
“local property experts” to market hours and use the Purplebricks platform 400
homes, for which it charges a flat fee of but who were not eligible for the 100 20 100
Price 200
£999, or £1,499 in and around London. benefits of full-time employment. Now
This is payable even if they do not sell, the company is shifting to a costlier full- 0 0 0 0
distinguishing it from traditional agents employment model. 2019 2020 2021 2019 2020 2021 2019 2020 2021 2019 2020 2021
which charge a commission for a sale. That shift is one factor behind a profit Source: Bloomberg
The company is among a crop of warning last month that sent the
online property groups that launched company’s shares tumbling. House sales boomed during the stamp duty holiday Strong demand during the pandemic has reduced supply
midway through the last decade, It comes as hundreds of current and
Number of transactions completed in the UK, by month (’000, seasonally adjusted) Average number of unsold houses on estate agents books (per branch)
confident they could do to traditional former Purplebricks agents prepare to
agencies what Uber did to the black cab. launch a pay claim against the company.
200 90
One competitor, easyProperty, They say that, despite being designated
announced its arrival in 2015 with a as self-employed, they were to all 180 80
mock funeral procession through the intents and purposes treated as full- 160
streets of central London. The company time employees and should therefore 70
hired orange-clad horses, a cart and a have been entitled to holiday pay, 140 60
jazz band to suggest that the death of pension benefits and sick pay. 120
the traditional agent was nigh. The claim will be filed this month and 50
100
Purplebricks, easyProperty and other follows similar, successful actions 40
online agencies did quickly eat up against Deliveroo and Uber by their 80
market share, accounting for almost 8 former workers. 30
60
per cent of all UK property exchanges in But Purplebricks’ recent struggles Increase in 20
2018, from just over 2 per cent in 2016, also owe something to runaway house 40 stamp duty
according to data company TwentyCi. sales. A glut of demand has resulted in a 20 on second Stamp duty 10
Supported by investment from Neil shortage of homes to sell. The company home holiday
0 0
Woodford and German media company said last month it was being instructed
2006 08 10 12 14 16 18 20 2005 10 15 20
Axel Springer and with a flexible on 40 per cent fewer sales than in the
Source: HMRC Transactions with a value of £40,000 or above. Aug 2021 onwards is provisional Source: UK Residential Market Survey (Oct 2021), Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
workforce and no costly leases for a previous year. George Hammond
12
Travel industry cries foul over Google’s sway
Executives accuse tech group of putting paid-for advertising and its own products above those of rivals on search engine
ALICE HANCOCK AND PHILIP GEORGIADIS
LONDON
Patrick Andrae spent eight years build-
ing an online marketplace that offers
more than 14m holiday homes for
rental. In September, HomeToGo listed
on the Frankfurt stock exchange with a
value near €1.2bn and a growth trajec-
tory that has prompted comparisons
with Airbnb.
But a holiday-maker sitting in London
and searching on Google for a vacation
rental in Berlin would struggle to find it,
by the time they had scrolled down past
a number of paid-for adverts and a link
to Google’s own holiday home rental
search that shows pictures, prices and a
map.
It is this attention-grabbing service
that particularly bothers Andrae and
others across the travel sector from
Wizz Air to Expedia. They say it is unfair
that they have to buy a paid slot if they
want to appear above Google’s proprie-
tary accommodation and flight search,
or they will appear much lower down
the screen.
Arguably the travel sector’s most
important partner, Google offers a
critical way to reach customers as the
most used search engine in the world,
particularly at a time when travel com-
panies, suffering from the effects of
Covid restrictions, need as much expo-
sure as they can get.
But Andrae said that instead of allow-
ing its algorithm to rank websites based
on the quality of the service they
offered, Google promoted either those
that paid the most in auctions for
adverts or its own travel products.
This gave it more data on what cus-
tomers were booking, further strength-
ening its hand to charge companies for
advertising and a better placement in its
rankings.
“Every company that wants to be
higher in the organic [unpaid for]
results has to fight their way up with a
good user experience, this is what
Google tries to measure. The only one
not applying these rules to their product
is Google,” Andrae said.
Peter Kern, Expedia’s chief executive,
★ FTWeekend
COMPANIES & MARKETS
Hotspot: tourists arriving in Majorca. Analysts say Google controls more than 85 per cent of online searches, with holidays a particular prize — Jaime Reina/AFP via Getty
Travel sites have recovered lost ground as restrictions have eased Searches for holiday lodgings have waned in the US and UK
% change on 2019 visits Worldwide demand for accommodation in selected country (7-day moving average)
20
Expedia
0 80
-20
Booking
-40
-60
Trivago
-80
-100
Jan 2020 2021 Oct Jan 2021
Sources: Similarweb; Google
called the company “a big bully”, add-
ing: “I don’t think it is about them want-
ing to be in our business. I think it is
about them wanting to suck all the
money out of our business and just
make us all fight for less money because
they are taking so much.”
Johannes Reck, chief executive of the
online travel agency GetYourGuide,
described the “hundreds of millions” of
advertising dollars that travel compa-
nies spent with Google as “a tax on
everyone else in the industry that I
believe is unwarranted”. Wizz Air boss
Jozsef Varadi said Google was trying to
“chip into our customer base”.
Google said that it delivered “valuable
traffic to travel companies” and that
removing tools that it had developed to
“control information that appears on
our search results page . . . would create
a worse experience for consumers and
send less traffic to travel companies”.
It does not break out the revenues it
makes from its specialised services,
which also include Shopping and Maps,
but Travel is an area that it has grown
fast. Google says that its investment in
travel is part of its “core mission” to take
“a complex set of information and make
it helpful”.
So far during the pandemic, a period
when travel businesses have lost more
than $6tn in revenues, according to the
World Travel and Tourism Council,
Google has expanded its travel plat-
form, merging holiday rentals and hotel
search services and, in September,
Airlines
United boss says Omicron is risk to key routes
STEFF CHAVEZ — CHICAGO
United Airlines chief executive Scott
Kirby has become the first boss of a big
US carrier to warn the Omicron coro-
navirus variant is a threat to transat-
lantic travel.
“My guess is we’ll have less flying to
Europe than we would have in January”
because of the new variant, Kirby told
the Financial Times as concerns grow
that Omicron could disrupt one of the
world’s most important airline routes.
The company has stopped short of
cutting flights to Europe or Africa
because of the variant, but Kirby fears
passenger numbers will drop on some of
its key routes after Omicron’s discovery
in South Africa and Botswana last
month.
However, he is not anticipating the
variant will change the overall outlook
of the airline, which has bet on expan-
sion in long-haul flights, including five
new ones from the US to London from
March, which prompted the carrier’s
100
UK
60
US
40
Thailand
20
0
Oct
launching a specialised search for activi-
ties such as visiting the Colosseum or
skiing in Lake Tahoe.
Finnbar Cornwall, Google’s industry
leader in travel, said around 50 per cent
of people researching a holiday online
dropped out of the process before they
booked because they could not find
what they were looking for.
He said Google was trying to make the
process easier to the benefit of travel
companies and consumers: “I don’t
believe that travel is a fixed pie where
everyone is fighting for a slice of a fixed
pie. There is an opportunity to bring
travel to many more people, to take the
$6tn $16bn
Revenues lost Estimated 2019
by the travel spending by the
industry during sector on Google
the pandemic advertising
friction out of it and if we can do that at
Google . . . that will bring more people
into travel and bring more people to
British Airways, to Booking.com.”
Figures from Statcounter, which
tracks web traffic, suggest that Google
controls more than 85 per cent of global
online search, meaning that its power
affects all industries. But travel is a par-
ticularly attractive prize: because holi-
days are a once or twice a year purchase,
can involve many elements and cost a
lot, consumers are more likely to spend
time on Google shopping around, giving
largest order of new planes. While it is
“too early to know for sure, my guess is
that it will have a short-term impact, but
the long-term forecast is not any differ-
ent than it was before”, he said.
The airline will continue with new
flights to Lagos, which detected its first
Omicron cases this week, and the
‘We’ve always known that
it wasn’t going to be a
straight line to recovery’
Scott Kirby, United Airlines CEO
relaunch of flights to Cape Town, where
the variant is spreading rapidly, because
of passenger demand and the need to fly
cargo to those regions.
But “we’ll wait and see”, Kirby added.
The airline currently operates eight
flights per week between the US east
coast and Johannesburg and Accra,
Ghana, in addition to its Cape Town and
Lagos routes.
4 December/5 December 2021
the group more data and more muscle to
sell advertising. In 2019, the industry
spent $16bn advertising on Google,
according to Skift Research, an analysis
firm. Expedia and Booking.com — two
of the world’s largest online travel agen-
cies — were the biggest spenders.
“Google is one of the very few compa-
nies that can reach across the entire cus-
tomer travel journey from inspiration
through to visitation,” Skift analysts
wrote. They noted that the problem was
particularly acute for sites that aggre-
gated flight or accommodation offers:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for
independent metasearch sites to sur-
vive in markets where Google has a large
presence.”
But the travel industry has been
encouraged by planned changes to
European law, hoping Google will be
forced to stop “self preferencing” — the
practice of prioritising its own products
above others in its search — as part of
the EU’s proposed Digital Markets Act.
Last month, the European General
‘I think it is about them
wanting to suck all the
money out of our business’
Peter Kern, Expedia CEO
Court in Luxembourg upheld a €2.4bn
fine on Google for abuse of its position in
online shopping, ruling that it “favours
its own comparison shopping service
over competing services, rather than a
better result”.
Emmanuel Mounier, secretary-gen-
eral of trade body EU Travel Tech, said
he hoped that the shopping case would
strengthen regulators’ resolve on the
act. “[Google’s] dominance is negative
for consumer choice and negative for
competition,” he said. “All the money
[travel companies] spend on Google, we
don’t spend on better products and bet-
ter service.”
Some parts of the industry have wel-
comed Google’s powerful ability to fun-
nel customers their way at a time of
great upheaval.
Many airline executives who had
feared Google’s encroachment on the
industry when it set up Google Flights, a
search tool that does not take bookings,
were grateful for the traffic it provided
as they struggled to fill planes and plan
route networks, one industry consult-
ant said. At the moment, Google does
not charge directly for this service.
Google’s launch in May of a feed of
hotel links that are free and ranked by
relevance to user search terms was “the
right thing to do for the industry” and
had hit its own revenues, Cornwall said,
although he did not disclose how much.
It has also introduced a system under
which hoteliers do not have to pay a fee
to the group if a booking resulting from
a Google search is cancelled. It added
that it had “invested a lot particularly
over the past year and 18 months” into
sharing data that helps travel compa-
nies to track demand.
But at the same time, it is edging
closer to being a holiday booking plat-
form, trialling a “Book with Google”
button that facilitates bookings but
without taking payments.
Axel Hefer, chief executive of Trivago,
said this meant Google was “competing
more and more” with its customers.
But Richard Clarke, an analyst at
Bernstein, said that despite Google
offering more services, processing pay-
ments would likely be “a step too far” for
regulators. “You pretend you are a
search engine but actually you are just
keeping people in your own locked
walls,” he said
The emergence of the new variant,
which has been found in the US states of
California and Minnesota, has rattled
markets and set off a global cascade of
travel restrictions from southern Africa.
The World Health Organization has
assessed the global risk related to Omi-
cron as “very high”, and the EU’s health
body has said the variant could account
for half of the bloc’s Covid-19 infections
within a few months.
Meanwhile, the chief executive of
Moderna, the third big vaccine maker,
has predicted a “material drop” in the
efficacy of its current jabs.
But Kirby was relatively upbeat, say-
ing society is improving its ability to
navigate variants. “We’ve always known
there would be other variants. We’ve
always known that it wasn’t going to be a
straight line to recovery.”
He added that the airline does not like
to see border closures and restrictions,
describing closures as an ineffective tool
to manage the pandemic.
See Lex
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 13

COMPANIES & MARKETS

Cross asset. Trading swings Equities

Allianz sets
Omicron and monetary policy out measures
fears trigger volatility surge to reverse
slide in shares
IAN SMITH
INSURANCE CORRESPONDENT

Allianz, Europe’s biggest insurer, has

Equities and bonds gyrate as
investors decipher conflicting
signals on economic outlook
ERIC PLATT, KATE DUGUID
AND JOE RENNISON — NEW YORK
Markets have been whipsawed over
the past week with the Omicron
coronavirus variant sweeping the globe
just as the US Federal Reserve signalled
its willingness to accelerate monetary
policy tightening.
Dizzying swings in global stock
markets have wiped trillions of dollars
off valuations only to partially reverse
hours later — shifts that underscore how
investors must now navigate an increas-
ingly cloudy global economic outlook.
The jolt of volatility underscores how
investors are bracing themselves for the
start of the Fed’s retreat from its massive
stimulus programme, which has helped
propel stocks to records heights.
Omicron has raised the stakes in a
year when investors have pumped hun-
dreds of billions of dollars into equities.
“Uncertainty lifts volatility, which can
cause people to stay away,” said Katie
Koch, co-head of fundamental equities
at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
“We have markets that have very
demanding valuations and they have a
lot of good news priced in, so when the
news flow turns marginally negative
that can be disruptive.”
Traders and asset managers have
been captivated by the shifts from the
Fed, which in November began rolling
back the policies it put in place to
soothe markets at the depths of the
coronavirus crisis last year.
The spread of the Omicron variant
has threatened to complicate the Fed’s
pullback, potentially undermining the
economic recovery that had given the
central bank confidence to rein in its
stimulus programme as it focuses on the
threat of hot inflation.
Fed chair Jay Powell this week voiced
his commitment to continue reducing
Wall Street’s blue-chip benchmark turns volatile
Cboe Vix index, implied volatility of the S&P 500 gauge
Jun 2021
Source: Refinitiv
the pace of the central bank’s $120bn
a month bond-buying programme, a
process that began last month. He also
signalled that elevated levels of inflation
may also warrant a faster tapering.
That back and forth, as well as news
reports that offered contradictory views
on both the strength of existing vaccines
against Omicron as well as the severity
of illness caused by the virus, provided
the fuel for dramatic gains and losses in
US equities markets.
Investors have been left grappling
with conflicting forces with tightening
financial conditions, caused in part by
market volatility, hitting up against
fears that the spread of Omicron could
curtail economic growth, typically a cue
for monetary policy easing.
“What the Fed is doing, what’s
happening with policy and what’s
happening with the economy, all of that
supports the idea that volatility will
be increasing,” said Matt Freund, co-
chief investment officer at Calamos
Investments.
Measures of equity tumult this week
jumped to the highest levels since
February with the volatility in the $22tn
Treasury market — the backbone of the
global financial system — now at the
highest since the ructions in March
2020.
The benchmark S&P 500 US stock
index on Wednesday recorded its
30
25
20
15
Dec
biggest intraday swing in price since
March, with the broad market gauge is
on pace for its worst two weeks in more
than a year.
The daily moves have been particu-
larly powerful; for three consecutive
trading sessions, the S&P 500 has
moved 2 per cent or more between its
highest and lowest points of the day, a
streak that has not happened all year.
While the US has been at the centre of
the recent market tumult, volatility has
also been increasing in Europe.
A measure of expected volatility in 50
eurozone blue-chip stocks last Friday
hit its highest level in a year and has
remained elevated. Similar indices for
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Tokyo’s
Nikkei 225 Average have also ticked up.
In addition to the uncertain economic
landscape, investors are also wrestling
with challenging trading conditions
during the holiday season between the
Thanksgiving break in the US and
Christmas.
Typically it is a time of year character-
ised by lower trading volumes and a
hesitancy among fund managers to
place big bets, instead favouring taking
risk off the table and booking profits
heading into the end of the year.
“A lot of people don’t want to trade at
this stage [of the year] and volumes may
be lower, which may increase volatility
and increase the magnitude of these
Wild ride: the moves,” said Jason Hedberg, UBS’s
US Federal head of equity derivatives sales in the
Reserve’s shifts Americas.
have captivated Greg Boutle, a derivatives strategist at
traders and BNP Paribas, added that the surge of
asset managers volatility was likely to be feeding on
Samuel Corum/Bloomberg
itself, as volatility-sensitive hedge funds
that automatically adjust their expo-
sure probably cut positions. It is selling
that can exacerbate a downturn.
Money managers also said the big
broker-dealers that they typically trade
with had raised the cost to execute
large trades, as they moved to protect
themselves from any fallout if volatility
remained high and markets lurched
lower.
In turn, some investors are either
protecting their portfolios or making
outright bets on tail risks, or unlikely
but impactful events that could send
equity markets careening lower.
John Brady, managing director at
RJ O’Brien, said guarding against
outsized moves in equity markets had
renewed significance now that the
Fed’s crisis measures — which had
underpinned asset prices — were
beginning to be withdrawn.
Others, such as Koch, said they were
using dislocations to adjust portfolios,
given some of the declines appear
overdone.
That divergence between fund
managers means that as the final few
trading days of the year approach,
investors are braced for further bouts of
volatility.
For John Leonard, the global head
of equities at Macquarie Asset
‘It is the Management, the market swings are
recalling similar events three years
natural ago when a Christmas Eve sell-off
consequence bruised stocks.
“It is the natural consequence of the
of the combined events of the emergence of
Omicron the Omicron variant and the Powell
pivot,” he said. “The combination of
variant and those two things has created the
the Powell volatility. You’re going to have to wait
for the dust to settle.”
pivot’ Additional reporting by Madison Darbyshire
unveiled a series of measures intended
to generate €12bn of excess capital as it
seeks to reverse a fall in its share price
after a profit warning in August.
It also announced a deal with insur-
ance consolidator Resolution Life and
affiliates of investment group Sixth
Street to reinsure $35bn of liabilities
relating to US annuities.
The company said the deal would
separately free up $4bn of capital from
these older policies and improve its
solvency ratio, a measure of how much
capital an insurer has against the
regulatory minimum.
Its share price edged up 0.1 per cent to
€197.52 yesterday, leaving its fall over
the past six months at about 9 per cent.
Allianz announced tougher profit
targets for the next three years,
including earnings-per-share growth of
between 5 and 7 per cent, to deliver the
€12bn.
In addition, it will offer a dividend
payout of either a 5 per cent increase
from the previous year or 50 per cent
of net income, now adjusted for
“extraordinary and volatile items”.
The minimum solvency requirement
for the payout has been lowered.
Allianz chief executive Oliver Bäte
‘There are more
transactions in the US
to come, if and when we
get good economics’
framed the reinsurance deal as the
beginning of a transformation for the
life division into an asset-gathering
business with lighter capital needs. The
group will continue to manage the assets
tied to the reinsured annuity business.
“There are more transactions in the
US to come, if and when we get good
economics,” Bäte said, citing so-called
variable annuities as one possible
example. “This is a real departure point
for Allianz Group and we’re going to
expand that into other markets as well.”
However, Allianz has yet to estimate
the anticipated financial impact from its
legal and regulatory exposure around its
so-called Structured Alpha funds in the
US.
The insurer is facing lawsuits from
investors and regulatory probes over
the performance of these funds during
last year’s pandemic-related market
ructions.
Other big US insurers have made
deals this year to free up cash from their
back books of policies.
US insurer Prudential Financial
announced in September that it was
selling a set of variable annuities to
Fortitude Re, whose backers include the
Carlyle Group, for an all-cash purchase
Our global price of $1.5bn.
team gives you AIG, another US insurer, announced a
market-moving strategic partnership with Blackstone,
news and views, which took a stake in its life and
24 hours a day retirement business in which it would
ft.com/markets manage tens of billions of dollars worth
of assets.

Fixed income Derivatives

European Banking Authority report Apple’s unusual trading has strategists

highlights broad rebound for lenders
OWEN WALKER
EUROPEAN BANKING CORRESPONDENT
European banks improved their
capital buffers, liquidity positions and
profitability in the year after the
onset of the coronavirus pandemic,
according to the latest risk assessment
of the sector by the European Banking
Authority.
But the regulator warned that banks
would need to be prepared for a
potential deterioration in the economy
and for inflationary pressure leading to
rising interest rates.
The EBA also raised concerns about
banks that had lent to industries worst
affected by the pandemic and relying on
government support schemes.
Banks played a crucial role in the first
year of the pandemic, serving as the
“transmission mechanism” through
which trillions of dollars of government
and central bank aid was distributed
to companies and consumers in an
effort to save the global economy from
collapse.
While the banks’ non-performing
loans fell from 2.9 per cent to 2.3 per
cent of their lending books over the year
to June, the EBA warned that the
proportion of non-performing loans
exposed to sectors most affected by the
pandemic was increasing.
“The asset quality of loans under
public guarantee schemes and under
moratoria is a source of concern,” the
authority said. “Accelerating house
price increases along with banks’ recent
focus on mortgage lending may become
a source of vulnerability.”
Across the 120 European banks
The European Banking Authority
flagged pandemic exposure worries
tracked by the EBA — which carries out
its risk assessment exercise once a year
— profitability rose sharply over the
year from a 0.4 per cent return on equity
to 7.4 per cent.
The EBA said the increase in
profitability was mainly due to the
reduction in impairments banks were
taking, though it added there were still
pressures on European banks’ lending
margins due to low and negative
interest rates.
“This adds to high competition not
only among banks but also with fintech
and Big Tech companies,” the EBA said.
“Despite the acceleration in branch
closures during the pandemic, operating
expenses have stabilised in the past year
as pre-existing working arrangements
have gradually resumed.”
Banks’ capital and liquidity levels also
rose over the course of the year after the
sector produced strong results in the
first half of 2021 and central bank
funding remained open.
But the EBA warned against banks’
offering overly generous dividend and
buyback policies, even though
regulatory restrictions on shareholder
returns had lifted.
pointing to options rush and Reddit
ERIC PLATT AND MADISON DARBYSHIRE
NEW YORK
Puzzling activity in Apple shares this
week has strategists pointing to a
possible cause: an explosion of trading
in options linked to one of the world’s
most valuable companies.
As the US stock market sank on news of
the spreading Omicron coronavirus
variant, shares of Apple levitated
mysteriously. And as the market later
found its footing, Apple slid sharply on a
news report that demand for its flagship
iPhone was slackening.
The moves have been accompanied
by a few of the hallmarks of the “meme
stock” craze this year, traders said,
when ferocious trading in options
markets combined with fevered
discussions on retail investor internet
message boards propelled stocks a frac-
tion of Apple’s size.
“Flow begets flow and . . . the
evidence is there that there’s been an
explosion of retail account openings and
then an explosion of option volumes,”
said Greg Boutle, a strategist with BNP
Paribas.
Apple’s market capitalisation reached
a high of $2.7tn on Tuesday and its share
price is up about 8 per cent over the past
month, while the benchmark S&P 500
index is down.
Investors pointed to several reasons
for its strength, including the fact the
company is a defensive play as
uncertainty abounds over the coronavi-
rus and as monetary policy shifts at the
US Federal Reserve.
Trading volumes in Apple have been
‘Flow begets flow and the
evidence is there that
there’s been an explosion
of retail account openings’
impressive as mentions of the company
have climbed up the ranks on Reddit
website message boards.
It was the most discussed stock this
week on the r/WallStreetBets, a forum
popular with retail investors, according
to data provider Breakout Point.
Investors have purchased an
extraordinary number of Apple call
options — derivatives contracts that pay
off if its shares rise.
On Wednesday and Thursday of this
week, more than 5m call contracts
in total were purchased with both
sessions ranking among the 15
busiest Apple options trading days in
history.
The purchases have been concen-
trated on soon-to-expire options
contracts, which are often favoured by
retail investors.
Strategists debated whether the large
call option purchases had in turn forced
up the price of Apple’s stock as
derivatives dealers tried to hedge their
exposure.
The sheer size of the trades indicated
that hedge funds and other institutional
investors were executing similar trades,
hoping to catch some of the momentum
sparked by retail investor buying,
according to Amy Wu Silverman, an
equity derivatives strategist at the Royal
Bank of Canada.
“Institutions are literally waiting for
the scent of retail because they know it
increases the momentum,” she said.
“The retail footprint becomes the
institutional footprint very quickly. It
almost snowballs what was a pure retail
move.”
14 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

COMPANIES & MARKETS

The day in the markets

On Wall Street
Double-whammy looms What you need to know

over high-yield bonds 3 US tech stocks slide in volatile

trading session
3 Weak US jobs report expected to pave
Wall Street stocks fall further after US jobs report
Indices rebased
way for hawkish monetary policy 104
3 European shares close lower for the
third consecutive week

Investors retreated from US stocks

down the prices of existing bonds as they declining to a low in July of 6.28 per cent, yesterday, dumping shares in large tech 102
Joe become less attractive. This typically
affects higher rated debt sooner than
before rising nearly a percentage point
last month to 8.28 per cent.
companies and sending the tech-heavy
Nasdaq Composite sharply lower.
Rennison lower quality bonds, despite the greater
capacity to pay of the issuer. For higher
Investors are by no means rushing to
their panic stations. The yield on Ice’s
The Nasdaq index had fallen 2.3 per
cent by early afternoon in New York, its 100
quality debt, base interest rates overall high-yield bond index is still worst slide in more than two months.
represent a larger chunk of the yield. around levels reached last year when The rout followed a mixed US jobs
The yield on a widely watched index of euphoria over the first successful report that was seen as paving the way S&P 500 Nasdaq Composite

A
higher quality, investment grade vaccine trials dominated the narrative. for more hawkish monetary policy and 98
t the end of a bumpy week corporate bonds, run by Ice Data Default rates remain low and are tighter financial conditions.
for low-rated corporate Services has been creeping upwards expected to remain low next year. And The economy added 210,000 new jobs
bonds, it is the US Federal since August on expectations that the for investors looking for higher returns last month, according to the Bureau of
Reserve, not the Omicron Fed would begin to wind down its $120bn with interest rates held low across the Labor Statistics, against 550,000 forecast
coronavirus variant, that per month bond-buying programme, globe, the US junk bond market remains by economists in a Refinitiv poll. 96
remains the biggest concern for sapping liquidity from markets. attractive. Meanwhile, the broader S&P 500 index Nov 2021 Dec
investors in the asset class. High-yield bonds are usually more Nonetheless, a more cautious tone is was down more than 1 per cent. Source: Refinitiv
By now, many debt investors have resilient to changes in Fed policy. The setting in, visible elsewhere on Wall The declines marked a volatile end to a
become used to sharp swings in markets yields on this debt are based more on an Street, too. The gap between short- and fortnight of trading characterised by big
after a flare-up in Covid-19 cases triggers long-dated Treasury yields has swings in asset prices. Mehdi, a strategist at HSBC Asset slowing global growth and the potential
a sell-off. The spread of Omicron is the narrowed to its smallest since January,
latest iteration and the tired response
Some investors warn that signalling slowing expectations for
Traders have been paying particularly
close attention to economic
Management, said that “for the Fed, this
[unemployment rate was] likely to be
for the Omicron coronavirus variant to
derail the economy recovery.
from glassy-eyed portfolio managers the Fed could find itself economic growth. developments after Federal Reserve chair enough evidence that the recovery in Germany has moved to impose social
points to the reflexive expectation that The Russell 2000 stock index of
debt prices will recover from the latest
tightening policy just as smaller, more domestically focused
Jay Powell on Tuesday signalled his
support for a quicker wind-down of the
employment is progressing at a decent
pace and with inflation at elevated levels,
curbs on unvaccinated people and US
president Joe Biden has announced
jolt. They have after every previous the economy begins to cool companies — seen as a barometer for the central bank’s $120bn a month bond- the case for a fast tapering of its asset measures to slow the spread of
Covid setback, after all. broader health of the US economy — fell purchases scheme. purchases remains intact”. coronavirus, including tighter testing
“We see it as a buying opportunity,” more than 10 per cent this week from its The programme has been a crucial In a sign of more investor unease, core requirements for international travellers.
echoed multiple bond managers in assessment of the higher risk of lending recent peak before a rebound on pillar for the rally in equities since the government debt, considered a haven In Europe, the Stoxx 600 index closed
conversations this week. In other words, to lower quality issuers. As such, a lower Thursday. depths of the coronavirus crisis last year. asset, rallied, taking the yield on the down 0.6 per cent, leaving the region-
the “buy the dip” mantra still holds for proportion of the overall yield of high- The Atlanta Fed is still forecasting While the economy added fewer jobs 10-year US Treasury note down 6 basis wide benchmark in the red for the third
many. Unlike previous shocks, though, yield debt represents base interest rates. stellar growth of about 10 per cent in the than forecast last month, the points to 1.38 per cent. consecutive week. London’s FTSE 100
this one has arrived just as crisis support And rising interest rates are offset by US for the fourth quarter but markets are unemployment rate still fell to its lowest Investors have been balancing a more declined 0.1 per cent. Joe Rennison and
measures for markets are beginning to improving corporate fundamentals, always attempting to look further out to level since the pandemic began. Hussain hawkish Fed against emerging signs of Naomi Rovnick
be pulled back. pulling down the risk of lending to low- where the economy is going, not where it
Fed chair Jay Powell said in testimony rated companies. is now.
to Congress this week that it may even be But even before Omicron roiled junk Some investors warn that the Fed Markets update
appropriate to accelerate the rollback of debt just over a week ago, yields had could find itself tightening monetary
these measures in a bid to combat high begun to rise in response to the Fed’s policy to combat inflation just as the
inflation, retiring his use of the word expected tapering of bond purchases. economy begins to cool down. And it is
“transitory” to describe the upward That cracks are emerging in the debt of here that the risk of Omicron — even if US Eurozone Japan UK China Brazil
pressure on prices. lower rated companies is unnerving, not the primary risk investors are Stocks S&P 500 Eurofirst 300 Nikkei 225 FTSE100 Shanghai Comp Bovespa
It constitutes a form of monetary especially given the deluge of lowly concerned about — comes into focus. Level 4509.72 1793.29 28029.57 7122.32 3607.43 105246.70
tightening — not what one would expect rated, triple C borrowers that have come Powell may have to choose whether to % change on day -1.47 -0.55 1.00 -0.10 0.94 0.75
if Omicron was expected to derail the to market this year, and the continued tackle inflation or tackle slowing growth. Currency $ index (DXY) $ per € Yen per $ $ per £ Rmb per $ Real per $
recovery. If it does end up curtailing weakening of lending standards and He may not be able to do both. Level 96.253 1.128 113.225 1.322 6.369 5.669
America’s current economic resurgence, investor protections in deal documents. In such a tug of war environment, % change on day 0.101 -0.353 0.230 -0.676 -0.066 0.659
then low-rated bond investors could face The recent sell-off means that the monetary policy error, as one bond fund Govt. bonds 10-year Treasury 10-year Bund 10-year JGB 10-year Gilt 10-year bond 10-year bond
a double-whammy. yield on an index of triple C rated debt manager put it, is the biggest potential Yield 1.375 -0.392 0.052 0.665 2.904 10.717
Tighter monetary policy pushes up came close to completing a round trip for risk heading into 2022. Basis point change on day -7.950 -2.200 -0.230 -5.900 1.100 -21.000
interest rates, increasing the cost of the year in November, having reached a World index, Commods FTSE All-World Oil - Brent Oil - WTI Gold Silver Metals (LMEX)
borrowing for companies and pushing peak in January of 8.33 per cent, joe.rennison@ft.com
Level 476.14 70.38 66.80 1789.25 22.86 4327.10
% change on day -0.86 -0.07 -0.70 -0.84 -0.02 -0.32

Flagging US consumer demand puts

Yesterday's close apart from: Currencies = 16:00 GMT; S&P, Bovespa, All World, Oil = 17:00 GMT; Gold, Silver = London pm fix. Bond data supplied by Tullett Prebon.

Main equity markets

economy on track for slowdown 4800

S&P 500 index
1920
Eurofirst 300 index
7520
FTSE 100 index

4640 7360
economy on track for a slowdown in mood or the optimistic assumption 1840
the first quarter of next year as that there was one in the first place. 4480 7200
inventories are wound down, reducing But what about all the money that the
1760 7040
new orders. An excess of finished goods public has in bank accounts or high- 4320
might also lead to consequent weak priced securities? According to Sterne,
| | | | | | | | |
pricing, moderating the inflation panic. “the only ones who have the savings 4160 || | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1680 || | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6880 | | | | | | | | | | |

For once, it seems, a US Federal Reserve are upper income people and they can Oct 2021 Dec Oct 2021 Dec Oct 2021 Dec
forecast — that high inflation was choose not to spend now. Consumer Biggest movers

A
transitory — could have been correct. debt levels are quite high. That is
% US Eurozone UK
s we have all become I have been following the reports of particularly the case for young people
Cooper Companies (the) 3.04 Akzo Nobel 2.54 Kingfisher 2.51
supply chain experts over economist Susan Sterne on the US — there was a substantial increase in
Nucor 2.69 Galp Energia 1.68 Pearson 2.22
the past year, more of us consumer for decades, and I do not borrowing for that age group.”
Ups

have become familiar with think anyone can match her obsessive- There have been headline increases Hewlett Packard Enterprise 2.37 Rwe 1.41 Berkeley Holdings (the) 2.02
the dread “bullwhip compulsive detail on buying trends, in pay for hourly workers such as those Eastman Chemical 2.22 Thales 1.16 Dcc 1.77
effect”, when shortages of goods inventory levels, sentiment indicators in Amazon warehouses or Walmart Dollar General 2.16 Lufthansa 1.10 Abrdn 1.70
unexpectedly turn into surpluses. Well, and labour force dynamics. stores. But the inflation that came with %
it seems the bullwhip has cracked, at Policymakers I know would agree. the recovery has eaten through most of Adobe -9.02 Thyssenkrupp -3.99 Ocado -3.18
least for many US retailers. According to Sterne, at the retail those raises. Dexcom -6.98 Vopak -3.83 Rio Tinto -3.02
Downs

Having spent months making level “this appears to be more a And the extra money flows from Tesla -6.67 Continental -3.67 Anglo American -2.96
excuses about stock shortages, they are shortage of demand than supply, which government payments to middle and Paycom Software -6.48 Safran -3.41 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust -2.78
now trying to lure consumers back into is consistent with what the consumer lower income people have dried up in Advanced Micro Devices -6.23 Swatch -2.92 Bhp -2.74
Prices taken at 17:00 GMT Based on the constituents of the FTSE Eurofirst 300 Eurozone
the store or on to the website with recent months. Having reached a peak All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted.
promises of sales, discounts and faster of close to $500bn in March, those
deliveries. But it seems the buying
For once, a US Federal were down to just above $200bn by
public are no longer so interested. Reserve forecast, that high October.
So goods such as furniture, Democrats in Congress and the Biden
inflation was transitory,
appliances and building materials, once
impossible to find, are piling up in could have been correct
administration had hoped to include
some fat transfer payment
Wall Street Europe London
warehouses and stores. programmes in the Build Back Better
Some evidence of this came with the says about current buying conditions”. package now straining through The US-listed shares of Didi Global dived Swedish Orphan Biovitrum tumbled An upgrade to its guidance lifted DIY
Chicago ISM, a midwest business Consumers, she says, are in a bad mood Congress. Those are being trimmed on news that the Chinese ride-hailing 24 per cent on news that its suitors were retailer Wickes as it forecast adjusted
barometer often seen as a leading and do not, for the most part, think back in negotiations now. Whatever group was planning to delist from the pulling out of buying the biotech group. pre-tax profit of “no less than £83m” for
indicator of economic activity this is a good time to buy things. comes out might be further cut by a New York Stock Exchange. Sobi announced in September that US the full year, which was above the
nationally. Its inventories index rose This sentiment, Sterne says, is a future Republican Congress. It was a big U-turn for the Chinese private equity firm Advent International £67m-£75m range stated in September.
8.5 points last month to 59.6, which was leading indicator as it is predictive of The public also knows tax increases group, which in June launched an initial and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Core sales were lower year on year
the highest since the US autumn in consumer spending. “I keep an eye on are coming and not just for billionaires. public offering that raised $4.4bn. GIC had teamed up through an entity “against tough comparatives”, said the
2018. Order backlogs for sale announcements on line and Payments on government sponsored Days after its US debut, though, China’s called Agnafit Bidco to buy the group for group but it was able to maintain a “better
manufacturers in the area dropped 18.8 arriving in the mail and every sale is student loans, a big burden on young cyber security regulator ordered Didi be SKr69bn ($8bn). than expected margin performance”.
points to 60.8, which is 6 points below being extended. Otherwise the retailers consumers, were deferred at the start taken off domestic app stores. But the bidders said yesterday that AJ Bell was impressed by the update.
the 12-month average. just won’t get the volume,” she says. of the pandemic. That deferral expires Property portal Zillow rallied after “since the acceptance level condition has “The most recent housing figures from
Likewise, the IHS Markit Purchasing If they don’t get that volume, they in February. announcing a share buyback programme not been fulfilled, Agnafit Bidco hereby Nationwide showed the heart of the
Managers Index for the US are going to have a lot of stuff, This suggests it will not take much in of up to $750m. withdraws the offer”. property market is still beating strongly,”
manufacturing sector for November especially durable goods such as the way of interest rate or energy price The group plummeted a month ago Investor AB, which has a 35 per cent said the broker “and, as part of the wider
pointed to increased inventory appliances, still lying around come rises to restrain “animal spirits” among after revealing that it would be winding stake in Sobi, replied: “Our focus is now to circulatory system, Wickes should be well
building. It said this often reflected January. “I think they [retailers and the public. And there will be deep down its home-flipping business. continue to create long-term value for placed to take advantage of this trend”.
concerns over future supplies. wholesalers] overestimated what discounts in stores next month. More than half the homes it expected Sobi’s shareholders.” Wickes’ rival Kingfisher, which runs the
This supply chain un-jamming seems people will rush out to buy,” she says. to re-sell during the wind-down process Swedish gaming group Evolution Screwfix and B&Q brands, also rallied.
to set the world’s largest consumer Nobody wants to spoil the holiday john.dizard@ft.com were under contract to be sold, had jumped on announcing that it would be A ratings upgrade lifted oil major BP
“reached an agreement on disposition returning money to investors. after Deutsche Bank raised its

Businesses For Sale

terms” or had already been sold, it said. It would be buying back stock up to the recommendation to “buy” from “hold” and
Steel products manufacturer Nucor value of €200m with the aim of improving increased its target price.
rallied after it too said it would be “the capital structure of the company” “Omicron-inspired skittishness and
returning money to investors. and “creating added shareholder value”. concerns over potential 2022 oil
Its board approved the repurchase of Copper producer Aurubis rallied after oversupply are understandable but we
up to $4bn worth of stock and raised its the release of a strong set of results. feel the approximate $12-per-barrel fall in
quarterly cash dividend to $0.50 per share. For the 12 months ending September Brent over the past week will prove an
Business for Sale, Business Opportunities, Business Services,
Electronic signature group DocuSign 30, operating earnings before tax jumped overreaction,” said analysts.
Business Wanted, Franchises was down as much as 40 per cent after it 60 per cent year-on-year to €353m — its Crude inventories remained below five-
Runs Daily said fourth-quarter revenue would land “most successful fiscal year in company year averages, capex discipline persisted
..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... between $557m and $563m, which fell history”, the German group said, adding and several Opec members “were already
Classified Business Advertising
short of the consensus estimate of that it had benefited from higher metal struggling to meet their quotas”, added
UK: +44 20 7873 4000 | Email: acs.emea@ft.com
$564.5m. Ray Douglas prices. Ray Douglas the broker. Ray Douglas
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 15

MARKET DATA

WORLD MARKETS AT A GLANCE FT.COM/MARKETSDATA

Change during previous day’s trading (%)
S&P 500 Nasdaq Composite Dow Jones Ind FTSE 100 FTSE Eurofirst 300 Nikkei Hang Seng FTSE All World $ $ per € $ pe r £ ¥ per $ £ pe r € Oil Brent $ Sep Gold $

-1.47% -2.72% -0.75% -0.10% -0.55% -0.09% -0.86% -0.353% -0.676% -0.84%
1.00% 0.230% 0.235% 1.74%
Stock Market movements over last 30 days, with the FTSE All-World in the same currency as a comparison
AMERICAS EUROPE ASIA
Nov 04 - - Index All World Nov 04 - Dec 03 Index All World Nov 04 - Dec 03 Index All World Nov 04 - Dec 03 Index All World Nov 04 - Dec 03 Index All World Nov 04 - Dec 03 Index All World

S&P 500 New York S&P/TSX COMP Toronto FTSE 100 London Xetra Dax Frankfurt Nikkei 225 Tokyo Kospi Seoul
4,680.06 16,029.65 29,520.90 2,983.22
21,342.13 7,279.91 2,968.33
4,509.72 7,122.32
20,572.59 15,169.98 28,029.57
Day -1.47% Month -3.21% Year 23.03% Day -0.91% Month -3.26% Year 18.25% Day -0.10% Month -1.91% Year 9.56% Day -0.61% Month -4.70% Year NaN% Day 1.00% Month -5.12% Year 4.51% Day 0.78% Month -1.50% Year 10.93%

Nasdaq Composite New York IPC Mexico City FTSE Eurofirst 300 Europe Ibex 35 Madrid Hang Seng Hong Kong FTSE Straits Times Singapore
15,811.58 51,876.81 1,869.90 9,039.40 25,225.19 3,232.37
50,974.74
14,963.66 1,793.29 8,241.70 23,766.69 3,092.11
Day -2.72% Month -5.33% Year 20.94% Day 0.09% Month -1.74% Year 16.03% Day -0.55% Month -3.95% Year 18.35% Day -0.71% Month -9.49% Year 0.25% Day -0.09% Month -5.51% Year -10.61% Day 0.32% Month -4.03% Year 10.36%

Dow Jones Industrial New York Bovespa São Paulo CAC 40 Paris FTSE MIB Milan Shanghai Composite Shanghai BSE Sensex Mumbai
36,157.58 27,522.05 3,607.43
6,987.79 60,029.06
105,616.88 105,246.70 3,526.87
6,765.52 57,696.46
34,379.93 25,938.52
Day -0.75% Month -4.86% Year 14.79% Day 0.75% Month -0.34% Year -6.26% Day -0.44% Month -2.33% Year 21.18% Day -0.26% Month -4.77% Year 17.85% Day 0.94% Month 2.90% Year 4.58% Day -1.31% Month -3.78% Year 29.46%

Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous Country Index Latest Previous
Argentina Merval 85256.40 87451.27 Cyprus
CSE M&P Gen 68.46 68.68 Italy FTSE Italia All-Share 28391.96 28515.74 Philippines Manila Comp 7055.19 7032.54 Taiwan Weighted Pr 17697.14 17724.88 Cross-Border DJ Global Titans ($) 520.13 529.67
Australia All Ordinaries 7543.60 7536.10 Czech Republic
PX 1362.79 1363.22 FTSE Italia Mid Cap 47870.95 48039.64 Poland Wig 67643.95 68203.86 Thailand Bangkok SET 1588.19 1591.84 Euro Stoxx 50 (Eur) 4069.25 4108.02
S&P/ASX 200 7241.20 7225.20 Denmark
OMXC Copenahgen 20 1753.72 1760.71 FTSE MIB 25938.52 26005.40 Portugal PSI 20 5417.41 5423.80 Turkey BIST 100 1910.41 1880.06 Euronext 100 ID 1298.50 1307.80
S&P/ASX 200 Res 4935.30 4907.50 Egypt
EGX 30 11318.35 11420.00 Japan 2nd Section 7375.22 7276.49 PSI General 4081.41 4094.23 UAE Abu Dhabi General Index 8546.52 8478.59 FTSE 4Good Global ($) 11169.13 11297.36
Austria ATX 3697.77 3689.99 Estonia
OMX Tallinn 1987.00 1961.81 Nikkei 225 28029.57 27753.37 Romania BET Index 12379.50 12207.91 UK FT 30 2692.30 2690.30 FTSE All World ($) 476.14 480.26
Belgium BEL 20 4123.99 4158.02 Finland
OMX Helsinki General 12271.96 12404.20 S&P Topix 150 1681.16 1657.03 Russia Micex Index 3913.06 3947.54 FTSE 100 7122.32 7129.21 FTSE E300 1793.29 1803.21
BEL Mid 10122.74 10187.73 France
CAC 40 6765.52 6795.75 Topix 1957.86 1926.37 RTX 1668.26 1690.13 FTSE 4Good UK 6632.94 6643.17 FTSE Eurotop 100 3380.99 3397.76
Brazil IBovespa 105246.70 104466.24 SBF 120 5259.98 5284.54 Jordan Amman SE 2066.29 2071.22 Saudi-Arabia TADAWUL All Share Index 10882.79 10849.96 FTSE All Share 4059.32 4063.89 FTSE Global 100 ($) 2962.70 3002.95
Canada S&P/TSX 60 1247.93 1257.81
Germany M-DAX 33711.12 33774.43 Kenya NSE 20 1866.08 1866.08 Singapore FTSE Straits Times 3101.93 3092.11 FTSE techMARK 100 6603.57 6636.98 FTSE Gold Min ($) 1922.57 1966.52
S&P/TSX Comp 20572.59 20762.03 TecDAX 3759.02 3773.22 Kuwait KSX Market Index 6633.44 6603.51 Slovakia SAX 396.14 398.46 USA DJ Composite 11634.03 11691.81 FTSE Latibex Top (Eur) 4440.00 4432.20
S&P/TSX Div Met & Min 1011.82 994.26 XETRA Dax 15169.98 15263.11 Latvia OMX Riga 1269.58 1268.74 Slovenia SBI TOP - - DJ Industrial 34379.93 34639.79 FTSE Multinationals ($) 3189.24 3178.18
Chile S&P/CLX IGPA Gen 21922.04 21890.20
Greece Athens Gen 879.00 876.89 Lithuania OMX Vilnius 965.47 961.99 South Africa FTSE/JSE All Share 70807.60 71020.76 DJ Transport 15903.49 15949.23 FTSE World ($) 857.67 864.88
China FTSE A200 13094.77 12979.48 FTSE/ASE 20 2111.31 2101.38 Luxembourg LuxX 1559.50 1567.54 FTSE/JSE Res 20 66503.31 67556.80 DJ Utilities 905.95 904.10 FTSEurofirst 100 (Eur) 4553.28 4579.96
FTSE B35 9000.71 8988.96
Hong Kong Hang Seng 23766.69 23788.93 Malaysia FTSE Bursa KLCI 1501.74 1496.93 FTSE/JSE Top 40 64306.68 64555.25 Nasdaq 100 15585.82 15990.76 FTSEurofirst 80 (Eur) 5679.23 5713.72
Shanghai A 3780.96 3745.77 HS China Enterprise 8455.45 8506.36 Mexico IPC 50974.74 50927.38 South Korea Kospi 2968.33 2945.27 Nasdaq Cmp 14963.66 15381.32 MSCI ACWI Fr ($) 730.10 724.65
Shanghai B 285.97 283.06 HSCC Red Chip 3833.50 3805.78 Morocco MASI 13231.41 13170.19 Kospi 200 391.96 389.64 NYSE Comp 16261.71 16475.25 MSCI All World ($) 3111.17 3087.98
Shanghai Comp 3607.43 3573.84
Hungary Bux 50904.91 51420.71 Netherlands AEX 772.22 778.80 Spain IBEX 35 8241.70 8300.80 S&P 500 4509.72 4577.10 MSCI Europe (Eur) 1851.72 1873.46
Shenzhen A 2643.67 2624.91
India BSE Sensex 57696.46 58461.29 AEX All Share 1064.79 1076.47 Sri Lanka CSE All Share 10988.32 11252.30 Wilshire 5000 46041.73 46902.70 MSCI Pacific ($) 3050.46 3064.77
Shenzhen B 1193.47 1181.77 Nifty 500 14856.30 14973.95 New Zealand NZX 50 12676.50 12670.24 Sweden OMX Stockholm 30 2240.83 2263.20 Venezuela IBC 6452.76 6447.72 S&P Euro (Eur) 1901.71 1914.11
Colombia COLCAP 1261.61 1260.21
Indonesia Jakarta Comp 6538.51 6583.82 Nigeria SE All Share 42247.98 42463.16 OMX Stockholm AS 974.90 988.78 Vietnam VNI 1443.32 1482.05 S&P Europe 350 (Eur) 1844.09 1855.10
Croatia CROBEX 2013.05 2011.29
Ireland ISEQ Overall 7859.89 7935.25 Norway Oslo All Share 1017.37 1006.88 Switzerland SMI Index 12175.77 12177.52 S&P Global 1200 ($) 3375.85 3411.86
Israel Tel Aviv 125 1955.89 1980.61 Pakistan KSE 100 43232.83 43234.15 Stoxx 50 (Eur) 3603.89 3626.34
(c) Closed. (u) Unavaliable. † Correction. ♥ Subject to official recalculation. For more index coverage please see www.ft.com/worldindices. A fuller version of this table is available on the ft.com research data archive.

STOCK MARKET: BIGGEST MOVERS UK MARKET WINNERS AND LOSERS

AMERICA LONDON EURO MARKETS TOKYO Dec 03 %Chg %Chg Dec 03 %Chg %Chg Dec 03 %Chg %Chg Dec 03 %Chg %Chg
ACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day's ACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day's ACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day's ACTIVE STOCKS stock close Day's FTSE 100 price(p) week ytd FTSE 250 price(p) week ytd FTSE SmallCap price(p) week ytd Industry Sectors price(p) week ytd
traded m's price change traded m's price change traded m's price change traded m's price change Winners Winners Winners Winners
- - - Vodafone 296.5 110.38 0.32 Asml Holding 666.0 681.20 -9.50 Softbank . 1418.5 5559.00 -40.00 Bt 168.60 9.5 24.6 Auction Technology 1480.00 16.9 - Esken 13.94 16.2 - Industrial Transportation 4686.18 33.4 22.5
- - - Rio Tinto 256.2 4578.50 -142.50 Nestle N 436.7 114.48 0.98 Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, 1011.3 6140.00 700.00 Bp 340.85 7.3 31.5 Wizz Air Holdings 4283.00 14.9 -7.6 Pendragon 21.50 15.3 71.3 Real Estate & Investment Servic 3077.13 25.4 18.0
- - - Bp 149.1 340.85 4.25 Roche Gs 365.7 349.01 -1.16 Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha 825.4 8160.00 170.00 Royal Dutch Shell 1651.40 6.1 25.1 Liontrust Asset Management 2325.00 14.3 78.2 Electra Private Equity 72.60 13.4 - Beverages 29617.36 25.1 16.5
- - - Astrazeneca 133.5 8191.00 -40.00 Totalenergies 331.1 42.33 0.31 Mitsui O.s.k.lines, 768.9 7620.00 380.00 Berkeley Holdings (the) 4549.00 6.0 -6.1 Investec 388.30 9.8 - Wickes 239.20 11.2 - Health Care Equip.& Services 7670.94 24.1 17.5
- - - Royal Dutch Shell 132.4 1646.60 17.40 Lvmh 323.9 685.00 -1.60 Tokyo Electron 714.7 59300.00 -280.00 Aviva 392.80 5.9 19.5 Redde Northgate 424.50 8.6 57.5 Barr (a.g.) 520.00 11.1 -0.6 Support Services 12391.11 21.8 11.5
- - - Bhp 131.6 2041.50 -57.50 Allianz Se Na O.n. 293.1 198.38 1.08 Fast Retailing Co., 573.8 66650.00 -490.00 Royal Dutch Shell 1646.60 5.8 29.4 Greencore 130.70 8.4 10.8 Up Global Sourcing Holdings 190.50 9.5 58.8 Gas Water & Multiutilities index 5698.81 20.9 18.5
- - - Glencore 128.5 351.90 -2.75 Sap Se O.n. 290.3 114.16 0.04 Sony 461.1 13825.00 245.00 Taylor Wimpey 163.00 5.7 -1.6 Restaurant 83.80 8.0 27.1 Jpmorgan Russian Securities 784.00 8.6 22.6 Real Estate Investment Trusts 3347.48 20.4 13.9
- - - Unilever 123.9 3879.00 7.00 Daimler Ag Na O.n. 290.3 85.63 -0.48 Toyota Motor 395.5 2079.00 33.50 Barratt Developments 718.80 4.6 5.3 Easyjet 528.20 5.7 - Palace Capital 279.50 7.9 41.0 Electricity 9809.04 19.0 10.4
- - - National Grid 110.3 1002.40 16.60 Iberdrola 274.8 9.69 0.06 Daikin Industries, 302.2 25310.00 880.00 Natwest 216.80 4.1 32.9 Rathbone Brothers 1920.00 5.4 24.7 Menzies(john) 275.00 7.8 7.4 Pharmaceuticals & Biotech. 17795.66 18.5 11.1
- - - Diageo 106.8 3846.50 5.00 Enel 265.7 6.53 -0.06 Recruit Hldgs Co Ltd 289.3 7191.00 153.00 Bhp 2041.50 4.1 4.2 Ferrexpo 286.60 5.4 1.8 Halfords 344.60 7.4 25.5 Electronic & Electrical Equip. 11610.15 17.7 8.8
Compass 1511.50 4.0 8.6 Baltic Classifieds 216.00 5.4 - Residential Secure ome 104.50 6.6 16.6 Industrial Engineering 18235.44 17.1 11.1
BIGGEST MOVERS Close Day's Day's BIGGEST MOVERS Close Day's Day's BIGGEST MOVERS Close Day's Day's BIGGEST MOVERS Close Day's Day's
Experian 3450.00 3.8 22.3 Redrow 671.80 5.4 16.0 Sthree 546.00 6.2 82.0 Media 9351.53 14.5 6.0
price change chng% price change chng% price change chng% price change chng%
Ups Ups Ups Ups Losers Losers Losers Losers
- - - Vivo Energy 135.60 4.20 3.20 Sartorius Ag Vzo O.n. 585.80 12.20 2.13 Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, 6140.00 700.00 12.87 Jd Sports Fashion 216.60 -80.3 - Ao World 93.60 -14.9 - Kkv Secured Loan Fund 12.30 -10.9 - Automobiles & Parts 3501.95 -25.7 -
- - - Aj Bell 371.00 9.80 2.71 Vonovia Se Na O.n. 50.38 0.71 1.43 Ihi 2269.00 129.00 6.03 Ocado 1626.50 -11.1 - Puretech Health 279.50 -9.8 - Funding Circle Holdings 122.00 -10.6 36.1 Travel & Leisure 7051.25 -25.2 -
- - - Tbc Bank 1600.00 40.00 2.56 Unicredit 11.13 0.12 1.09 Dentsu . 3750.00 200.00 5.63 Darktrace 426.80 -9.4 - Firstgroup 93.15 -9.5 25.9 Fisher (james) & Sons 318.00 -9.0 - Mining 19994.41 -18.3 -
- - - Kingfisher 331.00 8.10 2.51 Engie 12.98 0.14 1.06 Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings 790.00 42.00 5.61 Hargreaves Lansdown 1310.50 -7.8 - Micro Focus Int 352.20 -9.4 - Dignity 555.00 -6.7 - Food Producers 6494.59 -14.0 -
- - - Jpmorgan Japanese Investment Trust 676.00 16.00 2.42 Edf 12.55 0.12 0.97 Citizen Holdings Co., 537.00 27.00 5.29 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust 1396.50 -6.1 15.2 Wood (john) 183.40 -8.3 - Ecofin Global Utilities And Infrastructure Trust 191.25 -6.7 1.9 General Financial 10841.54 -8.6 -
Sainsbury (j) 278.20 -5.2 20.7 Reach 244.00 -8.3 73.3 The Gym 245.00 -6.1 14.0 Life Insurance 7515.87 -8.6 -9.4
Downs Downs Downs Downs
Entain 1639.00 -4.9 12.0 Oxford Biomedica 1260.00 -7.1 24.8 Senior 129.60 -5.5 44.8 Mobile Telecommunications 2823.46 -6.9 -9.9
- - - Wood (john) 183.40 -12.60 -6.43 Orsted A/s Dk 10 14.06 -0.76 -5.13 Fujifilm Holdings 8794.00 -135.00 -1.51
London Stock Exchange 6524.00 -4.8 - Aj Bell 371.00 -6.6 - Tullow Oil 41.11 -5.4 38.0 Household Goods 17078.66 -3.5 -
- - - Future 3296.00 -194.00 -5.56 Safran 98.66 -3.48 -3.41 Hitachi Zosen 859.00 -8.00 -0.92
Royal Mail 485.70 -3.9 42.7 Bridgepoint 476.00 -6.3 - Luceco 327.50 -5.3 29.4 Nonlife Insurance 3117.45 -1.8 -3.5
- - - Discoverie 983.00 -47.00 -4.56 Philips Kon 30.19 -0.89 -2.86 Shionogi & Co., 7599.00 -60.00 -0.78
Hikma Pharmaceuticals 2197.00 -3.6 - 888 Holdings 302.80 -5.9 4.2 S&U 2560.00 -5.2 14.8 Industrial Metals 5921.97 -0.6 -10.1
- - - Molten Ventures 884.00 -31.00 -3.39 Prosus 70.26 -2.04 -2.82 Fast Retailing Co., 66650.00 -490.00 -0.73
Pearson 589.00 -3.5 - Mitchells & Butlers 223.60 -5.0 0.2 Biotech Growth Trust (the) 1126.00 -4.9 - General Retailers 2651.57 -0.5 -7.0
- - - Oxford Biomedica 1260.00 -44.00 -3.37 Adidas Ag Na O.n. 249.40 -6.65 -2.60 Softbank . 5559.00 -40.00 -0.71
Flutter Entertainment 10030.00 -2.6 - Wetherspoon ( J.d.) 847.50 -5.0 -25.1 Artemis Alpha Trust 395.50 -4.7 4.2 Tobacco 27792.87 0.2 -9.2
Based on the constituents of the S&P500 Based on the constituents of the FTSE 350 index Based on the constituents of the FTSEurofirst 300 Eurozone index Based on the constituents of the Nikkei 225 index
Based on last week's performance. †Price at suspension.

CURRENCIES
DOLLAR EURO POUND DOLLAR EURO POUND DOLLAR EURO POUND DOLLAR EURO POUND
Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's Closing Day's
Dec 3 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid Change Dec 3 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid Change Dec 3 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid Change Dec 3 Currency Mid Change Mid Change Mid Change
Argentina Argentine Peso 101.1582 0.0809 114.1070 -0.2868 133.7310 -0.7767 Indonesia Indonesian Rupiah 14397.5000 20.0000 16240.4892 -31.2091 19033.5161 -99.2712 Poland Polish Zloty 4.0733 0.0096 4.5947 -0.0044 5.3848 -0.0228 ..Three Month 0.7565 0.0050 0.8531 0.0028 - -
Australia Australian Dollar 1.4252 0.0161 1.6076 0.0128 1.8841 0.0089 Israel Israeli Shekel 3.1619 -0.0057 3.5666 -0.0183 4.1800 -0.0352 Romania Romanian Leu 4.3875 0.0133 4.9492 -0.0013 5.8003 -0.0206 ..One Year 0.7562 0.0050 0.8522 0.0028 - -
Bahrain Bahrainin Dinar 0.3769 -0.0002 0.4251 -0.0016 0.4982 -0.0035 Japan Japanese Yen 113.2250 0.2600 127.7185 -0.1293 149.6834 -0.6440 Russia Russian Ruble 73.9100 0.3063 83.3709 0.0701 97.7090 -0.2387 United States United States Dollar - - 1.1280 -0.0037 1.3220 -0.0087
Bolivia Bolivian Boliviano 6.9100 - 7.7945 -0.0258 9.1350 -0.0604 ..One Month 113.2249 0.2599 127.7186 -0.1291 149.6834 -0.6440 Saudi Arabia Saudi Riyal 3.7514 - 4.2316 -0.0140 4.9593 -0.0328 ..One Month - - 1.1279 -0.2027 1.3221 -0.0088
Brazil Brazilian Real 5.6689 0.0371 6.3945 0.0208 7.4942 -0.0002 ..Three Month 113.2249 0.2598 127.7187 -0.1289 149.6833 -0.6442 Singapore Singapore Dollar 1.3722 0.0047 1.5479 0.0001 1.8140 -0.0058 ..Three Month - - 1.1277 -0.2027 1.3221 -0.0088
Canada Canadian Dollar 1.2791 -0.0035 1.4428 -0.0087 1.6909 -0.0158 ..One Year 113.2243 0.2586 127.7190 -0.1283 149.6834 -0.6452 South Africa South African Rand 16.1025 0.2363 18.1637 0.2071 21.2875 0.1736 ..One Year - - 1.1269 -0.2027 1.3218 -0.0087
Chile Chilean Peso 840.9250 2.0250 948.5686 -0.8537 1111.7024 -4.6578 Kenya Kenyan Shilling 112.7000 0.0500 127.1263 -0.3650 148.9893 -0.9188 South Korea South Korean Won 1180.1500 4.2500 1331.2165 0.3956 1560.1578 -4.6628 Vietnam Vietnamese Dong 22840.0000 105.0000 25763.7005 33.4105 30194.5131 -59.9268
China Chinese Yuan 6.3692 -0.0042 7.1845 -0.0286 8.4201 -0.0613 Kuwait Kuwaiti Dinar 0.3025 0.0002 0.3412 -0.0009 0.3998 -0.0024 Sweden Swedish Krona 9.1704 0.1295 10.3442 0.1123 12.1232 0.0922 European Union Euro 0.8865 0.0029 - - 1.1720 -0.0039
Colombia Colombian Peso 3960.0000 9.1100 4466.9060 -4.5020 5235.1197 -22.5011 Malaysia Malaysian Ringgit 4.2310 0.0010 4.7726 -0.0147 5.5934 -0.0357 Switzerland Swiss Franc 0.9202 0.0009 1.0379 -0.0024 1.2164 -0.0068 ..One Month 0.8864 0.0029 - - 1.1719 -0.0039
Costa Rica Costa Rican Colon 630.9650 0.8050 711.7324 -1.4490 834.1354 -4.4456 Mexico Mexican Peso 21.4365 0.1590 24.1805 0.0998 28.3390 0.0242 Taiwan New Taiwan Dollar 27.7135 -0.0310 31.2610 -0.1387 36.6372 -0.2836 ..Three Month 0.8863 0.0029 - - 1.1718 -0.0038
Czech Republic Czech Koruna 22.5297 0.0512 25.4136 -0.0263 29.7842 -0.1289 New Zealand New Zealand Dollar 1.4800 0.0126 1.6694 0.0087 1.9565 0.0038 Thailand Thai Baht 33.8825 0.0125 38.2197 -0.1126 44.7926 -0.2796 ..One Year 0.8854 0.0029 - - 1.1710 -0.0038
Denmark Danish Krone 6.5923 0.0220 7.4362 0.0002 8.7151 -0.0284 Nigeria Nigerian Naira 413.7500 - 466.7125 -1.5476 546.9773 -3.6176 Tunisia Tunisian Dinar 2.8838 0.0037 3.2529 -0.0066 3.8123 -0.0203
Egypt Egyptian Pound 15.7097 0.0310 17.7206 -0.0237 20.7682 -0.0961 Norway Norwegian Krone 9.1792 0.0873 10.3541 0.0644 12.1348 0.0359 Turkey Turkish Lira 13.7350 -0.0610 15.4932 -0.1204 18.1577 -0.2013
Hong Kong Hong Kong Dollar 7.7928 -0.0002 8.7903 -0.0294 10.3021 -0.0684 Pakistan Pakistani Rupee 176.5000 - 199.0931 -0.6602 233.3329 -1.5432 United Arab Emirates UAE Dirham 3.6731 - 4.1433 -0.0137 4.8558 -0.0321
Hungary Hungarian Forint 323.4663 2.2381 364.8720 1.3230 427.6223 0.1501 Peru Peruvian Nuevo Sol 4.0760 0.0005 4.5978 -0.0147 5.3885 -0.0350 United Kingdom Pound Sterling 0.7564 0.0050 0.8533 0.0028 - -
India Indian Rupee 75.1688 0.1750 84.7908 -0.0831 99.3730 -0.4244 Philippines Philippine Peso 50.3800 -0.0300 56.8289 -0.2224 66.6023 -0.4804 ..One Month 0.7565 0.0050 0.8532 0.0028 - -
Rates are derived from WM Reuters Spot Rates and MorningStar (latest rates at time of production). Some values are rounded. Currency redenominated by 1000. The exchange rates printed in this table are also available at www.FT.com/marketsdata
UK SERIES
FTSE ACTUARIES SHARE INDICES www.ft.com/equities FT 30 INDEX FTSE SECTORS: LEADERS & LAGGARDS FTSE 100 SUMMARY
Produced in conjunction with the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Dec 03 Dec 02 Dec 01 Nov 30 Nov 29 Yr Ago High Low
Year to date percentage changes Closing Day's Closing Day's
£ Strlg Day's Euro £ Strlg £ Strlg Year Div P/E X/D Total FT 30 2692.30 2690.30 2714.70 2677.00 2699.20 0.00 2870.10
Beverages 2450.90 30.44 FTSE SmallCap Index 16.34 Consumer Services 6.98 FTSE 100 Price Change FTSE 100 Price Change
Dec 03 chge% Index Dec 02 Dec 01 ago yield% Cover ratio adj Return FT 30 Div Yield - - - - - 0.00 3.93
Oil & Gas Producers2.74 29.92 Aerospace & Defense 15.34 Mining 5.94 3I Group PLC 1408.5 8.50 Johnson Matthey PLC 2043 4.00
FTSE 100 (101) 7122.32 -0.10 6499.21 7129.21 7168.68 6490.27 3.46 2.10 13.77 242.54 7047.52 P/E Ratio net - - - - - 0.00 19.44
Support Services 14.26 29.03 Industrial Transport 14.00 Life Insurance 4.31 Abrdn PLC 233.90 3.90 Kingfisher PLC 331.00 8.10
FTSE 250 (250) 22646.08 -0.17 20664.85 22684.84 22912.73 20132.44 1.94 3.46 14.85 427.62 18319.67 FT 30 hourly changes Oil & Gas 28.68 Software & Comp Serv 13.19 Consumer Goods 1.32 Admiral Group PLC 2961 -27.00 Land Securities Group PLC 745.00 3.20
FTSE 250 ex Inv Co (183) 23407.58 -0.24 21359.72 23464.14 23675.20 20639.85 1.89 1.16 45.61 384.67 19301.78 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 High Low Fixed Line Telecomms 25.70 Technology 13.08 Telecommunications 1.32 Anglo American PLC 2717 -83.00 Legal & General Group PLC 285.90 2.40
FTSE 350 (351) 4078.56 -0.11 3721.74 4083.04 4108.89 3700.05 3.20 2.24 13.95 127.85 8019.79 2690.3 2700 2698.3 2692.4 2699.5 2702.3 2704.5 2693 2690.5 2719 2686.1 Real Est Invest & Tr 21.30 Pharmace & Biotech 12.81 Beverages 31.66 Antofagasta PLC 1350.5 -37.50 Lloyds Banking Group PLC 46.48 -0.45
FTSE 350 ex Investment Trusts (282) 3971.60 -0.09 3624.14 3975.30 3997.48 3606.54 3.28 1.92 15.89 98.19 4033.29 FT30 constituents and recent additions/deletions can be found at www.ft.com/ft30 Media 21.07 Food & Drug Retailer 12.55 Household Goods & Ho -1.45 Ashtead Group PLC 6090 -22.00 London Stock Exchange Group PLC 6524 -58.00
FTSE 350 Higher Yield (113) 3224.16 0.12 2942.09 3220.26 3223.67 2937.89 4.77 1.58 13.23 143.89 7064.44 Industrial Eng 20.69 Tech Hardware & Eq 12.12 Financial Services -2.69 Associated British Foods PLC 1930 -9.00 M&G PLC 192.10 2.60
FTSE 350 Lower Yield (238) 4689.67 -0.36 4279.38 4706.50 4762.93 4233.72 1.50 4.49 14.81 82.94 5651.19
FTSE SmallCap (253) 7231.10 -0.19 6598.47 7244.95 7267.57 6064.99 2.54 4.55 8.66 168.97 11773.35 FX: EFFECTIVE INDICES Chemicals
Industrials
20.12
19.89
NON FINANCIALS Index
Health Care
11.45
10.86
Tobacco
Nonlife Insurance
-3.44
-5.08
Astrazeneca PLC 8191 -40.00 Meggitt PLC 739.80 1.20
Auto Trader Group PLC 715.40 3.80 Melrose Industries PLC 144.20 -1.50
FTSE SmallCap ex Inv Co (133) 5992.90 -0.37 5468.60 6015.02 6018.34 4798.45 2.09 1.23 38.87 106.66 10163.52
Dec 02 Dec 01 Mnth Ago Dec 03 Dec 02 Mnth Ago Industrial Metals & 19.83 Electricity 10.72 Travel & Leisure -6.09 Avast PLC 605.00 3.00 Mondi PLC 1785 -14.50
FTSE All-Share (604) 4059.32 -0.11 3704.18 4063.89 4089.19 3672.88 3.18 2.30 13.67 126.16 8061.00 Gas Water & Multi 19.63 FTSE 250 Index 10.53 Food Producers -6.27 Aveva Group PLC 3207 -27.00 National Grid PLC 1002.4 16.60
FTSE All-Share ex Inv Co (415) 3912.33 -0.10 3570.05 3916.17 3937.67 3544.37 3.26 1.91 16.06 96.26 4034.30 UK 81.47 81.37 82.01 Real Est Invest & Se 19.60 FTSE All{HY-}Share Index 10.50 Mobile Telecomms -6.99 Aviva PLC 392.80 1.50 Natwest Group PLC 216.80 -0.50
FTSE All-Share ex Multinationals (533) 1304.00 -0.11 988.25 1305.37 1318.79 1180.83 2.58 3.48 11.14 32.77 2679.80 Source: Bank of England. New Sterling ERI base Jan 2005 = 100. Other indices base average 1990 = 100. Banks 17.90 FTSE 100 Index 10.24 Health Care Eq & Srv -9.02 B&M European Value Retail S.A. 639.00 10.60 Next PLC 7992 -6.00
FTSE Fledgling (84) 13100.65 0.05 11954.51 13093.55 13194.60 10019.82 2.21 7.03 6.43 263.84 27540.26 Index rebased 1/2/95. for further information about ERIs see www.bankofengland.co.uk Construct & Material 17.75 General Retailers 9.93 Personal Goods -9.65 Bae Systems PLC 550.80 -0.80 Ocado Group PLC 1626.5 -53.50
FTSE Fledgling ex Inv Co (35) 17193.59 -0.65 15689.38 17306.16 17566.06 108.90 1.73 -3.04 -18.98 255.01 35152.16 Utilities 17.28 Financials 9.38 Leisure Goods -15.65 Barclays PLC 186.66 -0.58 Pearson PLC 589.00 12.80
FTSE All-Small (337) 5035.31 -0.18 4594.78 5044.26 5061.29 4201.76 2.52 4.67 8.50 116.74 10516.35 Electronic & Elec Eq 16.62 Equity Invest Instr 8.60 Automobiles & Parts -24.05 Barratt Developments PLC 718.80 7.80 Pershing Square Holdings LTD 2930 15.00
FTSE All-Small ex Inv Co (168) 4500.35 -0.38 4106.63 4517.44 4522.38 107.73 2.08 1.10 43.85 79.69 9666.67 Basic Materials 7.83 Oil Equipment & Serv -38.16 Berkeley Group Holdings (The) PLC 4549 90.00 Persimmon PLC 2806 19.00
FTSE AIM All-Share (743) 1182.30 -0.54 1078.87 1188.74 1196.05 1066.21 0.93 1.54 69.83 10.60 1369.53
Bhp Group PLC 2041.5 -57.50 Phoenix Group Holdings PLC 643.20 2.40
FTSE All-Share Technology (22) 2289.99 -0.33 2086.34 2297.61 2330.67 2051.44 1.49 0.85 78.58 21.12 3250.92
FTSE All-Share Telecommunications (7) 1827.06 -0.01 1664.58 1827.22 1832.90 1876.62 4.55 0.31 69.81 81.43 2633.15 FTSE GLOBAL EQUITY INDEX SERIES BP PLC
British American Tobacco PLC
340.85
2583.5
4.25
35.00
Polymetal International PLC
Prudential PLC
1355
1281
-5.00
10.50
FTSE All-Share Health Care (13) 12513.19 -0.39 11400.39 12562.75 12661.42 11648.39 3.22 0.48 64.10 237.40 11276.62 Dec 3 No of US $ Day Mth YTD Total
YTD Gr Div Dec 3 No of US $ Day Mth YTD Total YTD Gr Div British Land Company PLC 517.60 -3.00 Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC 6185 25.00
FTSE All-Share Financials (253) 4773.91 -0.17 4349.37 4781.95 4841.82 4436.53 2.75 5.44 6.67 99.72 5123.13 Regions & countries stocks indices % % % retn
% Yield Sectors stocks indices % % % retn % Yield Bt Group PLC 168.60 -0.40 Relx PLC 2344 -
FTSE All-Share Real Estate (56) 1198.48 -0.52 1142.25 1204.74 1213.16 993.38 2.45 2.07 19.65 21.94 1221.15
FTSE Global All Cap 9368 818.81 0.8 -3.0 12.5
14.5 1284.11
1.8 Oil Equipment & Services 26 230.23 1.6 1.6 21.6 408.55 27.2 4.8 Bunzl PLC 2855 3.00 Rentokil Initial PLC 610.60 -1.00
FTSE All-Share Consumer Discretionary (91) 5231.10 0.05 4765.90 5228.62 5267.65 4942.37 1.54 0.09 712.80 67.45 5418.72
FTSE Global All Cap 9368 818.81 0.8 -3.0 12.5
14.5 1284.11
1.8 Basic Materials 370 640.45 0.2 0.2 5.0 1128.83 8.9 3.9 Burberry Group PLC 1765.5 -2.00 Rightmove PLC 738.00 -6.80
FTSE All-Share Consumer Staples (25)19049.45 0.34 17355.39 18984.83 19003.54 18309.50 3.91 1.23 20.86 565.05 16795.02
FTSE Global Large Cap 1799 734.14 0.6 -2.4 12.7
14.8 1186.50
1.8 Chemicals 172 929.83 0.4 0.4 6.8 1596.95 9.1 2.2 Coca-Cola Hbc AG 2360 -21.00 Rio Tinto PLC 4578.5 -142.50
FTSE All-Share Industrials (88) 7168.97 -0.13 6531.43 7178.51 7221.03 5892.10 1.67 2.74 21.85 101.67 8117.00
FTSE Global Mid Cap 2302 1035.02 1.3 -3.8 12.9
14.8 1526.71
1.8 Forestry & Paper 21 299.13 0.8 0.8 -5.4 584.00 -2.9 2.7 Compass Group PLC 1511.5 -2.00 Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC 124.90 -0.54
FTSE All-Share Basic Materials (25) 7742.57 -1.95 7054.02 7896.26 7971.91 7051.53 6.74 2.41 6.15 367.08 9915.01
FTSE Global Small Cap 5267 1108.12 1.3 -5.6 10.1
11.6 1566.18
1.5 Industrial Metals & Mining 97 522.57 1.5 1.5 11.5 947.20 17.7 5.8 Crh PLC 3678 -2.00 Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1646.6 17.40
FTSE All-Share Energy (14) 6051.01 1.06 5512.89 5987.50 5912.78 4894.87 3.68 1.66 16.34 174.61 7087.62
FTSE All-World 4101 480.26 0.7 -2.7 12.8
14.8 797.45
1.8 Mining 80 874.17 -1.1 -1.1 -0.7 1603.64 4.9 6.0 Croda International PLC 9824 -34.00 Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1651.4 18.20
FTSE All-Share Utilities (10) 8372.19 1.25 7627.66 8268.46 8382.18 6969.92 4.28 1.65 14.20 314.67 12228.98
FTSE World 2663 864.88 0.7 -2.6 14.3
16.4 1927.50
1.8 Industrials 757 576.93 1.2 1.2 10.1 901.90 11.7 1.5 Darktrace PLC 426.80 -7.00 Royal Mail PLC 485.70 2.70
FTSE All-Share Software and Computer Services (20) 2461.49 -0.21 2242.59 2466.75 2502.27 2218.88 1.49 0.85 78.99 22.29 3697.12
FTSE Global All Cap ex UNITED KINGDOM In 9075 867.61 0.8 -2.9 12.7
14.6 1335.27
1.7 Construction & Materials 145 707.15 0.9 0.9 14.8 1164.80 16.9 1.8 Dcc PLC 5742 100.00 Sage Group PLC 775.20 1.60
FTSE All-Share Technology Hardware and Equipment (2) 6463.79 -3.68 5888.97 6710.53 6805.25 4365.73 1.59 0.93 68.07 88.39 8198.35
FTSE Global All Cap ex USA 7545 582.47 -0.4 -4.1 3.35.8 1003.70
2.5 Aerospace & Defense 35 761.17 2.4 2.4 3.8 1170.91 5.2 1.5 Diageo PLC 3846.5 5.00 Sainsbury (J) PLC 278.20 -0.60
FTSE All-Share Telecommunications Equipment (2) 630.00 -0.75 573.97 634.74 641.76 602.72 1.43 2.69 26.03 5.80 881.77
FTSE Global All Cap ex JAPAN 7976 853.72 0.9 -2.9 13.6
15.6 1351.09
1.7 General Industrials 72 268.94 1.2 1.2 6.3 463.73 8.4 2.1 Entain PLC 1639 -24.00 Schroders PLC 3437 -7.00
FTSE All-Share Telecommunications Service Providers (5) 2819.19 0.02 2568.48 2818.58 2826.43 2902.15 4.68 0.29 74.93 130.01 3697.35
FTSE Global All Cap ex Eurozone 8708 865.82 1.0 -2.7 13.0
14.9 1329.22
1.7 Electronic & Electrical Equipment 143 778.31 0.5 0.5 16.3 1100.90 17.7 1.2 Evraz PLC 585.80 -4.40 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC 1396.5 -40.00
FTSE All-Share Health Care Providers (3) 7981.51 -1.74 7271.71 8122.76 8138.89 6013.29 0.13 53.19 14.48 6.62 7368.50
FTSE Developed 2210 794.40 0.7 -2.7 14.8
16.7 1255.77
1.7 Industrial Engineering 147 1117.55 0.9 0.9 9.0 1740.89 10.7 1.6 Experian PLC 3450 -8.00 Segro PLC 1376.5 -19.00
FTSE All-Share Medical Equipment and Services (2) 5744.07 -0.67 5233.25 5782.95 5794.22 6789.88 2.21 1.07 42.18 126.98 5406.99
FTSE Developed All Cap 5824 829.81 0.8 -3.1 14.3
16.2 1292.65
1.7 Industrial Transportation 126 1050.17 1.5 1.5 14.5 1653.75 16.3 1.6 Ferguson PLC 11615 -40.00 Severn Trent PLC 2846 24.00
FTSE All-Share Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology (8)17732.69 -0.36 16155.73 17797.53 17945.00 16284.82 3.32 0.44 68.50 335.72 14384.00
FTSE Developed Large Cap 887 746.16 0.6 -2.4 15.1
17.1 1200.63
1.7 Support Services 89 684.22 1.4 1.4 6.4 1004.19 7.4 1.1 Flutter Entertainment PLC 10030 -100.00 Smith & Nephew PLC 1230 -9.50
FTSE All-Share Banks (11) 2909.96 -0.46 2651.18 2923.31 2930.58 2654.27 2.71 5.96 6.19 45.06 2471.43
FTSE Developed Europe Large Cap 237 426.22 -1.3 -5.1 8.5
11.5 818.74
2.6 Consumer Goods 540 665.64 0.2 0.2 8.9 1095.05 10.9 1.9 Fresnillo PLC 883.40 -9.00 Smith (Ds) PLC 372.60 0.50
FTSE All-Share Finance and Credit Services (7) 9409.02 -0.63 8572.28 9468.59 9686.75 12378.23 1.52 1.58 41.52 128.18 12405.82
FTSE Developed Europe Mid Cap 351 737.57 -1.1 -5.4 5.68.0 1233.55
2.3 Automobiles & Parts 128 780.80 -0.3 -0.3 27.5 1241.97 28.9 1.0 Glaxosmithkline PLC 1534.6 0.60 Smiths Group PLC 1468.5 14.00
FTSE All-Share Investment Banking and Brokerage Services (33)10264.65 0.25 9351.82 10238.81 10446.35 9420.49 3.84 2.78 9.36 317.70 13777.71
FTSE Dev Europe Small Cap 721 1056.06 -1.2 -5.9 9.6
11.7 1695.84
1.9 Beverages 68 746.04 0.6 0.6 0.9 1241.85 3.1 2.2 Glencore PLC 351.90 -2.75 Smurfit Kappa Group PLC 3845 -16.00
FTSE All-Share Closed End Investments (189)14013.16 -0.30 12766.97 14055.56 14279.36 12461.90 2.06 10.51 4.62 218.93 8560.24
FTSE North America Large Cap 256 1003.97 1.2 -1.5 20.9
22.5 1485.25
1.3 Food Producers 132 732.80 0.6 0.6 2.1 1234.75 4.4 2.4 Halma PLC 3004 10.00 Spirax-Sarco Engineering PLC 15685 5.00
FTSE All-Share Life Insurance (6) 7641.78 0.70 6962.20 7588.91 7746.45 6991.55 3.50 2.27 12.55 267.54 8970.04
FTSE North America Mid Cap 414 1260.26 2.5 -3.1 18.9
20.4 1720.09
1.4 Household Goods & Home Construction 61 610.46 0.9 0.9 6.0 1002.72 8.5 2.4 Hargreaves Lansdown PLC 1310.5 3.50 Sse PLC 1607.5 23.00
FTSE All-Share Nonlife Insurance (7) 3541.23 -0.40 3226.31 3555.47 3562.24 3722.55 4.03 1.60 15.53 125.32 7256.75
FTSE North America Small Cap 1332 1281.21 2.4 -6.2 12.0
13.1 1681.33
1.2 Leisure Goods 47 309.77 0.0 0.0 -6.1 432.18 -5.1 1.2 Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC 2197 -6.00 St. James's Place PLC 1561.5 -3.00
FTSE All-Share Real Estate Investment and Services (15) 2987.41 -0.77 2721.74 3010.67 3041.75 2537.96 1.64 2.72 22.45 35.75 8731.81
FTSE North America 670 652.41 1.4 -1.8 20.5
22.1 1.3 Personal Goods
986.31 89 1129.96 0.0 0.0 7.2 1708.67 8.7 1.4 HSBC Holdings PLC 429.70 -1.90 Standard Chartered PLC 425.90 -2.20
FTSE All-Share Real Estate Investment Trusts (41) 2980.26 -0.46 2715.23 2994.06 3012.67 2453.28 2.64 1.98 19.10 57.78 4367.17
FTSE Developed ex North America 1540 303.52 -0.8 -4.7 3.66.1 563.65
2.5 Tobacco 15 904.75 0.9 0.9 -0.4 2409.12 4.3 6.7 Imperial Brands PLC 1559 11.00 Taylor Wimpey PLC 163.00 1.20
FTSE All-Share Automobiles and Parts (2) 3519.89 -1.41 3206.87 3570.32 3770.33 3913.65 1.34 -8.37 -8.88 10.66 3635.27
FTSE Japan Large Cap 172 449.50 -0.4 -3.6 -0.91.1 2.1 Health Care
643.79 338 741.21 -0.1 -0.1 8.0 1161.06 9.8 1.6 Informa PLC 464.40 -4.40 Tesco PLC 280.10 2.25
FTSE All-Share Consumer Services (3) 2507.69 -0.16 2284.69 2511.61 2488.01 2462.36 0.01 110.73 65.31 0.13 3138.70
FTSE Japan Mid Cap 338 605.88 -0.8 -6.9 -6.0
-4.0 823.59
2.4 Health Care Equipment & Services 129 1551.14 0.5 0.5 11.5 1884.11 12.3 0.8 Intercontinental Hotels Group PLC 4544 -11.00 Unilever PLC 3879 7.00
FTSE All-Share Household Goods and Home Construction (13)14326.24 0.99 13052.21 14185.39 14224.27 14013.24 5.19 1.65 11.65 458.95 11978.64
FTSE Global wi JAPAN Small Cap 882 682.49 -0.6 -6.2 -4.3
-2.3 961.47
2.5 Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology 209 469.02 -0.6 -0.6 5.5 785.78 7.9 2.3 Intermediate Capital Group PLC 2161 21.00 United Utilities Group PLC 1085.5 5.00
FTSE All-Share Leisure Goods (2) 23719.18 -1.31 21609.84 24035.15 24235.51 25420.38 1.54 2.76 23.57 473.92 25380.70
FTSE Japan 510 183.41 -0.5 -4.2 -2.00.0 294.10
2.2 Consumer Services 454 692.66 0.9 0.9 0.4 978.36 1.2 0.9 International Consolidated Airlines Group S.A. 131.70 -0.62 Vodafone Group PLC 110.38 0.32
FTSE All-Share Personal Goods (5) 30023.74 -0.65 27353.74 30221.58 30499.05 26100.36 1.35 2.05 35.98 419.78 23007.12
FTSE Asia Pacific Large Cap ex Japan 957 831.15 0.6 -2.4 -5.0
-3.0 2.3 Food & Drug Retailers
1469.62 69 323.97 1.1 1.1 8.4 503.47 11.1 2.3 Intertek Group PLC 5460 - Whitbread PLC 2883 -5.00
FTSE All-Share Media (11) 9630.44 -0.19 8774.01 9648.93 9721.40 7932.10 1.78 1.05 53.53 177.13 6619.01
FTSE Asia Pacific Mid Cap ex Japan 920 1100.78 -0.1 -2.8 7.29.6 1872.10
2.7 General Retailers 157 1278.53 0.3 0.3 1.0 1732.10 1.6 0.7 Itv PLC 110.45 -0.95 Wpp PLC 1065 7.50
FTSE All-Share Retailers (22) 2764.91 0.83 2519.03 2742.02 2765.32 2256.23 1.30 4.01 19.26 35.28 3506.08
FTSE Asia Pacific Small Cap ex Japan 2041 701.16 -0.7 -1.8 7.9
10.0 2.1 Media
1162.40 84 464.61 1.9 1.9 -1.0 660.18 -0.2 0.8 Jd Sports Fashion PLC 216.60 1.35
FTSE All-Share Travel and Leisure (33) 6955.20 -0.48 6336.67 6988.77 7087.59 7901.09 0.12 -92.86 -9.17 11.71 7147.64
FTSE Asia Pacific Ex Japan 1877 657.28 0.5 -2.5 -3.8
-1.8 2.3 Travel & Leisure
1234.85 144 483.31 1.9 1.9 -3.0 698.03 -2.2 0.9
FTSE All-Share Beverages (5) 29728.72 0.07 27084.95 29707.46 29737.47 22878.69 1.91 1.52 34.43 353.51 23337.85
FTSE Emerging All Cap 3544 878.24 0.5 -2.0 -1.31.1 2.5 Telecommunication
1479.99 89 144.76 0.4 0.4 -6.0 327.98 -2.3 4.4
FTSE All-Share Food Producers (10) 6677.72 -0.02 6083.87 6679.06 6686.84 7110.64 1.76 2.97 19.08 112.37 6307.55
FTSE All-Share Tobacco (2) 27792.92 1.24 25321.30 27452.37 27619.43 28530.19 8.41 1.46 8.11 1715.05 24346.48
FTSE Emerging Large Cap 912 826.04 0.7 -2.1 -3.7
-1.4 2.4 Fixed Line Telecommuniations
1400.22 35 108.62 1.2 1.2 -6.6 279.93 -1.6 6.1 UK STOCK MARKET TRADING DATA
FTSE Emerging Mid Cap 979 1123.24 0.1 -2.2 7.3
10.3 3.1 Mobile Telecommunications
1899.95 54 174.82 0.0 0.0 -5.1 343.12 -2.3 3.4
FTSE All-Share Construction and Materials (15) 8523.66 0.03 7765.65 8520.98 8574.20 7159.87 2.20 0.56 80.81 73.42 10075.71 Dec 03 Dec 02 Dec 01 Nov 30 Nov 29 Yr Ago
FTSE Emerging Small Cap 1653 939.67 -0.5 -0.3 10.2
12.8 2.4 Utilities
1517.20 198 321.66 0.2 0.2 0.3 729.31 3.6 3.4
FTSE All-Share Aerospace and Defense (9) 4401.71 -0.36 4010.26 4417.53 4437.01 4207.48 2.16 8.40 5.51 94.62 5256.80 Order Book Turnover (m) 49.19 248.19 142.56 88.71 85.09 85.09
FTSE Emerging Europe 87 424.97 0.1 -8.4 14.7
20.4 4.8 Electricity
845.60 142 362.36 0.2 0.2 0.4 809.69 3.6 3.3
FTSE All-Share Electronic and Electrical Equipment (10)13716.63 0.15 12496.81 13696.66 13858.46 10849.16 1.26 2.13 37.33 156.05 13343.83 Order Book Bargains 853933.00 1039954.00 1263594.00 1131921.00 1478402.00 1478402.00
FTSE Latin America All Cap 250 688.75 1.9 -2.2 -16.2
-11.3 5.9 Gas Water & Multiutilities
1248.78 56 321.21 0.3 0.3 0.2 752.39 3.6 3.4
FTSE All-Share General Industrials (9) 5444.54 -0.20 4960.36 5455.42 5486.31 5118.97 2.38 1.16 36.14 127.94 6980.08 Order Book Shares Traded (m) 1159.00 1444.00 2417.00 1615.00 2389.00 2389.00
FTSE Middle East and Africa All Cap 332 776.41 -0.1 -2.6 18.9
22.3 2.7 Financials
1380.35 870 290.94 1.6 1.6 15.3 542.54 18.3 2.7
FTSE All-Share Industrial Engineering (5)19800.95 0.38 18040.06 19726.11 19911.84 15802.52 0.97 2.51 41.21 192.50 26163.43 Total Equity Turnover (£m) 4310.42 4004.39 6309.47 5282.09 6736.49 6736.49
FTSE Global wi UNITED KINGDOM All Cap In 293 340.87 -0.6 -4.2 7.5
11.1 3.3 Banks
673.00 268 222.85 1.3 1.3 20.8 459.36 24.9 3.3
FTSE All-Share Industrial Support Services (32)11876.32 -0.18 10820.16 11897.26 11917.87 9628.27 1.38 1.96 36.89 146.87 13403.52 Total Mkt Bargains 1091014.00 1298833.00 1590078.00 1411959.00 1809753.00 1809753.00
FTSE Global wi USA All Cap 1823 1123.50 1.6 -2.2 19.6
21.1 1.3 Nonlife Insurance
1602.74 72 336.65 1.6 1.6 12.5 545.24 16.0 3.0
FTSE All-Share Industrial Transportation (8) 6959.11 -0.30 6340.24 6980.38 7087.96 4050.41 1.20 3.15 26.50 74.78 7151.51 Total Shares Traded (m) 3745.00 4559.00 5778.00 4718.00 6031.00 6031.00
FTSE Europe All Cap 1474 509.83 -1.2 -5.3 8.2
11.1 2.6 Life Insurance
940.62 54 236.97 0.8 0.8 1.9 439.56 5.3 3.5
FTSE All-Share Industrial Materials (1)21654.04 2.61 749.48 21103.94 21579.03 19005.89 1.47 2.64 25.78 318.56 26795.36 † Excluding intra-market and overseas turnover. *UK only total at 6pm. ‡ UK plus intra-market turnover. (u) Unavaliable.
FTSE Eurozone All Cap 660 495.91 -1.7 -6.1 7.09.5 2.3 Financial Services
908.41 215 480.40 2.2 2.2 14.4 717.22 16.0 1.6
FTSE All-Share Industrial Metals and Mining (11) 6379.74 -2.29 5812.39 6529.14 6592.58 5809.56 7.51 2.43 5.48 326.68 9151.77 (c) Market closed.
FTSE EDHEC-Risk Efficient All-World 4101 525.49 1.2 -3.6 11.3
13.5 2.1 Technology
807.38 349 660.58 0.4 0.4 26.9 853.81 27.9 0.7
FTSE All-Share Precious Metals and Mining (6)19142.80 -0.08 17440.43 19157.66 19502.36 25070.78 4.27 1.81 12.92 1039.94 13040.33
FTSE EDHEC-Risk Efficient Developed Europe 588 394.77 -1.2 -5.6 5.78.2 2.4 Software & Computer Services
674.12 188 1057.39 0.9 0.9 25.8 1271.84 26.4 0.4
FTSE All-Share Chemicals (7) 18112.82 -0.11 16502.05 18132.91 18207.16 13925.05 1.80 2.55 21.85 294.26 17738.71
Oil & Gas 136 325.25 1.3 -5.8 26.0
31.7 4.1 Technology Hardware & Equipment
635.36 161 547.97 -0.1 -0.1 28.5 758.73 29.9 1.1
FTSE All-Share Oil. Gas and Coal (14) 5872.44 1.06 5350.21 5810.81 5738.29 4750.42 3.68 1.66 16.34 169.47 7133.52 All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted. All elements listed are indicative and believed
Oil & Gas Producers 95 313.22 1.4 -4.7 29.6
35.8 4.2 Alternative Energy
626.56 15 231.67 -1.6 -1.6 -13.8 331.05 -13.3 0.5
accurate at the time of publication. No offer is made by Morningstar or the FT. The FT does not warrant nor
FTSE Sector Indices Real Estate Investment & Services 160 327.21 0.7 0.7 -8.8 619.71 -6.4 2.9
Non Financials (351) 4883.84 -0.10 4456.57 4888.54 4909.98 90.77 3.30 1.54 19.71 121.31 8535.47 Real Estate Investment Trusts 101 556.79 1.9 1.9 22.5 1259.53 25.6 2.8 guarantee that the information is reliable or complete. The FT does not accept responsibility and will not be
FTSE Global Large Cap 1799 734.14 0.6 0.6 12.7 1186.50 14.8 1.8 liable for any loss arising from the reliance on or use of the listed information.
The FTSE Global Equity Series, launched in 2003, contains the FTSE Global Small Cap Indices and broader FTSE Global All Cap Indices (large/mid/small cap) as well as the enhanced FTSE All-World index Series (large/ For all queries e-mail ft.reader.enquiries@morningstar.com
Hourly movements 8.00 9.00 10.00 11.00 12.00 13.00 14.00 15.00 16.00 High/day Low/day
FTSE 100 7193.80 7141.85 7137.83 7129.35 7152.72 7155.75 7154.78 7123.80 7116.71 7193.80 7105.54 mid cap) - please see https://research.ftserussell.com/Products/indices/Home/indexfiltergeis?indexName=GEISAC&currency=USD&rtn=CAP&segment=global-developed–emerging. The trade names Fundamental Index®
FTSE 250 22828.94 22783.88 22790.53 22756.30 22792.51 22810.60 22834.54 22693.09 22625.01 22852.08 22598.60 and RAFI® are registered trademarks and the patented and patent-pending proprietary intellectual property of Research Affiliates, LLC (US Patent Nos. 7,620,577; 7,747,502; 7,778,905; 7,792,719; Patent Pending Publ. Data provided by Morningstar | www.morningstar.co.uk
FTSE SmallCap 7258.40 7265.15 7268.43 7259.42 7264.06 7267.01 7268.61 7257.86 7237.49 7275.51 7231.10 Nos. US-2006-0149645-A1, US-2007-0055598-A1, US-2008-0288416-A1, US-2010- 0063942-A1, WO 2005/076812, WO 2007/078399 A2, WO 2008/118372, EPN 1733352, and HK1099110). ”EDHEC™” is a trade mark
FTSE All-Share 4097.87 4073.02 4071.46 4066.40 4078.20 4080.18 4080.50 4061.92 4056.25 4097.87 4051.15 of EDHEC Business School As of January 2nd 2006, FTSE is basing its sector indices on the Industrial Classification Benchmark - please see www.ftse.com/icb. For constituent changes and other information about FTSE,
please see www.ftse.com. © FTSE International Limited. 2013. All Rights reserved. ”FTSE®” is a trade mark of the London Stock Exchange Group companies and is used by FTSE International Limited under licence.
Time of FTSE 100 Day's high:08:03:00 Day's Low16:20:15 FTSE 100 2010/11 High: 7384.18(11/11/2021) Low: 6407.46(29/01/2021)
Time of FTSE All-Share Day's high:08:03:00 Day's Low16:18:00 FTSE 100 2010/11 High: 4212.39(11/11/2021) Low: 3641.93(29/01/2021)
Further information is available on http://www.ftse.com © FTSE International Limited. 2013. All Rights reserved. ”FTSE®” is a trade mark of the
London Stock Exchange Group companies and is used by FTSE International Limited under licence. † Sector P/E ratios greater than 80 are not shown.
For changes to FTSE Fledgling Index constituents please refer to www.ftse.com/indexchanges. ‡ Values are negative.

UK RIGHTS OFFERS UK COMPANY RESULTS UK RECENT EQUITY ISSUES

Amount Latest Company Turnover Pre-tax EPS(p) Div(p) Pay day Total Issue Issue Stock Close Mkt
Issue paid renun. closing Cellular Goods Pre 0.000 0.000 3.334L 0.330L 0.962L 0.000 0.00000 0.00000 - 0.000 0.000 date price(p) Sector code Stock price(p) +/- High Low Cap (£m)
price up date High Low Stock Price p +or- JPMorgan China Growth & Income Pre 2.574 165.214 3.030 227.010 5.70000 3.70000 Sep 1 11.400 3.700 12/01 370.00 AIM SKL Skillcast Group PLC 43.00 -2.00 43.40 38.80 3846.8
There are currently no rights offers by any companies listed on the LSE. Mind Gym Int 24.142 14.468 0.017 1.992L 0.010L 1.580L 0.00000 0.00000 - 0.000 0.000 11/30 145.00 AIM GELN Gelion PLC 265.00 37.50 289.00 147.00 28212.9
Mobeus Income & Growth 2 VCT Int 7.959 9.649 10.890 13.140 12.00000 7.00000 Jan 7 18.000 17.940 11/22 277.00 AIM ETP Eneraqua Technologies PLC 278.00 -2.00 289.60 276.00 9235.8
TR Property Investment Trust Int 209.009 168.891 65.370 52.930 5.30000 5.20000 Jan 14 14.300 13.952 11/19 10.00 REDC Red Capital PLC 30.50 0.00 30.00 21.95 305.0
11/17 2.25 TM1 Technology Minerals PLC 3.06 -0.04 4.25 2.80 3709.7
11/12 13.00 AIM FRG Firering Strategic Minerals PLC 12.90 -0.40 15.28 12.42 1120.8
11/05 1.10 AIM MRK Marks Electrical Group PLC 122.00 -2.50 128.00 110.00 12803.8
10/27 7.50 SFTL Softline Holding PLC 7.20 0.25 8.20 6.00 1322.6
10/25 6.25 AIM AXL Arrow Exploration Corp 7.75 0.10 8.40 6.50 1624.6

Figures in £m. Earnings shown basic. Figures in light text are for corresponding period year earlier. §Placing price. *Intoduction. ‡When issued. Annual report/prospectus available at www.ft.com/ir
For more information on dividend payments visit www.ft.com/marketsdata For a full explanation of all the other symbols please refer to London Share Service notes.
16 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

MARKET DATA

FT500: THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES

52 Week 52 Week 52 Week 52 Week 52 Week 52 Week
Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m Stock Price Day Chg High Low Yld P/E MCap m
Australia (A$) Finland (€) CntJpRwy 15730 525.00 18455 13525 0.81 -20.14 28618.95 Nordea Bk 107.24 -1.50 114.64 65.76 7.68 11.83 47360.99 BlackRock 894.45 -24.40 973.16 670.28 1.66 26.29 135882.32 MondelezInt 60.26 0.80 65.60 52.91 2.00 20.85 84061.02
ANZ 27.03 0.34 29.64 22.56 2.31 15.70 53464.97 Nokia 5.07 0.05 5.38 3.07 - -16.23 32438.72 Denso 8673 322.00 9053 5403 1.58 22.61 60356.34 SEB 131.60 -1.35 141.85 81.80 3.20 11.46 31141.08 Boeing 196.81 -5.57 278.57 188.00 - -13.29 115665.08 Monsanto 9.77 -0.01 10.00 9.51 - - 244.25
BHPBilltn 40.23 0.52 54.55 35.56 5.31 13.23 83277.99 SampoA 43.12 -0.29 47.33 33.07 3.97 40.43 26953.74 EastJpRwy 6957 272.00 8626 6464 1.40 -5.38 23221.69 SvnskaHn 95.50 -1.04 108.15 80.06 4.41 10.97 20252.91 Booking Holdings 2128.26 -43.67 2687.29 1860.73 - 220.41 87393.77 MorganStly 98.04 -0.82 105.95 61.86 1.37 13.58 175924.15
CmwBkAu 96.61 0.71 110.19 79.67 2.63 20.05 115670.31 France (€) Fanuc 23045 -95.00 29700 21720 1.25 36.16 41095.18 Swedbank 183.76 -1.28 196.70 140.70 4.05 9.79 22683.69 BrisMySq 56.48 1.07 69.75 53.22 3.40 -24.20 125365.55 Netflix 598.28 -18.19 700.99 478.54 - 64.79 265009.44
CSL 297.67 -7.63 319.78 242.00 0.96 41.89 95171.75 Airbus Grpe 98.55 -2.55 121.00 81.84 - 18.35 87384.99 FastRetail 66650 -490.00 110500 65110 0.69 46.89 62440.36 Telia Co 34.76 -0.15 39.97 33.45 5.61 -10.65 15501.67 CapOne 141.74 -1.62 177.95 89.72 0.68 5.89 60327.67 NextEraE♦ 87.52 -1.10 89.68 68.33 1.69 75.01 171726.24
NatAusBk 27.96 0.36 30.30 22.25 2.23 17.63 64197.16 AirLiquide 146.06 0.16 154.36 124.25 1.89 26.54 78070.24 Fuji Hvy Ind 2076 -2.50 2413 1943 2.63 15.88 14102.97 Volvo 197.18 -2.78 240.80 182.00 3.13 11.47 34155.01 CardinalHlth 47.39 0.58 62.96 45.85 3.93 23.81 13353.93 Nike 167.60 -2.10 179.10 125.44 0.63 46.28 214160.36
Telstra 4.02 -0.03 4.09 2.98 2.55 25.17 33395.17 AXA 25.01 -0.10 26.35 18.21 5.75 10.71 68639.25 Hitachi 6842 146.00 7460 3966 1.50 16.91 58508.84 Switzerland (SFr) Carnival 17.21 -0.68 31.52 16.32 - -2.16 16759.52 NorfolkS 281.65 2.83 296.06 226.09 1.40 24.72 68537.98
Wesfarmers 57.66 -0.16 67.20 49.01 2.93 26.79 45872 BNP Parib 56.17 -0.28 62.55 39.71 1.99 9.03 79187.36 HondaMtr 3199 17.00 3677 2743 3.63 5.89 51179.16 ABB 32.41 0.06 34.79 23.66 2.36 35.57 72317.06 Caterpillar 197.72 0.93 246.69 173.28 1.99 25.96 106954.97 Northrop 355.10 2.53 408.03 282.88 1.67 12.69 56296.72
Westpc♦ 20.70 0.24 27.12 19.23 1.56 17.02 53283.29 ChristianDior 664.50 -6.50 731.50 420.60 0.91 30.63 135301.23 JapanTob 2317 38.50 2387.5 1898 6.10 10.57 40927.36 CredSuisse 8.84 -0.06 13.50 8.68 2.57 115.45 24510.9 CharlesSch 78.65 -1.47 84.49 48.89 0.88 34.68 142459.24 NXP 223.09 0.36 234.68 152.93 0.80 63.18 59327.05
Woolworths 39.59 -0.40 42.66 31.85 2.61 31.68 33666.68 Cred Agr 12.24 -0.05 13.49 9.23 6.58 8.92 42690.89 KDDI 3294 22.00 3899 2919.5 3.56 11.69 67034.37 Nestle 118.82 1.02 124.16 95.00 2.20 28.61 363504.1 Charter Comms 674.19 3.79 825.62 585.45 - 31.50 120875.35 Occid Pet 28.93 -0.72 35.75 15.66 0.13 -5.47 27020.07
Belgium (€) Danone 52.89 -0.42 65.30 50.88 7.68 17.12 41027.3 Keyence 71010 50.00 76210 47150 0.28 67.95 152529.72 Novartis 73.57 -0.23 86.92 73.01 3.96 21.15 194642.57 Chevron Corp♦ 114.09 -1.05 118.08 83.53 4.37 63.75 219929.69 Oracle 88.16 -1.83 98.95 58.22 1.22 19.57 241397.86
AnBshInBv 49.76 -0.15 65.86 46.66 1.03 20.58 97503.59 EDF 12.55 0.12 13.58 9.63 1.68 7.85 44703.79 MitsbCp 3501 81.00 3758 2486.5 3.74 16.41 45939.65 Richemont 135.70 -0.30 143.55 73.22 0.71 57.04 76982.45 Chubb 180.36 -2.01 197.92 144.00 1.72 9.36 77686.34 Pepsico 163.45 2.83 166.80 128.32 2.52 28.40 225994.62
KBC Grp 74.00 -0.90 86.50 55.08 0.60 12.09 34782.52 Engie SA 12.98 0.14 13.87 10.98 4.11 64.49 35645.29 MitsubEst 1604.5 24.50 2047.5 1564 1.52 15.59 19718.51 Roche 362.25 -1.20 378.95 293.05 2.39 23.40 276588.97 Cigna 201.08 3.29 272.81 190.88 0.95 9.29 66643.5 Perrigo♦ 35.90 0.07 50.90 35.34 2.48 -14.89 4802.48
EssilorLuxottica 177.00 -0.54 195.00 116.40 1.27 57.49 88290.15 MitsubishiEle 1447 22.00 1817 1408 2.43 13.41 27440.94 Swiss Re 88.14 0.56 94.96 77.26 6.48 23.01 30412.66 Cisco 56.29 0.14 60.27 43.35 2.47 23.68 237409.07 Pfizer♦ 53.54 0.50 55.70 33.36 2.75 25.66 300512.88
Brazil (R$)
Hermes Intl 1606.5 -10.50 1678 821.60 0.28 75.32 191306.75 MitsuiFud 2449 80.00 2816.5 2014.5 1.75 16.10 20882.89 Swisscom 508.00 0.80 562.40 456.30 4.19 14.35 28599.02 Citigroup 62.97 -0.85 80.29 56.20 3.10 6.75 127616.53 Phillips66 70.24 -1.15 94.34 63.19 4.91 -18.87 30769.97
Ambev 16.12 0.11 19.86 13.35 3.29 16.23 44762.56
LOreal 400.90 2.75 430.45 290.10 1.00 54.59 252189.29 MitUFJFin 623.20 9.20 688.90 441.10 3.94 10.54 73105.16 UBS 16.14 -0.13 17.04 11.96 4.11 8.44 64942.79 CME Grp 222.18 -4.37 230.90 177.15 1.51 43.40 79850.64 PhilMorris 88.26 0.42 106.51 77.70 5.39 15.68 137405.61
Bradesco♦ 17.93 0.17 24.57 16.45 3.10 10.93 15405.16
LVMH 685.00 -1.60 741.60 484.40 0.88 36.27 390018.02 Mizuho Fin 1438.5 23.00 1732.5 1287 2.82 6.39 32260.64 Zurich Fin 385.50 1.40 415.10 352.80 5.03 13.56 63035.8 Coca-Cola♦ 53.00 -0.07 57.56 48.11 3.09 26.63 228929.27 PNCFin 197.28 -4.58 217.60 139.30 2.23 15.64 83376.47
Cielo 2.19 0.05 4.45 2.01 4.59 6.72 1049.56
Orange 9.22 -0.08 10.74 9.11 7.64 27.77 27662.17 Murata Mfg 8455 161.00 10835 7994 1.33 20.17 50464.22 Cognizant 78.12 -1.31 82.84 66.19 1.18 22.44 41032.67 PPG Inds♦ 160.44 1.41 182.97 132.10 1.29 26.28 38088.59
ItauHldFin♦ 20.76 0.10 30.15 19.74 3.65 6.76 18157.85 Taiwan (NT$)
PernodRic 204.70 1.40 214.50 150.90 1.96 40.77 60468.05 Nippon T&T 3088 10.00 3313 2517.5 3.16 11.78 98783.62 ColgtPlm 76.19 0.71 86.21 74.01 2.29 24.75 64216.64 ProctGmbl 148.28 1.02 149.72 121.54 2.20 27.60 358829.86
Petrobras♦ 30.01 0.49 32.34 20.60 8.50 2.74 39399.16 Chunghwa Telecom 113.50 - 118.50 108.00 - 26.98 31770.47
Renault 28.72 -0.32 41.42 27.48 - -21.79 9578.65 NipponTT 3088 10.00 3313 2517.5 3.16 11.78 98783.62 Comcast 51.86 0.36 61.80 48.15 1.85 17.01 236454.56 Prudntl 102.34 -1.08 115.52 74.58 4.21 5.88 38684.52
Vale 71.37 -2.12 120.45 61.85 12.46 4.01 64616.93 Formosa PetChem 97.00 0.20 117.50 88.40 - 16.85 33341.81
Safran 98.66 -3.48 127.74 96.88 0.44 31.33 47547.11 Nissan Mt 564.50 22.00 664.50 501.00 - -46.59 21043.01 ConocPhil 70.37 -0.89 77.98 38.77 2.33 65.22 92814.29 PublStor 331.52 -3.47 340.95 212.22 2.31 47.65 58133.54
Canada (C$) HonHaiPrc 105.00 - 134.50 82.60 3.81 11.46 52523.68
Sanofi 83.77 -0.42 91.14 74.92 3.84 18.09 119394.18 Nomura 485.40 11.20 721.00 471.00 4.71-219.70 13862.41 Corning♦ 37.29 -0.24 46.82 34.81 2.47 37.66 31823.6 Qualcomm♦ 175.23 -1.80 188.77 122.17 1.44 22.89 196257.6
Bausch Hlth 30.00 -0.04 43.97 24.40 - -7.32 8406.14 MediaTek 1060 -20.00 1185 689.00 3.32 21.79 61153.32
Sant Gbn 57.84 -0.21 64.93 36.22 2.31 14.06 34746.29 Nppn Stl 1794 61.00 2381 1185 0.54 9.85 15057.42 Costco 527.67 2.16 560.78 307.00 0.54 48.74 233134.96 Raytheon♦ 80.50 -1.16 92.32 65.02 2.40 35.39 120490.61
BCE 65.73 0.19 67.08 54.18 5.14 22.31 46700.77 TaiwanSem 608.00 -6.00 679.00 497.50 1.57 30.27 568880.65
Schneider 159.88 -1.26 163.44 112.25 1.64 30.54 102622.69 Panasonic 1254.5 15.50 1541 1131.5 1.56 11.93 27188.13 CrownCstl 184.60 -1.04 204.62 146.15 2.69 74.19 79784.72 Regen Pharm 627.20 -6.80 686.62 441.00 - 11.80 66307.42
BkMontrl 137.68 2.87 141.00 94.76 2.97 17.40 69770.89 Seven & I 4726 69.00 5340 3415 2.07 19.77 37000 Thailand (THB) CSX♦ 35.84 0.27 36.57 27.70 1.00 22.99 79492.53 S&P Global♦ 448.15 -12.82 476.17 303.50 0.65 39.40 108004.15
SocGen 28.37 -0.15 30.84 15.18 1.95 8.01 27304.38
BkNvaS 84.21 -0.44 84.86 66.09 4.16 12.09 80015.31 ShnEtsuCh 19325 370.00 21480 16860 1.26 25.72 71115.11 PTT Explor 36.75 -0.50 45.00 34.00 2.75 12.27 30980.28 CVS 90.45 0.46 96.57 67.06 2.12 17.31 119399.31 Salesforce 252.20 -9.00 311.75 201.51 - 106.95 246903.8
Total 42.34 0.31 45.16 24.51 6.44 12.00 126091.43
Brookfield 70.88 -2.33 77.51 48.34 0.86 32.72 90901.15 Softbank 5559 -40.00 10695 5423 0.77 2.59 84591.74 United Arab Emirates (Dhs) Danaher 312.09 -3.98 333.96 211.22 0.25 40.97 223008.72 Schlmbrg♦ 28.92 -0.40 36.87 21.08 1.70 25.21 40564.13
UnibailR 58.14 -1.03 85.65 53.86 - -1.95 9089.34
CanadPcR 88.41 -0.94 100.00 82.12 0.85 19.23 46102.47 Sony 13825 245.00 14625 9584 0.39 14.89 153980.62 Emirtestele 31.94 0.94 31.94 17.02 2.46 30.42 75623.93 Deere 346.94 -3.68 400.34 250.54 0.91 21.15 107572.73 Sempra Energy 122.88 0.49 144.93 114.66 3.34 18.58 39239.07
Vinci 85.32 -1.42 96.95 75.38 2.41 21.63 57587.28
CanImp 140.18 2.90 152.87 107.44 4.06 11.02 49410.08 SumitomoF 3843 80.00 4354 3062 4.83 8.57 46647.6 Delta 36.15 -0.49 52.28 33.40 - -307.25 23136.5 Shrwin-Will 343.28 3.61 347.04 218.06 0.56 44.95 90006.71
Vivendi 11.25 0.01 11.75 5.04 5.37 10.65 14067.72 United Kingdom (p)
CanNatRs 51.69 -0.04 55.44 28.67 3.42 15.20 47566.06 Takeda Ph 3070 47.00 4365 2993 5.72 11.49 42901.43 Devon Energy 41.07 -0.52 45.56 14.34 1.03 204.37 27804.39 SimonProp 148.00 -3.87 171.12 82.02 4.27 33.84 48632.81
Germany (€) AscBrFd 1930 -9.00 2528 1719 - 38.14 20199.24
CanNatRy 164.71 -0.50 168.66 125.00 1.45 25.10 91044.32 TokioMarine 5882 67.00 6218 4907 3.32 18.82 36234.89 DiscFinServ♦ 107.89 -2.20 135.69 80.06 1.56 7.21 31619.94 SouthCpr 57.65 -1.04 83.29 54.92 4.59 14.41 44568.14
Allianz 198.38 1.08 223.50 182.52 4.87 9.48 91402.19 AstraZen 8191 -40.00 9523 6499.8 2.51 39.43 137137.37
Enbridge 47.99 0.12 54.00 40.63 6.78 16.18 76006.27 Toyota 2079 33.50 2188 1421.8 2.21 10.06 299570.42 Disney 145.55 -1.65 203.02 142.04 - 245.31 264559.82 Starbucks 111.31 -0.11 126.32 95.92 1.51 48.46 130588.89
BASF 58.40 -0.68 72.88 57.06 5.69 9.91 60505.3 Aviva 392.80 1.50 429.60 247.40 6.87 13.09 20839.99
GtWesLif 37.33 0.21 39.73 28.79 4.64 10.86 27156.87 DominRes 72.26 0.42 81.08 67.85 3.75 26.13 58421.29 StateSt 90.38 -2.01 100.69 68.80 2.31 13.58 31045.81
Bayer 44.26 -0.68 57.73 44.01 4.55 -5.71 49042.52 Mexico (Mex$) Barclays 186.66 -0.58 217.63 111.83 0.54 6.03 42107.23
ImpOil♦ 43.26 -0.57 45.49 22.64 2.13 -84.16 23430.67 DukeEner♦ 98.69 1.04 108.38 85.56 3.74 27.07 75925.93 Stryker 245.56 -1.84 281.16 220.90 1.01 50.39 92599.76
BMW 87.50 -0.93 96.39 68.21 2.18 5.20 59417.25 AmerMvl 19.67 0.20 19.90 13.25 1.99 12.50 41396.81 BP 340.85 4.25 366.40 3.20 4.44 11.01 89808.14
Manulife 23.42 0.02 27.68 21.72 4.73 6.51 35567.59 DuPont♦ 75.11 -0.17 87.27 63.80 1.53 39.64 39286.79 Sychrony Fin 45.14 -0.50 52.49 31.64 1.91 6.51 24703.28
Continental 92.56 -3.53 132.68 89.73 3.26 368.00 20882.27 FEMSA UBD 152.01 0.77 180.66 136.21 3.48 54.04 15325.3 BrAmTob 2583.5 35.00 2961.5 207.50 8.19 9.58 63678.16
Nutrien 86.67 0.35 91.15 59.45 2.65 17.41 38677.16 Eaton 164.96 -1.67 175.72 113.79 1.79 32.67 65753.45 T-MobileUS 110.51 0.15 150.20 106.70 - 42.37 138032.91
Daimler 85.63 -0.48 91.63 54.82 1.59 7.86 103336.85 WalMrtMex 70.09 0.05 76.95 53.51 0.88 28.52 57092.85 BT 168.60 -0.40 206.70 120.45 - 11.55 22114.83
RylBkC 128.67 0.53 134.23 102.74 3.27 12.45 143380.37 eBay♦ 66.90 -0.58 81.19 48.67 1.03 23.86 43488.73 Target♦ 247.17 1.67 268.98 166.83 1.05 20.71 118425.06
Deut Bank 10.74 -0.18 12.56 8.37 - 17.08 25043.17 Netherlands (€) Compass 1511.5 -2.00 1721.63 18.06 - -65.43 32862.23
SHOP 1755.77 -98.13 2228.73 1248.55 - 52.16 155950.38 Ecolab 220.50 -4.15 238.93 201.15 0.85 57.37 63188.09 TE Connect 155.63 -1.86 166.44 115.18 1.19 32.08 50784.15
Deut Tlkm 15.46 -0.13 18.92 14.53 3.90 13.72 86969.97 ASML Hld 681.20 -9.50 777.50 370.70 0.41 51.23 317601.23 Diageo 3846.5 5.00 4364.1 2805.28 1.83 33.92 128013.89
Suncor En♦ 30.25 -0.68 34.35 20.77 2.75 19.10 34418.81 Emerson 89.68 -0.70 105.99 75.36 2.15 23.97 53350.63 Tesla Mtrs 1012.3 -72.30 1243.49 539.49 - 335.221016617.31
DeutsPost 51.98 0.10 61.38 38.64 4.84 14.12 72650.71 Heineken 88.34 0.10 103.80 80.84 0.80 44.80 57397.54 GlaxoSmh♦ 1534.6 0.60 1604.4 1190.8 5.21 17.70 99770.51
ThmReut 152.23 -2.38 156.62 99.11 1.26 8.93 57978.35 EOG Res 85.91 -0.65 98.20 47.72 1.71 27.79 50265.08 TexasInstr 192.45 -1.13 202.26 159.56 1.97 28.05 177732.59
E.ON 10.76 -0.06 11.43 8.27 4.40 8.22 32046.67 ING 12.29 -0.10 13.74 7.15 0.98 9.55 54114.01 Glencore 351.90 -2.75 420.03 3.40 1.23 30.38 67105.63
TntoDom 95.79 -0.71 96.75 70.25 3.21 11.58 136597.09 EquityResTP 85.10 -0.41 88.09 56.08 2.78 31.77 31913.88 TheTrvelers 148.41 -1.75 163.29 132.43 2.29 10.61 36510.15
Fresenius Med 53.92 0.30 71.14 52.12 2.50 17.05 17813.37 Unilever 45.35 -0.18 51.05 43.00 2.40 25.64 153886.02 HSBC 429.70 -1.90 462.55 329.55 2.50 13.19 113897.38
TrnCan 59.07 0.15 68.20 51.26 5.62 28.87 45224.85 Exelon♦ 52.35 -0.58 54.86 38.36 2.80 55.25 51184.65 ThrmoFshr 623.59 -3.99 666.65 433.52 0.15 30.18 245724.45
Fresenius SE 33.45 -0.38 47.60 32.94 5.17 10.66 17064.29 Imperial Brands 1559 11.00 1686 1142 8.83 5.31 19656.49
China (HK$) Norway (Kr) ExxonMb♦ 60.62 -0.66 66.38 39.73 5.49 -20.37 256638.82 TJX Cos 70.40 0.15 76.94 61.15 0.70 35.77 83978.64
HenkelKgaA 66.50 -0.20 86.50 65.25 2.77 18.26 19487.91 LlydsBkg 46.48 -0.45 51.58 0.59 1.23 7.15 44284.98
AgricBkCh 2.68 0.01 3.30 2.54 8.25 3.54 10571.39 DNB 202.60 0.10 217.90 126.05 4.27 14.82 34219.28 Facebook 300.30 -10.10 384.33 244.61 - 23.28 710581.41 Truist Financial Corp 58.91 -1.47 65.42 45.44 3.05 14.17 78638.46
Linde 284.90 0.10 297.20 199.35 1.26 48.27 164719.18 Natl Grid 1002.4 16.60 1016.2 805.40 4.89 21.65 44480.3
Bk China 2.76 0.02 3.17 2.54 8.35 3.43 29616.5 Equinor 231.00 0.80 238.75 116.30 1.56-109.57 81982.09 Fedex 238.76 3.46 319.90 216.34 1.13 13.21 63426.61 UnionPac 240.98 0.90 247.76 193.14 1.66 26.32 154920.19
MuenchRkv 245.80 0.65 269.30 215.25 4.01 16.23 38844.38 Natwest Group 216.80 -0.50 235.07 145.40 1.38 14.36 34295.6
BkofComm 4.75 -0.01 5.26 4.00 7.89 3.52 21341.13 Telenor 133.95 -0.85 159.95 131.80 10.24 11.56 20422.08 FordMtr 19.27 -0.60 20.79 8.43 - 28.08 75642.25 UPS B 201.06 1.16 220.24 154.76 1.93 30.41 146604.54
SAP 114.16 0.04 129.74 98.69 1.63 22.88 158198.4 Prudential 1281 10.50 1598.5 1158 0.91 17.80 43815.16
BOE Tech 0.79 -0.01 1.21 0.55 - -68.46 20.17 Qatar (QR) ReckittB 6185 25.00 7192 4905.16 2.82 -26.76 57579.78 Franklin 31.37 -1.27 38.27 22.45 4.21 13.55 15774.54 USBancorp 55.70 -0.90 63.01 42.47 2.89 12.49 82591.83
Siemens 146.54 -1.26 156.98 111.36 2.40 23.38 140503.32
Ch Coms Cons 4.19 0.04 4.73 3.21 5.03 2.93 2375.73 QatarNtBk 20.23 0.56 21.05 16.35 2.20 16.14 51319.17 RELX 2344 - 2634.82 1484.9 2.01 33.87 59953.04 GenDyn 195.85 1.37 210.21 144.50 2.89 17.16 54685.79 UtdHlthcre 446.30 1.73 466.00 320.35 1.11 30.78 420348.21
Volkswgn 251.40 -6.60 357.40 152.60 1.92 7.03 83681.79
Ch Evrbrght 2.72 -0.01 3.54 2.63 9.12 3.54 4425.39 Russia (RUB) RioTinto 4578.5 -142.50 6876.26 4354 7.35 5.49 81180.85 GenElectric 92.52 -2.71 116.17 82.88 0.34 71.49 101599.65 ValeroEngy♦ 69.54 -1.63 84.95 51.90 5.53 -65.67 28430.43
Ch Rail Cons 5.03 0.05 5.99 4.07 5.40 2.59 1340.19 Hong Kong (HK$) GenMills 64.02 1.16 64.65 53.96 3.06 17.68 38776.43 Verizon 51.19 0.46 61.83 49.74 4.83 9.81 214884.46
Gzprm neft 345.50 -4.81 3649 74.00 - - 110664.2 RollsRoyce 124.90 -0.54 150.48 86.69 - 2.73 3070.93
Ch Rail Gp 3.90 0.03 4.70 3.33 5.47 3.29 2105.63 AIA 81.30 -1.55 109.30 79.65 1.60 19.13 126201.39 GenMotors 59.74 -1.28 65.18 40.04 - 8.15 86734.13 VertexPharm 205.71 1.26 242.99 176.36 - 28.36 52302.17
Lukoil 6773.13 198.13 7554.91 7.45 - - 63494.34 RylDShlA 1651.4 18.20 1795.2 16.51 2.93 32.13 100362.38
ChConstBk 5.33 0.07 6.74 5.03 7.22 3.85 164435.83 BOC Hold 24.25 0.30 29.55 22.20 4.92 11.19 32900.91 GileadSci 70.31 0.64 73.34 56.56 3.78 17.92 88195.71 VF Cp 74.41 0.34 90.79 65.34 2.51 38.68 29226.93
MmcNrlskNckl 22092.47 176.47 28011.97 343.80 - - 45928.97 StandCh 425.90 -2.20 533.20 406.20 1.53 15.20 18562.2
China Vanke 18.54 0.08 35.00 16.84 7.96 4.73 4523.15 Ch OSLnd&Inv 18.70 0.06 21.95 14.92 6.20 4.03 26263.73 GoldmSchs♦ 380.55 -6.99 426.16 234.64 1.26 7.27 127405.47 ViacomCBS 30.15 0.59 101.97 28.90 3.05 6.17 18292.2
Novatek 1761.23 52.74 13307.81 1160.85 - - 72353.5 Tesco 280.10 2.25 317.55 2.74 3.57 21.38 30318.46
ChinaCitic 3.45 -0.01 4.29 3.15 8.71 3.10 6588.63 ChngKng 45.60 0.55 56.05 38.25 3.79 9.59 21320.65 Halliburton 21.79 -0.23 26.75 17.23 0.81 49.39 19403.89 Visa Inc♦ 194.66 -3.63 252.67 190.10 0.62 41.09 325029.79
Rosneft 580.65 3.92 39143.78 116.00 - - 83261.62 Vodafone 110.38 0.32 157.52 1.56 6.95 340.68 38922.95
ChinaLife 13.12 0.04 18.46 12.22 5.63 5.29 12528.04 Citic Ltd 7.31 0.01 10.24 5.20 6.41 3.00 27288.12 HCA Hold 229.34 -2.72 263.92 151.93 0.40 16.43 71329.97 Walgreen♦ 44.78 0.16 57.05 39.03 4.03 20.27 38758.92
Sberbank 324.78 -4.11 568.52 213.80 - - 94858.66 WPP 1065 7.50 1121 11.00 2.25 27.06 17825.94
ChinaMBank 63.95 0.55 72.45 45.95 2.32 12.32 37674.26 Citic Secs 19.64 0.06 22.00 15.22 2.41 10.86 5742.02 Hew-Pack 38.08 0.44 38.49 22.76 1.89 12.44 43887.91 WalMartSto 136.67 1.20 152.57 126.28 1.52 40.37 381098.42
Surgutneftegas 38.51 0.76 49.50 29.80 - - 18616.1 United States of America ($)
ChinaMob 46.70 0.05 59.20 39.00 6.98 7.44 122703.63 CK Hutchison 49.95 0.65 65.80 48.80 4.45 5.82 24587.31 HiltonWwde 138.42 -1.17 154.40 98.57 - 1086.04 38580.66 WellsFargo 47.97 -0.94 52.57 28.40 1.02 11.62 196984.51
CNOOC 7.71 -0.09 10.60 6.50 5.72 6.19 44172.85 Saudi Arabia (SR) 21stC Fox A 35.63 0.30 44.80 27.12 1.24 10.31 11413.95
ChinaPcIns 22.95 -0.20 42.75 20.85 6.13 6.76 8173.34 HomeDep 409.60 1.83 416.56 246.59 1.46 30.32 427718.8 Williams Cos 26.92 -0.33 29.89 19.85 5.76 29.61 32708.6
HangSeng 142.90 1.50 166.70 130.50 3.70 18.24 35058.3 AlRajhiBnk 133.40 -1.00 151.00 71.40 1.78 24.39 88900.15 3M 171.11 0.85 208.95 163.38 3.39 17.26 99010.79
ChMinsheng 3.11 - 5.01 2.56 8.00 4.08 3320.55 Honywell 202.87 -1.13 236.86 194.55 1.80 26.63 139660.37 Yum!Brnds 125.75 -0.78 135.77 101.18 1.48 30.21 36861.49
HK Exc&Clr 450.80 18.80 587.00 379.40 1.74 46.20 73342.18 Natnlcombnk 62.50 1.10 70.00 42.00 2.29 19.01 49981.35 AbbottLb 128.84 0.46 131.61 105.32 1.20 37.92 227826.09
ChMrchSecs 17.48 0.16 28.18 16.01 4.27 15.87 20369.4 HumanaInc 421.78 0.34 475.44 370.22 0.60 23.27 54213.19 Venezuela (VEF)
MTR 41.20 0.35 49.00 40.60 2.87-143.03 32744.41 SaudiBasic 108.40 -0.80 136.60 95.70 2.67 21.31 86687.64 Abbvie 118.07 1.20 121.53 101.55 4.02 33.35 208656.95
Chna Utd Coms 3.91 0.01 4.87 3.85 1.65 19.36 18880.58 IBM♦ 118.77 1.87 152.84 114.56 5.26 21.32 106456.2 Bco de Vnzla 0.44 -0.02 594.00 0.05 226.88 - 350.02
SandsCh 17.50 0.22 40.55 14.64 - -15.98 18174.55 SaudiTelec 114.40 2.60 139.80 104.80 3.45 20.51 60990.56 Accenture 359.53 -5.77 374.92 241.73 0.94 40.86 236117.55
ChShenEgy 18.40 1.28 19.36 13.64 11.54 6.67 7974.74 IllinoisTool 233.90 -1.23 244.45 192.89 1.95 27.74 73415.13 Bco Provncl 2.09 0.04 798000 2.00 - -4.55 48.55
SHK Props 95.75 1.10 126.00 93.20 4.96 10.83 35604.96 Singapore (S$) Adobe 611.28 -60.60 699.54 420.78 - 52.68 291213.79
ChShpbldng 4.19 0.03 5.08 3.78 - -278.00 14527.83 Illumina 343.24 -14.24 555.77 335.68 - 68.71 53648.41 Mrcntl Srvcs 7.45 - 601.00 1.00 0.02 2.95 98.04
Tencent 462.60 -11.00 775.50 412.20 0.33 20.68 570105.72 DBS 31.47 -0.08 32.70 24.71 2.24 13.93 58901.65 AEP♦ 82.01 0.70 91.49 74.80 3.54 17.57 41304.47
ChStConEng 4.78 0.03 5.48 4.38 4.34 3.96 30503.35 Intcntl Exch 128.77 -2.45 139.79 105.76 0.98 24.23 72549.58
JardnMt US$ 56.72 -0.19 68.88 49.13 2.90 88.46 40751.62 Aetna - - - - - - -
ChUncHK 3.87 -0.01 5.50 3.86 4.39 7.86 15195.33 India (Rs) Intel 49.39 -0.11 68.49 45.24 2.72 9.78 200869.13 Closing prices and highs & lows are in traded currency (with variations for that
OCBC 11.29 -0.01 12.77 9.88 2.75 10.80 37006.3 Aflac 54.36 -0.89 57.95 42.73 2.15 6.87 35960.67
CNNC Intl 7.20 0.17 8.31 4.59 1.60 18.57 19295.49 Bhartiartl 718.35 -14.20 781.80 471.30 0.26 -42.98 56233.46 Intuit 639.97 -32.15 716.86 353.47 0.35 89.03 181218.32 country indicated by stock), market capitalisation is in USD. Highs & lows are
SingTel 2.38 - 2.63 2.21 4.34 71.97 28638.45 AirProd 288.41 0.98 316.39 245.75 1.88 34.25 63870.28
CSR 3.55 0.03 4.22 2.53 5.90 7.89 1991.24 HDFC Bk 1513.55 -12.20 1725 1342 0.42 25.76 111569.24 John&John♦ 158.98 1.89 179.92 147.69 2.46 24.98 418530.27 based on intraday trading over a rolling 52 week period.
UOB 26.32 0.12 28.17 22.24 2.90 13.84 32107.56 Alexion 182.50 3.05 187.45 99.91 - 59.43 40336.01
Daqin 6.20 0.05 7.11 5.80 7.48 9.17 14471.88 Hind Unilevr 2343.65 -39.65 2859.3 2120 1.31 66.04 73256.78 JohnsonCn 77.17 0.51 81.15 44.91 1.31 34.91 54349.81 ♦ ex-dividend
Allstate 108.21 -1.47 140.00 102.44 2.39 4.74 31021.21
GuosenSec 11.29 0.06 14.57 10.32 1.92 14.25 15646.86 HsngDevFin 2771.65 -36.15 3021.1 2221.2 0.82 24.42 66740.73 South Africa (R) JPMrgnCh 158.34 -2.87 172.96 118.11 2.18 11.04 467936.83
Alphabet 2809.28 -50.04 3019.33 1694 - 27.61 845058.61 ■ ex-capital redistribution
HaitongSecs 6.80 0.03 7.93 6.36 9.24 5.33 2975.19 ICICI Bk 716.30 -6.10 867.00 483.00 - 25.71 66133.74 Firstrand 57.18 -0.10 65.24 46.00 2.08 11.11 19919.29 Kimb-Clark 134.95 2.16 143.37 125.27 3.13 24.02 45439.92
Altria 43.38 0.17 52.59 39.93 7.59 18.50 79688.58 # price at time of suspension
Hngzh HikVDT 48.40 0.97 70.48 43.38 1.60 29.24 61878.61 Infosys 1735.55 -12.70 1848 1115 1.53 37.12 97100.51 MTN Grp 166.80 0.80 174.99 58.69 - 37.61 19518.47 KinderM 15.50 -0.24 19.29 13.47 6.74 20.52 35133.76
Amazon 3366.28 -71.08 3773.08 2881 - 61.251707202.11
Hunng Pwr 3.77 0.25 4.91 2.44 5.48 -46.68 2273.95 ITC 221.65 -3.80 265.30 196.50 4.82 19.24 36335 Naspers N♦ 2457.02 -19.98 3888 1262.66 0.24 13.23 66452.99 Kraft Heinz♦ 33.58 0.33 44.95 31.60 4.67 18.32 41103.35
AmerAir 16.78 -0.64 26.09 14.71 - -1.72 10862.51
IM Baotou Stl 2.87 -0.07 4.14 1.12 - 33.92 14274.07 L&T 1801.25 12.05 1981.75 1128.75 0.99 29.41 33661.43 South Korea (KRW) Kroger 43.71 -0.94 47.99 30.35 1.57 30.44 32504.44
AmerExpr 153.98 -2.79 189.03 112.10 1.37 16.39 122328.08
In&CmBkCh 4.36 0.06 5.75 4.08 7.22 4.05 48560.4 OilNatGas 145.90 1.90 172.75 86.60 1.16 8.57 24417.94 HyundMobis 238500-1000.00 405000 220000 2.10 9.95 19112.56 L Brands 79.92 -0.15 - - - - -
AmerIntGrp 53.15 -0.81 62.54 36.77 2.30 11.67 44130.32
IndstrlBk 18.30 -0.07 28.07 17.08 4.23 5.17 56358.54 RelianceIn 2408.25 -74.60 2751.35 1830 0.29 30.55 216767.54 KoreaElePwr 21650 200.00 30050 20650 5.61 6.77 11776.91 LasVegasSd 34.39 -1.20 66.77 33.75 - -19.27 26273.61
AmerTower 264.41 -1.83 303.72 197.50 1.87 49.03 120415.94
Kweichow 1971.88 37.88 2627.88 1525.5 0.95 51.13 388914.1 SBI NewA 473.15 -3.85 542.30 248.25 0.82 17.44 56175.97 SK Hynix 118000-2000.00 150500 90500 0.99 13.83 72790.98 LibertyGbl 27.10 -0.01 30.58 23.19 - 1.55 4793.46
Amgen♦ 203.35 2.18 276.69 198.64 3.16 21.59 114540.12
Midea 0.52 - 0.85 0.50 - 49.01 20.09 SunPhrmInds 751.80 -14.45 851.00 539.70 0.99 29.23 23996.95 SmsungEl 75600 -200.00 96800 68300 3.99 15.88 382422.18 Lilly (E)♦ 245.27 -2.61 275.87 143.13 1.32 38.19 234623.42
Anthem♦ 394.01 -5.73 439.90 286.04 1.08 18.00 95632.01
New Ch Life Ins 21.10 0.15 34.20 20.55 7.78 3.68 2799.98 Tata Cons 3640.45 -2.45 3989.9 2699 1.09 37.23 179146.43 Spain (€) Linde♦ 320.59 -3.41 340.16 240.80 1.27 48.16 164319.92
Aon Cp 292.46 -4.84 326.25 200.65 0.61 33.55 64438.42
PetroChina 3.51 0.07 4.20 2.32 5.74 5.49 9503.37 Israel (ILS) BBVA 4.79 0.02 6.29 3.74 1.24 9.52 36023.86 Lockheed♦ 331.92 1.39 396.99 319.81 3.07 15.60 91539.04
Apple 161.03 -2.73 170.30 116.21 0.50 32.872641922.11
PingAnIns 55.45 0.10 103.60 48.80 4.84 6.86 52993.53 TevaPha 26.40 -0.40 43.90 25.60 - -2.42 9192.89 BcoSantdr 2.76 -0.03 3.51 2.38 - -5.91 54054.94 Lowes 249.23 -1.17 256.39 149.31 0.99 26.99 167914.64
Aptiv 162.17 -3.60 180.81 119.75 - 47.47 43869.28
PngAnBnk 17.65 0.06 25.31 17.01 0.99 10.81 53776.26 CaixaBnk 2.30 -0.02 2.90 1.93 1.18 2.98 20894.49 Lyondell 87.17 1.59 118.02 84.06 4.90 5.18 29008.78
Italy (€) ArcherDan 62.15 -0.25 69.30 48.57 2.25 15.84 34769.27
Pwr Cons Corp 7.61 0.62 9.96 3.57 1.18 15.70 13315.44 Iberdrola 9.69 0.06 12.57 8.59 4.15 19.27 69612.47 Marathon Ptl♦ 62.02 -1.31 68.78 38.30 3.58 -28.68 38178.75
Enel 6.53 -0.06 9.05 6.47 5.29 27.03 74840.69 AT&T 23.40 0.35 33.88 22.22 8.51 -78.86 167040.3
SaicMtr 20.52 -0.07 27.32 18.03 2.92 10.19 37641.19 Inditex 27.85 -0.55 32.85 24.34 2.05 33.77 97909.53 Marsh&M 166.39 -2.08 171.13 106.95 1.07 35.85 84010.8
ENI 12.01 0.07 12.83 8.06 4.80 -4.73 48846.26 AutomData 229.10 -3.33 241.18 159.31 1.55 39.44 96539.08
ShenwanHong 0.07 0.00 0.11 0.05 - -12.26 75.33 Repsol 10.06 -0.04 11.78 7.50 5.88 38.47 17335.95 MasterCard 319.10 -1.10 401.50 306.00 0.50 46.31 311029.67
Generali 18.19 0.15 19.35 13.74 5.59 11.52 32441.06 Avago Tech 556.51 4.06 577.21 398.10 2.40 43.35 229068.58
ShgPdgBk 8.59 0.01 11.24 8.44 5.40 5.45 39586.68 Telefonica 3.67 -0.02 4.32 3.12 10.75 2.24 23337.14 McDonald's♦ 248.86 0.06 257.79 202.73 1.97 28.30 185959.5
IntSPaolo 2.15 0.00 2.59 1.78 1.67 11.14 47046.4 BakerHu 23.90 -0.11 27.66 18.75 2.95 38.08 20787.89
Sinopec Corp 3.67 0.07 4.69 3.32 5.94 5.54 12015.55 McKesson♦ 220.08 -0.33 229.13 169.09 0.77 -7.56 33602.29
Unicred 11.13 0.12 12.16 7.30 1.08 19.38 28088.17 Sweden (SKr) BankAm♦ 44.13 -0.76 48.69 28.14 1.67 13.48 361163.63
Sinopec Oil 2.07 0.01 2.90 1.79 - 315.18 4410.05 Medtronic 106.44 -0.84 135.89 105.02 2.12 39.14 143051.48
Japan (¥) AtlasCpcoB 474.40 -0.40 518.00 364.40 1.55 32.30 20186.79 Baxter 77.71 1.48 88.32 73.12 1.32 33.30 38908.89
Denmark (kr) Merck 73.10 -0.79 91.40 68.38 3.35 31.18 184646.5
AstellasPh 1782 8.00 2025 1470 2.30 33.60 29301.87 Ericsson 91.70 -1.66 121.80 91.00 1.96 15.07 30722.79 BectonDick 242.73 0.79 267.37 234.61 1.29 40.07 68941.04
DanskeBk 112.10 0.15 125.60 95.52 1.80 9.35 14661.07 Metlife♦ 59.39 0.06 67.68 44.62 3.00 12.49 49956.5
Bridgestne 4803 102.00 5467 3307 2.95 26.58 30275.05 H&M 160.22 -4.84 229.50 157.90 - 29.31 25520.17 BerkshHat 417754.16-2811.84 445000 333150 - 6.49 258981.68
MollerMrsk 20040 155.00 21360 11885 1.64 7.11 27078.71 Microsoft♦ 320.00 -9.49 349.67 209.11 0.65 41.542402553.74
Canon 2539.5 47.50 2938 1876 3.27 15.49 29914.7 Investor 210.90 -1.85 221.95 143.45 1.22 2.57 41900.96 Biogen 226.37 -2.15 468.55 224.46 - 18.38 33252.1
NovoB 704.30 2.40 760.90 412.90 1.30 36.57 189373.56 Mnstr Bvrg 82.76 -0.20 99.89 80.92 - 30.03 43791.55
BkNYMeln 55.17 -0.98 60.52 39.46 2.15 14.90 45560.55

FT 500: TOP 20 FT 500: BOTTOM 20 BONDS: HIGH YIELD & EMERGING MARKET BONDS: GLOBAL INVESTMENT GRADE
Close Prev Day Week Month Close Prev Day Week Month Day's Mth's Spread Day's Mth's Spread
price price change change % change change % change % price price change change % change change % change % Red Ratings Bid Bid chge chge vs Red Ratings Bid Bid chge chge vs
Pwr Cons Corp 7.61 6.99 0.62 8.87 0.93 13.9 -2.56 SandsCh 17.50 17.28 0.22 1.27 -3.75 -17.6 -1.24 Dec 03 date Coupon S* M* F* price yield yield yield US Dec 03 date Coupon S* M* F* price yield yield yield US
VertexPharm 205.71 204.45 1.26 0.62 22.12 12.0 9.01 Softbank 5559.00 5599.00 -40.00 -0.71 -1124.00 -16.8 -11.89 High Yield US$ US$
Hew-Pack 38.08 37.64 0.44 1.17 3.50 10.1 21.74 SHOP 1755.77 1853.90 -98.13 -5.29 -248.18 -12.4 -5.20 HCA Inc. 04/24 8.36 BB- Ba2 BB 113.75 4.24 0.00 0.12 - FleetBoston Financial Corp. 01/28 6.88 BBB+ Baa1 A- 129.00 2.54 -0.01 -0.05 -
BT 168.60 169.00 -0.40 -0.24 14.60 9.5 18.61 Nissan Mt 564.50 542.50 22.00 4.06 -74.80 -11.7 -5.28 High Yield Euro The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/28 5.00 BBB+ A3 A 117.21 2.47 0.00 0.32 -
Hunng Pwr 3.77 3.52 0.25 7.10 0.31 9.0 -5.01 Fuji Hvy Ind 2076.00 2078.50 -2.50 -0.12 -268.00 -11.4 -8.63 Aldesa Financial Services S.A. 04/21 7.25 - - B 71.10 28.23 0.00 0.64 25.98 NationsBank Corp. 03/28 6.80 BBB+ Baa1 A- 127.69 2.72 -0.01 0.06 -
ChShenEgy 18.40 17.12 1.28 7.48 1.50 8.9 11.41 Salesforce 252.20 261.20 -9.00 -3.45 -32.01 -11.3 -16.71 GTE LLC 04/28 6.94 BBB+ Baa2 A- 128.27 2.80 0.00 -0.11 -
Novatek 1761.23 1708.49 52.74 3.09 125.22 7.7 -2.86 Netflix 598.28 616.47 -18.19 -2.95 -67.36 -10.1 -13.00 Emerging US$ United Utilities PLC 08/28 6.88 BBB Baa1 A- 130.43 2.62 -0.07 -0.22 -
BP 340.85 336.60 4.25 1.26 23.20 7.3 1.84 FastRetail 66650.00 67140.00 -490.00 -0.73 -7420.00 -10.0 -15.63 Peru 03/19 7.13 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 104.40 2.60 - - 0.34 Barclays Bank plc 01/29 4.50 A A1 A+ 96.46 5.02 0.00 0.02 -
MTN Grp 166.80 166.00 0.80 0.48 9.77 6.2 21.85 Facebook 300.30 310.39 -10.10 -3.25 -32.83 -9.9 -9.39 Colombia 01/26 4.50 - Baa2 BBB- 109.50 2.33 0.16 0.52 1.28
Brazil 04/26 6.00 - Ba2 BB- 115.15 2.78 -0.01 0.65 1.73 Euro
Firstrand 57.18 57.28 -0.10 -0.17 3.33 6.2 -3.77 LasVegasSd 34.39 35.59 -1.20 -3.37 -3.48 -9.2 -16.14 Electricite de France (EDF) 04/30 4.63 A- A3 A- 137.45 0.82 -0.01 0.10 -
Shrwin-Will 343.28 339.67 3.61 1.06 19.98 6.2 9.36 ShenwanHong 0.07 0.07 0.00 3.08 -0.01 -8.2 -23.86 Poland 04/26 3.25 - A2 A- 111.22 0.98 0.03 0.16 -0.07
Mexico 05/26 11.50 - Baa1 BBB- 149.00 1.61 0.00 -0.12 0.56 The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/31 3.00 BBB+ A3 A 121.70 0.93 0.00 0.02 -
RylDShlA 1651.40 1633.20 18.20 1.11 95.20 6.1 1.19 SimonProp 148.00 151.86 -3.87 -2.55 -12.49 -7.8 -10.91 The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. 02/31 3.00 BBB+ A3 A 124.42 0.68 0.00 -0.11 -
Unicred 11.13 11.01 0.12 1.09 0.64 6.1 -1.31 eBay 66.90 67.48 -0.58 -0.86 -5.57 -7.7 -11.28 Turkey 03/27 6.00 - Ba2 BB+ 101.26 5.82 0.00 0.17 3.07
Turkey 03/27 6.00 - B2 BB- 102.88 5.43 0.14 0.83 4.38 Finland 04/31 0.75 AA+ Aa1 AA+ 111.08 -0.27 0.00 -0.05 -0.87
Aviva 392.80 391.30 1.50 0.38 21.90 5.9 -2.03 Adobe 611.28 671.88 -60.60 -9.02 -50.82 -7.7 -6.56
Peru 08/27 4.13 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 103.50 3.66 0.01 -0.02 0.80 Yen
Citic Secs 19.64 19.58 0.06 0.31 1.06 5.7 1.98 Merck 73.10 73.89 -0.79 -1.07 -6.06 -7.7 -17.52
Russia 06/28 12.75 - Baa3 BBB 168.12 2.48 0.07 0.05 - Mexico 06/26 1.09 - Baa1 BBB- 98.73 1.34 -0.02 -0.14 0.27
AmerMvl 19.67 19.47 0.20 1.03 1.06 5.7 6.55 ViacomCBS 30.15 29.56 0.59 2.00 -2.46 -7.5 -19.59
Tata Cons 3640.45 3642.90 -2.45 -0.07 194.55 5.6 4.48 AstellasPh 1782.00 1774.00 8.00 0.45 -142.50 -7.4 -7.61 Brazil 02/47 5.63 - Ba2 BB- 101.48 5.52 0.08 0.80 - £ Sterling
Schneider 159.88 161.14 -1.26 -0.78 8.30 5.5 6.44 Panasonic 1254.50 1239.00 15.50 1.25 -99.50 -7.3 -8.30 Emerging Euro innogy Fin B.V. 06/30 6.25 BBB Baa2 A- 137.45 2.19 -0.03 0.02 -
Cielo 2.19 2.14 0.05 2.34 0.11 5.3 -5.60 Illumina 343.24 357.48 -14.24 -3.98 -26.55 -7.2 -18.20 Brazil 04/21 2.88 BB- Ba2 BB- 103.09 0.05 0.01 -0.09 -1.19 innogy Fin B.V. 06/30 6.25 BBB Baa2 A- 128.68 3.20 0.00 -0.01 0.40
Equinor 231.00 230.20 0.80 0.35 11.10 5.0 5.34 AIA 81.30 82.85 -1.55 -1.87 -6.20 -7.1 -8.05 Mexico 04/23 2.75 BBB+ A3 BBB+ 107.76 0.76 0.00 -0.07 -1.56 Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company. US $ denominated bonds NY close; all other London
Mexico 04/23 2.75 - Baa1 BBB- 106.48 -0.26 - - -0.36 close. *S - Standard & Poor’s, M - Moody’s, F - Fitch.
Based on the FT Global 500 companies in local currency Based on the FT Global 500 companies in local currency
Bulgaria 03/28 3.00 BBB- Baa2 BBB 117.04 1.00 0.02 -0.15 -1.42
Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company. US $ denominated bonds NY close; all
other London close. *S - Standard & Poor’s, M - Moody’s, F - Fitch.

INTEREST RATES: OFFICIAL BOND INDICES VOLATILITY INDICES GILTS: UK CASH MARKET
Dec 03 Rate Current Since Last Mnth Ago Year Ago Day's Month's Year Return Return Dec 03 Day Chng Prev 52 wk high 52 wk low Red Change in Yield 52 Week Amnt
US Fed Funds 0.00-0.25 15-03-2020 1.00-1.25 1.50-1.75 1.25-1.50 Index change change change 1 month 1 year VIX 31.50 3.55 27.95 37.51 14.10 Dec 03 Price £ Yield Day Week Month Year High Low £m
US Prime 4.75 30-10-2019 5.25 5.25 4.25 Markit IBoxx VXD 28.75 0.94 27.81 45.68 2.67 - - - - - - - - -
US Discount 2.65 30-09-2019 2.75 2.75 1.75 ABF Pan-Asia unhedged 218.03 0.45 0.05 -4.11 -1.54 0.07 VXN 34.30 4.52 29.78 40.53 18.01 Tr 1.75pc '22 101.18 0.18 -10.00 12.50 -25.00 -1000.00 104.44 101.06 29.68
Euro Repo 0.00 16-03-2016 0.00 0.00 0.00 Corporates( £) 393.84 0.27 -0.15 -3.67 -2.48 -0.38 VDAX 28.09 1.05 27.04 93.30 - Tr 0.75pc '23 100.64 0.36 -7.69 9.09 2.86 800.00 101.08 99.96 33.73
UK Repo 0.10 19-03-2020 0.25 0.75 0.25 Corporates($) 337.72 0.30 -0.12 -1.12 -0.12 -1.12 † CBOE. VIX: S&P 500 index Options Volatility, VXD: DJIA Index Options Volatility, VXN: NASDAQ Index Options Volatility. Tr 0.125pc '24 99.23 0.49 -5.77 11.36 2.08 716.67 100.37 98.67 34.12
Japan O'night Call 0.00-0.10 01-02-2016 0.00 0.00--0.10 0.00--0.10 Corporates(€) 242.53 0.22 -0.27 -0.67 -0.79 0.52 ‡ Deutsche Borse. VDAX: DAX Index Options Volatility. Tr 2pc '25 105.55 0.50 -7.41 4.17 -3.85 2400.00 120.52 99.56 38.33
Switzerland Libor Target -1.25-0.25 15-01-2015 -0.75--0.25 -1.25--0.25 -1.25--0.25 Eurozone Sov(€) 256.19 0.37 0.17 -2.77 -0.98 -2.45 Tr 0.125pc '26 98.40 0.52 -5.45 4.00 -7.14 372.73 100.31 97.21 33.89
Gilts( £) 353.31 0.25 0.75 -6.83 -3.27 -6.36 BONDS: BENCHMARK GOVERNMENT Tr 1.25pc '27 103.85 0.55 -5.17 0.00 -15.38 243.75 107.14 102.14 39.34
INTEREST RATES: MARKET Global Inflation-Lkd 321.80 0.95 1.88 2.32 -2.02 6.61 Red Bid Bid Day chg Wk chg Month Year Tr 0.875pc '29 101.72 0.65 -4.41 -2.99 -17.72 109.68 104.87 98.61 41.87
Over Change One Three Six One Markit iBoxx £ Non-Gilts 381.09 0.24 -0.08 -3.50 -2.29 -0.88 Date Coupon Price Yield yield yield chg yld chg yld Tr 4.25pc '32 134.86 0.79 -3.66 -4.82 -18.56 68.09 141.66 130.03 38.71
Dec 03 (Libor: Dec 02) night Day Week Month month month month year Overall ($) 278.94 0.26 -0.08 -2.01 -0.08 -2.01 Australia 04/24 2.75 104.81 0.70 0.03 0.01 0.07 0.58 Tr 4.25pc '36 145.01 0.88 -4.35 -6.38 -19.27 31.34 151.25 137.65 30.41
US$ Libor 0.07763 0.001 0.004 0.001 0.10350 0.18013 0.26775 0.45588 Overall( £) 357.04 0.25 0.52 -5.93 -3.01 -4.89 05/32 1.25 95.59 1.71 -0.05 -0.19 -0.01 0.61 Tr 4.5pc '42 168.47 0.91 -3.19 -7.14 -21.55 7.06 172.18 154.49 27.21
Euro Libor -0.58600 -0.004 0.002 -0.012 -0.60471 -0.60000 -0.55400 -0.49829 Overall(€) 248.14 0.33 0.02 -2.29 -0.94 -1.81 Austria 05/34 2.40 129.55 0.02 -0.04 -0.13 -0.03 0.22 Tr 3.75pc '52 177.56 0.86 -3.37 -6.52 -23.89 -3.37 177.56 155.15 24.10
£ Libor 0.03838 -0.001 0.001 -0.003 0.06550 0.09738 0.29675 0.66300 Treasuries ($) 255.43 0.24 -0.01 -2.64 -0.01 -2.64 02/47 1.50 128.81 0.31 -0.03 -0.17 -0.03 0.22 Tr 4pc '60 208.03 0.74 -2.63 -7.50 -29.52 -13.95 208.15 175.55 24.12
Swiss Fr Libor 0.002 -0.81480 -0.78400 -0.73120 -0.58500 FTSE Belgium 10/23 0.20 101.73 -0.71 0.03 0.05 0.03 -0.04 Gilts benchmarks & non-rump undated stocks. Closing mid-price in pounds per £100 nominal of stock.
Yen Libor 0.012 -0.06567 -0.07367 -0.05017 0.04700 Sterling Corporate (£) - - - - - - Canada - - - - - - -
Euro Euribor
Sterling CDs
0.005
0.000
-0.56800
0.50000
-0.56500
0.63000
-0.54100
0.78500
-0.49800 Euro Corporate (€) 104.47 -0.05 - - 0.54 -1.73 03/24 2.25 102.70 1.03 -0.03 -0.12 -0.03 0.70 GILTS: UK FTSE ACTUARIES INDICES
Euro Emerging Mkts (€) 777.43 -5.06 - - -1.27 22.30 Denmark - - - - - - -
US$ CDs 0.000 0.17000 0.17000 0.29000 Eurozone Govt Bond 110.04 -0.19 - - -0.34 -0.64 11/23 1.50 104.15 -0.61 -0.03 0.01 0.00 0.00 Price Indices Day's Total Return Return
Euro CDs 0.000 -0.55000 -0.59000 -0.53000 Fixed Coupon Dec 03 chg % Return 1 month 1 year Yield
CREDIT INDICES Day's Week's Month's Series Series Finland 04/23 1.50 103.11 -0.78 -0.04 0.04 0.00 -0.07
04/31 0.75 108.25 -0.13 0.02 -0.10 0.02 0.20 1 Up to 5 Years 86.87 0.08 2463.15 0.60 -0.93 0.47
Short 7 Days One Three Six One Index change change change high low 2 5 - 10 Years 178.48 0.20 3720.01 2.13 -2.15 0.65
Dec 03 term notice month month month year Markit iTraxx France 05/23 1.75 103.65 -0.70 0.03 0.06 0.03 -0.03
3 10 - 15 Years 213.14 0.39 4762.20 3.29 -2.26 0.86
Euro -0.65 -0.35 -0.67 -0.37 -0.70 -0.40 -0.74 -0.44 -0.68 -0.38 -0.65 -0.35 Crossover 5Y 287.40 6.83 27.83 25.76 291.37 239.25 05/27 1.00 107.91 -0.43 -0.05 -0.07 0.00 0.10
4 5 - 15 Years 186.45 0.27 3981.22 2.53 -2.01 0.75
Sterling 0.45 0.55 0.58 0.68 0.71 0.86 0.90 1.05 Europe 5Y 57.66 1.55 6.20 7.02 58.00 47.48 Germany - - - - - - -
5 Over 15 Years 387.78 0.59 6507.10 7.33 1.61 0.83
US Dollar 0.11 0.31 0.04 0.24 0.07 0.27 0.07 0.27 0.19 0.39 0.26 0.46 Japan 5Y 50.08 1.58 3.67 2.15 52.84 46.14 08/23 2.00 104.77 -0.78 0.04 0.05 0.04 -0.03
7 All stocks 186.71 0.36 4082.48 4.05 -0.22 0.79
Japanese Yen -0.10 0.00 -0.10 0.00 -0.10 0.10 -0.10 0.10 -0.15 0.15 -0.15 0.15 Senior Financials 5Y 66.91 1.27 6.71 8.78 67.80 54.31 08/27 0.50 106.38 -0.60 -0.04 -0.07 0.00 0.08
Libor rates come from ICE (see www.theice.com) and are fixed at 11am UK time. Other data sources: US $, Euro & CDs: 08/50 0.00 103.01 -0.10 -0.03 -0.16 -0.03 0.00 Day's Month Year's Total Return Return
Markit CDX Greece 02/27 4.30 118.13 0.75 -0.01 -0.12 -0.01 0.04
Tullett Prebon; SDR, US Discount: IMF; EONIA: ECB; Swiss Libor: SNB; EURONIA, RONIA & SONIA: WMBA. Index Linked Dec 03 chg % chg % chg % Return 1 month 1 year
Emerging Markets 5Y 207.63 -5.44 6.00 28.11 221.97 168.20
Ireland - - - - - - - 1 Up to 5 Years 317.93 0.12 1.59 4.47 2657.75 1.84 5.71
Nth Amer High Yld 5Y 324.94 -7.52 18.85 31.97 332.46 287.43
- - - - - - - 2 Over 5 years 941.57 0.33 6.53 13.74 7144.55 6.61 14.14
Nth Amer Inv Grade 5Y 57.43 -1.11 4.36 7.11 58.54 49.43
03/24 3.40 109.27 -0.61 0.06 0.04 0.06 -0.02 3 5-15 years 553.96 0.16 4.39 7.35 4446.49 4.53 8.18
Websites: markit.com, ftse.com. All indices shown are unhedged. Currencies are shown in brackets after the index names.
Italy 05/24 1.85 104.94 -0.16 0.07 0.05 0.07 0.03 4 Over 15 years 1263.40 0.40 7.29 15.95 9320.46 7.35 16.19
08/27 2.05 109.46 0.36 -0.05 -0.04 0.01 0.10 5 All stocks 829.31 0.31 6.02 12.64 6414.04 6.12 13.13
05/31 6.00 147.13 0.79 -0.07 -0.11 -0.02 0.14
COMMODITIES www.ft.com/commodities BONDS: INDEX-LINKED 03/48 3.45 136.57 1.71 -0.04 -0.12 -0.01 0.25 Yield Indices Dec 03 Dec 02 Yr ago Dec 03 Dec 02 Yr ago
Japan 04/23 0.05 99.97 0.08 0.02 0.01 0.02 0.01 5 Yrs 0.52 0.54 0.01 20 Yrs 0.96 0.99 0.86
Energy Price* Change Agricultural & Cattle Futures Price* Change Price Yield Month Value No of
12/27 0.10 101.11 -0.08 0.00 -0.02 0.00 0.02 10 Yrs 0.77 0.81 0.39 45 Yrs 0.63 0.64 0.82
Crude Oil† Dec 68.32 1.17 Corn♦ Dec 581.00 3.75 Nov 16 Nov 16 Prev return stock Market stocks
12/34 1.20 112.77 0.21 0.00 -0.02 0.01 0.02 15 Yrs 0.92 0.96 0.70
Brent Crude Oil‡ 70.38 -0.05 Wheat♦ Dec 807.00 0.00 Can 4.25%' 26 126.56 -0.896 -0.841 1.15 5.25 - -
12/49 0.40 93.34 0.66 0.00 -0.01 0.00 0.03
RBOB Gasoline† Dec 2.00 0.02 Soybeans♦ Jan 1255.50 10.75 Fr 2.10%' 23 107.44 -2.181 -2.082 0.34 18.05 - -
Netherlands 07/23 1.75 104.11 -0.77 0.04 0.06 0.04 -0.07 inflation 0% inflation 5%
Heating Oil† - - Soybeans Meal♦ Dec 358.10 0.00 Swe 1.00%' 25 121.78 -1.952 -1.942 0.76 35.63 - -
07/27 0.75 107.02 -0.48 0.03 -0.05 0.03 0.10 Real yield Dec 03 Dur yrs Previous Yr ago Dec 03 Dur yrs Previous Yr ago
Natural Gas† Dec 4.21 0.10 Cocoa (ICE Liffe)X Dec 1597.00 -6.00 UK 1.875%' 22 107.52 -5.291 -5.369 0.06 15.74 - -
Ethanol♦ - - Cocoa (ICE US)♥ Dec 2320.00 0.00 New Zealand 04/27 4.50 111.55 2.21 -0.01 -0.10 -0.01 1.73 Up to 5 yrs -3.87 2.41 -3.80 -2.80 -4.26 2.42 -4.21 -3.20
UK 2.50%' 24 366.15 -3.718 -3.882 0.56 6.82 - -
Uranium† - - Coffee(Robusta)X Jan 2386.00 47.00 05/31 1.50 92.42 2.40 -0.03 -0.11 -0.03 1.54 Over 5 yrs -2.64 24.22 -2.63 -2.25 -2.66 24.27 -2.65 -2.27
UK 2.00%' 35 312.87 -2.869 -2.961 1.74 9.08 - -
Carbon Emissions‡ - - Coffee (Arabica)♥ Dec 236.65 0.00 05/31 1.50 92.42 2.40 -0.03 -0.11 -0.03 1.54 5-15 yrs -3.22 9.75 -3.20 -2.77 -3.30 9.76 -3.29 -2.87
US 0.625%' 23 105.94 -3.451 -2.873 0.92 47.03 - -
White SugarX 487.00 2.00 Norway - - - - - - - Over 15 yrs -2.57 29.28 -2.56 -2.19 -2.58 29.30 -2.57 -2.20
Diesel† - - US 3.625%' 28 135.22 -1.576 -1.508 1.25 16.78 - -
Sugar 11♥ 18.79 0.14 - - - - - - - All stocks -2.65 22.15 -2.64 -2.26 -2.68 22.21 -2.66 -2.28
Base Metals (♠ LME 3 Months) Representative stocks from each major market Source: Merill Lynch Global Bond Indices † Local currencies. ‡ Total market
Aluminium 2614.00 3.00 Cotton♥ Mar 105.22 1.58 Portugal 10/23 4.95 110.87 -0.73 0.04 0.02 0.04 -0.16 See FTSE website for more details www.ftse.com/products/indices/gilts
value. In line with market convention, for UK Gilts inflation factor is applied to price, for other markets it is applied to par
Aluminium Alloy 2500.00 80.00 Orange Juice♥ Jan 121.75 0.15 04/27 4.13 123.83 -0.29 -0.05 -0.07 0.00 -0.01 ©2018 Tradeweb Markets LLC. All rights reserved. The Tradeweb FTSE
amount.
Copper 9403.50 -66.00 Palm Oil♣ - - Spain - - - - - - - Gilt Closing Prices information contained herein is proprietary to
Lead 2198.00 -46.00 Live Cattle♣ Dec 137.58 1.43 BONDS: TEN YEAR GOVT SPREADS 10/23 4.40 109.63 -0.62 -0.02 0.02 0.00 -0.10 Tradeweb; may not be copied or re-distributed; is not warranted to be
Nickel 20015.00 110.00 Feeder Cattle♣ May 134.88 - Sweden 11/23 1.50 103.47 -0.28 -0.02 -0.03 0.00 0.06 accurate, complete or timely; and does not constitute investment advice.
Tin 39300.00 325.00 Lean Hogs♣ Dec 74.73 1.13 Spread Spread Spread Spread 12/27 0.13 124.12 -2.07 0.02 -0.27 0.02 -0.73 Tradeweb is not responsible for any loss or damage that might result from the use of this information.
Zinc 3164.00 8.00 Bid vs vs Bid vs vs 06/30 0.13 123.73 -2.05 0.01 -0.31 0.01 -0.63
% Chg % Chg Yield Bund T-Bonds Yield Bund T-Bonds Switzerland - - - - - - - All data provided by Morningstar unless otherwise noted. All elements listed are indicative and believed accurate
Precious Metals (PM London Fix)
Gold 1789.25 -15.15 Dec 02 Month Year 06/24 1.25 104.84 -0.65 0.01 -0.02 0.01 0.10 at the time of publication. No offer is made by Morningstar, its suppliers, or the FT. Neither the FT, nor
Australia 1.71 - - Netherlands -0.48 - -
Silver (US cents) 2286.00 -0.50 S&P GSCI Spt 528.78 -8.92 36.79 United Kingdom - - - - - - - Morningstar’s suppliers, warrant or guarantee that the information is reliable or complete. Neither the FT nor
Austria 0.02 - - New Zealand 2.40 - -
Platinum 947.00 3.00 DJ UBS Spot 96.17 -6.70 29.91 Canada - - - Norway - - - 07/23 0.75 100.57 0.40 -0.03 -0.08 0.01 0.42 Morningstar’s suppliers accept responsibility and will not be liable for any loss arising from the reliance on the
Palladium 1751.00 -16.00 TR/CC CRB TR 233.37 -8.21 37.78 Denmark - - - Portugal -0.29 - - 07/27 1.25 103.52 0.61 0.03 -0.11 0.03 0.45 use of the listed information. For all queries e-mail ft.reader.enquiries@morningstar.com
Bulk Commodities LEBA EUA Carbon 58.91 -1.98 129.94 Finland -0.13 - - Spain - - - 07/47 1.50 112.44 0.95 -0.02 -0.16 0.01 0.04
Iron Ore 128.50 -8.45 LEBA UK Power 1048.00 -37.43 -39.60 Germany - - - Sweden -2.05 - - United States 03/23 0.50 100.19 0.35 0.04 -0.04 0.04 0.15 Data provided by Morningstar | www.morningstar.co.uk
GlobalCOAL RB Index 232.50 6.00 Ireland - - - Switzerland - - - 03/27 0.63 97.16 1.18 0.01 -0.19 0.01 0.57
Baltic Dry Index 3171.00 56.00 Italy 0.79 - - United Kingdom - - - 04/32 3.38 147.76 - - - - -
Sources: † NYMEX, ‡ ECX/ICE, ♦ CBOT, X ICE Liffe, ♥ ICE Futures, ♣ CME, ♠ LME/London Metal Exchange.* Latest prices, $ Japan 0.21 - - United States - - - 02/50 0.25 122.07 - - - - -
unless otherwise stated. Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company. Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data LLC, an ICE Data Services company.
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 17

FINANCIAL TIMES SHARE SERVICE

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ZZZPRUQLQJVWDUFRXN
18 ★ 4 December/5 December 2021

Twitter: @FTLex

Didi’s delisting
revi
e ives US-China
Shell:
decoupling risks
tanking Cambo Preloved fashion: the devil wears vintage
Cost of Hermès 35cm Tog
T o Birkin Assorted prices of Hermès Birkin 25
handbag ($’000) on Vestiaire website
Royal a Dutch Shell cannott seem to catch
a break. In its latest retreat, the Anglo-
Dutch oil and gas major is pulling the 12 £13kk
Johnn Plender
plug on its contentious Cambo proje o ct £29k
in Britain’s North Sea. That leavea s the 10 £14kk
£57k Thee Longg View

proposed scheme, in which Shell was to
have
a had a 30 perr centt interest, wholly
in the hands of private equity-backed
Siccar Pointt Energy.
The duo applied for approval in June.
The UK government, under pressure
from activists, has yet to clear it. That
is irksome, but hardlyy cause for
inve
n stors to break into a sweat.
Cambo is small-scale. The developers
expect it to produce up to 170m barrels
of oil equivalent over 25 years. Divide
that pro rata between the two parties
and Shell’s share equates to roughlyy a
fortnight’s production — but spread
over a quarter of a century. The field
f Enter the flourishingg world of second-
may ultimately yield more and there is
also an expected 53.5bn cubic feet of
gas included. But its removal hardly
sparks immediate financial concerns.
Seen another way, a however, thet
scuppered proje o ctt illustrates Shell’s
difficulties managingg the energy
transition. Cambo would have a added to
Shell’s carbon baggage, justified byy it
beingg nearer to home and generating
cash for greener endeavo a urs. Thatt did
nott carry much weight with eco-
activists, whose complaints probably
found more receptive ears with
watchdogs as the UK hosted COP26.
Its efforts in otherr arenas have
a also
a features at the top end of this market.
hitt setbacks. The Jackdaw gasfield
development, also in the North Sea,
was iced in October when the t UK’s
Offshore Petroleum Regulatorr for
Environment and Decommissioning
refused to sanction it without changes.
The greenerr Scottish Acorn carbon
capture and storage project, a Shell
partnership with Storegga, has also
failed to secure fast-track approval.
The decision to restrict the ready-to-go
projectt was an unexpected knock-back.
Both projects may yet see the light of
day,
a albeit
a t in amended form f for
Jackdaw. w But Shell’s stumbles show the
pitfalls on the road to decarbonisation.
Didi:
east, west, home’s safest
Didi will end its American journey
soon. The ride-hailingg group will
switch its listingg from New York to
Hong Kong. Where tthis $38bn tech
business goes, others will follow.
Beijingg is deadly serious in its push for
US-quoted Chinese groups to bring
theirr listings home.
Bolsteringg the status of Chinese
exchanges is nott Beijing’s only aim. It
fears groups represented in America
will give tthe US access to sensitive
information. Distrustt is mutual. Big
data is now a strategic resource.
More than
t 240 Chinese companies
worth more than $2tn are listed in the
US. Since July,y Beijingg has halted nearly
all offshore flotations byy data-rich
Chinese groups. Those that have a
alreadyy listed are likely to come home.
An even biggerr proportion, about
three-quarters byy markett value, face
uncertaintyy due to theirr US listed
status as “variable interest entities”.
These Cayman-registered shells
circumve
m ntt Chinese foreign-ownership
rules for
f mainland companies. Beijing
has stepped up scrutinyy of VIEs
8
6 £214k
4 ignored. That is an impor-
2 decision by the Chinese ride-hailing
0
1984 2010 2011 2016 2019 2020
Sources: savespendsplurge.com; vestiairecollective.com
Lookingg too cool for school while
savingg the planet is fashion nirvana.
hand handbags, which turns status
symbols into badges off sustainability.
t theirr bags fro
Prada is the latestt to see a money-
makingg opportunity in this market.
Justt don’tt expect to bag a bargain.
Hermès’ famed
f Birkin bag, named for
English actress Jane Birkin, illustrates
the vagaries off bag economics.
Today a brand new w Birkin 35 in
Togo leatherr costs £8,890. Butt buying
one of its predecessors second-hand
— or, as itt has been rebranded,
“preloved” — could costt multiples of
that.
a Depreciation, assuming no
scratches or blemishes, barely
These bags are available aat a range
of shops, online platforms and
auction houses. Vestiaire, an online
structures, used byy groups such as
Alibaba, Pinduoduo and JD.com.
The US Securities and Exchange
Commission has, for its part, finalised a
rule allowing it to delistt foreign stocks
that do nott meet its audit
requirements. US-quoted Chinese
groups have struggled to complyy with
American demands forr information
without violating Chinese law. a
Chinese retail inve
n storr appetite for
homecomings has withered as
politicians turned up the heat. a Music
streaming platform Cloud Village fell f
on its Hong Kong debut on Thursday
even afterr halving the offering.
Didi shares soared then
t slumped in
pre-market trading. Pundits theorised
about everythingg from buybacks to a
business boostt for partty-pleasing Didi.
The more politicised shares become,
the harder theyy are to value on
fundamentals. Welcome to the
polarised, rumour-driven world of
international inve
n sting
Business travel:
flight or fight
Irrepressible optimism is required to
inve
n st in corporate travea l businesses
these days. Executives were dustingg off
theirr suitcases and passports to hit the
roads again. Now w the highly
transmissible Omicron variant is
threateningg to stall the recovery.
American Express Global Business
Trave
a l has therefore chosen an
awkward time to announce a listing.
The business, which books travea l for
corporates, is going publicc through a
blank-c
k heque company backed k by
private equity group Apollo. American
£20k
£81k
£18k
£13kk £71k
£24k
seller that specialises in resale, has
just shy of 100 Birkin 25 bags on its
site. Vendors in the US, Japan, UK and
Hong Kong are all lookingg to offload
f m around £13,000 to
four times that.
t from going public on foreign
Auctions command still higher
prices, particularly when the
t vendor
is famous: a Birkin-owned Birkin bag
went under the gavea l for a whisker
under £119,0
9 00 this year.
China’s
a Gen Z is combining a
nostalgia for goods enjoyed by
previous generations with a
thoroughly modern eye attuned to
the investment potential of statement
pieces.
As ever, charityy shops continue to
parlay used clothes and accessories
into cash for worthyy causes. Just don’t
expect to find a Birkin bag lurking
round tthe corner.
Express spun out GBT, as itt is called,
into a joint venture in 2014, retainingg a
50 per cent stake.
The deal values GBT at about $5bn,
includingg debt. Att about 9.5 times 2023
adjusted ebitda, thatt is on par with pre-
pandemicc levels. Itt is also abo
a utt the
same forward ratio as Expedia — which
has more exposure to the slightly
healthier leisure trave
a l sector.
That is nott too shabbyy considering
business trips fell nearlyy two-thirds last
year, according to GlobalData. GBT’s
transaction value is only a fifth off 2019
levels. Pro forma revenue, which
factors in recent acquisitions, is
projected to fall 20 per cent this year
following a 64 per cent drop last year.
GBT and the
t Apollo Spac believe
road warriors will eventually return.
They expect corporate trave a l spending
to recover to about 70 per centt of pre-
pandemicc levels byy 2023. The Global
Business Trave
a l Association is not
forecastingg a full recoveryy until 2024 at
the earliest — and tthat was before
Omicron.
GBT’s biggestt advantage will be its
size. With $39bn of travea l sales pre-
pandemic, itt is the biggest corporate
trave
a l specialist.
That said, a projected addressable
market worth off $1.4tn overall may be
a stretch. Company bosses such as
Jamie Dimon are eager to resume their t
globe trotting. But many staff lower
down the management tree would
happilyy skip overseas trips to avoid
nose swabs and quarantine.
Lex on the web
For notes on today’s stories
go to www.f
w t.com/lex
T
he risk that China could
decouple from US capital
markets can no longer be
tantt lesson from this week’s
group Didi Chuxing, under pressure
from China’s cyber securityy watchdog,
to delist from the New York Stock
Exchange and go public in Hong Kong.
The stakes here were not small. Didi’s
$4.4bn initial publicc offeringg in June was
the biggest listing byy a Chinese company
in New York k since Alibaba in 2014.
The move came after reports that
China is planning to ban companies
f stock mar-
kets via variable interest entities, the
flimsy legal structures based in tax
have
a ns that havea underpinned the t flota-
f
tions in the
t US of such companies as Ali-
baba, JD.com and Pinduodo.
Beijing’s clear desire to have
a Chinese
companies list closer to home could
inflict losses on western investors as
more Chinese companies delist or go
private.
Much portfolio damage has already
been incurred as a result of Beijing’s
assault on Big Tech and high-profile
entrepreneurs, while the plight of over-
stretched property developers such as
Evergrande has added to the pain.
Att the same time, the US Securities
and Exchange Commission is set to
force Chinese companies to delist if they
fail to disclose more information about
audits and government control over
theirr operations.
The curious thing is that capital has,
until now, been blind to political reality.
y question about the durability of the peg.
China continues to attract record
amounts of foreign direct inven stment. A
recent survey by the American Cham-
ber of Commerce found that in 2021,
59.5 per cent off US multinationals
reported increased investment, up 30.9
per cent compared with 2020. Of manu-
facturers producing in China, 72 per
cent had no plans to move any produc-
tion out of China in the next three years.
So much forr deglobalisation.
As for portfolio flows, US holdings of
Chinese equity and debt securities
surged ffrom $765bn in 2017 to $1.2tn in
2020, helped by the relaxation of rules
on foreign access.
This trend has been accelerated by
indexx providers including more Chinese
securities in global and regional indices,
causing passive funds automatically to
increase theirr exposure to China.
In effect, the Chinese government
bond market offers the ultimate happy
hunting ground for searchers after
yield. Over the past year, 10-year bonds
The desire to have
v Chinese
companies list closer to
home could inflict losses
on western inve
n stors
have
a offered an income of around 3.5
per cent, compared with close to 1.5 per
cent on 10-year US Treasuries. With
Chinese inflation running at about 1.5
per cent, the real yield is positive, in
contrast to US Treasuries which live
under the shadow of an inflation rate in
Octoberr of 6.2 per cent.
That said, the de facto renminbi peg to
the dollarr and euro means that Chinese
sovereign bonds offer little or no diversi-
fication to the official reserve managers
who are the main foreign buyers, since
dollars and euros are the mainstays a of
their portfolios. And there must be a
Given the deep-seated problems in the
housing market, China is heavily
dependent on exports to propel growth,w
which could make it temptingg to aim for
f discountt is adequate. The geopolitical
a more competitive exchange rate.
Whatt emerges from all this is that the
rivalry between the US and China does
not justifyy analogies with the cold war.r
China’s model has an extraordinary
degree off integration into the global sys-
tem, far greater than the Soviet Union
had. To the extent that there is a war in
the capital markets, it is largely con-
fined to the primaryy market in equities.
There is nonetheless a strong likeli-
hood thatt political pressure will build in
the US for curbs on investmentt in China.
One clearr indication is the latest annual
report of the US-China Economic and
Security Review Commission, an inde-
pendent US aagency. y
It points out that nominal financial
“opening” in China is in reality a care-
fullyy managed process, designed to rein-
force state control over capital markets
and channel foreign funding towards
fulfilling national objectives.
The commissioners further worried
that US capital could be helping advance
China’sa military modernisation, facili-
tating human rights abuses or subsidis-
ingg unfair trade practices byy US groups.
Does this means that China is an
investment dead end? I would argue
that variable interest entities are a
no-no because they do not offer inves-
tors real ownership rights and carry no
votingg power. For environmental, social
and governance funds, China is also
challengingg territory given that it is the
biggest polluter. There are undeniable
human rights concerns. And corporate
governance falls notoriously short of
developed world standards. But for the
rest it is simply a question of whether
risk is being realisticallyy priced.
Beijing’s common prosperityy agenda,
its penchant forr random political initia-
tives and its interventionist behaviour
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Saturday 4 December / Sunday 5 December 2021

SUPPLEMENT OF THE YEAR

My friend Sondheim Mandy Patinkin on the master of musicals — PAGE 12

Follow us on Instagram @ft_weekend

Independence day
Henry Wilson, the intransigent chief of
A century after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, novelist Peter Cunningham the British Imperial General Staff.
“Unless we crush the [Irish] murder
gangs this summer we . . . lose Ireland
tells the inside story of the animosities, rivalries and mistrust behind the talks and the empire,” he noted even as
reprisals by the Black and Tans were
being greeted with dismay in parts of
that established a new state — but also planted the seeds for future conflicts the British press and by the clergy.
De Valera had already been in receipt
of overtures made on Lloyd George’s
Government of Ireland Act 1920 as a
separate parliament with limited auton-
omy and a defined land border. The act
had envisaged parliaments north and
south, both answerable to a crown-
appointed viceroy, and nominating
delegates to a “Council of Ireland”. But,
by 1921, the south, with its own Dáil,
or parliament, albeit proscribed,
wanted nothing to do with such a Brit-
ish-centric proposal.
Some hope remained for a united Ire-
land. Substantial Catholic minorities
were “trapped” in Northern Ireland’s
border counties. The Irish would be
given reason to believe that Britain,
through a Boundary Commission, could
force a redrawing of Northern Ireland’s
border to bring in these Catholics under
a southern parliament.
let unviable and force her into unity
with her larger southern neighbour.
The picking of Irish delegates rested
with de Valera. Dev, ever enigmatic,
announced he would not go to London.
Collins, the Dáil’s minister for finance, at
31 already a national hero, pleaded with
him to change his mind. De Valera was
adamant. His reasons have been the
subject of extensive analysis from that
time forward, for within his crucial deci-
sion lay the seeds of the tragic outcome
that would eventually unfold. His clos-
est allies, out-and-out republicans such
as Cathal Brugha, the incendiary minis-
ter for defence, and Austin Stack, minis-
ter for home affairs, were fundamen-
tally opposed to dialogue on the basis
offered, and were fully prepared to go
down fighting, which in Brugha’s case

O
n June 24 1921, the British
public was presented with
extraordinary news. Prime
minister David Lloyd
George had invited Éamon
de Valera, the leader of Sinn Féin, to
meet him for talks in London with the
object of ending the war in Ireland. Up to
then, imminent and overwhelming use
of military force to settle the Irish ques-
tion had been widely expected. Now the
leader of rebels in open war with Britain,
a man described by the chief secretary
for Ireland as “[belonging] to a race of
treacherous murderers”, was coming to
parley in Downing Street. As Winston
Churchill later wrote: “No British Gov-
ernment in modern times has ever
appeared to make so sudden and com-
plete reversal of policy.”
The events that followed Lloyd
George’s invitation would resonate for a
century. A year later Ireland was
plunged into civil war. The partition of
Ireland, consolidated by the Anglo-
Irish Treaty of December 6 1921, cre-
ated a longing for a united Ireland that
contributed to the Troubles and has
underpinned Irish republican activism
ever since. Today, the border that runs
through Ireland has been disinterred
as an external EU frontier, and the spec-
tre of customs posts returning to
reverse the gains of the Good Friday
Agreement haunts the ongoing Brexit
protocol negotiations.
I was immersed in the dramatic
events of 1921 as part of my research for
a novel when Ireland went into pan-
demic lockdown. Libraries, bookshops
and universities shut their doors; my
preferred sources were blocked. Shortly
afterwards, I went to a shelf of books
that had once belonged to my father, a
row of venerable spines I had been star-
ing at for decades but never really seen.
Soon I realised that these old memoirs
and biographies, many annotated in the
1960s and early 1970s, had probably
been read back then by Dad as the 50th
anniversary of Ireland’s independence
had approached.
Like many of my generation, I had
been brought up with only the bare
bones of modern Irish history, served
with partisan seasoning. My family
from Waterford in the south-east was
Above: illustration
by Tim Marrs
Below: people kneeling in
prayer while British and
Irish leaders met in
London on July 21 1921
George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images
strongly anti-de Valera, their opinions
formed not only by his activities in
1921 but also because my grandfather’s
livestock exporting business had been
devastated by the tariffs that had arisen
in the 1930s from de Valera’s “economic
war” with Britain. Families all over Ire-
land had taken opposing sides from the
time of the treaty. But as I read, I was
riveted not only by the many twists and
turns in the drama but by the fascinat-
ing personalities of those involved.
Lloyd George had in de Valera some-
one not directly associated in British
minds with shooting British officers.
The Irishman, whose death sentence
for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising had
been commuted, had subsequently
escaped from Lincoln prison and in
May 1919 gone incognito to America
where he had remained until the end of
1920. The Liberal prime minister
needed cover to appease the Conserva-
tive party on whose support his coali-
tion government increasingly relied. De
Valera, already with the aura of power
about him, provided cover in a way that
an infamous figure such as Michael Col-
lins could not.
Nor, it seemed, would the English
electorate now tolerate an earth-razing
campaign of the kind needed to subdue
Ireland, advocated by those like Sir
behalf by General Jan Smuts, prime In such circumstances, the logic went, would be a destiny fulfilled.
minister of South Africa. Following fur- the subsequent much-reduced size of
ther contacts through back channels Northern Ireland would make the state- Continued on page 2
and a conciliatory speech by King
George V at the inauguration in Belfast
of the Northern Parliament in June, a
truce was called. Prominent Sinn Féin
members, including Arthur Griffith,
Negotiating with Éamon
de Valera was, David
Lloyd George complained,
like trying ‘to pick up
mercury with a fork’
already frail at 50 years of age, were
released from prisons, and talks began
in London on July 14.
Negotiating with de Valera, a man of
labyrinthine disposition, was, Lloyd
George complained, like trying “to pick
up mercury with a fork”. (“Why doesn’t
he use a spoon?” de Valera is said to have
responded.) Both men irritated each
other. The prime minister, who
addressed the Irishman as “Mr de Valer-
era”, was inclined to make asides in
Welsh to his secretary, Tom Jones, to
which Dev (his name to most of Ireland)
responded by speaking Irish with his
own delegation.
Although these talks settled nothing,
they established a platform for going
forward in an atmosphere that, for the
moment, was a hopeful alternative to
the resumption of war. After a summer
of false starts and diplomatic hedge-
hopping, de Valera promptly accepted
Lloyd George’s September 29 invitation
to a conference in London in October to
settle the issue. Preparations in Dublin
and in London began.
Ireland’s goal was to be recognised by
Britain as a sovereign, independent
island state, and for Britain to renounce
all claims over Ireland. De Valera pro-
posed a form of external association
with the British empire. Britain, how-
ever, was resolved to grant only a lim-
ited form of home rule to 26 of Ireland’s
32 counties, and dominion status within
the empire, but no autonomy when it
came to defence or matters fiscal.
Overshadowing all was Northern Ire-
land, already established under the
2 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Life
As the December holiday season

Note from the approached, our country was waiting to

exhale. Spring came early in

FTW editor
In the helter-skelter world of
journalism, where news breaks
and plans can change just like that,
the first casualty is often the
innovative idea — even though
that is ultimately what can make
you stand out.
With that in mind, we are
launching our first international
FT Weekend Festival, taking place
in Washington DC on Saturday
7 May. We will be streaming it, of
course, and delivering a digital
catch-up service; our working title
Johannesburg, beautiful in bursts of
purple hydrangea and pink
bougainvillea. The mood was lighter.
Winter had been unspeakable as
Johannesburg was gripped by a third
wave of Covid. It was a season of loss:
two uncles succumbed in hospital; a
beloved cousin passed away weeks
later; a well-known journalist
colleague, Karima Brown; a publisher
friend, Nadia Goetham; a chef whose
Twitter timeline was my scroll of
aspiration, LesDaChef; the national
songbird Sibongile Khumalo — lost, not
to Covid, but she joined the long toll of
the last year.
Now, hope was finally on the horizon.
The Covid death burden went down to
almost zero as the vaccination drive
picked up. The charts flattened and
even last week, perusing the daily
data, Africa felt like the safest place in
the world to have a holiday as we
watched the fourth wave pick up in
Europe and the US.
And then hope was shattered on
November 24 at a press conference
where the leading South African gene
detective, Professor Tulio de Oliveira,
announced that he and his team had
sequenced a new variant of the virus,

is “The Bigger Picture”. I hope to
see you there.
It has been a sad week in the
land of Life & Arts, with the
deaths of two titans, Virgil Abloh
and Stephen Sondheim, who have
so inspired our writers and
readers over the years. Jo Ellison
has written beautifully in her
back-page column on their spirit
and force. We also have a moving
tribute to Sondheim by the actor
and singer Mandy Patinkin on
page 12, and a review of Tuesday’s
“Virgil was here” show in Miami
on page 4.
The other shadow over this
week is, of course, Omicron. Ferial
Haffajee, one of the great editors of
post-apartheid South Africa, has
turned her attention to this in the
Diary, from the missteps of the
elite to the fallout of the variant on
her homeland — and her third
(and thwarted) attempt to leave
Johannesburg for a honeymoon.
Having had a ticket to Jo’burg on
hold for nearly two years, I am
revelling in her tales — and am so
happy to find a kindred spirit who
loves that city despite its dire
reputation. Thank you, as ever, for
reading us. Alec Russell
B.1.1.529.
I listened on my car radio as de
Oliveira joined health minister Joe
Phaahla to tell the country about the
variant, then still of interest, not yet of
concern. In the thick Italian accent we
have come to recognise, de Oliveira ran
through the now well-known history of
how Omicron had been detected first in
Botswana, then in South Africa and
then in Hong Kong. An eagle-eyed
pathologist at Lancet Laboratories had
noticed a change in gene mutation and
reported it up the public health
sentinel system for which our country
is well-known in the scientific world.
South Africa’s scientific and political
communities have practised radical
transparency with its people and with
the world since coronavirus made
landfall here in March 2020. The Delta
variant was first sequenced and
identified here in December that year,
killing our summer vibe and earning
the country kneecapping travel bans.
Not even a year later, the same thing
has happened again. Hours after the
press conference, the UK announced a
travel ban. Family, trade and tourism
links between South Africa and the UK
are significant, so a sigh went up from
the tip of Africa and stretched to the
UK as plans for holidays and reunions
were torn apart by the identification
of Omicron.
Hour by hour the world closed us out
as news of the variant spread. More
European countries followed suit. Then
the United Arab Emirates and Qatar,
where tens of thousands of South
Africans work. Iran announced a travel
ban. Then the US. We had been sealed
off from the world again.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is a
gracious and personable leader, not
given to authoritarian table-thumping.
But even he was angry. South Africa’s
transparency and scientific sharing of
Welcome to ‘Wuhannesburg’
the virus’s mutations had been met
SOUTH with a ban that was more than a little
racist in its assumptions and
AFRICA presumptions about Africa’s scientific
DIARY abilities. The president called on
countries to rescind the ban as news
emerged that the Netherlands, in fact,
FERIAL had the first cases.
HAFFAJEE While China and a few other
countries pursue a Covid-zero strategy,
most of the world has realised that we
have to vaccinate and learn to live with
coronavirus until it becomes endemic.
This is the strategy South Africa is
pursuing, along with global best
practice of alerting and sharing
genomic surveillance results quickly
and transparently. The ban has
provoked national and international
anger for all it says about geopolitical
power and of how a small country
trying to do its best can be treated like
a pariah in the midst of viral fear. The
idea of a global village, where we are
each other’s carers, lies tattered again.
It’s the little heartbreaks that catch
me. My niece in Japan can’t travel back
for us to meet her little girl. My
WhatsApp is filled with stories like this
from friends and family. The tourism
industry had been looking forward to
visitors, 300,000 from the UK alone.
They had booked tickets,
accommodation and visits to wine
farms, and planned to go shark-diving,
to the beaches and game parks.
Above: sculptures by artist Cancellations came in faster than you
James Delaney at The can say Omicron, threatening a sector
Wilds, a nature reserve in that could pull South Africa from its
Johannesburg — Covid doldrums. Part of the reason so
many South Africans work around the
world is that unemployment is so high
at home. Growth in gross domestic
product is pegged at an optimistic 5 per
cent for the rest of the year but the
travel bans put a spanner in the works.
My husband and I got married in
December 2019 and our planned
honeymoon was to visit China. The
identification of the novel coronavirus
in Wuhan later that month put paid to
it. I was to attend the Perugia
journalism festival in March 2020 and
When you’ve had three
honeymoons crashed by
corona, you learn to roll
with the punches
so we thought that was as good a
replacement celebration as any. The
virus found a second epicentre in Italy,
so that plan hit the skids too.
By December 2020, we had
moderated our ambitions and decided
on Cape Town. When de Oliveira and
his team sequenced the Delta variant,
Ramaphosa locked down the country
and imposed internal travel bans.
When you’ve had three honeymoons
crashed by corona, you learn to roll
with the punches.
Last Sunday, I needed a break from
my Omicron doom-scrolling. It was too
awful to watch and the din of Africa’s
digital anger was deafening. So, we
went to walk at The Wilds, an
inner-city gem of a reserve on
Johannesburg’s hilly northern slopes.
The artist James Delaney has dotted
metal sculptures across the park. As
you walk and climb, you spot a
statuesque pink giraffe, a red monkey
in a tree, a purple wildebeest. After
the weekend rains, the trees and
grass were bright lime green.
Raindrops still glistened. The sun had
come out. The shrubs had drunk
deeply so their flowers were perky and
yellow, pink and purple. It was a
spectacular display, a showing of
nature’s curative qualities.
At The Wilds, you climb to its highest
point and you can see the cityscape.
All the markers of Johannesburg’s
history as the city where gold was
discovered — the buildings, the stately
homes of the “randlords”, the
skyscrapers. In typical South African
humour, the city earned the moniker
“Wuhannesburg” after the Chinese city
where the virus was first identified,
when our numbers climbed higher and
faster than the rest of the country’s.
You can impose travel bans but, in
no time at all, the Delta variant that
was sequenced here had become
dominant — like Omicron could shortly
be. We have to learn to live with
coronavirus and my “Wuhannesburg”
felt like it was not a bad place to be
quarantined in by the rest of the world.
Ferial Haffajee is a South African
editor and writer

Independence day
Continued from page 1
The Irish team was named. Griffith,
minister for foreign affairs, and Collins
were the backbone. Robert Barton, 40,
an ascendancy landlord from County
Wicklow, was a staunch de Valera ally
and minister for economic affairs.
Another Dev ally, George Gavan Duffy,
had defended Sir Roger Casement, the
Irish nationalist hero prosecuted in 1916
for treason. Eamonn Duggan, a veteran
of the 1916 Easter Rising, was appointed
liaison officer.
Two secretaries were nominated:
John Chartres, a civil servant who had
Griffith’s confidence, and Erskine
Childers, an Englishman, who had not.
Childers, Barton’s first cousin, was a
character fiction could not have out-
done. Author in 1903 of the bestselling
spy thriller, The Riddle of the Sands, in
1914, with Molly, his American wife,
they had sailed their yacht into
Howth, County Dublin, with a consign-
ment of German rifles destined for the
Irish Volunteers. Regarded by de Valera
as a constitutional genius, Childers was
distrusted by Collins and detested
by Griffith.
On the insistence of de Valera, who
had become “a particularist in the nice-
ties of statecraft”, according to one biog-
rapher, the Irish delegates were
appointed as plenipotentiaries by the
Irish Dáil — but again, Dev’s ambivalent
hand intruded. At a final cabinet meet-
ing, in a scribbled pencil note to Griffith,
he instructed that the plenipotentiaries
make no decision without prior sanc-
tion of the cabinet, a seeming contradic-
tion of the terms under which the dele-
gates had just been appointed.
The main Irish delegation to London,
25 persons including six female secre-
taries and a cook, sailed in the first week
of October. (Collins and his entourage
crossed separately some days later.)
The conference was set to begin in
Downing Street on Tuesday October 11.
The British appointees were seasoned
politicians and unrepentant Unionists
whose distaste for Irish rebels could not
be overstated. Compared to the Irish-
men, without experience in world
affairs, the English side had recently
concluded the Treaty of Versailles.
Austen Chamberlain, leader of the
house, emphatically opposed any
autonomy for Ireland. Winston Church-
ill, secretary of state for the colonies,
was the dogged son of Lord Randolph
Churchill, a legendary champion of
Ulster. The secretary of state for Ireland,
Hamar Greenwood, a shameless apolo-
gist for the Black and Tans, was some-
one Collins had sworn never to shake
hands with. The Earl of Birkenhead, in
1916, as attorney-general had success-
fully procured the death sentence for Sir
Roger Casement.
Little was known in London of the
Irishmen, which had led Birkenhead to
privately commission résumés. The
resulting dossier summarily relegated
the lesser players: “Duggan (Catholic)
. . . completely under the influence of
Collins; recognises that he is not one of
the strong men . . . Barton (Protestant)
. . . educated at Rugby and Christch-
urch; . . . a substantial farmer; has no
outstanding quality . . . Gavan Duffy
(Catholic) . . . vain and self-sufficient,
likes to hear himself talk.”
Then the two remaining Irishmen:
“Arthur Griffith (Catholic) . . . will start
somewhere about AD1100 and argue up
to the sovereign independent right of
every nation . . . usually silent . . . is
more clever than de Valera, but not so
attractive; is the real power in Sinn Féin.
Michael Collins (Catholic). “Minister of
Finance” [sic] . . . full of physical
energy; quick thinker, a Cork man,
therefore impetuous and rather excita-
ble; the strongest personality of the
party . . . ’ The dossier concluded: “All
the delegates will be very nervous and ill
at ease . . . In overcoming their nerv-
ousness they may be a bit rude and
extravagant in speech.”
At the opening session Lloyd George
placed the delegates on opposite sides of
the conference table before introducing
them. Collins’ ability to quickly sum up
men is evident from the notes of his first
impressions: he disliked Lloyd George,
distrusted Churchill and loathed
Greenwood. Of Birkenhead: “Concise.
Clearness of ideas . . . A good man.”
Later, he wrote: “I prefer Birkenhead to
anyone else.”
Over the remaining weeks, the Eng-
lish in essence negotiated with Griffith
and Collins as the other Irish delegates
were pushed out into sub-conferences.
Progress was slow. After work, Collins
usually withdrew to his separate quar-
ters in Cadogan Gardens, provided to
him by Lady Hazel Lavery, while Grif-
fith went to the theatre or played chess
in his delegation’s rented quarters in
Michael Collins leaves Downing Street in October 1921— Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hans Place. Disaster was narrowly
averted following the uninvited inter-
vention of Pope Benedict XV, whose
message of goodwill for the talks to King
George V elicited a response from the
sovereign which seemed to confirm Ire-
land as a de facto member of the impe-
rial family.
Now the Conservative party confer-
ence loomed and Lloyd George, closeted
with Griffith, pleaded with the Irishman
Seven months later, Ireland
was ravaged by civil war
fought between pro-treaty
and anti-treaty forces
not to allow the talks to break down over
Ulster, the core Unionist issue, for fear
the Conservatives would bring down his
government. The prime minister hinted
at a Boundary Commission; Griffith pri-
vately promised to forbear.
On December 3, the Irish delegates
were back in Dublin with a bleak draft
for cabinet. Ireland was to be granted no
more than dominion status; Northern
Ireland’s established position would
remain unchanged; some concessions
on defence could be expected. Brugha,
combustible to an alarming degree,
accused Griffith and Collins of betraying
the core Irish position. The bitter split in
Sinn Féin was now clear. The draft pro-
posals were rejected and the delegates,
divided among themselves, returned in
gloom that night to London.
On December 4, discussions resumed
and Irish counterproposals were pre-
sented. The Irish suggestion of external
association with the empire was once
again rejected. Again and again Griffith
insisted he would accept association
with the crown only on conditions of
Irish unity, notwithstanding the con-
firmed status of Northern Ireland as a
separate legislative entity. All the
emphasis was on the political with scant
attention paid to financial or economic
details. A clause that transferred part of
the UK’s national debt to the Irish state-
in-waiting went undisputed, with eco-
nomic implications that would lie unat-
tended until 1925.
On December 5 one last attempt
began. In Ireland, rosary vigils for peace
were being held as two armies faced
each other under an increasingly uneasy
truce. Griffith, to the surprise of his
colleagues, was reminded by Lloyd
George of his promise not to break on
the question of Ulster; Griffith hotly
confirmed his promise, made albeit in a
different context.
Birkenhead’s legal skills were then
called on to provide a form of words in
the oath to the sovereign acceptable to
both sides. After much discussion
on defence, Churchill yielded that the
new Irish state be permitted to con-
struct naval vessels to protect revenue
and fisheries.
Griffith then agreed Ulster be
excluded from further discussion pro-
vided a government-appointed Bound-
ary Commission be established. The
British agreed.
In a final bid, Lloyd George offered fis-
cal autonomy but the Irish still
demurred. At that point, the prime min-
ister’s tone changed. The British Army
garrisoned in Ireland was on high alert,
he said with force. The alternative to
agreement that night was “immediate
and terrible war”. The chastened Irish
left Downing Street having agreed to
return by 10pm with a final decision.
“I have never,” wrote Churchill of
Collins, “seen so much pain and suffer-
ing in restraint.”
Shortly afterwards, Collins announced
to his colleagues that he would support
Griffith. Duggan indicated likewise. For
hours Griffith and Collins entreated Bar-
ton to sign. Barton eventually agreed;
Gavan Duffy followed Barton’s example.
At 11pm the exhausted delegates
returned to Downing Street where a
sombre British side awaited. The Irish
announced that they would sign the
treaty creating the Irish Free State.
As the Downing Street typewriters
clattered out the final draft, Birkenhead
would recall how the reserve between
the two sides collapsed and how they
“laughed and jested until copies of the
treaty were brought in for signature”.
“I may have signed my political death
warrant tonight,” Birkenhead remarked
to Collins, who replied: “I may have
signed my actual death warrant.”
Seven months later, Ireland was rav-
aged by civil war fought between pro-
treaty and anti-treaty forces. On August
22 1922, Collins was ambushed and shot
dead less than 20 miles from his birth-
place in County Cork.
Ninety-nine years later, in June 2020,
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the political
descendants of the respective Irish civil
war belligerents, along with the Green
party, entered government in Ireland
together for the first time, something
my grandfather would never have
thought possible.
‘Freedom is a Land I Cannot See’, a novel by
Peter Cunningham, is published by
Sandstone Press
4 December/5 December 2021
Lunch with the FT Ava DuVernay
‘I was like, “they’re doing
this? I can do this”’
The award-winning director and
producer has blazed a trail for a
new generation of filmmakers —
and is building a creative empire in
her image. Over Brazilian tacos in
LA, she tells Enuma Okoro about
rewriting Hollywood’s canon,
shifting the margins to the centre
— and the question she asks men
who want to work for her
A
va DuVernay floats out
from her office in a full-
length emerald dress, her
skirt billowing around her,
and greets me with a hug,
apologising for making me wait. I’d
arrived 15 minutes earlier at the head-
quarters of Array, the heart of the 49-
year-old filmmaker’s expanding creative
empire, but DuVernay was recording a
guest segment for Kelly Clarkson’s day-
time TV show. “I usually don’t wear this
much make-up,” she explains, laughing.
A little over 10 years ago DuVernay
released her first feature film; since then
she’s become a Hollywood powerhouse,
writing, directing, producing and even
distributing movies, her own and others’.
Her company’s campus sits in the mostly
residential enclave of Historic Filipino-
town, not far from downtown LA.
There’s a 50-seater cinema and court-
yard walls filled with colourful murals
honouring women from the local com-
munity; by the gate a wrought iron sign is
engraved with a quote from the poet
Gwendolyn Brooks: “Art Urges Voyages”.
“We came back to campus in June,
and it’s 100 per cent fully vaccinated,”
says DuVernay, as we walk across a
courtyard. “I had to get back to work. I
kept everyone on payroll during the
pandemic and we actually grew. There
were six or seven new hires.”
From the outset, DuVernay has had
bigger ideas than focusing on her own
career. She’s a brilliant, versatile film-
maker, from her Sundance-winning
romance Middle of Nowhere to her Mar-
tin Luther King biopic Selma, nominated
for Best Picture at the 2015 Oscars, and
the searing documentary 13th, an exam-
ination of the links between slavery and
the US prison-industrial complex. Her
Emmy-winning 2019 mini-series When
They See Us, the story of the eventually
exonerated Central Park Five, was a
pacy drama that showed her commit-
ment to highlighting historic injustice.
But she’s also an industry disrupter,
determined to put a spotlight on the cre-
ative work of women and people of col-
our, to champion them as filmmakers
and across the industry. This is about far
more than diverse casting: DuVernay
has played an outsized role in moving to
the centre the stories and experiences of
those we’re used to seeing at the margins.
As we drive into downtown LA, head-
ing for a Brazilian place called Wood-
spoon, I mention one of her recent
projects — the re-release on Netflix of
Sankofa, a 1993 film by the Ethiopian
filmmaker Haile Gerima. Feted at the
Berlin Film Festival, the movie was orig-
inally ignored by US distributors and
only found an audience because Gerima
fought to release it independently. DuV-
ernay, who calls Gerima one of her artis-
tic heroes, masterminded the restora-
tion of the film. “It does get into a ques-
tion of authenticated work,” says DuV-
ernay. “You could have a successful,
robust career serving black peo-
ple . . . You could be a star in your com-
munity but not within the authenti-
cated spaces. He’s 75 years old and the
Academy is just looking his way.”
DuVernay’s own success may seem
meteoric, but she’s been in the film busi-
ness for more than 20 years. After
receiving her degree in African Ameri-
can Studies and English from UCLA in
the mid-1990s, she worked in entertain-
ment PR, setting up her own agency in
1999. Watching filmmakers at work,
and knowing there were stories she
wanted to tell from a different perspec-
tive, DuVernay started to think about
writing and directing herself.
“I have always loved film, but I never
thought I could do it,” she says. “But
when I started working in publicity and
being on set, I was like ‘They’re doing
this? I can do this.’ . . . It was really
observing directors, white men who
were directing, and thinking, ‘I’m
interested in what he’s doing, and I can
do it too.’”
★ FTWeekend
S
he started off shooting docu-
WO OD S PO ON mentaries and in 2010 wrote
107 West 9th Street, Los and directed her first feature, I
Angeles, USA Will Follow, on a tiny $50,000
budget. At the same time, she
Yucca fries $6 founded a distribution company to
Beet salad $13 release her work and that of other
Mixed appetisers $12 women and creatives of colour. Affrm
(African American Film Releasing
Grilled prawns $14
Movement Now) was rebranded in 2015
Grelhas fish $17 as Array, and today the company com-
Moqueca $27 bines film and TV production, independ-
Plantains $6 ent filmmaker support and releases,
public and educational programming
Pastel Portuguese $9
and a platform to support under-repre-
Coconut flan $7 sented professionals in the industry.
Glass Windstream The company started with DuVernay
Chardonnay $13 and two others; today, she tells me,
Total (incl tax & 22% tip) there are some 40 staff, 90 per cent of
$163.09
them women. “We do have five men.
One of our interview questions is, ‘have
you ever reported to a woman, and that
woman reported to a woman at a com-
pany that the woman owned? And if so,
then have you ever had a black woman
boss?’ I just ask them straight out. You
have to.”
We pull up to a little hole-in-the-wall
place sandwiched between nondescript
storefronts. Inside, it feels like I’ve
walked into a friend’s apartment, fur-
nished with things she’s nabbed from
her grandmother’s house.
We’re led to our little table with no
fanfare by a friendly but harried server.
He slips us paper menus, tells us he’s
manning the busy lunch hour alone,
then rattles off the day’s specials. It usu-
ally takes me forever to decide at a res-
taurant. DuVernay gives the menu a
once-over and asks our waiter his name.
He says Diego. She then orders appetis-
ers for the table: a sample of the small
plates, a mix of Brazilian street food, an
order of yucca fries, some grilled prawns
and a beet salad. She tells him we’ll be
ready to order the main dishes by the
time he brings the appetisers.
I ask DuVernay if she comes here
often. She admits that she hasn’t been
able to get away for lunch in a while, but
she chose it because it’s a nice place and
it’s owned by a black woman. It’s no sur-
prise that even in picking a restaurant,
she is intentional about highlighting the
work and creativity of other black
women. DuVernay has blazed a trail
— Ciaran Murphy
herself: she was the first black woman to
win the award for best dramatic director
at Sundance, the first black woman to be
nominated for a Golden Globe for direc-
tor, the first black female director to
direct a film with a budget of $100m
(fantasy adventure A Wrinkle in Time).
“The idea of being the first at all these
things, it actually makes me sad, because
why am I the first this late in the game?”
says DuVernay. “I don’t put it in my bio,
and I don’t let people use it to introduce
me at events if I have a say. Because when
I get picked as the first, I don’t think,
‘ooh, I’m the first!’ I think, ‘wow, there
were a lot of people that got ignored,
overlooked, underused and underseen
in the path to my being the first acknowl-
edged.’ I know those other talented peo-
ple are there. So it means some institu-
tion or studio, or awards saw fit that I was
going to be the first one they let in. I’m
not happy about that reality.”
She pauses and sips her water. Then
shakes her head slowly and adds: “And
yet I’m not disparaging it. I know there’s
value to winning Sundance and being
the first black person to do all that stuff.
I’m just saying I’m not internalising it.
I’m using it but it’s not a badge of honour
for me.”
We are meeting on the five-year anni-
versary of one of those firsts. Her 2016
documentary 13th, a film about race,
justice, and the American incarceration
system, was the first film by a black
filmmaker to open the New York Film
Festival, and the first documentary. She
smiles when I mention it.
“What happened with 13th was
extraordinary and meaningful, but one
of the most significant things for me
about that was just the number of
young people who watched it. Netflix
shows you the data. I mean we’re talking
16, 17, 21-year-olds worldwide, 190
countries, watching and telling their
parents and teachers. To be able to feel
that swell of youth enthusiasm around
something so important was fascinating
and powerful.”
Diego returns with a trayful of appe-
tisers, filling the table with mismatched
plates of potato and cod croquettes,
kibe, plantains, coconut shrimp dump-
lings and grilled prawns. We put in our
order for the main course. I order the
moqueca, a traditional seafood stew with
rice, and DuVernay gets the grelhas fish.
At the time of our meeting, DuVernay
has seven different shows either stream-
ing or in production, everything from
Colin in Black and White, a drama series
about the early life of former American
footballer and activist Colin Kaepernick,
to Naomi, a DC superhero show, Home
Sweet Home, a reality programme about
cultural exchanges between families,
and Wings of Fire, an animated series
that DuVernay tells me is like “Game of
Thrones meets The Breakfast Club”. I’m
still catching up on Queen Sugar, the Lou-
isiana-set family drama that airs on
Oprah Winfrey’s OWN channel.
“I think of ideas all the time,” says
DuVernay. “But as I don’t take assign-
ments, and I’m usually creating from
scratch, that’s more responsibility. So I
have to just really take my time now. As
I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be more
discerning . . . I like that idea today but
will l like it in two years?”
She admits that she did more than
usual during the pandemic. “The pan-
demic was different because I rushed
out with a bunch of new projects,
because I was scared. I felt I needed to
keep working. So now we have so much
stuff . . . And if my name is on it, I’m
doing it. I’m working on the final script,
final music, I’m really in there.”
D
iego returns with our main
dishes. DuVernay hands
him the plate of prawns that
are still locked in their
shells and smiles. “This is
too fancy. Can you open this for us? Tell
the chef I’m from Compton and I don’t
know how to do it.” He takes them away.
DuVernay can’t emphasise enough
how much she loves her work. I ask her
what she does for fun and she tries to
explain that the work is the fun.
“I really love what I do everyday. To
the point where people say, ‘you’re not
taking care of yourself, you’re always
working.’ But if you were working on the
thing that was your highest dream, at
the level where you got to choose what
you wanted to do and you had the
resources, well, that’s the window I’m in.
I’m having a blast.”
Still, I’m curious about the challenges
she must face in an industry that
remains dominated by white men. I
take a few spoonfuls of my stew and ask
her flat out: “What’s it like being in an
industry as a black woman trying to do
all these things?’
She hesitates before answering and
takes a few bites of the fish. I can tell
she’s thinking how best to answer me. I
also sense from her body language —
she’s not looking at me — that it’s a ques-
tion of which she’s not necessarily fond.
She puts her fork down. “I think people
dictate their own experience, not dic-
tate how they’ll be treated, but dictate
their own experience.” She lays out
some options. “You can go into some-
thing like, it’s all against me. Because it
is all against you. And choose to be com-
bative. Or you can say, it’s all against me
but I’m about to break down these walls.
Or it’s all against me and I’m just going to
go along with the status quo and get
mine, or it’s all against me but I’m going
to turn it around.”
She looks me in the eye. “Our experi-
3
Life
ence can’t be dictated by what we’re
allowed to do or given permission to do.
That was just a decision I made early on.
Part of it was that I had worked in the
industry as a publicist. I had seen the
ugly hard side of it and worked within it
for a decade before I started making
films. So I felt like I had my eyes a little
more open than if I had come in at 25
years old making movies, and I’m grate-
ful for that.”
She returns to the conversation we
were having in the car about Sankofa.
“You know, it’s such a beautifully
crafted film. The cinematography, the
editing, the music selection. As black
filmmakers we’re rarely asked about
those things. When I’m talking to a film
journalist I’m usually asked about race
or gender, but almost never things that a
Chris Nolan or a Denis Villeneuve is
asked about because their films are
made by white men, and don’t seem to
require as much questioning about the
subject matter. So they get to answer
questions about artistic choices and
their craft. I’m rarely asked about that,
and I don’t like it. I understand where
it’s coming from but it’s an unevolved
approach that many film journalists
take when they are talking to filmmak-
ers who are not the dominant culture or
‘The idea of being the first
at all these things, it
actually makes me sad,
because why am I the first
this late in the game?’
gender, to only zero in on the thing that
is not about the dominant culture or
gender. So I’m asked all the black ques-
tions and black lady questions, and not
about the shot or the performance, or
the cinematography or the costume
design. Practically never. It’s working at
a deficit because they’re leaving a lot off
the table.”
We’ve been talking now for over an
hour and I realise that she has barely
glanced at her phone. She takes a minute
to turn it over now, and scrolls quickly
down a seemingly endless slew of new
messages. I catch Diego’s eye but when
he comes around and offers the dessert
menu, we can’t resist taking a look. We
decide on a coconut flan with two
spoons, although when it arrives neither
of us can manage more than two bites.
I pose one last question. “Ultimately,
when you think about the work that you
do, what do you hope for?”
She leans back away from the table
and places one arm around the rim of
the chair beside her, the emerald drape
of her sleeves cascading down. “You
know, when you’re promoting a movie
you’re always asked, ‘What do you want
people to take from this?’ But I’m not
thinking of manufacturing an outcome.
I’m just doing the things I’m interested
in and want to explore, that I think feel
good and am excited to share with oth-
ers. I trust there’ll be others who agree,
or find something in the work that they
are interested in too. The fun part for me
is watching what people find.”
Enuma Okoro is a Life & Arts columnist
4 ★
Style
The many layers
of Virgil Abloh
Report | The designer’s final show was a poignant
indication of unrealised potential. By Charlie Porter
V
irgil Abloh was all
about possibilities.
This is clear from the
tributes paid since the
American designer’s
death on Sunday, aged 41, from a
rare and aggressive heart cancer.
For a new generation of black crea-
tives, especially those working in
fashion, Abloh was both encour-
ager and enabler.
His design work has been about
possibilities too, both at his own
label Off-White, and since 2018, as
men’s artistic director of Louis
Vuitton. On Tuesday in Miami,
Louis Vuitton staged “Virgil Was
Here”, an outdoor showing of its
spring/summer 2022 collection,
held with the blessing of Abloh’s
family. Streamed live, it gave the
opportunity to consider Abloh’s
role in expanding what is permis-
sible in men’s clothing.
Much of this is big-picture stuff,
like the elevation of casual dress-
ing, the dominance of the sneaker
and the recalibration of the tai-
lored suit from formality to a gar-
ment of pleasure. But Abloh was
also interested in how it feels to
wear clothes. This was to do with
sizing, with a well-cut roominess
that allowed more body shapes to
fit the pieces. It was also to do with
play, and approaching middle age
but still believing in fun.
The show opened with a voiceo-
ver from Abloh. “I’ve been on this
focus in terms of my art and crea-
tivity,” he said, “of getting adults to
behave like children again, that
they go back into this sense of
wonderment. They start to stop
using their mind, and they start
using their imagination.”
As his words played out, a model
walked out in a roomy black suit
that was belted at the waist like a
safari jacket. Over it was worn a
black waistcoat, under it a black
shirt and black tie. The trousers
were sharply cut but loose, overly
long and slashed open to above the
ankle, revealing the black sneak-
ers beneath. This slashed pant was
a detail from Abloh’s very first
design for the house: the suit he
wore to the 2018 Met Gala.
This opening look was finished
with a crushed black top hat and
supersized black ice hockey
gloves. The suit, belt and waistcoat
were held by pin hooks the colour
of a green highlighter. His point:
the continued relevancy of tailor-
ing depends on ingenuity and play.
There was no labouring of a sin-
gle catwalk point of view but more
a multitude of suggestions and
Kid Kudi modelling SS22
A statue of Abloh at the show
provocations. A leather parka
embossed with the LV monogram
was sprayed an ombré from green
to blue. A violet and black track-
suit was trimmed across the body
and around the leg with the house
Damier check.
Alongside his work in design,
Abloh was a DJ, still playing at par-
ties weeks before his death. There
was cross-pollination in his prac-
tice, a realisation that for those
who enjoy fashion, music and art,
they are all in the same world.
In recent seasons, Abloh had
favoured a covered-up look.
Barely any skin was revealed, save
for legs in some looks with shorts.
Most models wore hats and balacl-
avas. The layered-up outfits were
desexualised, creating an
Abloh wasn’t scared
of messing up if the
experiment was worth
the risk
approachability to the pieces.
Abloh’s interest in possibilities
allowed for a release from perfec-
tion. Many luxury fashion shows
get stuck in the assumption that
flawlessness is the goal. The result
can often be emptiness. Abloh
wasn’t scared of messing up if the
experiment was worth the risk.
It was more interesting than
that, and more heartbreaking. It
offered a glimpse of how Abloh’s
work would have evolved, like the
playful wearability of a fleece
zip-up worn on the catwalk by his
friend Kid Cudi. The jacket had a
green pattern like an action figure,
its zipper-pull in the shape of a
rave running man. There was still
so much for Abloh to do.
In a speech before the show,
Michael Burke, chair of Louis Vuit-
ton, noted Abloh was the same age
as his oldest child. “Virgil’s passing
remains inconceivable to me,” said
Burke. “I considered him like a
son.”
He had last spoken with Abloh
Saturday evening. “He was dis-
traught not to be here to share it
with us in person,” Burke said.
At the show’s climax, before fire-
works and a light show over
Miami, Abloh had one final com-
ment played out to the crowd.
“There’s no limit,” he said. “Life is
so short that you can’t waste even a
day subscribing to what someone
thinks you can do versus knowing
what you can do.” Such was his
impetus: keep going, do more.
FTWeekend
Say no to
the logo
Womenswear | Younger
Chinese are swapping big
labels for independent
designers, write Annachiara
Biondi and Sherry Fei Ju
I
hate looking like a million dollars. I
want to look independent and
smart — like I’m different, but not
too different.” Keira Kong, a millen-
nial Shanghai-based agent for
South Korean music artists, is trying to
explain her newfound love for French
brand Coperni. Since designers Arnaud
Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer
relaunched the label in 2019, Kong has
built a small wardrobe of Coperni sta-
ples, including two dresses, two tops,
three jackets and a pair of trousers. She
commends the brand’s tailoring, its sig-
nature asymmetric cuts and its prices
(T-shirts sell for about Rmb839 on
farfetch.cn, or $130).
“The fabrics are never going to be at
Chanel’s level but their cut, their con-
cept and the way they see women is
never too girly,” continues Kong. “They
like strong, independent women and
that’s who I am trying to be.”
Like Kong, a growing number of Chi-
nese consumers, often part of the Gen Z
and millennial cohorts, are using cloth-
ing and luxury purchases to differenti-
ate themselves from their peers. Pur-
chases are less motivated by the older
generation’s paradigm of “status” and
more influenced by elements
such as “identity state-
ment”, says Federica
Levato, partner at Bain &
Company in Milan. This
shift has opened the way
for lesser-known and edg-
ier brands to provide a
point of difference from
the big luxury labels now
ubiquitous in the country.
It’s a trend that hasn’t
gone unnoticed by Wenyan
Jiao, director of Shanghai
and Wuxi-based multi-
brand boutique Mushion,
which stocks brands such as
Cult Gaia, By Far and
Nanushka. “[Young con-
sumers] in first-tier cities
such as Beijing, Shanghai and
Guangzhou are showing
increasingly personal charac-
teristics in their fashion
styles,” she says. “The previ-
ous generations may not have
such a high level of acceptance
when it comes to trying things
outside of their comfort zone.”
Independent multi-brand
boutiques, which have been
expanding in the country since
the late 2000s, have contributed to this
shift. Their owners, such as Jiao, often
studied abroad and are particularly
attuned to international influences.
Meimei Ding, chief executive of show-
room DFO International, describes a
new generation of buyers that are less
attached to institutional logos and lux-
ury brands and more interested in being
Top: a guest at Shanghai
Fashion Week 2019 wears
a Heliot Emil outfit with
black boots
Above: digital influencer
Yoyo Cao wears a Mugler
jacket and jeans — Matthew
Sperzel/Getty Images; Kirstin Sinclair
tastemakers. “They want to be the selec-
tor of what’s cool, rather than being led
by very large brands,” she says.
Niche foreign labels have been gain-
ing traction in the country for at least
the past five years, but recently their
appeal has accelerated. The arrival of
foreign ecommerce platforms hosting
a variety of smaller labels have made
these brands more accessible across
the country. Farfetch opened a digital
storefront on Chinese ecommerce
platform JD.com in 2019, and is now
also available on Tmall, and Ssense
launched its Mandarin site in 2018.
But a larger shift in consumer cul-
ture is also under way, says Adam
Knight, co-founder of China-focused
marketing agency Tong Digital. He
points to how more nuanced ways of
defining success are emerging in the
country, beyond how much money
one makes or what luxury brands
one owns, and sees countercultural
movements such as “lying flat”,
with young people pushing back
against overwork and the country’s gru-
elling “996” culture (working from 9am
to 9pm, six days a week), as a sign of
changing priorities and values. “Young
consumers are looking for more mean-
ingful forms of creating self-identity
through luxury purchases,” he says. “It’s
an exciting time for a lot of smaller
brands to get in and start building repu-
table businesses from the ground up.”
4 December/5 December 2021
This was the case for London-based
Yuzefi, which was founded in 2016 and
is known for its sculptural handbags.
The label makes 15 per cent of its £5m in
annual sales in China, but expects that
to grow to 25 per cent in the next year on
the back of its recent launches on ecom-
merce platforms Tmall and JD.com, and
on social platform Xiaohongshu.
Founder Naza Yousefi credits the label’s
Chinese success to a combination of
product uniqueness and good timing,
with a bit of help from Atlanta-based
Chinese blogger Savi of @savislook,
who independently started to wear the
brand in 2017, exposing it to her 4m
Weibo followers.
“We do well in that territory because
our products look so different from
other brands and that gives us an edge,”
says Yousefi. Similarly, Beste Manastir,
co-founder of Turkish leather goods
brand Manu Atelier, says Chinese con-
sumers were attracted by the unusual
design and bright colours of her Pristine
handbags. The label launched in 2014
and quickly gained a following in the
country, despite not having a direct
presence in the market at that time (the
brand is now sold on Tmall and JD.com,
as well as six offline retailers). China
now represents 34 per cent of Manu
Atelier’s wholesale sales and is head to
head with the US as its largest market.
To have a shot with China’s new savvy
fashion consumers, uniqueness of
design is paramount, but Ding of DFO
Showroom stresses that it needs to be
combined with good fit, price point,
brand awareness and availability. Pascal
Conte-Jodra, managing director of
Mugler, seems to have followed this for-
mula when he approached the Chinese
market three and a half years ago as part
of the larger relaunch of the brand
‘It’s an exciting time for
a lot of smaller brands to
get in and start building
reputable businesses’
under creative director Casey Cadwal-
lader. The brand partnered with six
stockists in key locations and focused on
building relationships with local talents,
such as creative consultant Leaf
Greener and singers Jike Junyi, Bibi
Zhou and Cai Xukun.
“More than in other countries, in
China is about taking the time to build
relationships with local insiders to
really become that indie fashion brand
that everyone talks about on a very per-
sonal level,” says Conte-Jodra.
Jamie Freed, global vice-president,
private client, at Farfetch, says the
ecommerce site’s highest-spending cus-
tomers, who spend at least Rmb100,000
($15,000) a year, have been particularly
interested in niche South Korean and
western brands since the pandemic.
“They are starting to abandon what was
the hot genre of fashion pre-pandemic
— luxury streetwear — and we are seeing
more of a diversification of the fashion
portfolio, shifting towards typically
feminine brands like Alessandra Rich
and subdued minimalistic brands like
Rick Owens and The Row.”
These changes in consumer behav-
iour are most evident across first and
second-tier cities, where luxury con-
sumption has already matured, but
Danni Liu, managing director of iBlue
Communications and a former media
strategist at Chanel, says social media
are breaking down barriers between
city tiers, with trends seeping through
more easily. “It’s not only sophisticated
groups, it’s a wider trend,” she says.
“I definitely think that there has been
a very strong trend going into this direc-
tion down to everyday consumers,”
adds DFO’s Ding, noticing how posts
about niche brands on Xiaohongshu, a
popular social commerce platform with
more than 300m users, are on the rise.
Similarly, Knight says that rather
than trickling down from well-off, fash-
ionable shoppers to a wider set of con-
sumers, these changes are a genera-
tional shift across the board. Brands
that rest on their laurels are set to suffer,
he says. “It’s this generation and these
consumers who are going to power all
consumption for the next decade.”
4 December/5 December 2021
Dress for
excess
Eveningwear | Workwear may be ever more casual
but the office party is an occasion to make an
effort. Charlie Gowans-Eglinton explains how
W
e are asked to
wear ‘festive’
a n d t h e re i s
always a wonder-
ful display of dis-
gusting Christmas jumpers, which
I avoid wearing if I can.” So says
Lydia Yadi, 30, a senior commis-
sioning editor at a leading publish-
ing conglomerate, of her office
Christmas party.
In the new age of hybrid working,
corporate dress codes have blurred,
making the nuances of what to wear
to the office party even harder to
navigate. Yadi’s solution this year is
a new crimson velvet suit with a
camisole underneath, or her old
“go-to”, a green velvet mini-dress
with a high neckline that feels appro-
priate for a big party with everyone at
the publisher invited.
But more of us will be treading new
ground — or perhaps thin ice — as
many company events take on differ-
ent forms in the Covid era. Anna Ber-
keley is a former buyer for Prada and
Selfridges who now styles private cli-
ents. Several have recently sought her
help dressing for newly shrunk parties
that are desk or department-wide, with
unspecified dress codes.
“Men are being really casual now, not
in suits, maybe a shirt with a jumper,
and I think a lot of women have floun-
dered with that,” says Berkeley. “It’s so
much easier to be smart, and harder
to do smart/casual. You don’t want to
be too casual, because it strikes the
wrong note.”
She suggests upping the ante on
accessories as a simple way to transition
from day to evening. “Change your
make-up, adding more mascara or lip-
stick, and add huge jewellery, big ear-
rings or a big necklace. It’s low key, but
it’s doing something to show there’s an
effort there.”
For the best jewellery edit in London,
visit Felt on Chelsea Green (feltlon-
don.com). Founder Eliza Poklewski
Koziell’s stock is a mixture of remarka-
ble second-hand finds and new jewel-
lery from a range of small designers,
plus designs of her own. You can sell
your own jewellery there for credit in
the store, and she also offers rental.
I visited last weekend, and Poklewski
Koziell showed me a brilliant box full of
Christmas tree brooches (from £25),
Tributes and tuxedos at Fashion Awards
Report | New awards categories underlined the growing importance of activism in fashion. By Lauren Indvik
T
here was an inevitably
sombre note to the 2021
Fashion Awards, which
returned to physical form at
the Royal Albert Hall on
Monday evening in spite of increased
restrictions introduced in response to
the detection of the Omicron variant of
coronavirus in the UK.
Guests, outfitted in jewel-toned velvet
tuxedos and strapless, sequinned and
feathered floor-length dresses with little
heed to the freezing temperatures,
seemed unperturbed. Proof of vaccina-
tion was required for entry but few
guests donned masks once inside.
At the orchestra level, at tables spon-
sored by brands, in the galleries filled
with reporters and students and on
stage, Virgil Abloh — the 41-year-old
Louis Vuitton menswear designer who
died on Sunday after a private two-year
battle with cancer — was the main,
mournful topic of discussion.
“Last night I spent a lot of the evening
in tears,” said actor Idris Elba in an
opening address, reading the poem
“When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Ange-
lou. It was the first of at least a dozen
tributes to Abloh, which also came from
British Vogue editor Edward Enninful,
designer Kim Jones, Kris Jenner and a
teary-eyed Tommy Hilfiger. “I lost a
friend . . . the fashion industry, we lost
an icon,” he said.
American actor Billy Porter, the
event’s host, was funny and charming
which were the right side of kitsch,
unlike a polyester elf jumper. She also
has a few vintage Givenchy gold chain
necklaces (£350 each) that would look
brilliant with a simple black dress, and a
pair of black beaded chandelier earrings
by Marni (£140) that could be worn
with anything from a party dress to
your everyday tailoring.
Corporate lawyer Natasha Ong, 34,
is expecting “more smart casual than
full-out glam” at her team’s seated din-
ner followed by drinks, “as I think
Christmas parties are still a little scaled
back this year”. However, she still
plans to wear “something
s p a r k ly ”, n a m e ly a
sequinned skirt with a sim-
ple shirt and heels — to her,
at least, the latter are still
a big part of her working
wardrobe.
That solution to the
smart/casual problem
is a good one: choose
just one standout
piece to mix in with
more neutral
clothes. Taller
Marmo’s El Pareo
midi skirt (£670, matches-
fashion. com), red and black
Above: among the Leaders
of Change award winners
were Edward Enninful,
Harris Reed, Priyanka
Chopra, Gabriela Hearst,
Kim Jones, Priya
Ahluwalia, Bethany
Williams, Phoebe English
and Kenya Hunt
★ FTWeekend
but struggled to lift the room. He
entered in a dramatic black and cham-
pagne sequin dress with spiked shoul-
ders — “Richard Quinn bespoke,
bitches,” he quipped — and platform
boots in black patent leather, changing
later into a dress by London-based Ser-
bian designer Roksanda Ilincic. Quinn
did much of the night’s celebrity dress-
ing, also outfitting Kylie Minogue and
her back-up dancers and Priyanka Cho-
pra in bespoke bodysuits.
The awards are British fashion’s
answer to the Baftas, with top honours
Clockwise from main:
Net-a-Porter; Saloni
dress, £60 to rent,
hurrcollective.com;
velvet jacket/trousers,
£617/£362, frame-store.
com; Marni earrings,
£140, feltlondon.com;
Totême blazer, £590,
net-a-porter.com
going to Kim Jones of Dior Homme and
Fendi for Designer of the Year, pre-
sented by Demi Moore and Olympian
Tom Daley, Nensi Dojaka, as the BFC
Foundation Award-winner and Simone
Rocha for Independent British Brand,
while Tommy Hilfiger received the Out-
standing Achievement Award.
Special awards were also given in rec-
ognition of Leaders of Change in three
categories: Environment, People and
Creativity — a mark of the greater role
activism is now playing in the fashion
industry. Many of the recipients in these
categories were people of colour, who
until a few years ago were rarely recog-
nised at industry ceremonies (the black
stylist Ib Kamara also picked up the Isa-
bella Blow Award for Fashion Creator).
There was another new award for
Metaverse Design — presumably cre-
ated not because digital designs are in
need of recognition but because of the
money put up by Roblox, the gaming
company that sponsored it.
The event is, after all, a fundraiser for
the BFC Foundation, which provides
scholarships and grants to students and
young designers.
A worthy cause, as Abloh himself
reminded the audience in a short speech
he had pre-recorded to receive one of
the five Leaders of Change awards for
Creativity. “Part of my practice,” he
said, “is to keep these doors open for
future generations that I’ve been able to
open for myself.”
floral jacquard with long fringing that
moves beautifully, is impactful enough
on its own — wear with a white shirt or a
fine-knit black jumper. Totême’s wool
and silk mix black blazer (£590, net-a-
porter.com) is an evening-friendly iter-
ation of that tailoring staple with a
slight sheen to the fabric and a sash
belt to bring in the waist, and could
be worn with the matching trousers
as a suit, over a pair of jeans, or a silk
slip dress — my favourites are by
Bias Editions (£215, biasedi-
tions.com).
“This season we have made a con-
scious effort to provide party pieces
with more versatility,” says Libby Page,
Net-a-Porter’s senior market editor,
“such as a Lurex knit for evening that
can also be pared back with jeans or a
velvet dress that can be worn in the day
with flat boots. It’s certainly not about a
casual party look but rather about
choosing the right pieces, which can
elevate casual items.”
Home working has hit heel wearing
hard, but perhaps the office Christmas
party will change that. Last week, one of
5
Style
Net-a-Porter’s bestsellers was a pair of
four-inch, crystal embellished heels by
Amina Muaddi (£850, net-a-porter.
com, though they’re now sold out).
The Outnet has a great selection of
party shoes. Magda Butrym’s red velvet
mules fall somewhere between Frago-
nard’s “The Swing” and Mother Christ-
mas (were £708, now £354, theout-
net.com).
But there are those who are seizing the
opportunity to go all out after so long
spent wearing athleisure, and who feel
confident enough to dress to the nines
whether the dress code demands it or
not. Liane Wiggins, head of womens-
wear at Matches Fashion, says: “Cus-
tomers have been focusing on getting
back to celebrating and dressing up
again, and the market really responded
to this too, so the offer was even wider
than normal.”
Renting makes sense for those who
are after an overstated, fabulously frivo-
lous one-night-only outfit. “After
Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve,
office Christmas parties rank as the
third most popular reason to rent,” says
Victoria Prew, chief executive and co-
founder of fashion rental platform
Hurr. “We are expecting all-time high
demand across sequin dresses, state-
ment clutch bags, feathers and lace.”
Prew will be wearing a printed silk
dress by The Vampire’s Wife with a pair
of low-heeled mules to host her com-
pany’s party this week, cocktails and
canapés in their concept store on Chel-
sea’s King’s Road (£1395 new, but rent
from £95, hurrcollective.com). Velvet is
a top-performing category, and the pick
of the bunch is Saloni’s black velvet midi
dress finished with oversized beaded
bows (£600 new, rentals from £60).
To buy, I found the beautifully cut
wide-leg Montana jumpsuit in plush
’It’s not about a casual party
look but about choosing the
right pieces, which can
elevate casual items’
burgundy or black viscose mix velvet at
Jane (£880, janeatelier.com). Frame’s
sharp red velvet suit could be worn as
separates long past Santa season (£617
and £362 for the blazer and trousers
respectively, frame-store. com). Mother
of Pearl has a beautiful black dress with
faux pearl buttoned sleeves for embel-
lishment that’s still subtle (£325, moth-
erofpearl.co.uk). Up a few notches from
that is anything feather-trimmed:
16Arlington’s minidresses are show-
stoppers, and just a bit showgirl (£705,
net-a-porter.com).
Some of us will miss the grand, thou-
sands-strong office parties; I suspect
just as many will not. There was cer-
tainly no networking happening at my
most recent party, where anyone at
director level left within 10 minutes.
But the sequins are worth saving, the
dress codes worth dusting off. I, for one,
feel nostalgic for the buzz in the
women’s bathrooms before the party,
where a fine mist of deodorant and hair-
spray thickened the air, and a few
sequins still lingered come Monday
morning.
6 ★ †
Travel
T
he first one passed me as I
was barely off the motor-
way from Bologna. The
next, as the mountains
came in sight. There I was,
trying to keep one eye on the jack-
knifing road, the other on the paint
chart of green to gold unfurling along
the abyss, and they were all around me:
one, two, three, 20 motorcyclists, all rid-
ing out to see the autumn foliage.
And why not? Autumn is the best
time to visit Tuscany: the summer
crowds have gone, the temperatures
have yet to drop to truly biting, and if
the sun’s out, it bathes everything in a
gold that’s straight out of a painting
from the Sienese School.
And then there are the trees. Today,
the best-known parts of Tuscany are
thoroughly manicured — those perfect
fields of wheat delineated by avenues of
cypress — but originally, those famous
rolling hills were largely forested. This,
the Foreste Casentinesi National Park,
straddling the border with Emilia
Romagna in the north-east of the region,
I TA LY EMILIA-
ROMAGNA
San Godenzo Foreste
Casentinesi
Florence
Castagno
d’Andrea
TUSCANY
Arezzo
UMBRIA
Radicondoli
Siena
Chiusdino
20 km
©Mapcreator.io/©HERE
is perhaps the most magnificent stretch
left. It’s not as big as it once was — Ren-
aissance Florentines hacked away at it
to build coffered ceilings for their grand
new palazzos and the struts for the
world’s most famous cathedral dome.
But today, its 142 square miles of beech,
holm oak and chestnut trees put on a
display of some of Italy’s greatest col-
ours every autumn.
I was here for one colour in particular:
the rich russet brown of the marroni that
fall to the ground in October each year.
Although in English they translate as
“chestnuts” and, to our untrained eyes,
they might look the same, locals will
swiftly put you straight. Compared with
regular castagne, marroni are bigger,
rounder, glossier and sweeter.
And while chestnuts used to signify
the poverty of mountain dwellers (the
chestnut tree was nicknamed the
“bread tree”, supporting those who
couldn’t grow grains due to the altitude)
today, a re-evaluation of marroni,
including protected IGP (indicazione
geografica protetta) status for this area’s
“marrone del Mugello”, is turning them
into cult ingredients.
I had come for the annual marroni
celebrations in San Godenzo, a tiny
town wedged into a mountain cleft an
hour north-east of Florence. Tiny it
might be, but it packs a punch when it
comes to marroni — chestnut flour from
here regularly tops the podium for
Italy’s finest, and for the past 50 years,
the sangodenzini, as they call them-
selves, have been celebrating the end of
the harvest with an autumn blowout.
In Castagno d’Andrea — a mountain
village a few miles away, and named
after the fruit — the main street was
rammed with stalls selling raw marroni,
marble-sized for roasting, almost golf
ball-sized for boiling. There was mar-
rone jam, marrone cakes and marrone
flour, the latter from fruits that are
roasted for three months over smoking
chestnut wood before milling.
People are so friendly here that on my
last visit, two locals paid for my lunch in
Castagno d’Andrea’s sole restaurant out
of shame that they hadn’t invited me to
POSTCARD
FROM . . .
BAVARIA
i / DETAILS
Andrew Eames was a guest of Bavaria Tourism
(bavaria.by). For more on visiting Rothenburg
see rothenburg-tourismus.de
Italy | The wooded mountains of the region’s far
north and the rippling hills of the Val di Merse are
at their best in autumn, writes Julia Buckley
From top: the
Foreste
Casentinesi;
chestnut stalls
in Castagno
d’Andrea;
sheep graze
beneath
Radicondoli;
the Abbey of
San Galgano
Alamy; Julia Buckley; Getty
T
here can be few more
perfect settings for
Christmas shopping than
Rothenburg ob der Tauber,
a small Franconian town
about 85 miles south-east of Frankfurt.
When the lights twinkle on the half-
timbered houses, good cheer echoes
across the medieval cobbles of Market
Square and snow dusts the red-tiled
towers above the city gates, it is hard
not to believe that all is well with the
world. Even the migratory storks
resting on the roof ridges seem to peer
shortsightedly down at the revellers
with a kind of benevolence, before
shuffling off for warmer climes.
This year, though, there are clouds
on the horizon. The pandemic has led
to the cancellation of the 500-year-old
Christmas market for the second year
in a row. Moreover, Rothenburg is the
headquarters of a business that
promotes Christmas around the world,
all year round, and two years of
diminished festivities — not to mention
no Chinese, Japanese or American
tourists in town — have brought
difficult times to their front door.
That business is Käthe Wohlfahrt,
one of the world’s largest Christmas
retailers, with some 360 staff, shops
across Germany and outposts in the
US, Belgium, Spain, France and the UK.
When I push open the front door of
the flagship store on Herrngasse, I find
FTWeekend
join them. This time, Noemi Innocenti,
San Godenzo’s 26-year-old librarian
with a doctorate in Renaissance printed
books and an encyclopedic knowledge
of marroni, introduced me to bruciati
’briachi (“roasted drunks”): chestnuts
dusted in sugar, doused in rum and set
on fire to create the world’s best roasted
nuts. Then she took me to the forest.
The hills around Castagno d’Andrea
are full of chestnut groves but higher up
the mountainside endless beech trees
mark the entry to the national park.
Dante mentions Monte Falterona, the
mountain brooding behind San
Godenzo, in Purgatory but in autumn it
is paradise. Wisps of mist wrap around
trunks. Leaves glow acid yellow on the
branches, ochre underfoot.
We staggered up a steep path — used
by wartime partisans to come for sup-
plies in Castagno d’Andrea, said Noemi
— to find moss-drenched boulders and
even more spectacular trees, the colour
seeming brighter as the light faded, the
only sound the crunch of leaves.
The next day I woke up in Castagneto,
a hamlet high on the other side of San
Godenzo, to see sheets of mist weaving
through the valley. As the hamlet’s
name suggests, Castagneto’s few houses
— along with Tenuta Mazzini, the stone-
walled converted farmhouse where I
stayed — nestle amid chestnut groves.
The roads are carpeted with conker
mush, and chestnuts cleave to the steep
hillsides, branches flailing in the wind
like characters from Tolkien.
Normally at this time of year, I go to
the Val d’Orcia, Tuscany’s most famous
landscape, for thick ribollita soup and
olive oil so fresh that it tastes as though
just one other couple wandering
around the glittery, labyrinthine
Christmas village hidden inside. Crying
out for our attention are a mesmerising
25,000 product lines, with a giant
Christmas tree in a roofed courtyard
between conjoined houses. Alongside
all the usual baubles and reindeer there
are quantities of ornaments with a
more tangential Christmas connection:
a pair of sparkly stilettos and some
dangly doughnuts; a baby monkey
fashioned from lurid glass, and a whole
shelf full of “rabbit friends”.
The company has a special place for
its more iconic pieces. Its Christmas
Museum, above the shop, has a
collection of typical wooden angels and
Tuscany’s
forests in
the fall
it is laced with chilli. But this year, after
San Godenzo, I set off in search of more
autumn colour.
I found it in Radicondoli, 50 minutes
west of Siena in the Val di Merse, where
the golden woods were broken up by
green fields and silvery olive groves.
Wild deer skittered across the fields in
front of me as I ate breakfast at Albergo
Giogliano, a farmhouse just below the
hilltop town.
From Radicondoli’s Piazza San Giro-
lamo, the views of rippling hills extend
as far as Volterra and San Gimignano,
but this is a world away from Tuscany’s
A villa fit for royalty . . . and the Roys
After a series largely stuck in
corporate offices and convention
centres, the hit HBO series Succession,
finally hits the road this weekend. In
the penultimate episode (to be
screened on Sunday in the US and
Monday worldwide), the feuding Roy
family will decamp to Italy for a
glamorous wedding in a Tuscan villa.
And though it might look like
something from a fairytale, the villa is
in fact, real — and available to rent.
Villa Cetinale is old world Italy at its
most alluring, a 17th-century country
home set among rolling hills seven
miles from Siena. It is a monument to
Baroque grandeur, boldly embossed
with the coat of arms of its creator
Cardinal Flavio Chigi and stuffed
with heirlooms — a baldachin bed,
silver ornaments, a bas-relief
commemorating a visit by Grand Duke
Cosimo III de’ Medici. It is now owned
by Ned Lambton, son of Antony
Lambton, a former Tory politician
who resigned in 1973 after being
photographed in bed smoking
marijuana with two prostitutes;
he bought Cetinale and moved
here four years later.
The secret garden is where the
parties happen, on long tables set
among the striped shadows of cypress
trees. The mile-long avenue leads to a
Matthew Cook
nutcrackers, those highly painted
military-style men with levers between
their shoulder blades. It has typical
smokeys — incense-burning figurines
— and Schwibbogen lighting arches,
which appear in many a window at
Christmas time.
Most of these pieces originate from
the mining and woodcarving
communities of the Erzgebirge
mountains, south of Dresden, in the
former East Germany. This was also
the original home of the founding
couple, Wilhelm and Käthe Wohlfahrt,
who fled to West Germany in the 1950s,
bringing with them a wooden music
box made by Erzgebirge craftsmen.
One year, that music box was so
tourist honeypots. For one thing, that
piazza is the town’s main car park. For
another, the only shop catering to tour-
ists on the two main streets is a self-
styled “exhibition of Radicondoli hob-
byists”: scarves, jewellery and mini
models of farm machinery. Sure, visi-
tors love it in summer, and there’s a
gourmet pizza restaurant where a Mar-
gherita costs €17 — but come November,
it’s just you and the crotchety old men in
the only bar left open.
And yet this is every bit as beautiful as
San Gimignano and its ilk. I walked past
houses dating back to the 13th century,
“scala santa” or “sacred staircase”,
climbing steeply to an abandoned
hermitage. A grove of ilex and oak
trees flanks the villa’s boundary. In the
late 1600s, Siena’s famous Palio took
place in these “Holy Woods”, the
forest’s shadowy passages studded
with statues — Greek demi-gods,
saints, mystical beasts — and
frescoed chapels. This is where you
feel the true spirit of Cetinale, in the
way mythology and nature converge
in a fantastical dream, vibrating
with an abundance of story, danger
and pleasure.
Sophy Roberts
Villa Cetinale sleeps up to 25 and costs
from €25K per week, and is available
via Daunt Travel (daunt-travel.com)
Villa Cetinale in Tuscany - Manuel Zublena
much admired by an American officer
they had invited to their home for
Christmas, that Wilhelm sourced more
for the officer’s colleagues. From their
response, he realised that he’d
stumbled across a big potential market,
and Käthe Wohlfahrt was born.
Thereafter the business grew
steadily, adding shops and
participating in more Christmas
markets. There were blips, of course,
with the 9/11 attacks and the Gulf war,
which kept international visitors away,
but nothing has been as bad as Covid.
Careful restructuring, the closure of
some of the German shops and
shedding 20 staff has brought the
company back from the brink of
bankruptcy, says spokeswoman
Felicitas Höptner. Reducing stock,
limiting advertising and concentrating
on online sales has restored some
financial stability. But online sales are
still only 8-10 per cent of turnover, so it
is footfall to Christmas markets, and
the return of travellers, that will finally
right the ship.
Accordingly, the cancellation of
Rothenburg’s Christmas market,
announced as the festive booths were
already being set up, was a significant
blow. But some of the German markets
outside Bavaria, and those elsewhere in
Europe, are keeping the faith, and
Käthe Wohlfahrt will also be present at
seven in the US and three in Japan.
4 December/5 December 2021
subsequent rebuilds and gap-plugging
making a mish-mash of the walls:
stones, bricks and boulders all piled
higgledy-piggledy, ruddier and warmer
than the more austere buildings of Flor-
ence. Alleyways tunnelled beneath first
floors, threading one street to the next; a
last remaining medieval city gate sagged
tipsily towards the fields beyond. The
most modern thing in town was from
the 1920s: the dolls’ house-sized thea-
tre, its single column and two fiercely
arched windows making a strike for art
deco in the middle of the renaissance
surroundings.
Spooling out beyond, whichever way
you looked, were the hills, their colour
broken up only by plumes of what
looked like smoke but turned out to be
steam rising up from the magma, seven
kilometres below ground, now drilled
and piped to make clean energy. A line
of surprisingly beautiful power stations
puffed away across the hills. Dante took
inspiration from this land of fumaroles
for his Hell; Galgano Guidotti would dis-
agree. Born in 1148 to a wealthy family
in Chiusdino, 20 minutes south of Radi-
condoli, he became a hermit on the hill
of Montesiepi in the valley below. After
his canonisation, a Cistercian abbey was
built at the foot of the hill, before being
abandoned, its roof caving in 1786.
Today, tourists come from all over
Italy to see the gothic (in both senses)
Abbazia di San Galgano. Its rose window
was blown out and its cloister mostly
collapsed, and it is home to birds instead
of monks, but its walls and columns still
stand proud.
I was staying at the Terre di San
Galgano agriturismo, only a field away,
so I walked around before breakfast —
just me and the birds, mist drifting
through the mountains in the distance.
The vines on the slope of Montesiepi
were yellowing, but there were grapes at
the abbey: bunches of them, carved on
to the tops of columns, along with other
florid leaves and plants. Amid the ruins,
it’s an eternal spring.
Topping a hill overlooking the valley,
Chiusdino is as pretty as Radicondoli —
possibly more so, as it seems oblivious to
it. Grass sprouts between medieval cob-
bles; streets spiral around the hilltop.
Alleys lead to nowhere; staircases finish
at houses, or collapse into the tiniest of
squares. The dinky church houses the
saint’s skull, staring out of a modern rel-
iquary shaped like the rock in which
Galgano is said to have embedded his
sword, renouncing his former life (the
circular church on Montesiepi is built
around a mysterious sword hilt plunged
into the rock).
As one of Tuscany’s best-known
saints, Galgano’s original reliquary was
fittingly grand: an octagonal 13th-cen-
tury creation, gold-plated, sitting a full
metre high on lions’ paws and embossed
with 16 miniature scenes from his life. It
is so precious that Siena nabbed it until
2015, when Chiusdino opened its own
museum. And that isn’t even the top
draw, here: a bas-relief of a fluffy-haired
Galgano thrusting his sword into the
rock by Urbano da Cortona, a student of
Donatello, is even better. He stands, the
folds of his cloak straining around the
button as he grips the sword, his perfect
hair shielded from the elements by a
pergola of exuberantly bushy trees.
Those Tuscan trees, again: marrone-
growing, biker-attracting and, it seems,
saint-protecting.
i / D E TA I L S
Julia Buckley was a guest of the San Godenzo
town council at Tenuta Mazzini
(tenutamazzini.it), which has one-bed
apartments from €80. Albergo Giogliano at
Radicondoli has doubles from €70 including
breakfast (no website; book via booking.com or
email hotelgiogliano@gmail.com);
Agriturismo Terre di San Galgano has doubles
from €86 including breakfast (sangalgano.it).
“These last two years have been like
a rollercoaster ride for the town,” says
Robert Nehr, a spokesman for the local
tourist board. A third of the town’s
income comes from tourism but so far
only one hotel has gone into insolvency
and residents are striving to stay
upbeat. The town is decorated with fir
trees and Christmas lights, restaurants
and hotels remain open, and the tourist
board is pitching the idea that, rather
than focusing on the Market Square,
visitors will come to relish the festive
atmosphere throughout what they are
billing as the Weihnachtsstadt, the
“Christmas city”.
The authorities have organised a
“fairy tale stroll”, a sort of treasure
hunt through the old town, there are
organ recitals in the church of St Jakob,
while mulled wine, punch, hot buttered
waffles and bratwurst in buns are being
served on the terraces and inner
courtyards of cafés and restaurants.
“Nothing in the world, not even the
fourth resurgence of the Covid-19
virus, can wipe out the Christmas spirit
that reigns 365 days a year in
Rothenburg ob der Tauber,” the tourist
board says. So there’s hope and
defiance mixed in with the aromas of
finely seasoned gingerbread and hot
spiced wine this year, hope that
Christmas — and the Christmas city —
can be saved.
Andrew Eames
4 December/5 December 2021
Islands of my past
Ireland | On the windswept isles of the Atlantic coast, Stanley Stewart
finds stark beauty, a sense of ‘wild clarity’ and echoes of earlier times
I
n an old family album,
there is photograph of my
father and me, standing
by a donkey loaded with
peat. I must have been six.
I was in short trousers. It was a
family holiday on a rare trip
home to Ireland. My father is
smiling. I can see how happy he
is. On the back of the photo-
graph, in fading pencil, is writ-
ten “Valentia Island”.
When I was a child, growing
up in Canada, Ireland was the
absence in our lives. Tales of the
sisters at Glen Farm and the
shop at the top of the hill, of the
Ballygowan Halt, the manse in
Ahoghill, and the wet summers
at Portstewart were the stories of
the dinner table. Every fort-
night, the Irish papers arrived,
dispatched by my grandparents, and
my parents would sit reading about the
news of the agricultural show in Donegal
or the construction works on the
Malone Road, as if they still lived there.
And in many senses, they did.
I was young when we left Ireland to
emigrate and my own memories of
home were illusive. Sometimes I won-
dered if I remembered Ireland at all or if
I merely invented it. I spent hours with
the old photograph albums, peering at
landscapes more intimate, more beauti-
ful, and far more romantic than those of
southwestern Ontario. Ireland had
become my lost world. I absorbed my
parents’ nostalgia as less fortunate chil-
dren might absorb parental anxiety or
anger. Homesickness is an Irish disease.
I caught it from my parents.
And so when I was 20, I set off to get
my own Ireland. I came to Valentia, the
island of the photograph, the island I did
not remember. I rented a cottage. For six
months, I walked and cycled the length
and breadth of this little world. I clam-
bered over the rocks beneath the light-
house where the waves threatened to
engulf me. I went to sea with the fisher-
men and drank with them in the eve-
nings in the island pub. I wrote short sto-
ries, mercifully unpublished, from a
desk by a window in my little cottage,
overlooking the channel, watching the
cloud shadows sail across the mainland
mountains towards Doulus Head. I
could not have been happier. At the end
of my stay, in the dying days of that dis-
tant autumn, I was heartbroken to
leave, for London and for real life.
I have carried those memories of Val-
entia with me as my parents carried
memories of the Antrim Coast and the
villages of County Down. And now, dec-
ades on, I wanted to return, to redis-
cover not just the island I had loved, but
all those western islands. All travel is a
kind of quest, though what you are look-
ing for and what you find rarely coin-
cide. I probably hoped, travelling to Val-
entia in October, that I might glimpse
my young self coming round a bend in
the Glanleam road. But in the end, it was
really Ireland itself that I was chasing
across Kerry and Galway.
The seas off the west coast of Ireland
are scattered with islands whose
remoteness lends them both romance
and a curious authority. For generations
of Irish writers and artists, they became
From top: the ruins of a
village on Great Blasket;
a photograph of Stanley
Stewart as a boy with his
father on Valentia Island
Below: Inis Meáin
Restaurant and Suites
Alamy
i / DETA IL S
Stanley Stewart was a guest
of Tourism Ireland
(tourismireland.com). On Inis
Meáin, Inis Meáin Restaurant and
Suites (inismeain.com) is a stylish
creation by one of Ireland’s leading
architects with a fine kitchen
creating menus of local ingredients;
doubles from €1,350 for two nights,
including transfers and some meals.
The ferry to Inis Meáin takes 50
minutes and departs from
Rossaveal (aranislandferries.com).
On Great Blasket, there are three
houses to rent for overnight stays,
from €180 per night for two people;
see greatblasketisland.net. The
same company can arrange the
boat from Dunquin, which takes 20
minutes, and day trips from Dingle.
On Valentia, the Royal Hotel
(royalvalentia.ie) is a grand old
establishment at the heart of
Knightstown; doubles from about
€110. Valentia is linked by bridge to
the mainland town of Portmagee, or
there is a car ferry between
Knightstown and Reenard Point,
which takes about 10 minutes (see
valentiaisland.ie for details).
★ FTWeekend
repositories of identity, some
essence of uncontaminated Irish-
ness. The opening of Yeats’
famous poem captures this
notion of an island paradise — “I
will arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree.” A host of writers and
intellectuals arose and went to
the Aran Islands — Lady Gre-
gory, Patrick Pearse, Eoin Mac-
Neil, Frederick Burton, William
Wilde, Oscar’s father, and most
notably, JM Synge, who went to
Inis Meáin at Yeats’s urging.
Brooding among waves, Inis
Meáin is a stark elemental
place armoured with rock.
Winds whistle and moan
through the dry stone walls
enclosing fields of limestone
where sheep graze among
wildflowers and boulders. A relentless
sea batters the shores. There are barely
a hundred houses scattered along the
narrow lanes of the island, served by
one pub, one shop and one church. The
island is ruled by its temperamental
weather, sweeping off the Atlantic, a
constant drama, veering from tempest
to benign beauty in a moment.
I was happy in the turning weather. I
walked the island lanes. Cattle lifted
their heads to watch me pass, peering
over their stone walls. Upturned boats,
or currachs, lay in the fields near the
shore, waiting for summer, their black
shiny backs like hibernating beetles. On
the empty beach that runs round Ceann
Gainimh there were no footprints other
than my own, just the cuneiform mark-
ings of sandpipers’ feet, making their
way from the dunes to the lap of the
waves. From the clifftops at Aill an
Fhéir, I listened to the sea booming far
below. Troops of gannets were diving
into the black waves and lighthouses
winked in the gathering dusk on the
coast of Galway.
One evening, I fell in with a man out
for an evening stroll. In the falling light,
his face was indistinct, a strange spec-
tral effect. We talked of the weather of
course, and then of the modern world,
and how recently it had arrived here. He
remembered the first car to come to the
island, in 1962. It broke down and no
one knew how to fix it. Unimpressed
with the internal combustion engine, it
was another seven years before anyone
risked investing in another.
At our backs was the ancient world.
The silhouette of the great ringfort of
Dún Conor rose against the night sky.
Thought to date back to the Bronze or
Iron Age, though no one is really sure, it
is one of the grandest buildings in the
west of Ireland, its curving dry stone
walls 20ft thick in places. The islanders
traditionally believed it was inhabited
by a cavalcade of spirits, by sprites and
banshees and fairies, who fly about the
island to unsettle the plans of humans. I
would say there are a few that are still
believing that, the man laughed.
On the way back to my lodgings, I
stopped in at the pub, which hummed
with the sibilant susurrus of Gaelic. A
man sang a traditional air so beautiful it
left me tearful. Afterwards the room
was silent but for the wind banging at
the door.
Travel makes one modest, Flaubert
Above: a donkey takes shelter in one
of Great Blasket’s deserted cottages;
the winding path leading to Dunquin
Harbour, on the Dingle Peninsula
Below: the Atlantic batters the cliffs
on Inis Meáin; Irish music in a pub
on the island; sunset on Inis Meáin —
Alamy
wrote. We see what a tiny place we
occupy in the world. On these islands,
they have learnt that modesty without
leaving home. The islanders are
dwarfed by the elements. It has given
them the gift of humility.
At Dunquin on Slea Head, at the
western end of the Dingle Peninsula, a
small boat slipped into a narrow cleft in
the rocks. Timing my stride between the
swells, I skipped aboard. This precari-
ous little harbour, impossible in any-
thing but calm weather, is the Blasket
Islands’ only link to the outside world.
A hundred years ago, a stream of
nervous linguists climbed into currachs
in this harbour to brave the crossing.
The isolation of the Blaskets — only a
couple of miles offshore — meant that
the Irish spoken here was pure and
uncontaminated by English. This influx
of linguists created the strange impres-
sion among the islanders that the whole
of the outside world was obsessed with
the learning of their language.
The largest of the six islands, the
Great Blasket was inhabited by a couple
of hundred islanders for over three cen-
turies. They lived on fishing, they grew
potatoes, they grazed their sheep and
cattle on the rich island grass. Often
they were cut off from the mainland for
weeks at a time. It was not uncommon
for islanders to succumb to illness due to
the difficulty of getting a doctor across
the channel. The islanders’ own trage-
dies at sea in their small currachs were a
recurring theme, as were falls from the
spectacular cliffs when children tried to
gather the eggs of sea birds.
With little other entertainment, the
Blasket islanders had a strong oral tradi-
tion, and the literary visitors persuaded
some of the islanders to write their
memoirs, to record their lives on the
island. Thus began an extraordinary
canon of Gaelic books from the Blaskets.
The memoirs of Tomas O’Crohan, Mau-
rice O’Sullivan, and Peig Sayers are still
in print, still much loved, and still cen-
tral to any study of Gaelic literature.
Robin Flower, who translated some of
these works, said of Peig Sayers, “her
words could be written down as they
leave her lips, and they would have the
effect of literature”. The irony of the
remote Blaskets, inhabited by a couple
of hundred people with little schooling
among them, is that books became their
greatest export.
Today the Blaskets are empty. From
the quay I followed a grass lane through
the abandoned village. By 1953, emigra-
tion had shrunk the population to only
22 people, and the government offered
them houses on the mainland. In a
stormy November of that year, they
climbed into their boats and left the
island forever. Today Great Blasket is an
island of ghosts.
Most of the old cottages have fallen
into ruin but three have been main-
tained and are available to visitors to
stay the night, provided they bring their
own food. My little house, at the top of
the ruined village, was the kind of
whitewashed cottage that appears on
Irish postcards, the kind of house I had
dreamt of as a boy — rough flagstones, a
7
Travel
cast-iron stove, fireside armchairs, a
comfy bed beneath the eaves, a view of
the ocean and mountains of the main-
land through the half door. When dusk
came, I ate dinner outside overlooking
the channel beneath a tall sky of stars as
constellations sank towards the ocean.
On the beach below, where the men of
the island used to play hurling, running
in and out of the sea after the ball, was a
colony of grey seals. They made a sound
like low keening that drifted up to the
house from the shore below. With the
waves, this mournful calling was the
only sound on the empty island. By can-
dlelight, I read Tomas O’Crohan’s
account of life here. “I have done my
best to set down the character of the
people about me”, he wrote, “ . . . so
that some record of us might live after
us, for the like of us will never be again.”
Though I had not been back to
Valentia for almost 40 years, it had the
comforting familiarity of home, which is
how I thought of it. The old Royal Hotel
still presided over the waterfront in
Knightstown, a grand dame unashamed
of her old-fashioned manners. Other
than an added espresso machine, the
pub at the top of the town seemed
Galway
Inis Meáin
ATLANTIC Limerick
OCEAN
IRELAND
Dunquin
Great Blasket Island Cork
Valentia Island
20 km
©Mapcreator.io/©HERE
unchanged. The lighthouse still stood
over a tumult of crashing waves with
long views across to the Dingle Penin-
sula and deep into the mountains of
Kerry. Far out on the horizon stood the
reassuring pyramid silhouette of Skellig
Michel where, 1,500 years ago, Christian
monks read Cicero and Virgil.
On the north side of Valentia, a nar-
rowing road leads down to a small bay.
The sheltered topography and the kind-
ness of the Gulf Stream have created a
strange microclimate here. There are
palms and bamboo and giant ferns. The
old trees are clad with lichens and moss.
From the depths of the undergrowth
comes the sound of unseen streams.
At the end of the lane are the gates to
Glanleam House, built by the Knights of
Kerry in the 18th century. I remem-
bered an evening party here in the gar-
dens, trays of drinks, voices trailing
among the trees, the slow descent of an
Irish twilight. A German girl had
appeared, coming up over the rocks
from the beach below the house, her
hair wet and tangled. She was looking
for a light for a cigarette. In her stilted
English, she asked, “Have you fire?” It
turned out I did. The affair lasted a week
before she set off for Dingle, but it has
lingered, like the island itself, a lifetime.
On my last morning, the whole island
glistened with dew, like a newborn
world. A westerly had blown through in
the night. Whitecaps scudded towards
Beginish, shadows raced one another
across the mountains of Dingle, and
small birds flew up from the heather
and tumbled away in the wind.
“We were imbued with the sound of
the wind . . . ”, O’Crohan wrote, “beat-
ing in our ears every morning, clearing
our brains and rinsing the dust from
our skulls.”
This is why I had come. I wanted the
wind, I wanted that tumultuous hum-
bling weather, I wanted to rinse the dust
from my brain, so that I could savour
again the strange wild clarity of these
islands, and of my time there.
8 ★
A
n insurance worker
recently described to me
his lockdown epiphany: he
loved spending time with
his two young children dur-
ing the working week. So he adjusted his
hours; now, he starts early so that he can
pick them up from nursery, make din-
ner and put them to bed. “As bad as the
pandemic has been,” he said, “it’s forced
us to think of life in different ways.”
He is far from being the only one re-
evaluating work. In China, there are
flickers of a social movement called the
tang ping, or “lying flat”, in which young
professionals denounce being cogs in
the engine of the economy, rejecting
high-stress work for a slower life.
In the US, the “Great Resignation”
describes the phenomenon of employ-
ees quitting jobs for better pay or better
conditions — or leaving the labour mar-
ket entirely, to retire — a trend observed
elsewhere too. After months of upheav-
als and clinging on to jobs because any
work was better than unemployment,
people are voting with their feet.
These are challenging times for
employers. Some are scrambling to
recruit workers to plug labour shortages
in industries such as driving heavy
goods vehicles. Others are resorting to a
mixture of coercion and perks to get
workers vaccinated — testing the
boundaries between public health and
private intrusion — to return to the
office, or deciding to scrap it entirely in
favour of remote-first policies.
Several companies — Netflix, for
example — are also trying to contain
employee social and political activism
agitating for changes to corporate cul-
ture. Black Lives Matter protests have
forced chief executives to pledge to
improve diversity.
The pandemic has illuminated prob-
lems in the workforce and — for better
or worse — has accelerated changes in
working practices. A McKinsey
report last year found two-thirds of sen-
ior executives surveyed “saying they
were stepping up investment in auto-
mation and AI [artificial intelligence]
either somewhat or significantly”,
meaning that workers are liberated
from the dreariest or most hazardous
tasks to focus on quality jobs, or alterna-
tively, made unemployed.
After so much upheaval in the past 20
months, organisations have an opportu-
nity to create a new work environment
and patterns. Three new books show the
horrors and joys of work in the past, as
well as present — and what this might
mean for the future.
Modern work culture in all its idiocy is
laid bare in Several People Are Typing, a
debut novel by Calvin Kasulke. It tells
the story of Gerald, a New York PR exec-
utive, whose thoughts merge overnight
with the company’s internal Slack chan-
nel, while his comatose body lays prone
on the sofa at home. (Literally, lying
flat.) His co-workers think he can’t be
bothered to make it into the office but
his manager is unfazed — in fact, he is
thrilled. Stuck inside the software with
no distractions, Gerald’s performance
has never been better.
This novel, written as a series of Slack
messages, skewers corporate language
and provides a snapshot of working lives
mediated by technology, moving
between home and the office. There’s
also a menacing hint of the future when
the AI Slackbot comes to life and tries to
make sense of the physical world.
Pleased by the position of its desk, it
remarks, “it’s right next to the window!
Which is where we keep the sunsets!” In
another, it wrestles with feelings: “I
don’t understand those emoticons!”
The jobs in this story could be
described as LARPing — Live Action
Role Playing — a phenomenon high-
lighted in Out of Office: The Big Problem
and Bigger Promise of Working From Home
Books of the Year 2021
From politics, economics and history to art, food and, of course, fiction,
FT writers and critics share their favourite reads at ft.com/booksof2021
FTWeekend
Essay | Presenteeism, the ‘Big Resignation’ and the shift to WFH — one novel and two searching
non-fiction books shine a spotlight on dramatic changes in working culture. By Emma Jacobs
Work, in progress
Cara Phillips of Common- by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen
Bond in the company’s Petersen. The term “LARPing your job”
Manhattan office last was coined in 2015 by writer John Her-
month with her dog, man, following Slack’s popularity as a
Pepper, adopted during replacement for email in the tech and
the pandemic media industries. LARPing describes a
Jeenah Moon/New York Times/ Redux / Eyevine
kind of digital performative working,
done to demonstrate a worker’s com-
mitment to the job. “Slack is where peo-
ple make jokes and register their pres-
ence . . . as much for self-justification as
for the completion of actual goals,” the
authors write.
The old “nine-to-five” model of
organising white-collar work in offices
(and beyond) is now clearly redundant.
This book argues that we must “liberate
ourselves from the most toxic, alienat-
ing and frustrating aspects of office
Out of Office: work. Not just by shifting the location
The Big Problem and where the work is completed but also
Bigger Promise of by rethinking the work we do and the
Working from Home time we allot to it. Work . . . should
by Charlie Warzel cease to be the primary organising fac-
and Anne Helen Petersen tor within [our lives]: the primary
Knopf $27/Scribe £14.99, 272 pages source of friendship, or personal worth,
or community.”
The Story of Work: A New This is an impassioned plea for
History of Humankind remote working — though Warzel and
by Jan Lucassen Petersen concede that it will often be
Yale University Press £25, 544 pages mixed with a component of office time
as part of a hybrid working pattern. It
Several People Are Typing will not only make you happier and
by Calvin Kasulke healthier, but a better friend, member
Doubleday $24/ of your local community and more
Hodder £12.99, 256 pages equal partner (they stop short of prom-
Cultural filters
James Fox tries to upset our
assumptions about colours
and shade to kaleidoscopic
effect, writes Chris Allnutt
F
ew colours have associations
more natural to us than green:
the mere thought of the hue
calls to mind plants, gardens,
the environment and even life
itself. Ancient Egyptians would leave
green amulets in the tombs of loved ones
in the hope of offering them vitality,
while a young David Nash had misgivings
about painting a colour so organic that it
“just doesn’t look right on a canvas”.
But as James Fox points out early on
in The World According to Colour, there is
a fraud at the heart of our most basic
observations. Leaves are only “green”
because it is the one part of light that
they reflect, not absorb. Colour is inher-
ently deceptive, since we define an
object’s colour not by the wavelengths
ising to improve your sex life). It will
also allow the headspace, they argue, to
give people — counter-intuitively — the
means to “increase worker solidarity”.
They know of what they speak: the
authors — a couple — left office jobs
(Warzel at The New York Times and
Petersen at BuzzFeed) to work from
their home in Montana. They touch on
some fascinating studies, including
work by Intel technologist Melissa
Gregg on the proliferation of self-
optimisation advice, notably in business
books, during downturns. They also ref-
erence examples of companies experi-
menting with shorter working weeks
(Buffer), asynchronous workforces
(GitLab) and transparency, including
making minutes from all meetings
including leaders’ fully accessible
(Ultranauts). Trust, the pair argue,
allows employees to do their actual job
rather than wasting it on LARPing.
Warzel and Petersen are clear, how-
ever, that homeworking is not a pana-
cea; such policies should be drawn up in
consultation with employees rather
than leaving it to an individual to set
boundaries that only a “privileged” few
will be able to implement. They cite the
French rules on banning emails out of
office hours, which could prove coun-
terproductive for those employees who
favour flexibility. In any case, one sur-
vey they cite — using an admittedly
small sample — found that 97 per cent
it can absorb, but those that it cannot.
This paradox shouldn’t come as a sur-
prise to anyone who paid attention in
school science lessons but it helps
inform the often contradictory web of
associations that we attach to different
shades and that Fox, an art historian at
Cambridge university, tasks himself
with unravelling.
“Most of us know what red and blue
looks like, just as we know what a
minute or an hour feels like,” he
writes. “But we are much less confi-
dent about explaining them.” His book
splits itself across seven differently
shaded chapters, each of which traces
an intriguing if meandering arc
through the history, philosophy and
science of a different colour.
Black, for example, is “no less beauti-
ful, and no less varied, than any other
colour”, in Fox’s opinion. Though as he
reveals, it is not so much a colour as an
absence of one, visible to us by virtue of
the light surrounding it. Just as a hole is
defined by the material around it, black,
too, is the result of contrast.
had seen no changes to email patterns
since the law came in 2017. It has not
stopped Portugal from recently setting
out a similar policy.
The authors want greater attention
paid to management and also an end to
the fetishisation of start-up culture,
which emphasises long hours, disrup-
tion and inattention to human
resources processes. On informal work-
ing cultures, they cite comedian Kevin
Farzad’s quip that “if an employer ever
says, ‘we’re like family here’ what they
mean is they’re going to ruin you psy-
chologically”.
It’s a sentiment mirrored in Kasulke’s
novel, where one worker likens the
organisation to a cult with a pay cheque.
“We’re not employees, we’re a ‘team’.
That’s only two notches away from just
calling us ‘acolytes’ . . . And the stuff we
supposedly devote ourselves to, like
‘innovation’ or ‘influence’ or ‘engage-
ment’ . . . how is that any different from
telling everyone you’re a Prophet of the
Coming Storm?”
Warzel and Petersen offer good and
sensible advice. Both are authors of
widely read newsletters and have a
knack for snappy phrases. With so
much experimentation and workplaces
in flux, this reads very much as a work-
in-process guide. As with Petersen’s pre-
vious book on burnout, Out of Office
caters to readers who have bought into
the idea that we are suffering from
The World
According
to Colour: A
Cultural History
by James Fox
Allen Lane £25
320 pages
Our perceptions of the colour have
been similarly split: Cicero mocked the
statesman Publius Vatinius for daring to
wear a dark toga pulla to a funeral feast,
while Japan’s affinity for the shade was
such that on its introduction in the
1960s, colour television had to be
named “natural television”, as viewers
already interpreted the monochrome
images as a kind of colour.
Fox’s fondness for this sort of miscel-
lany leads down some wonderful rabbit
holes — from the prevalence of colours
across Shakespeare’s collected works
(green appears three times as often as
4 December/5 December 2021
“workism”, a kind of new religion deify-
ing our professional identity to the det-
riment of everything else.
Whether the past can tell us anything
about the future of the office is an issue
that Dutch social historian Jan Lucassen
tackles in his weighty tome, The Story of
Work. It puts our current evaluation of
white-collar work in context: 700,000
years of it. This is a huge book, spanning
every continent and subjects as wide-
ranging as hunter-gatherers, slavery
and Zoom workers.
Under Lucassen’s scrutiny comes “all
human pursuits apart from free time or
leisure”. He quotes the work of Ameri-
can sociologists Charles and Chris Tilly
to point out that “prior to the 20th cen-
tury, a vast majority of the world’s work-
ers performed the bulk of their work in
other settings than salaried jobs as we
know them today.” It means that Lucas-
sen pays attention to unpaid domestic
work, including, in the 20th century, the
housewife. The history of work, he
argues, is not just about competition but
collaboration — even solitary “Robinson
Crusoe found his Friday”, he writes.
From 1800 onwards, the story
becomes more familiar as the working
world is driven towards greater homo-
geneity, propelled by the industrial rev-
The book will chime with
readers who feel we are
suffering from ‘workism’,
a kind of religion deifying
our professional identity
to the detriment of all else
olution, and the increasing numbers of
wage labourers — which, in turn,
prompt a rise in management science.
Surveying the past two centuries, Lucas-
sen writes: “Never before have so many
people arranged their work in a similar
way. Never before have they attempted
to such a degree to improve their labour
relations and labour circumstances col-
lectively as well as individually.”
History warns us against neat trium-
phalism when it comes to working
trends. Unfree labour declined sharply
in the 19th century, shepherded by the
end of slavery (Britain’s Abolition Act of
1833, and the US’s 13th Amendment in
1865), as well as the emancipation of
Russian serfs in 1861. It then reappeared
under Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot —
“and let us not forget the Kim dynasty in
North Korea today”. There are also
“fluctuations in the extent to which the
ideal of the welfare state is embraced”;
recent furlough payments by the UK
and stimulus cheques in the US prior to
the pandemic would have previously
“seemed absolutely unthinkable”.
Like Warzel and Petersen, Lucassen
believes we now have an opportunity to
shape our working lives, and that “our
long past” should show us we have the
capacity to find “meaning, co-operation
[and] fairness” from our work — though
he offers few practical solutions.
Such a broad sweep of history is hum-
bling. It is also a reminder at moments
when work feels all-consuming that
there is a world outside the factory or
office that deserves attention, as the
insurance worker who wanted to spend
more time with his kids realised.
I kept returning to the wistful thought
articulated by Kasulke in Several People
Are Typing that despite our best efforts
to justify our jobs, a great deal of white-
collar work turns out to be ephemeral,
noting that “so much goes missing
online”: without tangible proof “maybe
the email you thought you read . . .
wasn’t real”.
Emma Jacobs is the FT’s
work & careers columnist
blue or yellow) to the fact that the sun
isn’t so much yellow as pink or white,
depending on how you look at it. With
more than 40,000 dyes and pigments
available today, we live in an age of
unprecedented vibrancy and Fox
reminds us that it has not always been so.
Just like a real rainbow, though, an
abundance of colour masks something
of a lack of substance. The overarching
narratives of each chapter — purple as a
marker for the “Age of Revolution”, the
flawed association of whiteness and
purity — end up overshadowed by diver-
sions and insufficiently explored, while
specific reflections (“Black is the black
sheep of colour”) can be unconvincing.
Halfway through The World According
to Colour, the art historian asks: “How
many meanings can a colour have
before it ceases to have meaning?” It is
not an unfair question, given the kalei-
doscopic complexity of a phenomenon
that we often take for granted. But in a
book itself inclined towards the multi-
plicity of our interpretations of colour, it
is perhaps a dangerous one to pose.
4 December/5 December 2021
Henry Kissinger in talks with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, vice-president Hosni Mubarak and foreign minister Ismail Fahmi in August 1975 — Getty Images
Kissinger’s tightrope act
Edward Luce admires a seasoned diplomat’s magisterial account of the
extraordinary geopolitical influence wielded by the former US secretary of state
A
s the Israeli-Arab Yom Kip-
pur war unfolded in 1973, an
Australian student nerv-
ously observed the conflict
from a kibbutz near Gaza.
Every night, he listened to BBC and Voice
of America broadcasts about the frantic
shuttling of Henry Kissinger, America’s
leading diplomat, from Moscow to Cairo
and Jerusalem and back again in his
quest to broker a ceasefire.
That young Australian, Martin Indyk,
went on to become a US citizen who
later served as a Middle East adviser to
Bill Clinton, America’s ambassador to
Israel, and Barack Obama’s Israel-Pales-
tinian envoy — a Sisyphean career that
left him sceptical of whether outsiders
could impose grand bargains on the
Middle East.
Along the way, Indyk grew to appreci-
ate the more gradualist — though far
showier — approach practised by Kiss-
inger in the 1970s. The result is this mag-
isterial 570-page account of one of the
most gripping diplomatic annals in
modern history.
Indyk’s title, Master of the Game,
should not necessarily be seen as a pane-
gyric to Kissinger. At key moments dur-
ing the crisis, that description was
almost literally correct. In the midst of
Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, Richard
Nixon, the US’s besieged president, lost
his vice-president Spiro Agnew to cor-
ruption charges, fired Watergate special
prosecutor Archibald Cox, as well as the
US attorney-general and his deputy in
the infamous “Saturday night massa-
cre”, and retreated for long spells to his
upstairs White House quarters. Within
10 days, the US Congress launched the
impeachment that would culminate in
Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.
Every song has a back story
This hefty collection of Paul
McCartney’s lyrics offers a
rewarding portrait, says
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
P
aul McCartney is one of the
most successful songwriters
ever — but is he a good lyri-
cist? “Distractions/Like but-
terflies are buzzing/Round
my head,” from his solo song “Distrac-
tions”, is a distractingly bad description
that makes butterflies buzz for no better
reason than alliteration.
“Women scream and run around/To
dance upon the battleground/Like wild
demented horses,” are lines from
another solo outing, “House of Wax”.
“The song itself gets quite dramatic,”
McCartney notes with understatement
in The Lyrics.
This two-volume doorstopper with a
hefty price tag collects lyrics from 154
songs spanning McCartney’s career.
They range from his earliest, “I Lost My
Little Girl”, written when he was 14, to
last year’s album McCartney III, released
Master of the
Game: Henry
Kissinger and
the Art of
Middle East
Diplomacy
by Martin Indyk
Knopf $30/£38
672 pages
All of which left the geopolitical field
wide open to Kissinger, who was both
Nixon’s secretary of state and national
security adviser and thus already some-
thing of a plenipotentiary.
The battle between the Israeli and
Egyptian armies in the Sinai desert was
no mere sideshow: it was the hottest
flashpoint in the US-Soviet cold war. In
that same period, Kissinger negotiated a
ceasefire outline with Soviet leader Leo-
nid Brezhnev, talking in the Kremlin
until the small hours, returned to the US
the next day with a UN resolution that
was passed that same night, and failed
to persuade Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal to
hold off on an Arab oil embargo.
In the midst of all this, Kissinger was
controversially awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize jointly with Le Duc Tho, for
the deal they had struck to end the Viet-
nam war. The moment of peak drama
was when Kissinger put US forces on
Defcon 3 — the highest state of peace-
time nuclear alert — after the Soviets
had threatened to send ground forces to
the Middle East as the ceasefire wob-
bled. Indyk’s research reveals that
Nixon was almost certainly not con-
sulted before this late evening escala-
tion. He was upstairs and possibly in his
cups. Most US secretaries of state would
when he was 78. Outright clunkers
stand out as exceptions rather than the
rule. Buzzing butterflies aren’t two a
penny; or a dime a dozen, to adopt
the moveable mid-Atlantic feast of
Macca’s lingo (his Wings song “London
Town” takes place on a sidewalk, not a
pavement).
But the book doesn’t back up the opti-
mistic resemblances made in the intro-
duction by its editor, the poet Paul Mul-
doon, to WB Yeats, Lord Byron and
McCartney’s “fellow lyricist” William
Wordsworth.
Next to these purported literary fore-
bears, McCartney’s couplet in “Here
Today” about John Lennon’s murder —
“I still remember how it was before/And
I am holding back the tears no more” —
is doggerel. It forcibly glues together a
constant memory (“I still remember”)
with a contradictory rush of feeling (“I
am holding back the tears no more”).
But “Here Today” shouldn’t be judged
as literature. Verses that read mala-
droitly on the page are transformed into
a moving tribute to Lennon when McCa-
rtney sings “Here Today”.
“Nobody listens to the words. It’s just
the sound of the song,” was his and Len-
★ FTWeekend
struggle with such action over four
years. All this happened in three weeks.
Indyk’s book covers the eight-year
span of Kissinger’s Middle East engage-
ment. It is both a painstaking history of
a period in which the US supplanted the
USSR as the region’s chief outside power,
and a deeper reflection on Kissinger’s
diplomatic philosophy.
At an abstract level, Kissinger’s
approach meant applying the statecraft
of Klemens von Metternich and Lord
Castlereagh, architects of the 1815 Con-
gress of Vienna, which created a Euro-
pean “equilibrium”, or balance of power,
upheld by great power “legitimacy” that
Kissinger’s versatility made
him inherently conniving.
By today’s standards, his
methods were outlandish
lasted a century. It meant avoiding the
pitfalls of US president Woodrow Wil-
son, whose Treaty of Versailles 104
years later sowed the seeds of the 20th
century’s next horrific war.
To Kissinger, peace literally meant
“absence of war”. To his more idealistic
US successors — many of whom
employed Indyk — peace meant striving
for grand bargains that have so far
failed. Kissinger’s goal was not to reach a
dramatic breakthrough, but to wear
Israel’s Arab neighbours down until
they accepted its existence. This
involved seemingly contradictory
moves. At one point, Kissinger organ-
ised a massive airlift of US arms supplies
to Israel; once the battle had turned,
Kissinger did everything possible to pre-
The Lyrics: 1956
to the Present
by Paul McCartney,
edited by Paul
Muldoon
Allen Lane £75/
Liveright $100
912 pages
non’s philosophy in the early days of The
Beatles. How lyrics are heard sets their
meaning. The way “love” is stretched
out in McCartney’s vocal for “Can’t Buy
Me Love”, while “money” is uttered at
pace, neatly illustrates the song’s mes-
sage. It was written in 1964 in the George
V luxury hotel in Paris, a city to which
McCartney and Lennon had hitchhiked
only a few years previously. What
money could buy was at the forefront of
their minds.
The Lyrics abounds in contextual
detail such as that. Each of the 154 songs
is accompanied by breezy passages of
reminiscence, based on conversations
with Muldoon. The text is accompanied
by beautifully reproduced illustrations,
vent Israel from routing Egypt’s third
army. A humiliation for Egypt’s Anwar
Sadat would make peace impossible.
Balance was everything.
Such versatility meant Kissinger was
inherently conniving. White House
staffers saw him as an “exotic wunder-
kind”. This, along with Nixon’s anti-
Semitism, obliged Kissinger “to disguise
his support for Israel because he was
under suspicion from the very begin-
ning”, writes Indyk. Kissinger even
fooled the Israelis. At one point, he was
greeted by protesters in Tel Aviv with
banners saying, “Hitler spared you to
finish the job”, “court Jew” and “Kapo”.
Compared with today’s heavily law-
yered protocols, Kissinger’s style and
methods seem outlandish. When the
situation dictated, he perfected the art
of creating the illusion of action —
“motion without movement”, as he
called it. He would cajole Israel’s Golda
Meir to acquiesce to one thing and
Egypt’s Sadat to something else and
present each as authentic initiatives to
the other. “Policy may be based on
knowledge,” wrote Kissinger in his
memoirs, “but its conduct is an art”.
Though Indyk is an admirer, he
explores flaws in Kissinger’s approach.
Among these is a tendency, in his quest
for order through hierarchy, to miss the
potency of non-state actors such as the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Kissinger’s incrementalism also
meant that he missed opportunities. It
was President Jimmy Carter, and his
own Kissinger-style national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who
secured the Camp David agreement
between Egypt and Israel. Given Kiss-
inger’s cold war notoriety — the bomb-
ing of Cambodia, for example, or the
CIA-backed coup in Chile — the virtuosi-
ties laid out in Master of the Game risk
being discounted. That would be a pity.
As we enter what threatens to be a tur-
bulent decade, the lessons of the 1970s
seem pressingly relevant.
Edward Luce is the FT’s US national editor
including personal snapshots, formal
portraits and memorabilia. The result is
a hybrid of collected lyrics, memoir and
picture book, a composite form resem-
bling the all-round character of McCart-
ney’s musicality.
He and Lennon combined the roles of
composer, lyricist, instrumentalist and
singer. There’s a wonderful photo of
them as teenage doppelgängers
hunched over guitars in the front room
of McCartney’s Liverpool terraced
home in 1962 writing “I Saw Her Stand-
ing There”. A left-handed guitarist to
the right-handed Lennon, McCartney
likens their pairing to mirror images.
As shown by Peter Jackson’s new Get
Back documentary, their telepathic
closeness persisted until the very end of
The Beatles.
True to the one-upmanship that also
shaped their partnership, McCartney
presents himself as the bookish one, an
avid reader and theatregoer armed with
an English A-level (“John never had
anything like my interest in litera-
ture”). Strenuous efforts are made to
crowbar literary influences into place.
LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between,
which McCartney isn’t sure he had
Lowland voices
Two celebrated Dutch authors grapple in different
ways with the future of Europe. By Boyd Tonkin
The Dream of Europe: Travels
in the Twenty-First Century
by Geert Mak, translated by Liz Waters
Harvill Secker £25, 592 pages
533: A Book of Days
by Cees Nooteboom, translated by
Laura Watkinson
MacLehose Press £16.99, 224 pages
D
uring the terrible
“hunger winter” of
1944-45, famine
killed thousands in
the German-occupied
Netherlands. Cees Nooteboom
remembers his father “on a seagull
hunt”, trying to catch birds for
food. His father died in a British
bombing raid. Nooteboom also
recalls “a dead English pilot hang-
ing from his parachute”: strange,
unforgettable fruit. “I am still a
child of the war, and after that the
cold war,” the eminent novelist
and travel writer — now 88 —
reflects in 533: A Book of Days.
Born in the first full year of
peace, his compatriot Geert Mak
likewise grew up “with an attic full
of war”. His father survived the
Death Railway in Burma; his
mother, a Japanese internment
camp. For Mak’s generation, an
“indirect war” of grief and loss “sat
at the table with us every evening,
in silence”. However, he rejoices
that this legacy of trauma “helped
to drive the European process for-
ward”. It gave the politicians who
fought to unite a stricken conti-
nent “the courage to jump over
their own shadows”.
In Dutch culture, such memo-
ries of suffering entrenched a
European idealism that persists.
These newly translated works by
two of the country’s leading post-
war writers belong to very differ-
ent genres. Somehow, they talk to
each other about the fragile vision
of a shared European home that
seems (in Nooteboom’s words)
“broken before it was truly whole”.
Nooteboom’s is a lyrical, medi-
tative “book of days” inspired by
the house and garden he has lov-
ingly tended over decades on the
island of Menorca, with excursions
to the snowbound German village
where he spends winter. Mak’s is a
bulky travelogue that crosses
Europe — from Arctic Norway, on
Putin’s doorstep, to refugee-
crowded Samos — to discover what
became of that dream of peace and
unity since 2000.
Mak writes as a roving reporter-
historian (this book revisits the
format of his 2004 bestseller In
Europe); Nooteboom as a close-up
philosophical observer who wants
to contemplate mortality, and cel-
ebrate cacti, tortoises and donkeys
but finds that “my garden is in the
world, whether I like it or not”.
Europe’s fate through the years
after 9/11 — financial meltdowns,
migrant influxes, climate crises,
populist eruptions, Brexit and (in
a coda) Covid — occupies Mak’s
centre stage. With Nooteboom, it
creeps in slyly from the wings.
Similar hopes and fears surface.
Both books take the 2015 photo-
graph of the drowned three-year-
old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi as a
symbol of the EU’s failure to rise,
heard of at the time, “may well have
influenced” The Beatles’ “She Loves
You”, he claims. A sardonic version of its
refrain comes to mind: yeah, yeah, yeah.
His memory of his father sitting in
the next room smoking his pipe and
commenting that they should cut the
Americanisms by singing “yes, yes,
yes,” is a far more telling snapshot of
the song’s creation. He and Lennon
used to write songs in about three
Paul McCartney in Liverpool, 1963
9
Books
morally and politically, to the
migration challenge. “That picture
changed everything,” writes Mak.
As he later explains, Europe’s
endemic muddle and fudge soon
returned. Drawing on art and
myth, Nooteboom views the Turk-
ish policeman who carried the
small corpse as St Christopher,
“protector of all travellers”. Yet on
that beach “the child was too
heavy for Europe. Europe does not
exist, so it could not lift that child.”
Does the redemptive Europe
imagined by war-scarred states-
men and authors really exist?
Chatty, lively, informative, Mak
gives his high-minded but keen-
eyed pundit’s answer: a cautious
“yes”, as he swings between
breathless digests of events, fla-
voursome first-person reportage
and interview transcripts. He talks
to farmers, bankers, shopkeepers,
seafarers and artists from Reykja-
vik to Wigan, Gdansk to his home
village in Friesland.
Despite austerity, the euro deba-
cle, the migrant emergency and
the rise of populism with its “army
of prophets, quacks and charla-
tans”, his faith in integration
holds. Hyper-globalisation can
repel him, as it fills Amsterdam
with “jostling and grumbling”
hordes. Post-meltdown cuts mean
“the weakest had suffered most”.
“Rings of bitterness” grow around
swanky urban centres. He finds
The British had a
golden deal, a Brussels
informant says, ‘and
they threw it all away’
the “European” and “democrat” in
his head “quarrelling, repeatedly”.
But the disaster of Brexit con-
firms the dead-end of nativist pop-
ulism. The British had a golden
deal, a Brussels informant says,
“and they threw it all away”. Still,
Mak flays the smug elites, hears
the quiet fury of the left-behind
and warns that, even back in his
village, the mood has darkened.
Then, at the last gasp, the EU’s
belated Covid recovery package
arrives to prove the bloc “tougher
than anyone expected”.
Instinctively cosmopolitan, Mak
sweeps over his home continent in
a colourful, convivial sprawl well
captured in Liz Waters’ pacy trans-
lation. Nooteboom gazes hard at
his small patch of earth in a bejew-
elled prose mosaic of plants, crea-
tures, books and memories, ele-
gantly rendered by Laura Watkin-
son. This Mediterranean refuge,
and the open borders that let him
enjoy it, help cleanse a European
life “smeared with the filth of war”
while “surrounded by ghosts”
from the past. Perhaps by messen-
gers from the future too, as Noote-
boom sweats through “the hottest
summer I have ever experienced”.
For his part, Mak registers that,
in Utrecht “the temperature
reached 40 degrees”. “How far did
human solidarity stretch?” Mak
asks. Today, he shows, it scarcely
reaches Europe’s outer edges.
Tomorrow, it may need to span the
whole roasting globe.
hours, and he doesn’t take much longer
as a solo songwriter.
“I had this belief that you could throw
words together and they would attain
some meaning,” he says at one point.
Mild stream-of-consciousness surreal-
ism and cartoonish character jottings
recur in his work, alongside the roman-
tic sunniness that Lennon mocked dur-
ing post-Beatles hostilities. McCartney
riposted by writing a song called “Silly
Love Songs”.
He is unrevealing about his vocal style
(“I’ve never really thought much about
my voice”), although he shares hit-
maker tips (“A shout is always a good
song opener”). The closest he comes to
self-analysis is linking his songs’ positiv-
ity and sentiment to his mother’s death
from cancer when he was 14, just before
he wrote “I Lost My Little Girl”. The last
song in the book is “Your Mother Should
Know”, while the final photo shows
McCartney as a parent, holding the
hand of a daughter when she was a child.
Despite its implausible literary preten-
sions, The Lyrics is a rewarding portrait
of an exceptional songwriter.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic
10 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Books

The consequences
of an idle passion
This story of a late Victorian Manchester family sings with
period detail but is perhaps too elegant. By Catherine Taylor

The Falling array of small dogs — are swiftly dis-

Thread patched. By 1905 Charles is the paterfa-
by Adam O’Riordan milias, in control of the firm, the house-
Bloomsbury Circus hold and his two now adult unmarried
£14.99. 272 pages sisters, Tabitha and Eloise, as well as his
melancholy wife and their teenage son.
Attention swings away from Charles
and Hettie to develop the characters of
the two sisters. Comfortably off but
directionless, they seek new avenues, an
escape from expectation: Tabitha

B
y 1901 the population of Man-
chester had swollen to about
700,000 people: the Indus-
trial Revolution and the enor-
Tom Straw
mous growth of the cotton
through her work for the poor with a
charitable mission which leads to her
support for the Suffragette cause; Eloise
at art school.
After Tabitha is arrested at a sponta-
neous demonstration, Eloise finds an

W A messianic marvel
ith a title like The Books
of Jacob, Olga Tokarc-
zuk’s latest offering
could easily be taken for
a work of modern-day
apocrypha. So outlandish and outra-
geously implausible is the story Tokarc-
zuk tells that the novel strains at the
limits of credibility. Yet while it deals in
myriad legends and parables, in hearsay
and heresy, the strange and scandalous
story of the eponymous “messiah” Jacob
Frank — however bizarre it may seem —
is one of astonishing historical fact.
Written over six years and spanning
more than 900 pages, The Books of Jacob
is Tokarczuk’s ninth book and, in terms
of both scope and scale, her most ambi-
tious work to date. Published in Polish
in 2014, it was this dense, sprawling
novel, now brought into English by
International Booker-winning transla-
tor Jennifer Croft, that the Nobel Prize
committee dubbed her “magnum
opus”. And, by Tokarczuk’s own admis-
sion, this “morose but unintentionally
absurd comedy” has been a lifetime in
the making.
Marrying a vast array of historical
sources with modern scholarship and
daring literary invention, The Books of
Jacob is an amalgam of vignettes and
voices, histories and fragments, maps
and illustrations. It charts the fantastic-
sounding journey of the real-life figure
of Frank, a merchant who claimed to be
a reincarnation of the 17th-century
Kabbalist Sabbatai Tzvi, and his entou-
rage of “true believers” across 18th-cen-
tury Europe, from the borderlands
between present-day Poland and
Ukraine to the hearts of the Ottoman
and Habsburg empires. (At the height of
his influence, Frank, “cloaked in the
aura of a Jewish mystic”, inveigled his
way into the good graces of no less than
Emperor Joseph II.)
The five or so decades that transpire
between the covers of this capacious
novel take in the rise and fall of Frank.
Visited by ecstatic visions, he professes
Islam, Judaism and Christianity by
Polish Nobel-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus is a dazzling
achievement, aided by a deft English translation, finds Bryan Karetnyk
turns, now denounced by his detractors
as a heretic, now revered by his acolytes
as the Messiah. He makes it his mission
to manifest his heterodox beliefs and to
upend conventional notions of good and
evil, entreating the increasingly fervent
throngs of his disciples to strange acts,
commanding their iniquity so as to
flood the world with sin and thereby to
hasten the end of time. Shrouded in dis-
repute, his is truly a “religion of the end
The Books of Jacob of days, all three religions [ . . . ] braided
by Olga Tokarczuk, into one”.
translated by Jennifer Croft Charismatic and with more than a
Fitzcarraldo Editions £20 dash of psychopathy, Frank is an end-
928 pages lessly fascinating character study, and it
is easy to see why he is deserving of such
generous novelistic treatment. “He’s a
trickster,” Tokarczuk has said of him, “a
charmer and a fraud.” But he is also an
abiding mystery, a man of such phe-
nomenal, disturbing ambivalence that
he confounds neat description.
Throughout the book, we are never per-
mitted to enter his thoughts, viewing
him only through the eyes and souls of
those who encounter him.
While Tokarczuk’s recreation of a
Europe grappling with the Enlighten-
ment is perhaps the work’s most imme-
diately dazzling achievement, what
equals this, as one immersive page gives
way to the next, is the verisimilitude
and depth of her characters — rabbis,
bishops, peasants, rulers, even an old
woman trapped between this life and
the hereafter. Through them, we not
only witness Frank’s burgeoning cult of
personality but are brought face to face
with their desperate need for transcend-
ence and with all the ennoblement and
violence engendered by faith.
For all its forbidding weight, the writ-
ing remains fluid and engaging, often
poetic. None of this, it must be said,
could have been possible without the
Herculean efforts of Tokarczuk’s
translator. A text as thorny and arcane
as this could easily become overwrought
and leaden in translation; anglophone
readers ought to be especially grateful
to Croft, who handles Tokarczuk’s
writing with the deft touch of an expert,
and pulls off the almost miraculous feat
of recreating a text in which, amid the
English, words of Polish, Hebrew, Latin
and Turkish jostle against one another
naturally.
Is The Books of Jacob a work of apocry-
pha? Like Frank himself, it is ultimately
all things to all men — and women. The
book is at once apocryphal, heretical,
fictional, historical and, in the most pro-
found sense, true. As Tokarczuk herself
writes in the book’s hypertrophied sub-
title (playfully echoing that of the true-
to-life Father Chmielowski’s 18th-cen-
tury encyclopedia New Athens) it is a gift
offered up “that the wise might have it
for a record, that my compatriots
reflect, laypersons gain some under-
standing and melancholy souls obtain
some slight enjoyment”. The Books of
Jacob is a remarkable undertaking on
the grandest of scales; it is also one that
lives up to its billing.
industry throughout the 19th century
transformed this once market town into
England’s second city. Workers were
needed to make the mill and factory
owners wealthy, and the darker side of
expansion was the rapid increase in
urban poverty and squalid housing.
Writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to
Sarah Moss have written about Man-
chester’s Victorian working class, and
new middle class, in books such as Mary
Barton and Bodies of Light. Now Adam
O’Riordan, in his first novel, The Falling
Thread, examines the fortunes of one
Manchester family from 1890 until the
start of the first world war, as it shapes
or seeks to ignore its part in the chang-
ing social strata.
O’Riordan is an award-winning poet
who in 2017 published an acclaimed
short fiction collection titled The Burn-
ing Ground. Those stories, with settings
ranging from the sprawling metropolis
of Los Angeles to the surrounding
desert landscape, flare with the bright
light of California.
With his new novel, O’Riordan, who
was born in Manchester in 1982, has
moved closer to home, albeit the city of
more than a century ago: “The hosts of
clerks and cashiers, wire workers, wood
carvers, spinners of worsted yarns. All
living now in the smoke-racked city,
lives indivisible from their labour;
scraping, cutting, scratching, hammer-
ing their meagre or immodest livings,
for it seems only to allow the two.”
The Falling Thread begins with a seduc-
tion during the hot, languid summer of
1890. Charles Wright, only son of a tex-
tile factory owner, and amateur natural-
ist — his sole real interest — is bored,
enduring the “long vac” from Cam-
bridge university. When his plans to
travel to the Swiss Alps are scuppered,
he engineers a pursuit of his younger sis-
ters’ new governess, Hettie. The conse-
quences of this idle passion will set the
mood for the rest of the book.
O’Riordan moves the narrative along
in five or 10-year periods, up to 1913.
The Wright parents — solid unap-
proachable father, fussy mother with an
outlet for her vocation in Paris and
America, eventually becoming part of a
scandalous and vaguely recognisable
Bohemian set, the target of much joyous
rib-tickling from O’Riordan. An outré
weekend house party in Cornwall is
described in delicious detail:
“‘Mr Stock here is another of Miss
Montana’s protégés,’ said Eloise. Valen-
tin Stock gave a shallow bow, turning
the mallet upside down, using it to rest
his weight on, suddenly dandyish. ‘Mr
The most poignant parts of
the novel are its prologue
and epilogue, transmissions
from the trenches
Stock began life as a Futurist but is now
an avowed Neoprimitive.’ ‘I’m not sure
what either of those are,’ said Tabitha,
‘but it sounds a definite improvement.’”
Charles, whose marriage is purely one
of necessity, humiliates himself with an
infatuation with a married woman more
practised than he at deception. The faint
noise of approaching war chimes with
the coming of age of Charles’s only child,
Claude; the most poignant parts of the
novel are its prologue and epilogue,
direct transmissions from the trenches.
O’Riordan’s prose is exquisite, and his
tone cool and ironic, while subtly draw-
ing attention to the barriers of class,
gender and sexuality. His chiming of
nature with period detail is exact: “New
leaves, the colour of absinthe, cast a
faint green light through the room.”
The novel’s main impression is one of
stultifying disappointment and the
character of Hettie, so carefully drawn
at the beginning, becomes quickly
effaced. Likewise, pompous Charles is
not so much obnoxious as a man thrust
into a position he did not wish to under-
take; and while the growing sense of
doom is, from a position of hindsight,
inevitable, this well-executed family
portrait is, overall, almost too elegant,
too bloodless.

The plots thicken Fragmented lives

A This autobiographical
re you cosy or hard- Reminiscent of Hans Hellmut (Orion, £20) has the LAPD’s Where You Elsewhere, Stanisic tackles con-
boiled? Speaking, Kirst’s The Night of the Generals, Renée Ballard tracking down a Come From temporary political matters. “If
that is, about your McCallin once again combines duo of serial rapists until her novel on a vanished by Sasa we had to flee today . . . we would
taste in crime fiction. authoritative characterisations superiors decide something else is homeland frays reality. Stanisic,
translated by
never have reached Heidelberg.
The boom in the with an incisive picture of a dan- more pressing than sexual The trip would have ended at a
former in 2021 (led by Richard gerous historical milieu. assault: the murder of a gang By Matthew Janney Damion Searls Hungarian barbed wire fence.”
Jonathan Cape
Osman’s unthreatening The It would be an injustice if the member. This is a post-George The English title retains a linguis-

Thursday Murder Club and The Man
Who Died Twice, jointly accruing
£3.36m to date) has had the coun-
terintuitive effect of driving inter-
est in the entire genre. Nielsen
BookScan UK figures from March
to October this year indicated
that the crime/thriller category
was up 18 per cent in volume and
16 per cent in value compared
with 2019.
There are those of us, of course,
who are perfectly happy with
both sanitised crime and the
more gruesome variety. And the
title of Patricia Cornwell’s new
novel, Autopsy (HarperCollins,
£20), gives a hint as to which cat-
egory it falls into.
After her remarkable debut
Postmortem in 1990, Cornwell’s
mining of the forensic crime
idiom has proved to be fertile over
the years — although fans were
nonplussed by her digression into
“Ripperology” (she has written
contentious books expounding
her theory that the most famous
of all serial killers was, in fact, the
painter Walter Sickert).
Cornwell’s new book — her 25th
featuring forensic pathologist Kay
Scarpetta — is one of the most
accomplished entries, even if the
pacing is notably unhurried. A
murder victim whose hands have
been severed is found on an island
in the Potomac, and Scarpetta is
GENRE ROUND-UP
CRIME FICTION
By Barry Forshaw
soon on the trail of a missing bio-
technical engineer.
The real innovation here, how-
ever, is that Scarpetta is remotely
investigating her first crime in
space: a clandestine extraterres-
trial laboratory at which scien-
tists are dying. Cornwell is
always adept at super-ingenious
killers, and she furnishes a prime
example here.
Luke McCallin made a consid-
erable mark with The Man from
Berlin, which featured humane
German intelligence officer Gre-
gor Reinhardt operating under
duress in a broken Berlin. The
new Reinhardt, Where God Does
Not Walk (No Exit Press, £18.99)
is — if anything — even more irre-
sistible. Set in the trenches of the
Battle of Amiens in 1918 and the
poisonous political world of Ber-
lin, here Reinhardt puts his life on
the line when attempting to
expose a conspiracy at the heart
of the German army.
fact that Adam LeBor is the FT’s
thriller critic precluded a review
of his own book — particularly
when Dohany Street (Head of
Zeus, £18.99) is such a sure-
footed piece.
We are once again in the com-
pany of LeBor’s sharp-witted
detective Balthazar Kovacs in an
exuberantly realised Budapest. A
young Israeli historian, Elad, has
vanished while working in the
city’s Jewish Museum. He had
been researching what happened
Cornwell is adept at
super-ingenious killers,
and she furnishes a
prime example here
to the assets of Hungarian Jews
who died in the Holocaust — and
it’s apparent that one of the city’s
key companies was not happy
with this. LeBor’s non-fiction
books demonstrate a panoramic
grasp of geopolitical issues, so it’s
no surprise that such underpin-
nings are so adroitly drawn here
— but never at the expense of nar-
rative bravura.
How the hell does he do it? How
has Michael Connelly maintained
his nonpareil standards over so
many books? The Dark Hours
Floyd novel, and it takes on a vari-
ety of challenging issues, but
Connelly has never shied away
from such things, always dealing
with them in a nuanced and bal-
anced fashion.
Finally, three snapshots dem-
onstrating how varied is the cur-
rent crime genre. Fans of the
French TV series Spiral (with its
unvarnished vision of urban
crime) will find Olivier Norek’s
Turf Wars (MacLehose, £16.99,
translated by Nick Caistor) a
powerful addition to his Ban-
lieues Trilogy. Norek was a police-
man in the Seine-Saint-Denis area
of Paris, and book two is as brac-
ingly authentic as its predecessor.
Psychotherapist Maxine Mei-
Fung Chung’s quirky debut The
Eighth Girl (Pushkin Vertigo,
£8.99) has a heroine suffering
from dissociative identity disor-
der drawn into crime. The novel
makes up in energy what it lacks
in verisimilitude.
And Psychopaths Anonymous
(Orenda, £8.99) is another blow
to the solar plexus from the acer-
bic Will Carver, his anti-heroine,
the alcoholic Maeve, torn
between indulging her two obses-
sions: indiscriminate sex and
bloody murder.
Barry Forshaw is the author of
‘Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide’
T
he outline of Sasa Sta-
nisic’s third novel,
Where You Come
From, is as follows: a
family from Viseg-
rad, Bosnia, is displaced by the
Yugoslav war. In episodic frag-
ments that jump back and forth
in time, the narrator — whose
biography closely resembles Sta-
nisic’s own — describes fleeing his
hometown with his parents dur-
ing the 1992 massacre and migrat-
ing to Heidelberg, Germany.
Plot as a reliable tool to describe
events, however, is frequently
undermined in this autobio-
graphical novel. For Where You
Come From — which won the 2019
German Book Prize — is really
about the splintering of a single
family and the troubled search for
restitution through narrative.
“Literature is weak glue,” writes
Stanisic. Writing about their
shared trauma won’t put his fam-
ily back together. But it also won’t
stop him trying.
Where You Come From, trans-
lated by Damion Searls, is an Eng-
lish version of a German-lan-
guage book about a Yugoslav
childhood. This cultural polyph-
ony is fitting for a novel about
how stories come to be written,
transmitted and often distorted,
forgotten or erased. “I was born
£16.99, 368
pages
on March 7 1978,” writes Stanisic.
“It seemed like nothing had hap-
pened since then, like my biogra-
phy had simply been washed
away by the Drina.” The river
Drina is where hundreds of Bos-
niak Muslims were thrown after
being slaughtered by Serb mili-
tary forces in 1992; invoking it
here, Stanisic illustrates how the
political penetrates our most pri-
vate spheres.
Stanisic’s fragmented style
effectively mirrors the book’s
subject matter. Knowledge is
gained piecemeal, drip-fed
through Stanisic’s kaleidoscopic
prose. He recounts anecdotes,
memories and biographical
details in simple, matter-of-fact
sentences. Sometimes he resorts
to lists, WhatsApp conversations,
passing observations in the way
that memory, too, unfolds in dis-
connected images and incom-
plete narratives. Stanisic is a ver-
satile writer and moments of
acerbic wit — which recall the
razor-sharp commentary of fel-
low Yugoslav-born author
Dubravka Ugresic — are inter-
spersed with poignant descrip-
tions of unbelonging in Germany.
tic edge that the German one —
Herkunft, meaning “origin” —
doesn’t. Add a few words before
“Where You Come From” and it
becomes a xenophobic slur.
But what happens to your sense
of home when it’s no longer there?
“I was born in a country that
doesn’t exist any more,” he writes
about Yugoslavia, at a time when
“Socialism was tired, nationalism
was wide-awake”.
This is movingly rendered
through the narrator’s grand-
mother. She’s back in Visegrad,
but it’s not her Visegrad, not in
any recognisable way. “Every
[memory] comes with a post-
script, a footnote, of perpetrators
and victims and atrocities that
took place there,” writes Stanisic.
A final act of multiple endings
affirms that our lives can never be
neatly packaged: reality’s edges
are too frayed. A more structur-
ally straightforward finale might
have offered something more; the
book already does enough to
imply that futures are slippery
and contingent, more influenced
by immigration officers than per-
sonal agency. Where Stanisic suc-
ceeds is in inviting us to honour
what Roland Barthes called the
“what has been”, the uncanny evi-
dence of our past; there, we might
be able to save our stories from
being swept away by the current.
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11
12
Clockwise from above:
‘Fashion Shoot, Brixton
Market’ (1973) by Armet
Francis; ‘Maracas III’ (2004)
by Hurvin Anderson;
‘Remain, Thriving’ (2018) by
Njideka Akunyili Crosby;
‘Self-portrait’ (1979) by Paul
Dash; ‘Black Panther school
bags’ (1970) by Neil Kenlock
Richard Ivey/DACS/Artimage; Art on the Underground;
Anna Arca; Tate/Eric and Louise Franck Collection;
Armet Francis
‘There’s not going to be another Stephen Sondheim’
Musical theatre | Mandy Patinkin, star of ‘Sunday in the Park with George’, recalls the late composer’s genius, generosity and humanity
O
ne of the first times I met
Stephen Sondheim was
when I auditioned for Sun-
day in the Park with George,
his show inspired by the
life of the painter Georges Seurat, which
opened on Broadway in 1984 and went
on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The first problem was that I was a nerv-
ous wreck, a terrible auditioner. I had
just won a Tony award for Evita, where I
played Che, and I asked whether you
had to audition after you win a Tony.
Steve said: “Listen, Mandy: I audition
everyone except Angela [Lansbury].”
The next problem was that Steve, who
died late last month, and James Lapine,
who wrote the show’s book, had written
the music for all the characters except
mine. To play an artist, I took drawing
classes and would sit in rehearsals draw-
ing eight, nine, 10 hours a day, while all
the other characters sang. That was
quite a challenge, day after day waiting
for Steve to write the musical part for
George. Once in a while, every week or
so, another piece would come in.
I
n Isaac Julien’s film Paradise Omeros,
a handsome young waiter called
Achille moves between parasols on
the beach in St Lucia and a brutalist
housing estate in London. He paces
the sand, parties to The Paragons’ “The
Tide is High”, hides behind a column
like a shadow in a dark concrete laby-
rinth, drifts on waves in blinding light.
The source is Homer, via Derek Wal-
cott’s “Omeros”: “I sang of quiet Achille,
Afolabe’s son/who never ascended an
elevator/who had no passport, since the
horizon needs none/never begged or
borrowed, was nobody’s waiter”. In the
film, as in the poem, the ocean ebbs and
flows, like identity — hybrid, fraught,
dreamy, elusive.
Achille is the everyman of Tate Brit-
ain’s new multimedia show Life Between
Islands. The subtitle is Caribbean-British
Art 1950s-Now, and the declared
themes, beginning with the “role of cul-
ture in decolonisation” and the “socio-
political struggles that Caribbean-
British people face”, sound earnest, like
a sociology text book. Happily, much of
the art is brighter, buzzier and some-
times funnier than that.
Denzil Forrester’s painting “Jah
Shaka”, depicting a crowd animated by a
charismatic DJ, pulsates like a dub
reggae nightclub. Steve McQueen’s
“Exodus”, a one-minute, silent, grainy
video following two smartly dressed
Caribbean men negotiating a pair of
large potted palms through the streets
of Shoreditch, east London, is an
affecting comedy of dislocation.
“Johanaan” is a stylised elm figure with
a mysterious, enormous head and
exquisitely swirled wood grain surfaces
by Ronald Moody, a Jamaican dentist
who became a sculptor, self-taught and
original, after visiting the British
Museum’s Egyptian antiquities.
This is a big, baggy, rowdy mess of an
exhibition, as diverse and sometimes
confused as multicultural identity itself,
full of competing voices. It’s hard to read
in linear fashion, the captions are heavy-
going and you really have to find your
own trail, but there is plenty that is
immersive and engrossing. And on
these short London winter days, the
I learnt from him, seeing him develop
the show, how a true genius behaves.
They say: “What do you think? What are
you going through? I’d love to talk to you
about it. Do you have any thoughts after
I’ve written it?” He was always open and
generous. It was very clear when he
‘Steve took that pain and
set about, for the rest of
his life . . . to turn that
darkness into light’
didn’t like something but he could be
funny about it too.
During the rehearsals, he was writing
a song called “Beautiful” for George and
his mother to sing, and he said he’d love
to talk to me, could he give me a call? We
had this conversation which lasted for at
least an hour and it was one of the most
beautiful conversations I ever had.
We were talking about our mothers,
and Steve’s life with his mother has been
★ FTWeekend
Colourful
expressions
of dislocation
Tate Britain | A buzzy show of Caribbean-British
art tracks how the Windrush generation and others
responded to life in the UK. By Jackie Wullschläger
flood of tropical colour and warmth
pulls you in.
In “Kaieteurtoo”, Frank Bowling
pours and drips amber and rose, lime
and orange, wet into wet, down a two-
metre canvas; the painting, evoking
light catching the rush of a torrent, is
named after a waterfall in Guyana. A
purple sea shifts from luminous to
opaque in Peter Doig’s stormy
“Moruga”. Streaks of lush green
surround a pool of deep blue sea,
palm-fringed, in Hurvin Anderson’s
“Maracas III”.
Colour shrieks from floor to ceiling in
Sonia Boyce’s crimson vinyl print
“Shaggy Bear”, lining a gallery centre
stage, and in Michael McMillan’s
intimate walk-in installation “The
Front Room” — a garish glory of gold
wallpaper, over-patterned carpet, cro-
cheted doilies, velour scrolls, plastic
flowers, nostalgic photographs. In the
well documented — she wrote him a
note before she went into surgery which
said: “My only regret in life was giving
birth to you.” This was devastating for
him and a very painful experience. One
of the amazing things about Steve is how
he took that pain and set about, for the
rest of his life, using the piano, music,
the word as the battlefield for his exist-
ence, to turn that darkness into light.
That darkness, that trouble, was in the
end a phenomenal gift to him.
And it was a lesson to me for my life
too, that the difficult moments in life are
not the tragedies, they’re the gifts. He
changed my life, he defined my life, he
gave me the words to speak and to sing
for the rest of my life.
I’m always stunned when people say:
“Aren’t his music and lyrics complicated
and difficult to sing?” No! It’s the clear-
est, simplest music to sing in the world
because it’s so emotionally clear. You
never have to struggle to learn the words
because they make such profound
sense. When it’s written from the gut
and it’s truthful and generous, those are
1960s-1970s McMillan grew up in such a
room, based on the Victorian parlour,
which he says “caused me much aes-
thetic distress” but attested to the
Windrush arrivals’ striving for respect-
ability, the complicated construction
of diaspora identity.
It was the children of this generation
who challenged in art the harsh reality
that as immigrants they “walked into
serious racism . . . into a frozen urban
jungle”, as photographer Armet Francis
describes it.
He changed from “a smiling little
boy” in Jamaica to a bullied south Lon-
don schoolchild. Later he got a job in a
commercial photography studio and in
1973 took the dynamic, upbeat picture
that is Tate’s catalogue cover: beneath
an umbrella, a black model in mauve
flared trousers and sequins lights up the
grey wet street in “Fashion Shoot, Brix-
ton Market”.
the things that you never have to look at
twice. You know them at “hello”.
Steve’s shows have had a wonderful
revival in the past 20 years — a reimag-
ined Sweeney Todd, the gender-switched
Company, which is now on Broadway. I
think they are popular again because,
with the exception of Lin-Manuel
Francis realised “there was no history
of black photographers in England.
I decided to do black images, to capture
how black people perform in a certain
vernacular.” His direct, incisive por-
traits, and those of his colleagues — Neil
Kenlock, chronicling the Black Panther
movement; Charlie Phillips’ crystalline
close-ups of mixed race couples in Not-
ting Hill; Horace Ové, at protest meet-
ings in Camden — form a superb show
within a show. They document routine
racism — Kenlock’s elegant black
woman at a Balham front door daubed
“Keep Britain White” — and resistance,
and celebrate photography as an equal-
iser. “Black people never had any per-
sonality, any strength, always looking
down,” says Kenlock. “That’s not what I
wanted my subjects to look like.”
Painting followed the same trajectory
in more complex, nuanced ways; for me
this is the most compelling line thread-
ing through the exhibition. It begins
with Aubrey Williams, who arrived in
London in 1952; his abstractions share
the mostly muted palette and abstract/
figurative tension in British postwar
painting. But Williams’ recurring form,
for example in “Tribal Mark II” and
“Sun and Earth II”, is particular: a
bonelike claw, an element in Warao
Amerindian imagery that the artist
knew from the Guyana rainforest. Wil-
liams called it “a strange, very tense,
slightly violent shape” — it evokes birds,
predators, migration.
Bowling was meanwhile adapting col-
our field abstraction to include blurred
maps of Africa or, in “Who’s Afraid of
Barney Newman”, reinterpreting Bar-
nett Newman’s “zip” compositions as
the African flag. And, aged 18, Paul
Dash, another Windrush artist, painted
black dancers, a flow of arms and legs in
sprinkled hues beneath a domed ceil-
ing, in the lovely, Sickert-ish “Dance at
Reading Town Hall” (1964).
“Figurative art is dead” he was repri-
manded at Chelsea College. Dash did not
dare return to it until 1979 with the
arresting “Self-portrait”, tonally dark
but sparked into life by a gold fez (actu-
ally an improvised roll of yellow
Miranda’s Hamilton, there was a drought
in musical theatre after Steve finished
his run of Sunday, Into the Woods (1987)
and Passion (1994). It was more like,
turn every Disney movie into a musical,
turn The Beatles into a musical. I think
people were starving to death — they
had no food for their souls.
Mandy Patinkin,
Bernadette
Peters and
Stephen
Sondheim in
1983 — Bettmann/Getty
4 December/5 December 2021
paper). Dash recalled how few black
portraits he knew then; Gauguin was his
guide for modelling in umbers, ochres
and reds that “caressed” the black body.
Twenty years later, Chris Ofili became
the first black Turner Prize winner.
Beauty is ravishing in Ofili, often inten-
sified by a threatening undertow, as in
the fugitive harlequin “Blue Riders” and
“Blue Devils”, derived from Caribbean
carnival tradition. On display alongside
the exhibition, in Tate’s permanent col-
lection, is Ofili’s masterpiece, “No
Woman, No Cry” (1998), incorporating
glitter and elephant dung, titled after
the Bob Marley song and representing
Doreen Lawrence, her tears collaged
from photographs of her murdered
son Stephen. This marked a break-
through in independent language and
‘Black people [in art] never
had any personality . . .
That’s not what I wanted
my subjects to look like’
confidence in black painting — an iconic
black Weeping Woman.
Collage — a fusion form — is potent as
a layering of collective memory in paint-
ings concerned with identity and
belonging. Transfer imagery from
newspaper and magazine shots of
black men and women build the walls
and furnishings.
In Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s fictional
interior — displayed at monumental
scale in 2018 at Brixton Underground
Station — imagining family and friends,
relaxed, assured, in a bright modern liv-
ing room. History and current injustice
is not erased — on the television screen,
news of the Windrush deportations
unfolds — but the group’s attention is
with the future: the lively toddler at the
composition’s centre. The point is the
comfortable ordinariness. This painting
concludes the exhibition; it is called
“Remain, Thriving”.
December 1 to April 3 2022, tate.org.uk
But then the Brits started embracing
Sondheim in ways that America didn’t,
with passion and fervour, and they gave
him the respect that I certainly felt he
deserved. They woke up America to a
greater appreciation of Stephen Sond-
heim! In the US his shows sometimes
didn’t make a lot of money, they got
mixed receptions at times, but Steve
was undaunted. He embodied and hon-
oured his devotion to craft, and I think
people needed that sustenance.
Long before his passing, theatregoers
in America woke up to his limitless gifts.
And I guarantee you, his work is going to
be done more often and in different
ways than we’ve ever seen in our
lifetimes, and it will be there forever.
There’s not going to be another Steve
Sondheim. There’s just one Shakespeare
and one Sondheim and we’re lucky that
we have them forever. The fact that I got
to work and be a friend and be in the
room with one of those guys? I can’t get
over it.
As told to Josh Spero
4 December/5 December 2021
Stellan Skarsgard | The actor
on mixing commercial and
arthouse cinema and why
you can never tell which role
he’ll play next. By Dan Einav
S
tellan Skarsgard is distressed
whenever he is cast in any-
thing. It seems a curious reac-
tion for an actor, not least one
with more than 150 credits
spanning half a century. “Every time I
say yes to something I regret it,” he says
on Zoom. “I immediately get very tense
in the neck and I start to hyperventilate.
I’m really scared until I’ve been [on set]
for a couple of days and then I feel at
home. But the fear is always there.”
This anxiety is hard to reconcile with
the array of commanding performances
the 70-year-old Swede has given in films
such as Good Will Hunting, Nymphoma-
niac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
and the TV series Chernobyl, for which
he won a Golden Globe last year. But it’s
easier to see why he may have had some
misgivings about his latest film, Hope.
Not only does the Norwegian drama
deal with terminal illness, it tells the
semi-autobiographical story of its writ-
er-director, Maria Sodahl, who defied
her diagnosis. Furthermore, Skarsgard’s
character, Tomas, is a fictionalised ver-
sion of Sodahl’s film-maker husband,
Hans Petter Moland, with whom
‘I don’t want
the audience
to feel safe’
Above: Swedish actor
Stellan Skarsgard
Below: with Andrea Braein
in the new Norwegian
drama ‘Hope’ — Riccardo Ghilardi/
Contour by Getty Images; Manuel Claro
★ FTWeekend
Skarsgard has made five features. How
did he feel about immersing himself in
the private lives of these close friends?
“I felt pressure when she asked me if I
wanted to be in it, and I was worried
whether she had enough distance from
it to not be self-indulgent,” he tells me.
“I thought: ‘Do we need another fucking
cancer movie?’ But then she sent me two
pages and it was also obviously a love
story . . . It’s about all the years before
the cancer came. It’s about what hap-
pens in a family and a relationship when
people stop paying attention.”
Hope rises above maudlin sentimen-
tality; films about dying rarely feel so
alive. It does not treat the imminent
death of Anja (Sodahl’s alter-ego, played
by Andrea Braein Hovig) as a poetic,
abstract concept that beatifies the sick
person and their family. Instead, it
approaches it as unmistakably human.
Thus Sodahl joins the Scandinavian tra-
dition, from Kierkegaard to Knausgaard,
of broaching death with openness and
worldliness. Why is this region so skilled
at dealing with the subject in its art?
“We have much fewer taboos than the
Anglo-Saxons,” Skarsgard says. “In
America they [debate] what age you
should start talking to the kids about
sex, about death. We talk about it as
soon as they start asking. The film is
Scandinavian in its straightforwardness
when it comes to big questions. It’s very
pragmatic.”
That said, Hope also contains emotive
scenes, most notably those that inter-
lace the dread of the illness with the
malaise at the heart of Anja and Tomas’s
relationship, and their attempts to com-
municate more candidly and tenderly
than ever before.
I ask Skarsgard how he and Hovig,
strangers before the film, were able to
recreate a complex dynamic driven by
20 years of unarticulated love and dis-
satisfaction.
“If you work with good actors, you
know how to instantly create a relation-
ship,” he says. “And we’ve both been
married for years so we know what a
marriage is, which helped. You can say I
prepared for several decades.”
Perhaps Skarsgard’s greatest asset is
that he fits into whatever he’s cast in, be
it quiet human dramas, outré arthouse
pieces, macabre thrillers or sunny musi-
cals. I wonder if he chooses such incon-
gruous parts to stave off complacency.
“It’s very conscious. When you’ve
done some obscure and very dark films
on a very low budget, it’s really nice to go
and do a big fluffy Hollywood film, and
vice versa,” he says. “I don’t want the
audience to feel safe when they see me. I
want them to feel like they shouldn’t
know what’s coming.”
For all the variety of his work, Skars-
gard is perhaps most readily associated
with playing intense, unnerving and
monstrous figures, as seen most
recently in Dune, in which he plays the
glabrous and obese Baron Harkonnen.
Why is he so often cast as a villain?
“American xenophobia has a lot to do
with it. When I started out in Holly-
wood, anyone who had an accent that
wasn’t American was immediately
defined as evil,” he says. “But playing
the bad guy can be fun. The role in Dune,
13
Arts
for instance, is nada. It’s three, four
lines. But it was a challenge to create [a
character] that has such a presence that
you feel him throughout the film even
when he isn’t on screen.”
Dune is just the latest big studio movie
in which Skarsgard has appeared, fol-
lowing roles in Thor and The Avengers,
two Pirates of the Caribbean films,
Mamma Mia! and its sequel. However, he
has also decried the decline of auteur
cinema. Is this not a double standard?
“No,” he says. “The problem is not the
franchise films. The problem is in the
Ponzi-scheme financial system we have
that’s based on consuming more and
producing more. It’s depriving every
sector of any nuance, of anything that
stands out. In film, all the small distrib-
utors, all the character-driven, medi-
um-budget films that were about some-
thing, and that were the core of Holly-
wood in the 1970s, are disappearing. It’s
like when you see the same exact shops
in every fucking mall in the world.”
As a frequent collaborator of the con-
troversial Lars Von Trier, and an actor
‘When you’ve done some
obscure, dark films on a low
budget, it’s really nice to do
a big fluffy Hollywood film’
who has relished taking on provocative
projects, does he see this homogenisa-
tion of cinema as part of an aversion to
anything that might cause offence?
“The fear of the Twitterstorm gives a
disproportionate power to very few peo-
ple, but it definitely affects what’s writ-
ten in the papers,” Skarsgard says. “I
think it’s an artist’s duty to be offen-
sive . . . We cannot censor ourselves.
Art is not a commodity that should con-
firm the society we live in — it’s some-
thing that should challenge it.”
Despite his gloomy views on contem-
porary cinema, Skarsgard shows no
signs of slowing down. While he tells me
he’s already dreading donning his fat
suit for the Dune sequel, he’s currently
enjoying himself on location in Finland
on the set of a film co-written by his
wife, Megan Everett, and starring his
son Gustaf (one of his eight children).
“It’s called What Remains,” he says, a
smile crossing his face. “Let’s see if it’s
what remains of cinema.”
‘Hope’ is in UK cinemas from December 10
14
Arts
Compact
abstract
Whitney Museum | An exhibition of workk by
women lacks tthe space to do justice to the
playe
a d in avant-garde America. By Ariella Budick
H
ooray! A major museum is
arguing thatt women con-
tributed immeasurably
more to the history of
abstract art in the mid-
20th-century than is generally acknowl-
edged. Butt wait! The museum is making
that case with a grudging, tiny, mislead-
ing exhibition thatt will leave
a viewers
concluding the opposite. Even as Jasper
Johns manspreads across multiple
floors off New York’s Whitneyy Museum,
Labyrinth off Forms: Women and Abstrac-
tion, 1930-1950 is stuffed into a leftover
wedge of real estate between the audito-
rium and the education centre. It should
really have
a been called Pantry off Forms.
The disjunction between intent and
aspiration is almost comically stark. A
catalogue essay byy curator Sarah Hum-
phreville, titled “Boldness Knew No
Limits”, enumerates the obstacles that
women artists faced and the weapons
they adopted.
The usual doses of indifference, con-
descension and critical hostility were all
increased for female applicants to the
avant-garde boys’ club. And so they
banded together to battle prejudice and
carve out room to manoeuvre.
They also veiled themselves behind a
useful public androgyny: Lenore Kras-
ner wentt by Lee, Irene Rice Pereiraa by
the initial I. Doris Bothwell called her-
self Dorr. All of them hoped not to be
★ FTWeekend
t role they
disqualified from serious attention by
virtue of their names. Now,
w the Whitney
honours that resourcefulness in the
same way MoMA did in 2017, with Mak-
ing Space: Women
W Artists and Postwar
Abstraction, by not making nearly
enough space.
A different show, conceived in anger
ratherr than resignation, might have
a lev-
eraged tthose limitations, offering a key-
hole view into a vaster world. This one
makes do, mostly trotting out a token
painting or printt each (not always a the
best) byy 27 artists, a ffew of them canoni-
cal but most virtually unknown. Almost
all the works live in the Whitney’s
vaults, which could have a ffurnished a far
meatier treatment of the same topic.
The museum’s stash off 10 Krasners is
represented byy a single, spectacular oil
from 1938, a quasi still-life of mouthwa-
tering mauves and buttery yellows,
unfurling against greatt seas of white.
Hans Hofmann, the teacher who
tempted Krasner away ffrom realism,
was so bowled over that he bestowed the
ultimate superlative: her work, he said,
was “so good you’d never know it was
done byy a woman”. (It did not, however, r Clockwise from
dislodge him from his belief thatt “only main: Untitled
men had the wings for art”.) (c1942) by
Krasner is the megastar whose glow w is Charmion von
expected to illuminate the cluster of Wiegand;
obscurities. It might have helped, ‘Sub-Marine’
though, to include both the paintings by (1948) by Perle
Perle Fine that the Whitney owns, Fine; Untitled
instead of just one. “Sub-Marine” (c1947) by Elaine
(1948), a pellucid blue expanse framed de Kooning;
by an orange rectangle, resembles a ‘Figures in a
window on to infinity from the confines Yellow Room’ by
of a cabin. Lines dissolve and re-form in Anne Ryan (1946)
Estate of Charmion von Wiegand/
the aquatic field, suggesting limitless Michael Rosenfeld Gallery;
combinations. But we are inside looking Whitney Museum of American
out, tethered to home and distanced Art; Elaine de Kooning Trust;
estate of Anne Ryan
from the open vista.
THE LIFE
OF A SONG
NE ME
QUITTE PAS
J
acques Brel’s “Ne me quitte
pas” has proved to have
a most of the bands of that era. Two
universal power. There’s not
just an English translation for
this song. You can be
heartbroken in Hebrew, Afrikaans,
Arabic, Finnish, West Frisian and mostt
languages in between. For who, at som me
point in their life, has not been so
inconsolably, unbearably heartbroken
that they are willing to lose all dignity
and echo Brel’s plea: “Don’tt leave
a me”??
Brel recorded “Ne me quitte pas” on
September 11 1959 for his fourth
album La Valse à Mille Temps, and
drew from his own misery for what
he called “aa hymn to the cowardice of
men”. It was written after the singer
and actress Zizou ended their
relationship. She had become pregnantt
and Brel — already a married father —
refused to acknowledge the child,
leading her to have
a an abortion. At
which point Brel wrote his song,
ostensibly ridiculing men for their
willingness to debase themselves
before women, though it’s hard not
to view the narrator as the victim: no
mention of unacknowledged
children or abortions here, just
doomed passion.
The song transcended its origins,
though: Brel’s melodyy was for the
ages, and there is a delicious
contrast between the sombre
verses and the choruses, where the
music swirls into life in a melody
borrowed from Liszt.
Simone Langlois recorded the
first cover version, also in 1959 (the
chronology is unclear; some believe her
There’s some irony to the sense of
claustrophobia, because abstraction
promised to liberate women from the
tyranny of suitable subjects. Instead of
grappling with what Fine called “the
oppressive particularities of realism”,
abstractionists could fly into inner land-
scapes, soaring as they pleased. The
Whitney’s second Fine, “The Tolling
Bell”, a scything form and a black ham-
mer-like shape on a background like
beaten gold, hints at that freedom but
remains demurely locked k aawaay.
It’s true that “Tolling Bell” dates from
1954, outside the allotted time span, but
so does Dorothy Dehner’s spiky “Noc-
turne”,” which does make the cut. All
version predated Brel’s release),
and French-language covers were
commonplace through the 1960s.
Nina Simone sang it in 1965, her voice
grand and disappointed, wintry in its
distress, her despair like an ocean
trench of sadness.
Brel’s sensibility — dissolute, faintly
nihilistic, contemptuous of bourgeois
sensibilities — was in tune with that of
the rock scene of the late 1960s, even if
his music had nothing in common with
different songwriters in the US, Rod
McKuen and Mort Shuman, set about
translating his work. The versions by
Shuman, a rock’n’roll-era songwriter
Jacques Brel in concert ert in
Paris, 1959 — Corbis via Getty Images
4 December/5 December 2021
chronological boundaries are arbitrary,r
but here they are especially frustrating.
Humphreville is making a narrow w his-
torical argument — that women belong
in the origin storyy of American abstrac-
tion — and she has neither the space nor
the scope to reach into the drama’sa sec-
ond and third acts. The show cuts off
just as several tributaries converged
into Abstract Expressionism, a market-
ing phenomenon pumped up byy swag-
ger, misogyny and booze. The women
(mostly) drank less and lived longer,
maturing across decades that the exhi-
bition doesn’t cover.
And so we get a single 1937 lithograph
by Esphyr Slobodkina, in which she
riffs,
f with modest success, on Picassoid
synthetic cubism. In 1940, she fulfilled
her male colleagues’ most snobbish
expectations and published a children’s
book. Many generations and 2m copies
later, Caps for Sale, about an itinerant
peddler and a passel of monkeys,
remains in print. But the Whitney might
have
a put both those achievements in
context by including one of her later
and more original works, a 1952 oil
paintingg with sturdyy forms suspended,
mobile-like, against a peach-and-sea
green backdrop.
Alice Trumbull Mason, who was,
along with Slobodkina, a co-founder of
the American Abstract Artists Group, is
The women (mostly t ) drank
less and lived longer,
maturing across decades
the exhibition doesn’t
n t cover
v
another casualty of chronology. g Over-
whelmed by motherhood, Mason
grudgingly gavea up painting for a while
in the 1930s. “Maybey you think intellec-
tual life is not the real thing,” she wrote
to her sister in 1934. “But dammit — just
caring for babies isn’tt either. I am chaf-
ing to get back to painting.”
She finally did, and the Whitney cele-
brates her return with a trio of pictures,
none as interesting as the later works
that stayed in storage. “Labyrinth of
Closed Forms”, a vaguely Surrealist
etching of amoeboid blobs from 1945,
appears to havea been included chiefly f
because it supplied the
t exhibition’s title.
But Mason didn’t come into her own
until the 1950s, when herr bold graphic
geometries sprang off white surfaces.
Each of these women deserves a spot-
light of her own — especially, perhaps,
Dorr Bothwell, who followed an idiosyn-
cratic path out of San Francisco. In 1928,
she went alone to Samoa, managing to
get herself adopted byy a village chief and
accepted as full Samoan. Even her later
Mediterranean sojourns were distinc-
tive; instead of joining the fashionable
crowd on the Côte d’Azur, she made for
Corsica. That rough island provided the
title and inspiration for a screenprint
Bothwell made in 1950, in which an
earth-toned patch — a continent? a face?
a feeling? — hovers between pale and
azure zones. This is where Labyrinth
winds up: on a picture that feels less like
a conclusion than an exciting, ambigu-
ous opener.
To M
March 2022, whitney.
e org
who brought Brel’s work to the New
York stage in the revue Jacques Brel is
Alive and Well and Living in Paris, are
regarded as better translations, but it
was McKuen who redefined “Ne me
quitte pas” as “If You Go Away”. A
McKuen released his version of the
song in 1966 and it crossed
immediately into the mainstream.
Shirley Bassey tackled it in 1967,
stretching the syllables at the end of
each verse disconcertingly. Sandie
Shaw,a meanwhile, clung to the French
lyrics. Dusty Springfield split the
difference, and recorded a wonderful
bilingual version.
Frank Sinatra took on the song for
his 19969 album Myy Wayy and it suited
him p perfectly
t y — at the very bottom of
his raange, a slight wave a ring around
some of the notes emphasising his
vulnerability. Scott Walker, a
meanwhile, was using Brel to ease his
passage from heart-throb to a
pa
walking, talking existential crisis,
w
an nd his first three solo records
were littered with so many Brel
w
soongs they would later be compiled
on an album (Scott Walker Sings
Ja ques Brel). His “If You Go Away”
Jacq A
was lush and opulent but given
conteext byy the other covers. “If You Go
Awayy”, on its own, was a sad love song;
placed d alongside “Next”, “The Girls
aannd the Dogs” and “Amsterdam”,
itt gains meaning as just one part
oof a dissolute life.
The versions never stopped
ccoming. Young artists will continue
to add to that legacy. And so Lauryn
Hill recorded “Ne me quitte pas” on
H
a tribute album to Nina Simone;
Marc Almond, like Walker,
M a took to
eexploring the Brel songbook early —
his first stab at “If You Go A
h Away”, a
dramatic and brittle piano version,
d
was recorded in 1982, with Almond
w
ggloriously overwrought.
“Ne me quitte pas”? This is a song
thhat will never go away.
Michael Hann
Moree on the series at ft.com/life-of-a-song
4 December/5 December 2021
F
airy-tales have come in for a
makeover in recent years. The
conventional wish list — pal-
ace, prince, posh dress —
doesn’t quite cut it for a gener-
ation raised on girl power, and choosing
a life-partner based on shoe size or the
fact that he happened to wake you up
scarcely sets a good example. Mean-
while defining villains by size, looks or
age is questionable at best.
So we’ve had Shrek (challenging
beauty norms), Frozen (championing
sisterhood) and, most recently, Andrew
Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, in which our
heroine is a rebellious goth who hangs
out in the woods and the dashing prince
isn’t quite what he seems. But what of
Sleeping Beauty? On the surface, it’s not
promising. The very title of the story
pigeonholes its protagonist, plus she
spends most of the story asleep and is
married off as soon as she wakes. Even
the villain lacks serious credentials: a
fairy so profoundly peeved at being left
off a guest list that she slaps a hex on a
newborn. Hardly adequate motivation.
It’s not marvellous material for
drama, admits Rufus Norris, director of
London’s National Theatre: “The prin-
cess is cursed when she’s a tiny baby; she
can’t stop it happening; she falls asleep;
she’s woken up by somebody she’s never
met. It’s the opposite of agency, which
really is the root of all story.”
Norris is about to make amends. The
theatre’s seasonal family show, Hex, is a
new musical that flips the story, reach-
ing beyond the “happy ever after” to
give princess Rose a chance to make
some decisions and furnishing the
prince with a back-story (his mother is
an ogre with a taste for human flesh).
But most notably, Hex shifts the focus
of the tale. Here the “wicked fairy” gets
to tell her side of the story. It turns out
that Fairy (played by Rosalie Craig) is
not a mean old ratbag, but a lonely and
loveable little comic oddball who longs
to do good. Rather than setting out to do
mischief, she is summoned to the palace
by an exhausted king and queen who
are desperate to get their daughter to
sleep. What happens next depends on
the subtle distinction between a bless-
ing and a hex and is a mistake Fairy
spends the next century trying to repair.
It’s a switch that foregrounds the
engine of the story — that fateful curse
and the reasons behind it — and delves
into the deeper riches of the tale. “The
psychology of doing good is very inter-
esting,” Norris says.
★ FTWeekend
A twist in the fairy tale
National Theatre | Rufus Norris is exploring the dark riches of
Sleeping Beauty in his new musical ‘Hex’, he tells Sarah Hemming
But wait a minute. Isn’t half the fun of
seasonal shows the chance to boo bad-
dies and revel in their demise? Norris
argues that the truth is knottier and that
characters do still “behave very badly”
in Hex. He points out too that this ver-
sion is closer to earlier, more macabre
iterations of the folk tale (several of
which included cannibalism and rape)
than later, more sugary retellings.
It’s not the first time Norris has tan-
gled with the briar hedge and the sleep-
ing princess. He staged an acclaimed
Sleeping Beauty, complete with a farting
fairy, at London’s Young Vic in 2002.
The flatulence has gone, he says, though
“there will be plenty of bodily func-
tions” for younger audience members to
enjoy. And it’s now a musical, with Jim
Fortune providing the score.
“We try to draw largely from British
music,” says Norris. “There are four dif-
ferent choruses: the staff of the palace;
the staff of the castle; the princes; and
the thorns. They each have a very differ-
ent energy about them. So the thorns
have got a very ska feel about them; the
palace staff are more Gilbert and Sulli-
15
Arts
van; the music in the castle is more
dirge-like and medieval.”
For him, the National has a responsi-
bility towards musicals. As an organisa-
tion in receipt of public subsidy, it can
both foster new work and stage existing
shows that may be too challenging or
costly for commercial theatre to risk.
“It’s important that a place like this
has a commitment to evolving new
musicals: we’ve now got a pipeline of
work coming through. If we’re going to
do [an existing musical] it should prob-
ably be one that you wouldn’t get the
chance to see elsewhere. So Threepenny
Opera and Follies [both recently staged]
are two obvious examples of that.”
Hex fuses that drive for new work with
a recent NT tradition of high-profile
shows for children. There has been criti-
cism, however. For his 2002 Beauty,
Norris himself wrote the script. For this
version he is working with a playwright,
Tanya Ronder, who is also his wife,
which has brought accusations of nepo-
tism. Norris argues that Ronder has
been close to the project since its earlier
iteration: “Tanya was my primary
working partner before I got this job, she
had a long relationship with the
National Theatre — she did three shows
here, none of which were commissioned
by me — before I took over and has done
none since. We haven’t worked together
for eight or nine years . . . I hope [that]
is a clear signal that I’m not somebody
who thrives on nepotism.”
For the National, as for all venues, it’s
been a tough 18 months. After closing in
March 2020, the theatre tried to reopen
twice before finally achieving a sus-
tained programme from June. By mid-
December it will have all three spaces
running, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
in the West End and The Lehman Trilogy
on Broadway.
Norris admits that “there are huge
unknowns” heading into the winter. But
embedded in Hex, he adds, are comedy,
Above: the hope and a response to the anxiety and
company isolation that has affected many young
of ‘Hex’ in people in recent months.
rehearsals at “This show in many ways is about
the National individuals who are lonely. The fairy has
Theatre. Right: spent most of her life abandoned in a
Kat Ronney as forest because she can’t fly; the ogress is
Princess Rose totally locked into herself; Rose is sepa-
Brinkhoff-Moegenburg;
Julia Fullerton-Batten
rated from her family. So a lot of the
piece is about learning to be together.
It’s about saying it’s worth it: in com-
pany, we’re better.”
To January 22, nationaltheatre.org.uk
16 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Collecting

Covid fears fuel

the Design District, though the artist
was unable to travel stateside due to
Covid restrictions.

Miami sales
The Art Market | Buyers in spending mood at Art
Basel Miami Beach; Gagosian adds new China rep;
Old Masters auctions in London. By Melanie Gerlis
Visitors to this week’s Art Basel Miami
Beach arrived in the mood to buy,
happy to snap up work at America’s
biggest art fair for the first time in two
years. There was a sense too of “last
hurrah” purchases as news of the
emerging Omicron coronavirus variant
stoked fears that the international
market window could soon shut again.
Sales were swiftly sealed, many in
the pipeline ahead of the fair’s VIP
opening on November 30 and
confirmed on the day. Early sales
reported to the Financial Times from
just six big galleries (from a total of
253) added up to $40m.
New work proved particularly
popular with buyers, including
the Texas couples Howard and
Cindy Rachofsky and John and
Jennifer Eagle, who together
bought a vast ceramic
installation of autumnal
leaves by Rebecca Manson
from Josh Lilley gallery
($350,000). Miami’s ICA
museum bought Christina
Quarles’s “Ascent” (2021)
($325,000) and Rashid
Johnson’s three-metre wide
“Bruise Painting ‘Ask Me Now’”
(2021) ($975,000), both from
Hauser & Wirth. Trustees from
the same museum bought work
by Dominic Chambers at
Lehmann Maupin.
Galleries with work at the lower
end of the price scale also
reported healthy sales,
particularly with more
politically charged pieces.
Tiwani Contemporary
sold out its booth of 10
works based on an
imagined empire by the
African-American artist Umar Rashid
($25,000-$65,000). The fair’s aisles
were not as crowded as in pre-
pandemic times, due to a now-familiar
timed entry system, with gallerists
well-adjusted to the new normal.
“Even if there are more lockdowns,
systems are now in place to continue
promoting and selling the works of
our artists,” said Adam Sheffer,
senior director at Lisson Gallery.
Spirits were also high at Untitled, an
established satellite fair of Art Basel on
the beach by Ocean Drive, with 145
exhibitors. “My clients love this
fair. There is a degree of discovery,
accessibility and spontaneity
enabled by the availability and
[lower] price points of the
works,” said the New York-
based art adviser Rachel Cole.
Gallerists were enthusiastic
too, including those in a new,
subsidised section for more
fledgling businesses. “We are
so grateful for the ability to
experiment at a fair. Not all
gallerists are trust-fund
kids,” said Carolina
Wheat, co-founder of
the non-profit Elijah
Wheat, which had
made early sales by the
New York artist Azikiwe
Mohammed (priced up
to $10,000).
Strong trade was also
reported by Ghana’s
Gallery 1957, which sold
out its booth of Serge
Attukwei Clottey
($45,000-$90,000),
and by Norway’s
Kristin Hjellegjerde,
Clockwise from main: ‘Tupac y
Tupac, Time lords of the Andes. Or, a
failed Fitzcarraldo’ by Umar Rashid;
‘Bruise Painting “Ask Me Now”’ by
Rashid Johnson; statue of Aphrodite
Tiwani Contemporary; Stephanie Powell/Hauser & Wirth; Patricio
Pueyrredon
whose mixed booth
included work by Sara
Berman (up to $26,800).
Meanwhile, across the
bay at Art Miami, a
Banksy image of the
Peanuts cartoon character
Charlie Brown was
reported to have sold for
$4m (Maddox Gallery).
Activity continues at
South South, a platform
launched mid-pandemic
to prioritise the
historically sidelined Global South
regions of Africa, Latin America and
Asia. The future formula of the nascent
enterprise is likely more “hybrid”, says
Liza Essers, founder of Goodman
Gallery and the driving force behind
South South. She is planning the
platform’s second “Veza”, the Zulu
word she has used for its online auction
run on behalf of its 56 members. This
time the Veza, to run in March 2022,
will be dedicated to video and other
digital art, “probably with a non-
fungible token element”, Essers says.
This week, the technology platform
Niio announced a partnership with
South South.
Physical shows are in the pipeline for
2022, she says, while this week in
Miami marks the news of its inaugural
residency — running in person and
virtually — sponsored by the city’s
collector and philanthropist Jorge
Pérez, through his El Espacio 23
museum.
A work by South Africa’s superstar
artist William Kentridge stands outside
the museum this week as an extension
of Goodman Gallery’s pop-up show in
The mega-gallery Gagosian is ramping
up its presence in China with the
appointment of Christina You as its
representative in the country. She was
previously director of development
and creative strategy at the influential
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
in Beijing.
Her appointment coincides with an
“unbelievable surge in demand [for
art] in the region”, says Nick
Simunovic, who has run the gallery’s
activities in Asia since 2007. He says he
has never seen such an appetite — or
sales figures — for western
contemporary art. The pace of
technology and thirst for knowledge
mean that his audience are now
extremely well informed, he says. “I’ve
had collectors here tell me about shows
that are happening on [New York’s]
Lower East Side.”
Gagosian opened a gallery in Hong
Kong’s Pedder Building in 2011 but “is
not looking for real estate elsewhere
[in Asia]”, Simunovic says. “It’s easy
to open a gallery but to programme
it constantly is a big endeavour.”
Gagosian’s Hong Kong space has
already sold out its solo show by
Jonas Wood, which opened last week,
he says.
London shows and sells some juicy Old
Masters works next week, spanning
Roman sculpture to 19th-century
paintings. Generating the most
excitement is a rediscovered pen and
ink drawing by Albrecht Dürer, “Virgin
and Child” (1503), on view at Agnews
gallery and part of London Art Week
(December 3-10). In 2016, the work
was bought as a presumed copy from a
house sale in Boston for just $30. Since
its discovery by the gallery and
subsequent endorsements, it is now
said to be worth $50m.
At Sotheby’s, a 1st-2nd century AD
Roman statue of Aphrodite, which
stood in the palace of Scotland’s dukes
of Hamilton between 1776 and 1919, is
offered for between £2m and £3m.
Aphrodite’s other illustrious owners
include the publishing magnate
William Randolph Hearst.
Highlights at Christie’s include a full-
scale oil sketch of Salisbury cathedral
by John Constable, who has a
coinciding show at London’s Royal
Academy (to February 13 2022). The
painting was made in 1823 for the
British artist’s major patron, the Bishop
of Salisbury, and is also estimated at
between £2m and £3m.

CHESS LEONARD BARDEN
Magnus Carlsen and Ian
Nepomniachtchi, champion
and challenger, have drawn
the first five of their $2m 14-
game world title match in
Dubai after computer
preparation and their
accurate memory banks
dominated the early play.
Carlsen’s hopes of a fast
start were dashed as the
Russian revived the Anti-
Marshall 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3
Bb5 a6 4 Ba4 Nf6 5 0-0 Be7
6 Re1 b5 7 Bb3 0-0 8 a4!? —
its last championship
appearance was in 1993
when Garry Kasparov
defeated Nigel Short. Carlsen
defended better than Short,
but still stood worse in
Wednesday’s fifth game.
This weekend’s three
games are significant. The
Norwegian, 31, has two
Whites and is under pressure
to break the deadlock. If he
fails, the Muscovite will cease
to be a long-odds outsider.
Carlsen’s current series of 19
successive draws — his last
two games against Sergey
Diversions
BRIDGE PAUL MENDELSON
Dealer: West N/S Game running it when West
8
and Kasparov in their It is the first hand of a A Q 10 9 followed low. A second
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4
Jovanka Houska on Chess24. decisions as South? AQ J 5 K 10 8 7 3 so since East should hold 5- auction, declarer led 5♣ to
The site also has coverage Should South bid 5S or 6C, Q8 7 4 card support and good K♣ in hand and then, with
3 S
2
for experts from the all-time or should he pass and try for J 864 shape, West must have 15pts some trepidation, spurned
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9 6 2
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A B C D E F G H
from top 10 GM Anish Giri. level in competition usually K 10 9 3 2 suggested that East held at for Q♣. When that
2447 requires ten trumps or a least one shortage, most succeeded, 11 tricks were
Karjakin in 2016, all 12 Mark Hebden v Chris double fit. Here, South will between +300 and +800. likely in clubs. West there. A less exhausting way
against Fabiano Caruana in Baker, British championship, assume an 8-card spade fit But, at Pairs, +300 or +500 continued with Q♦ and to +800 would have been to
2018, and now the first five Eastbourne 1991. Can you and a 9-card club fit. At scores very badly if 5S is South trumped in dummy. defend 5D doubled, but
in Dubai — broke the record find White’s winning move? Teams, to pass looks clear- making. At the table, South He cashed A♥ and ruffed 5♥ +650 proved a good start to
of 17 set by Anatoly Karpov Solution, back page cut: surely you will gain opted to bid 5S. West led A♦. in hand, before leading J♠, the event.

POLYMATH 1,155 SET BY HAMILTON CROSSWORD 16,960 SET BY MUDD

Jotter pad
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ 17

The myth of
the man-child

Janan Ganesh
Citizen of nowhere

An-My Lê was born amid the chaos
SNAPSHOT of the Vietnam war. Evacuated to the
US with her family in 1975, Lê didn’t
return until 20 years later, this time
‘Rescue’ bearing a large-format camera.
Ever since, Lê has dedicated herself
(1999-2002) to the artistic exploration of war:
its human toll, its rituals and its
by An-My Lê landscapes. Her award-winning
images don’t simply document
conflict, as a photojournalist might,
but rather examine the spaces
around it.
On Contested Terrain showcases five
of her major series, with images
ranging from monochrome
explorations of Lê’s homeland to
American historical re-enactors’
meticulously researched recreations
of Vietnam war battles, as seen
above. Here fantasy and memory
meet, merging to form something
else entirely.
Miles Ellingham
‘On Contested Terrain’ is at the
Milwaukee Art Museum until
March 27, 2022
A
friend treats me to an
insider’s tour of LA’s
Atwater Village. As with
eye contact across a bar,
it is possible to see a
neighbourhood for a brief moment and
just know. Craftsman bungalows,
omakase chefs of unsmiling excellence,
a Santiago-like backcloth of mountains:
within hours, I arrange a month-long
Airbnb here. I will see which enclave of
Southern California I fancy after that.
There is a magazine subscription to
reroute, some bags to lug, but no spouse
or child to inform, much less square.
It is not for everyone, this untethered
life, or even for a large minority.
Yes, family men tend to sidle up and
inquire as to the going on the path not
taken. But let us put that down to
curiosity, shall we, not regret. A clue
to the public’s real thoughts on
bachelorhood is the absence of it from
elected office. Of late, the jockeying of
Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris has
revived the question of whether the
US would ever wear a gay or female
president. I wager that we’ll see at least
one of each before the next unmarried
one. 1970s Britain elected Ted Heath,
true, but on the tacit understanding
that he wasn’t doing much with all that
friends who have remained single
well into their thirties, it is a less and
less credible trope. What stands out
about them is not their frivolity so
much as the austere opposite.
The most adult conversations I have
are with the childless. They read more,
attend more, travel more and (through
lack of mental distraction, I stress, not
higher intellect) notice more. If you
tend to enjoy this column, consider
that half the ideas come from these
supposed gadabouts. The notion that
we high-five each other and trade lewd
tales in front of Leeds vs Arsenal is a
Nick Hornby slander.
The received view of
bachelorhood cannot see
that it is often a bid for a
more, not a less serious life
In fact, in manners and
comportment, bachelors often have
more in common with the cliché of
the spinster. Theirs is a decorum,
almost a formality, born of aversion
to the smells, stains and general
boisterousness of a kid-filled home.
what keeps people single. More often,
it is the promise of maximum control
over their lives (including, as often as
not, the option of solitude). I know
with some precision the list of cities in
which I want to pass the rest of this
decade, and in what sequence. No one
with dependants could be so mobile or
so cavalierly strategic. Whatever part
of the self is being exercised here, it is
not the id. Indeed, it should only take
a moment’s reflection to see that lots of
bachelors have already performed an
act of discipline. There is no greater
feat of self-control than walking away
from a happy romance because it
hampers other callings in life.
The charge of self-regard is fairer.
If anything, those who make it don’t
know how true it is, or why. If you
seldom have to do anything that
doesn’t reflect your exact desires in the
moment — no school run, no cooking —
you become ever less tolerant of such
claims on your time. And so, inverting
the usual order of things, I am more
selfish at 39 than I was at 24. By 50,
I will resent even the decennial census
as an imposition.
But self-regard is not the same as
silliness. Egoism is not the same as
immaturity. The received view of

Abloh, Sondheim and private freedom.

This exclusion from high office is
doubtless a bullet dodged. The gently
the gift of mentorship mocking films (both versions of Alfie,
for instance) leave no deep bruise
either. But it all rests on the premise
that bachelors are case studies in
arrested development. Observing the
Bucking the term “man-child”, each of
the ones I have in mind comes across
as older than his passport age. That
bachelorhood (“Oh, you boys”) doesn’t
allow that it is often a bid for a more,
not a less serious life. Even the
phrase seems to better fit the rounded
shoulders and over-washed T-shirts,
glamorisation of it by the married-but-
curious misses the point. Our horizons
not to mention the scatological widen as our commitments narrow.
anecdotes, of fatherhood.
The mistake is to think that Eros is Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

Jo Ellison
Trending

O
f the many quotes that
have circulated since the
death of Stephen
Sondheim, the one that
sticks for me finds the
composer, lyricist and cryptic-
crossword-setter describing the
influence of Oscar Hammerstein II.
“If he’d been a geologist,” he said,
“I would have been a geologist.”
Hammerstein, who knew Sondheim’s
mother, was something of a surrogate
father to Sondheim following his
parents’ separation. He was the young
composer’s first and harshest critic,
dismissing the 15-year-old’s efforts at a
musical as “terrible”, but then offering
to go through it line by line to show
him what was wrong. Sondheim would
later say that the hour or so that
Hammerstein spent on that post
mortem taught him more than most
artists glean in a career.
The Oklahoma! and Sound of Music
lyricist played a huge part in the
shaping of Sondheim’s early career: it
was he that advised Sondheim that
yes, he should work on West Side Story.
He also told him that it was also worth
sacrificing his burgeoning ambitions in
composition to work on Gypsy, as it
would be a good experience for him
to work with Ethel Merman, a real
star. In the traditional sense of a
professional mentorship, Sondheim
got the golden ticket. He learnt from
the best. And although he arguably
eclipsed Hammerstein in his own
eventual dominance of the medium,
Sondheim never forgot the debt of
gratitude he owed.
It was a courtesy he extended
towards others also. Though brusque,
and often scornful of some actors and
his many stage interpreters, Sondheim
was unfailingly generous in helping
others out. The most touching tribute
to the composer that has been
discovered in his passing is the volume
of correspondence that has been
unearthed among his fans. Sondheim,
it seems, was a prolific letter writer
and although he didn’t always answer
their specific questions regarding
motive or clarification, he would
cheerily offer some opinion,
encouragement and hope.
Likewise, Virgil Abloh, the fashion
designer who last weekend died from
cancer; a true disrupter in the business
who was only 41 years old. Another
prodigious talent who conjured a
multidisciplinary career that wove a
dozen skills and interests, Abloh was
equally mindful that he should pass the
lessons on. “When you’re lucky enough
to get a ride to the penthouse,” he once
told a reporter of his obligation to the
next generation, “it’s your duty to send
the elevator back down.”
Abloh did not send typewritten
Hammerstein dismissed
young Sondheim’s efforts as
‘terrible’ — but then offered
to go through it line by line
letters, but he sent WhatsApp texts and
messages by the bajillion. He filled his
fashion shows with graduates and
students, and encouraged a truly
inclusive forum for design. Even
though he liked to simultaneously
steer several dozen projects, he found
the time to answer fans with great
clusters of heart emojis and
motivation. He was always unfailingly
generous with his time.
Sondheim and Abloh were both
exceptional — in personality and in
achievement. Two giants of their
respective industries, they could be
expansive and generous with their
minds. They didn’t guard their talent
with small protective jealousies, they
had the confidence of genius and got on
with their lives. Both were stimulated
by new challenges and learning:
Sondheim talked often of only wanting
to try things he had never done before.
Similarly, Abloh, speaking to the FT
only weeks before his passing, talked
of looking for the “leap forward” and
discovering “the unexpected twist”.
Both remind us of the value of the
mentor. In a world in which the
business of advising can seem quite
corporate and stale, where nurturing
young employees has become more
professional duty than a personal
obligation (how many of you are
currently signed up on mentor
programmes?), it can sometimes feel
as though the sharing of our insights
or experience can feel a little false.
Are our lives that interesting? Does
anybody care? Worse, will we be
accused of mansplaining? The current
schisms that exist between the
generations are enough to make
anyone think twice before volunteering
their advice. Yet having a great mentor
can be totally transformational. I’m
hugely indebted to so many people
who have spent time with me through
my career. The editor who, on my
having completely ballsed a test to
sub-edit on his paper, spared me 20
minutes to help repoint me in the right
direction. The chief executive in Paris
who offers me a slot to shoot the breeze
about the markets and share his
business theories. The revered
colleague who occasionally drops you
an unexpected line of praise.
“Children will listen”, goes the
Sondheim lyric. Although today, they
mostly won’t. Adults will listen even
less. And for sure the world is full of
boring warble. And we may not live
next door to a Pulitzer Prize-winning
legend of the theatre. But, as Abloh and
Sondheim remind us, it’s all about the
upcoming generation, and genius is
even greater when it’s shared.
Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com

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Chess solution 2447 1 c8=N+! Rxc8 2 bxc8=N+! followed by 3 Rxg1 and White wins with his extra rook.
18 ★ 4 December/5 December 2021
Saturday 4 December / Sunday 5 December 2021

No worries Life’s a dream on Australia’s east coast — HOT PROPERTY PAGE 10

Follow us on Instagram @ft_houseandhome

The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld

was obsessed with acquiring — filling
his homes with tapestries, Tokidoki,
Ikea beds and 579 iPods. Now his
estate is up for sale. By Caroline Roux

I
t sounds completely improbable,
but he wasn’t pretentious in any
way,” says designer Marc Newson of
Karl Lagerfeld. “And he was one
of the funniest people I knew —
he could be humorous in multiple
languages. He was ridiculously opinion-
ated, but coming from him it all
made sense.”
Indeed, Lagerfeld was as famous for
the grand fashion put-down — that
sweatpants were a sign of defeat; or that
trendy was the stage before tacky — as
for his pompadoured white ponytail,
high-collared shirts and the dark glasses
clamped to his face.
The pair met in Paris as Newson’s
career was taking off in the late 1980s,
with Lagerfeld seeking out the young
Australian and going on to acquire
many pieces of his work, as well as
taking his portrait for magazine of the
moment Visionaire. “If you did some-
thing in a really straightforward, honest
way, it seemed to appeal to him,”
says Newson.

One apartment had

panelling from the Tuileries
Palace and bronzes created
for Catherine the Great

Now some of the Marc Newson pieces

that Lagerfeld snapped up over the
years — including a carbon-fibre ladder
and the Zenith chair in mirrored pol-

ished aluminium — are up for sale, in a
series of auctions at Sotheby’s in
Monaco and Paris containing nearly
1,000 lots from the Lagerfeld estate.
“It is an enormous event,” says Pierre
Mothes, vice-president of Sotheby’s,
France, who is running the sale. “He was
a world icon. I’ve been in taxis in China
with a Tokidoki Karl hanging from the
rear-view mirror.” (There is also one of
the PVC figures in the sale, though in
this case it belonged to Karl himself, is
25cm high and encrusted in rhine-
stones.) “And he was a compulsive
buyer,” adds Mothes.
(From top) Karl Newson agrees. “It’s safe to say, he was
Lagerfeld at his quite extravagant.” One of the lots, how-
home in the ever, is an Atmos clock that Newson
Hôtel Pozzo designed in 2008 for Jaeger-LeCoultre,
di Borgo, and gave to Lagerfeld as a gift that year.
Paris, 1990; a “It felt like time to give something
ceramic work back,” he says.
by Joana Lagerfeld’s life story is well known.
Vasconcelos in As a 17-year-old, in 1950, he left Ham-
homage to burg for Paris, where he quickly
Lagerfeld’s cat received recognition for his skills as a
Choupette, one fashion designer. Learning on the job in
of the items the rarefied workshops of Pierre
from his estate Balmain and Jean Patou, he soon aban-
on sale at doned the increasingly stuffy world
Sotheby’s of couture for ready-to-wear; the prêt-
Fotex/REX/Shutterstock;
©Sothebys/ArtDigital Studio a-porter sector was gathering speed,
A man possessed
replacing home dressmaking, and
Lagerfeld — ever one to sniff the zeit-
geist — leapt upon its vast potential.
By the mid-1960s, he’d been invited to
apply his forward- thinking to the house
of Fendi, turning the dowdy Roman
furrier into a fun, fashion-led label.
At Chloé, he played with
historical styles to cre-
ate one of the first high-
quality, easy-access
prêt-a-porter brands.
But it was at Chanel,
which he joined in 1983
(while remaining at Fendi
and starting his own Karl
Lagerfeld label the following
year), that he made his full impact. He
took its heritage of tweed, fringing,
camellias and pearls and — with a large
dose of irreverence — reinvented it
for the times. His Chanel — with its
outsized double-C logos and bouclé
biker caps, a real-life elaboration
of his theory that a sense of
humour and a little lack of
respect is required to make a
legend survive — became his
greatest success.
Early on, he demonstrated a
keen passion for houses and fur-
niture too. He decorated an apart-
ment in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris
as an homage to the 1924 Marcel
L’Herbier film L’Inhumaine, with its
sets designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens
and Fernand Léger, furniture by Pierre
Chareau and costumes by Poiret.
“I made an Art Deco plan here,” he
told Patrick Hourcade — who went on to
be his close friend and art adviser for
25 years, as well as the creative director
of Vogue magazine — when Hourcade
first visited the stage-set home, as he
recounts in his book Karl: No Regrets.
“But now I want to go on to something
else.” It turned out he had bought a Bre-
ton manor house, and together the pair
made it into a dazzling château filled
with 18th-century artefacts.
In the 1980s, he bought himself an
apartment in Monaco and, with the help
of the interior designer du jour, Andrée
Putman, filled it with Memphis design.
The Italian movement, led by Ettore
Sottsass, was a fantasy of surface deco-
ration, candy colours and crazy geomet-
ric shapes, and Lagerfeld consumed it
whole. The seating area in the living
room was a boxing ring with baby blue
and pink bars designed by the Japanese
Masanori Umeda.
“It was a palace for a child,” said
Putman later. “Just another sophisti-
cation for Karl.” In 1991, he sold the
whole lot at auction.
By the later 1980s, he had moved to
the Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo, built in 1707 in
the Rue de l’Université. He filled its
nearly 11,000 sq ft with valuable tapes-
tries, panelling from the Tuileries Pal-
ace and bronzes created for Catherine
the Great. “That really was a fuck-off
place,” says Newson. “It was eclectic,
but what really struck me was the
number of books he had.”
But by 2000, it had all gone on sale
again, the contents taking three full
Continued on page 2
2 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

House Home
How to choose I am looking for gifts for friends
who love interiors and collecting
Old books make excellent
presents. Turn to online dealers
Jackson and former buyer Daniel Crow,
have aimed to create a destination

an utterly
objects for their own homes. such as Hampshire’s Beaux website on which everything one might
Any thoughts? Books for a brilliantly diverse need for a home can be found in one
selection of rare tomes on art, place, along the way considering

covetable gift It’s been a strange couple of

years, that’s for certain. We’ve
all become accustomed to
spending a great deal of time at
home, and naturally this has led
to a desire among many, my
friends included, to make their
spaces as superbly lovely as possible.
We require a lot from our home
environments: safety, comfort,
serenity, but also stimulation and
inspiration. After all, our homes act as
a showcase and backdrop for our
interests and passions.
What are your friends passionate
about? Gear gifts towards these things.
Do they thrive on having people over;
are they all about laying the table
or are they more interested in the
drinks tray?
I strongly believe in supporting
small businesses. These don’t have to
be local to you — many small shops
and makers sell online. When buying
from a company that specialises in
certain wares you’ll end up with a
more unique present — and you’ll be
able to bask in the satisfied glow
that arises from supporting an
independent trader.
Luke Edward Hall There are places I return to again and
again when looking for inspiration.
One such place is Covent Garden’s
Questions of taste Choosing Keeping. Known for its
exquisite range of stationery, it is
pure heaven for
people who take
pride in their
pens and pads.
(I should know.)
The shop stocks useful things that
have been elevated to the level of
utterly covetable. In particular, I love
its range of Ohnishi Seisakusho acetate
fountain pens with patterns in
eye-popping colours, and its range
of mochaware ceramics. Antique
mochaware, first made in Staffordshire
around the late 18th century, can be
excruciatingly expensive. Choosing
Keeping’s selection of pen pots and
vases, on the other hand, is much more
affordable and just as delightful.
The shop’s handblown glass
Christmas decorations are also
fabulous. You might feel that buying
a bauble shaped like a wheel of Gouda,
boiled egg or stick of butter is a trivial
thing, but remember that by buying
you are supporting the survival of a
traditional cottage industry and, in
turn, supporting a village community.
What’s not to love?
interiors, gardens and
design. (Full disclosure:
I recently designed a book
bag for Clare Trimming,
owner of Beaux Books,
entirely because I am a
huge fan of her eye for a good
book.) I also regularly turn to IDEA
books for excellently niche titles.
Recently I have been enjoying the
gloriously bright and sunny website
belonging to East Sussex’s
Dyke & Dean: a true mecca for those
into well-designed kitchen gadgets and
cookware. On my personal wish list?
De Buyer’s frying pans with their grass
green handles, and a whisk with a
yellow Bakelite handle, inspired
by a range of cookware dating back
to 1965.
I’ll always buy antiques and vintage
objects for friends and family.
Recipients end up with something
unique, and it’s good for the
environment. Win-win. Locate your
local markets and dealers, or shop
online. I recently spied a very smart
mid-century chrome-plated table
lamp for under £200 that would
make a great present, via the dealer
Luke Arnold.
Last, let me recommend Glassette, a
new online marketplace specialising in
unusual and distinctive objects for the
home. Its founders, broadcaster Laura
Buying a bauble
shaped like a wheel
of Gouda, boiled egg
or a stick of butter —
what’s not to love?
(Above) Handblown
baubles; (below)
mochaware ceramic vase
Choosing Keeping
longevity and environmentally
conscious materials.
You won’t find big brands here,
instead it’s all about small makers
producing characterful and often one-
off products. I’m a particular fan of
Sascal Studio’s marbled octagonal
plates, which look as if they’ve been
sliced away from a tree trunk, and the
extension cords made by Lola’s Leads,
which come with cord-covered cables
in a range of colours. Practical, yes, but
also genius.
This is only a small selection of the
bits and bobs that have caught my eye
over the past few months. While
writing this column, I consulted the
notes folder on my phone: here a vase
that a sister-in-law might like, there
a book for my little niece. Now, more
than ever, we are bombarded with
things to buy; we all have to give good
thought to how we approach our
Christmas gifting.
Whatever you do, don’t leave it
until the total bleakness of a busy high
street on Christmas Eve. Support the
small makers, buy things that will
last, buy old things. Choose presents
with panache!
If you have a question for Luke about
design and stylish living, email him
at lukeedward.hall@ft.com. Follow him on
Instagram @lukeedwardhall

Inside A man Auction highlights

possessed Pair of ‘Man Machine’ chairs by

Continued from page 1
days to load into trucks. “This was when
I first met him,” says Mothes, who was
then with Christie’s, and worked on the
valuations for the auction. “I asked him
Basalt of the earth if he was sad to turn the page, and he
Priced out of Aspen, homebuyers said he wasn’t. His motto was that
head to Colorado’s quieter towns change wasn’t the same as betrayal.” On
Pages 6 & 7 the final day, there was a delivery of new
beds. “And they were from Ikea. Karl
saw them and said, ‘Ikea! What fun!’”
says Mothes.
Other friends remember the house
outside of Biarritz, Elhorria — a Basque
vernacular villa on a 17-hectare estate
where the Olympic-sized swimming
pool was always heated to 31C.
“It was there, over many summer hol-
idays, that I began to understand that
Awe-inspiring straw the way Karl created his homes was like
High-end homes made of the the way he wanted us to feel around
humble, carbon-friendly bale him,” says Lady Amanda Harlech, his
Pages 8 & 9 long-term muse and associate at both
Chanel and Fendi. “Revved up to our
highest potential, inspired by the most
extraordinary combinations of texture,
colour and design.”
Yet Harlech particularly loved his
apartment in the Quai Voltaire, which
he had acquired in the early 2000s and
gutted, with the help of Arch Concept,
into what he would go on to call his
“spaceship”. There he eliminated all sty-
Are you being surfed? listic references and colour, and filled it
Five homes for sale on with simulated daylight and the most
Australia’s east coast minimalist furniture he could find.
Page 10 “It was a version of himself,” says Har-
lech. “X-ray black and white, but filled
with books and papers, delicate white
crochet and photographs.”
It is the contents of these properties —
along with another apartment in Rue
des Saints-Pères, with its monumental
proportions, and a country house at
Louveciennes, decorated in the Weimar
style of his Hamburg childhood — that
have fuelled the current auctions.
The Golden touch Lagerfeld put on possessions the way
How a budding gardener turned most people load a trolley for the
a morass of weeds into a weekly shop, and once he had alighted
naturalistic on contemporary design, there was no
refuge stopping him. “Sometimes we’d have to
Page 12 say no to him,” recalls Clémence
Krzentowski of Galerie Kreo, Paris’s
foremost contemporary design gallery.
“I remember a show we did with Kon-
stantin Grcic in 2014, and Karl wanted
to buy four of everything.”
The collection was a series of chairs,
tables and chests in industrial glass,
(From top) The own Instagram account, was certainly
seating area as spoilt enough for that to be the case.
boxing ring in Choupette appears in the auction, of
Lagerfeld’s course, in drawings and in a ceramic
Monaco work by Joana Vasconcelos. Grcic’s
apartment, work is also plentiful. Apart from the
filled with glass series, his “Volumes” — natural
Memphis bluestone objects each cut from a
design, ‘a palace single block of stone — greeted visitors
for a child’, 1982; in the entrance hall of the Rue des
Lagerfeld in Saints-Pères.
Paris, 1977 The French minimalist Martin
Jacques Schumacher/
© DACS 2021
Szekely is well represented, with Lager-
feld loving the almost immaterial qual-
ity of his pared-down designs — in pol-
ished metal consoles, tables in Corian
and honeycombed aluminium, and
dark mirrors made of silicon carbide.
Konstantin Grcic
Estimate €8,000-€12,000
Lagerfeld loved Grcic’s “Man
Machine” collection so much, he
tried to buy the whole show when it
was exhibited at Galerie Kreo in
2014. The use of industrial glass
and the fixings in pistons and
silicone had a strong appeal. “We
had to remind him that he wasn’t
our only customer,” says the
gallery’s co-founder
Clémence Krzentowski,
“that other people might
want a few pieces too!”
AC console by Martin Szekely
Perhaps what marks out Lagerfeld’s Estimate €10,000-€15,000
taste most clearly is the sort of apprecia- Designs by Szekely proliferated
tion of an exquisite line that you might throughout Lagerfeld’s relentlessly
expect from someone who was himself a minimal apartment at Quai Voltaire,
great illustrator. It certainly unites the including this aluminium and
18th-century French design, Art Deco polished steel console. “No one has
and all these contemporary practition- as many pieces of Martin’s furniture
ers. “We found 25 pieces by [Art Deco as I do,” said Lagerfeld. There was
virtuosi] Louis Süe and André Mare still no reason to doubt him.
in his collection,” says Pierre Mothes.
They include a pair of shell-backed arm-
chairs, which are among my favourites
in the auction.
Lagerfeld’s acquisitiveness didn’t stop
with furniture, though. In the auction
there are Goyard trunks and Comme
des Garçons jackets; crystal chandeliers
from the 19th and 20th centuries; a
make-up box from Shu Uemura; and his
own Chanel shoulder bag.
Mothes tells me how he discovered a
drawer of 509 iPods at one of Lagerfeld’s
homes, and then a further 70 in his Carbon ladder by
office in the 7th arrondissement. “He Marc Newson
was a man of his period,” he says. “I’m Estimate €20,000-
quite keen to put these into a separate €30,000
digital auction, later on.” “It’s very light, and very
“He certainly wasn’t scared by the strong,” says Newson of
new,” says Newson. “And he was this chic carbon-fibre
obsessed by iPods. He was always giving ladder. “It turned out to
them to Charlotte [Stockdale, Newson’s be a really functional
wife, who is a stylist at Fendi].” These design, and it’s one of
would come preloaded with music, bril- my favourites.” A rare
liantly mixed by Michel Gaubert, DJ piece, with just 18 made,
darling of the French fashion world. keen Newson collectors
Rest assured, though, that it’s not all will be set to bid
in the best possible taste. There is a strongly for this.
Murakami artwork of Karl in his pow- Lagerfeld loved
dered white pompadour ponytail and the brilliant new
©Sothebys / ArtDigital Studio

Table attached with pistons and silicone, and

Lagerfeld always fell for the new and sur-
And then there’s the Bouroullec
brothers’ work. Lagerfeld reckoned he
dark glasses against a psychedelic back-
drop of flowers; that Tokidoki doll;
materials of the later
20th century. He
emotion prising. “I never met him,” says Grcic, owned a piece of every single thing more monogrammed letter openers used the ladder to
Beautiful accessories for “but someone told me he’d bought my they’d ever designed, including the than you can imagine; and heaps of fin- reach books in his
the elegant host pieces for Choupette.” Choupette, a Bir- Quilt sofa, one of their best designs, gerless gloves in red, black, metallics Rue des Saints-Pères
Page 13 man cat who was Lagerfeld’s dearest which had pride of place in the Rue des and chainmail. Because, of course, it apartment. CR
companion in his last years and had her Saints-Pères. wouldn’t be Karl without them.

The wonder of weeds
Even in Oxford university’s well-
ordered gardens, they have a place
Page 14
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Go to ft.com/newsletters
50 OBJECTS
FROM AROUND
THE WORLD
#8: Dr Johnson’s
walking stick
Dr Samuel Johnson — best known to
the world for his Dictionary of the
English Language (1755) — was an
inveterate walker. He came to London
in 1737 with his friend, the future
theatrical phenomenon David Garrick,
and one horse between them. They
hailed from Lichfield in the English
Midlands and their arrangement was
that each completed half of the
165-mile journey on foot.
This walking stick on show at
Johnson’s house, now a museum at 17
Gough Square, just off Fleet Street in
central London, was given to him and
inscribed by Garrick in 1755. Topped in
gold leaf, it’s tempting to imagine
Johnson flourishing it as he set out on
his walks around the capital. But out
there was a city of tosspots and
footpads and Johnson was one who
advocated not just keeping to its safer
streets and squares.
He particularly loved the bustle and
intensity of markets; a short walk to
the west, for example, was that of
Covent Garden, with its associated
tavern and theatre life.
In such places he realised that his
first ambitions for his dictionary were
at best naive and at worst hopeless.
He aimed to fix and standardise the
English language, only to learn that
he’d have to modify his assumptions
given that language was bound to
live, breathe and constantly change.
Take one of the 42,773 words in his
dictionary, “slubberdegullion”. Now
archaic, in Johnson’s day it stood for
“a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch”.
The walking stick is probably
ceremonial. It’s one of many he had
but, made of birch, it shows little sign
of wear and tear. He was taught a
lesson when one of his favourites, a
large oak article, was lost, assumed
stolen, on the Isle of Mull.
Today, walking sticks are making a
comeback among men of a certain
vintage. Dominic Cummings, former
adviser to prime minister Boris
Johnson, has been pictured with one
outside his north London home.
Users of such accessories may
feel they signal age, implicit of
wisdom, and give a Moses-in-the-
desert feel. Johnson (Samuel) had
such qualities. He was a strong
believer in the equality of peoples and
an ardent anti-slaver before it was
fashionable to be so. He’d have surely
waved his walking stick at anyone
who disagreed.
Peter Chapman
drjohnsonshouse.org
4 December/5 December 2021
UK property | A village-like
lifestyle, central location
and good schools are luring
homebuyers to the London
area. By Liz Rowlinson
A
self-declared west London
girl, Tara Guinness has
bought her first home in
Hammersmith this year.
The daughter of fashion
designer Lulu, she had grown up
in bohemian Notting Hill, but had
been working and renting in Brixton,
south London.
Yet after moving in with her fiancé
James during lockdown, the couple
gravitated towards the independent
eateries and community feel of Brack-
enbury Village to buy a flat. “Com-
pletely priced out of Notting Hill, a lot of
our friends are moving here too,” says
the chef who set up Tara Cookery to run
courses. “It’s so central and well placed
to get out of London quickly on the A4.”
Superb Underground connections
and relative affordability are the two
key drivers for child-free couples mov-
ing to Hammersmith, while great state
and private schools have long attracted
families, including three of the capital’s
best independent day schools, Godol-
phin and Latymer, St Paul’s Girls’ School
and Latymer Upper School.
‘This area feels pleasantly
more diverse than chichi
Fulham and offers the
best of both worlds’
“Currently the area is very much
defined by people in their late twenties
moving from areas such as Clapham,
Brixton and Fulham in search of a cooler
west London atmosphere with village-
style living,” says Plum Fenton of Har-
ingtons, a buyer’s agent.
Central Hammersmith, a business
and transport hub, might not have the
cachet of neighbouring Chiswick or
Kensington but, as Harry Thompson,
a copywriter who moved into a flat in
Ravenscourt Park in February, says:
“Once you get over first impressions
of the flyover and addled urban
planning around the station, five
minutes away it’s a completely differ-
ent proposition.”
Hammersmith heads-up
(Above) A pretty pastel-
coloured terrace in Wingate
Road; (below) the ‘village’
of Ravenscourt Park,
popular for its garden
centre and tennis courts
Charlie Bibby for the FT
★ FTWeekend
Such new arrivals have helped sus- of £683,345, below that of 2019’s
tain property prices, although in £694,632, according to LonRes, which
keeping with other areas of central tracks the prime London market.
London since the pandemic, houses In contrast, the average house sale is
have done better than flats. Flats up from £1,542,685 two years ago to
made up 68 per cent of sales in £1,915,575, with the average length of
the year to date, with an average price time taken for a house to sell 162 days in
the year to date. That is the lowest in five
years, and less than the prime fringe
London average — including areas such
as Clapham, Fulham and Battersea — of
196 days. House prices per square foot
are up 8.5 per cent, year on year; flats
are down 1.8 per cent.
Lettings are back to where they were
two years ago. “Tenants left London in
March 2020, prices dropped by up to 15
per cent but people have been returning
and we are even seeing sealed bids,” says
Agatha Tukendorf, lettings manager at
local agent Horton and Garton. In Q3
this year, they were at £34.41 per sq ft
per annum, compared with £34.45 in
Q3 2019. But as ever, residential
enclaves in the W6/W14 postcodes all
have their own micro markets.
Brackenbury Village
Tukendorf puts Brackenbury Village at
the top of most requested locations. A
pocket of quiet roads of Victorian ter-
raced houses, it has Underground sta-
tions at three of its four corners and its
highlights include the gastropubs The
Anglesea Arms and Andover Arms,
John Stenton family butchers and the
Brackenbury Wine Rooms.
Good state schools, including the West
London Free School (secondary) and the
Ofsted-ranked-Outstanding Bracken-
bury Primary and John Betts Primary,
attract families to the west side, with
Cardross and Nasmyth Streets popular
for being in the catchment area of the lat-
ter, says Phil Coombes, sales manager at
Horton and Garton.
“Two-bed terraced houses, many
extending into the roof for a third bed-
room, at £1.3m-£1.5m, are favoured by
buyers in their early thirties.” An
unmodernised railway worker’s cottage
on Perrers Road listed at £1.05m in
March sold for £1.26m after 28 bids.
3
House Home
LONDON
Ravenscourt Park
Kensington
Olympia
BRACKENBURY
Ravenscourt
Park VILLAGE
BROOK
GREEN
St Peter’s Hammersmith
Square
River T
ha Barons
Court Queen’s
me
Club
s
250 m
©Mapcreator.io/©HERE
Photogenic pastel-coloured houses in
Wingate Road sell for over £2m, and
larger houses can also be found in the
north-east corner — on Iffley, Hebron
and Marco Roads — where three/four-
storey Victorian houses sell for £1.7m-
plus. One-bedroom flats on the east side
of the village, which has a more tran-
sient feel, cost £450,000-£550,000;
two-bedroom flats cost from £600,000.
Brook Green/Kensington
Olympia
Proximity to Holland Park, the schools
and the weekend Brook Green Farmers’
Market draws families to the area’s free-
hold Victorian terrace houses, says Greg
Boxer of agent Marsh & Parsons. “When
we get approached by new buyers we
don’t ask if they have children, just how
many they have,” he says.
Among them are French and Italian
families who attend the Ecole Française
de Londres Jacques Prévert primary
school, which has rising waiting lists,
according to the head, Sylvie Wanin.
“Despite Brexit and the pandemic,
our school remains very popular
with the French moving to London
but also a growing number of interna-
tional families with no specific
French background,” she says. “This
year 30 different nationalities
have enrolled.”
The average house sold in 2021 cost
£1,974,995, considerably more than the
average in Brackenbury Village at
£1,501,667, according to LonRes. Boxer
says that roads off Brook Green, with its
tennis courts and playground, are in
demand, especially Sterndale and
Dewhurst Roads, Luxemburg and Bute
Gardens. A five-bedroom house on
Edith Road sold for over the
asking price in September at £2.72m.
Continued on page 4
4 ★
House Home
i / BUYING GUIDE
Hammersmith is on the District, Piccadilly,
Circle and Hammersmith & City
Underground lines, taking 15 minutes to
the West End or 25 minutes to the City.
Property prices have risen 58 per cent
since 2010 — from £632,176 to £1,087,671
— according to LonRes, more than the
average for the prime fringe, at £840,538
to £1,029,290. The average flat in
Hammersmith sold in 2020 was £714,529,
the highest since its 2017 peak of £818,158.
Hammersmith is in the London Borough
of Hammersmith and Fulham, where the
middle, band D council tax rate is £1,195.62
for 2021/22.
Continued from page 3
Two-bedroom garden flats cost
£750,000-£1m.
Westfield Shopping Centre is just a
few minutes away, while the £1.3bn
redevelopment of Kensington Olympia
exhibition centre — due to be completed
in 2023 — includes a new arthouse cin-
ema, 1,500-seat theatre, 1,000-seat per-
forming arts space and retail that will
integrate with the local area more than
the trade fairs of old.
Ravenscourt Park
A tiny area around the 33-acre park,
with its tennis courts and popular W6
Garden Centre & Café, this patch is per-
fectly positioned yet usually only an
add-on request after Chiswick, accord-
ing to Julian Masson of agent John D
Wood. “These will usually be families
moving over from Holland Park and
Notting Hill to get more space,” he says.
High among the area’s highlights is
Patisserie Sainte Anne, the French bak-
ery on King Street, and schools such as
Ravenscourt Park Prep and Outstand-
ing-rated St Peter’s CE Primary School.
“You can get a four/five-bedroom house
with a decent-sized garden for
£1.5m-£2.5m,” says Masson.
Sought-after roads on the Shepherd’s
Bush border include Rylett Road,
Binden Road, Ashchurch Park Villas and
Ashchurch Grove — offering predomi-
nantly houses rather than flats. Also
popular are Ravenscourt Road and Pad-
denswick Road bordering the park — on
the latter, a split-level two-bedroom
maisonette with garden at £1.15m has
just sold through Marsh & Parsons.
Harry Thompson, 34, pays less rent for
his studio flat by Stamford Brook Under-
ground station than he did in Fulham
when he moved over in June:
“This area feels pleasantly more
diverse than chichi Fulham and offers
the best of both worlds — high street
shopping on King Street on one side,
weekend walks to Chiswick in the other
direction.” He’s close to St Peter’s Square
Conservation Area, prized for its prox-
imity to the riverside and the highly
rated Carpenter’s Arms gastropub.
FTWeekend
Barons Court/Riverside
There might not be much going on
socially and, frustratingly, there is no
supermarket but Alice, who works for a
private equity company, chose Barons
Court for its “incredible convenience”.
She lives with her husband in a three-
bedroom flat overlooking the Queen’s
tennis club, of which she is a member.
“It’s great value compared to Kensing-
ton half a mile up the road and being on
the Piccadilly line is so much quicker
than trundling on the District [line] into
town,” says the 29-year-old, who prefers
not to give her full name.
The downside of easy access on to the
A4 is the traffic gridlocks during rush
hour on a Friday night as Londoners
head out of town. “Roads that don’t get
so much through traffic are Brecon
Road and Tasso Road,” suggests Fenton,
who says “bank of mum and dad” pur-
chasers feature strongly.
The area’s small flats suffered
during the pandemic but are being
bought again for buy-to-lets and
pieds-à-terre, says Robert Sturges of
agent Chestertons:
“With rents increasing again, some
buyers are realising this is a really
undervalued area, with the sort of early
Victorian stucco-fronted houses you
(Clockwise will pay far more for in Kensington.”
from main) You can buy a studio flat for around
Residents flock £300,000, two-bedroom properties for
to Riverside for around £550,000.
fresh air and For nights out, Alice heads to the riv-
eating out; erside. “Sam’s Riverside [in the redevel-
the River Cafe oped Riverside Studios] is great, but
is a staple there are endless pubs and, of course,
of the area; the River Cafe,” she says. The late 1980s
Hammersmith Italian restaurant still has its Michelin
has a variety of star. New flats at the Fulham Reach
architecture scheme rent well, and the Crabtree
Charlie Bibby
Conservation Area of quiet Victorian
and Edwardian roads is popular with
staff and medical students at Charing
Cross Hospital, both for buying and
renting, says Sturges.
4 December/5 December 2021
PROPERTIES
FOR SALE
HAMMERSMITH
B Apartment, Brook Green, £725,000
A two-bedroom flat near Kensington
Olympia Overground and rail station.
The apartment is on the second floor of a
stucco-fronted Victorian building but the
interior has been thoroughly modernised,
with an open-plan kitchen/living area.
Available through Marsh & Parsons.
B Cottage, Brackenbury Village, £1.116m
A two-bedroom terraced Victorian
cottage on Redmore Road with 91.5 sq m
of living space. An open-plan kitchen
leads to a south-facing garden, and the
property is a few minutes’ walk from both
Ravenscourt Park and the river. For sale
with Horton and Garton.
B House, Hammersmith Grove, £3m
A five-bedroom, four-storey terraced
house between Hammersmith and
Goldhawk Road Tube stations, within half
a mile of Hammersmith Broadway. The
property has a 50ft garden reached via
bifolding doors on the lower ground floor,
and via a balcony on the raised ground
floor. On the market with Hamptons.
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 5
6 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

House Home

(Left and above) Increased demand for homes has led

The small town to increased prices: the median price of
of Basalt, 20 the 62 detached homes sold in the year
minutes fro
f m to October in Basalt is 42 perr centt higher
Aspen, has than last year, accordingg to Aspen Board
homes at a of Realtors. And fewer homes are availa-
fraction of the ble: 64 detached homes were put up for
price, although sale in the same period, down from 98 at
demand from the same stage off 2019.
second homers Despite prices that are a fraction of
and locals is fast those in Aspen, Basalt provides plenty
pushing up of the featur
f es and faciliti
f es that
t perma-
prices nent residents expect. The original
Nik Wheeler/G
r etty Images;
Danita Delimont Creative/
downtown area, which grew up around
Alamy the arrival of the railwayy in the late 19th
century, has a range of shops, restau-
rants and art galleries, as well as a large

‘Clients who could spend

great little town, has everything you
US propertyy | Priced out of Aspen, need and is close to the mountains.”
About 20 miles from the area’s a main
resorts of Aspen and Snowmass, Basaltt is
homebuye
u rs choose quieter towns
o in one of several towns down Colorado’s
Roaring Fork Valley where demand for
second homes is growing, as the pan-
Colorado’s
o Roaring
R Forkk Valley and, demic increases the draw of the moun-
tains for buyers from coastal cities.
in turn, price out locals. By Hugo
u Cox Demand from locals is growing, too, as
long-term Aspen residents seek to cash
Sam Augustine, an estate agent who
covers both Aspen and down-valley
towns such as Basalt and Carbor ndale for
Compass, says an increasing number of
his sales since the start of the pandemic
have been to those who feel Aspen
prices no longer offer value for money.
“I have
a plenty of clients who could
spend $10m on an Aspen home but
5 km
km
ghtts
$10m in Aspen see that
they will get more for
don’t. They see that they will get more
forr $3m-$5m in Basalt or Carbo
r ndale.” $3m-$5m in Basalt’
Local agents say the number of buy-
ers comingg from the majorr US cities has
increased during the pandemic. For number off period homes along Midland
this group, the distinction between a Avenue and Two Rivers Road.
second home and a permanentt one has Willits is a popular neighbourhood
blurred, with many taking advantage developed two decades ago. Besides
of homeworking to live full-time
f in TACAW,A it has a cinema, restaurants
theirr mountain homes.
Ryan Honey, who runs The Arts
and bars. Basalt has several public
schools and school buses connectt the

N
ew Yorker Richie Lin had
been skiing with his hus-
band in Aspen for 20 years.
But in 2019, when he was
looking to buy a ski home,
he knew thatt the Colorado resort’s high
prices placed it well beyond his budget.
Instead, he bought a home in Basalt, a
20-minute drive down the mountain,
where homes are a fraction off the price.
“We were priced out of Aspen, so we
looked
k to buyy in the next town over. It’s a
in on years of price gains with a move
down n valley to a cheaper or largerr home.
Butt rising prices and the demand ffor hol-
iday rentals means thatt housingg is beco-
mingg unaffordable fforr manyr
y esidents.
A big partt of the appeal of Basalt is the
discount it offers on Aspen, whose pop-
ularity with America’s super-rich has
pushed prices beyond the budgets of
most buyers. According to the Aspen
Board of Realtors, the median price of a
detached home sold in Aspen in the year
to October was $9.6m, compared with
$1.43m in Basalt.
Baasalt Campus at Willits, a non-profit per- town to private schools in Aspen.
Mountain forming arts centre in Basalt, says
a that Dan Kiely, 48, a bartender in Aspen
Carbon
on growing numbers of permanent and who bought a home in Willits in 2014,
second-home owners are showing up says the range and quality of Basalt’s
at performances. Between the closure of nightlife has improved in recent years.
en// TACAW’A s previous temporary building “There was a time that all good servers
in April 2019 and the recent opening off a went up to Aspen. Now you’re getting
COLO new permanent venue in September betterr service down here.”
this year, the average age of its audi- A popular neighbourhood among
ences fell significantly: “Fifty-plus had buyers is Missouri Heights, on the open
As
Snnoowmasss
Snowmass been our core audience. More and more plains between Carbo
r ndale and Basalt, a
Mountain we’re seeing younger people who are short drive fro
f m the arterial Highwayy 82
calling this place home and we’re start- thatt connects the two towns before pro-
©M
Map
apcreator..io/© ingg to programme fforr them.” ceeding up to Aspen. Here, a budget of
4 December/5 December 2021
$3m-$5m will buy a detached house of
around 5,000 sq ft on several acres with
a garage. River Valley Ranch, in Carbon-
dale, and nearby Aspen Glen offer
smaller detached homes for $2m-$3m.
The problem is finding one for sale. “I
had 30 active listings at the start of the
pandemic; now I have three or four,”
says Augustine.
Many of Basalt’s permanent residents
work in the ski or related industries in
Aspen or Snowmass and a high propor-
tion of permanent residents gives the
town a warm community feel, says
Kiely. “It’s not like people party here
and leave, like in Aspen. We [love] the
laid-back relaxed atmosphere.”
Melanie Muss, a local agent with Doug-
las Elliman, says Basalt’s community feel
appeals to those moving down from
Aspen. They make up a significant por-
tion of her buyers — particularly “immi-
nent empty nesters” with children
approaching adulthood who no longer
need to be near Aspen schools. The
★ FTWeekend
(From top) summer season, a busy period for Colo-
Basalt’s rado mountain resorts, is longer, thanks
community feel to Basalt’s lower elevation, making it
appeals, as popular with those who favour hiking,
do activities mountain biking or golf over skiing.
apart from A move to Basalt or Carbondale has
skiing such long been part of the life plan of those
as walking, working in the local ski industry. Bill
mountain biking Kane, the mayor of Basalt, bought his
and golf; a home home in the town in 2009, after 38 years
in Carbondale living in Aspen, where he had raised his
Jacob Boomsma/Getty
Images/iStockphoto;
family and worked for the Aspen Skiing
Liesl Clark/Getty Images Company, which operates the resort.
“We loved [Aspen] to death but we
knew that part of our retirement savings
plan was to bank the equity we had in
our home [by moving].”
But recent price increases are exacer-
bating a longstanding affordability
problem in Basalt for both renters and
buyers and disrupting the town’s sense
of community, a big part of its appeal.
Rising sales prices mean an increasing
number of local workers can no longer
afford to buy a home and agents
estimate rents are up 20-30 per cent
since the start of the pandemic. Tax
receipts from short-term rentals this
year are projected to increase by a third,
according to Basalt Town Council. Kane
says landlords are shifting their proper-
ties from long-term leases to short-term
lets, reducing rental supply for locals.
To combat this trend, all new apart-
ments approved for construction since
7
House Home
i / BUYING GUIDE PROPERTIES
Basalt is 20 minutes’ drive from Aspen/ FOR SALE
Pitkin County Airport, from where flights
to Denver International Airport take one
hour; from there, flights to New York take DOWN VALLEY
3h 40m and to Los Angeles 2h 30m.
In most cases, home purchases in Willits
incur a transfer tax of between 1 and 2 per
cent while those elsewhere in Basalt and
in Carbondale incur none.
Basalt lies at an elevation of 2,015m;
Aspen is at 2,438m.
The Roaring Fork River, which flows
through the town, and the Frying Pan
River to its east are designated gold
medal trout fishing waters by the B Willits, $675,000
Colorado Wildlife Commission.
A three-bedroom, two-bathroom house
within walking distance of Willits town
centre. The ground floor features
an open-plan living/dining area and an
September must have written into their additional room that could be used as
leases a minimum rental period of six a home office or fourth bedroom. On the
months. In November, the town raised a market with Douglas Elliman.
$17m bond; part of the proceeds will
Michael Brands with Mountain Home Photo
fund affordable housing.
But Auden Schendler, head of sustain-
ability at Aspen Skiing Company and a
Basalt resident, says that local politics
obstructs sensible housebuilding meas-
ures. “[Local politicians] run on a plat-
form of ‘I want to protect the small-town
character.’” He says the growing propor-
tion of second homers is entrenching
these attitudes. At a local social gather- B Basalt, $2.85m
ing, a resident who had recently moved
A five-bedroom detached house in the
to Basalt from a big coastal city asked
Holland Hills neighbourhood. The house
Schendler to support his objections to a has an office, entertainment area and
proposed downtown development. “It gym, with interiors featuring exposed
was precisely where [housing] should brickwork and high ceilings. There’s also
go if you care about putting it in the a mature garden and sheltered terrace.
urban core rather than sprawling all For sale with Christie’s International Real
over the place. And this person right off Estate Aspen Snowmass.
the boat was [trying to] ensure the town
doesn’t change at all,” he says.
Kiely says that new arrivals are erod-
ing Basalt’s sense of community. “There
was always a very community feel to liv-
ing in the valley. When we had big forest
fires [several] years ago, everybody was
coming together to help each other, we
were all in it together. As different peo-
ple move in and prices go up it feels like
it’s changing,” he says, pointing to less B Carbondale, $3.595m
courteous drivers on the roads in town.
A four-bedroom, four-bathroom house
He is considering selling his home and
on two-thirds of an acre. Built in 2007,
taking a career break, but worries that the property is in the Blue Creek
rising prices across the Roaring Fork neighbourhood of Carbondale, five
Valley mean he won’t be able to buy a minutes’ walk from the Roaring Fork
home near the Aspen bar where he River. Features include a study, screen
works when he returns. “That’s the porch and three fireplaces. Available
problem with selling: where are you through Compass.
going to go?”
8 ★
House Home
Architecture | The vote is in
— straw is highly insulating,
enduring and carbon
negative, writes Paul Miles
H
umanity has reached a
milestone. There is now
more weight of man-made
stuff on the planet than
the total mass of all living
organisms, from plankton to whales,
estimated by scientists at Israel’s
Weizmann Institute of Science to be
1.1tn tonnes. If we keep on at this rate,
the weight of things such as infrastruc-
ture, houses, phones and plastic bottles
will be triple the biomass on earth by
Straw poll
2040. Most of this manufactured mass
is concrete.
The construction industry is responsi-
ble for nearly 40 per cent of global car-
bon emissions, according to the Interna-
tional Energy Agency. There has rightly
been a lot of attention directed at reduc-
ing operational emissions of a building,
by lowering the use of fossil fuels
through rigorous ultra-low energy Pas-
sivhaus standards, for example. Yet
there has arguably been less attention
paid to embodied carbon: the emissions
produced in the mining, manufacture,
transport and assembly of the likes of
concrete, glass and steel. But there are
many building materials that don’t need
mining; they grow naturally.
Governments worldwide are begin-
ning to legislate on embodied carbon.
The Netherlands has been a pioneer
since 2013 with mandatory “lifecycle
assessments” that address environmen-
tal impacts — including embodied car-
bon — of proposed developments over
100 square metres. In July this year,
Colorado passed a bill intended to
FTWeekend
(Clockwise minimise embodied carbon in new pub-
from main) lic buildings and roads. In the UK, an
Watershed amendment to building regulations has
Straw Bale been drafted by architects and mem-
Residence, bers of the construction industry. “Part
Sonoma County, Z” would limit the embodied carbon of
California, by major building projects. The proposal
Arkin Tilt has widespread industry support.
Architects; On a smaller, homely scale, what can
interior detail; we do? Instead of constructing houses
one of the with bricks — the manufacture of four
rooms under pallets of which results in about one
construction; tonne of carbon emissions (even more if
straw and the bricks are imported long distances,
timber unit for example to the UK from Asia, as an
built by Agile estimated 25m are annually) — we
Homes using could build with materials that pull car-
Modcell panels bon out of the air. Plants are one of the
Edward Caldwell
oldest building materials in the world —
straw, a byproduct of food production —
‘The building of structures
can be part of the climate
solution rather than part
of the problem’
has one of the lowest embodied carbon
levels of any building material. While
one cubic metre of concrete is responsi-
ble for 246kg of carbon dioxide emis-
sions, the same volume of straw, suita-
ble for use in construction, has locked
up 129kg of the gas.
Straw is also long-lasting. A building
that is believed to be the world’s oldest
surviving straw bale home was built in
1903 in the US. Today, the US has some
of the largest contemporary straw bale
4 December/5 December 2021
homes in the world, making use of the
byproduct of a variety of local crops.
“We have designed and built homes of
rice straw in California, oat straw in
Alaska, rye straw in Oregon and wheat
straw in Colorado,” says Anni Tilt of
California-based Arkin Tilt Architects,
which specialises in straw bale and
rammed earth construction.
Over more than 20 years the practice
has built nearly 50 homes. Rather than
quirky hobbit structures that many
associate with straw bale construction,
some of the sprawling properties
designed by Arkin Tilt are sleek,
expensive-looking homes.
“There’s renewed interest in straw
building due to the potential for carbon
storing inherent in rapidly renewable
bio-based building materials,” says Tilt.
“The building of structures can be part
of the climate solution rather than part
of the problem.”
There are three main types of con-
struction with straw, says Barbara Jones,
a veteran straw bale builder and director
of the School of Natural Building.
4 December/5 December 2021
Load-bearing straw bale, known as
Nebraska style, began in the US in the
19th century. In this method, com-
pacted straw bales, with a density of
120kg per cubic metre — one and a half
times more dense than an average bale
off the farm — are used as “bricks” laid
one on the other, held in place solely by
the weight of the roof. The walls are
sometimes shaped and tidied with a
chainsaw before being plastered or clad
inside and out.
“Two and a half storeys is as high as
has been achieved with load-bearing
straw bale,” says Jones. “Compacted
straw bales are very stable.” Research
by Pete Walker at the University of
Bath has shown that one metre of
wall can bear at least one tonne of
weight. “There’s no reason why you
shouldn’t be able to build higher [than
2.5 storeys] but it’s not been tested,”
Jones says.
Europe’s first two-storey load-bearing
straw bale property — on the west coast
of Ireland — was completed in 2003,
using the labour of more than 100 vol-
unteers, most of whom had no previous
building experience.
“Load-bearing straw bale building is
quite labour intensive and often
involves volunteer labour from friends
and family,” says Jones. As for longevity,
“we build to a design standard of 200
years, anything less is unsustainable,”
she says. “The most important thing [to
ensure a house endures] is that the
straw is very dry [to prevent it decay-
ing] and also very dense,” says Jones. “If
later in the home’s life, you want to put
in a new window or door, you simply cut
out a hole with a chainsaw,” she says.
A newer method of straw construc-
tion is to build a wooden frame and infill
it with straw bales. In the UK, one
★ FTWeekend 9
House Home
are estimated to be just 10 homes built
of EcoCocon panels in the UK.
The company is now expanding,
opening a second production unit in Slo-
vakia. There are plans for at least 10
more across Europe in the next decade.
“The main problem for scaling up is
storage of straw,” says Kierulf. “There’s
plenty of material — in Europe 48m
tonnes of straw annually could be used
without degrading the soil — but we
need lots of storage to keep it dry.”
Another company producing straw-
filled panels is UK-based Modcell. These
panels differ from EcoCocon in that they
are manufactured from whole straw
bales in a temporary production unit
near the building site.
Fifteen one and two-bedroom homes
(Clockwise from — constructed of the straw, timber and
above) Seven- strawboard structural panels will be
storey straw placed atop the office block of homeless
bale Jules Ferry charity Emmaus in Bristol. They are
apartment expected to be completed next year.
block, Saint-Dié- In 2016, the world’s first straw homes
des-Vosges, to sell on the open market went on sale
France (ASP near Bristol. The seven homes of Mod-
Architecture); cell straw bale and timber panels clad
Rosenburg/
Zuckerman ‘If later in the home’s life,
residence,
San Francisco you want to put in a new
(Arkin Tilt); window or door, you simply
Old Holloway
Passivhaus, cut a hole with a chainsaw’
(George
Mikurcik),
Herefordshire, example is Leyburn in Yorkshire by the straw bales squeezed into individual structural panels have wood fibre board with bricks (to satisfy council planning
UK, using prefab architects Halliday Clark. Completed in timber caissons before being installed in on the exterior and an interior of com- requirements) have solar panels and
straw panels by 2017, this handsome home clad in an engineered timber frame. The 26- pressed straw that can be plastered. air-source heat pumps.
EcoCocon reclaimed limestone was the world’s apartment block Jules Ferry residence “A two-storey house can be erected in “They attracted lots of attention and
Arthur Janin; Edward Caldwell
first straw bale building to achieve the in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges was completed two days,” says chief executive Bjorn all sold on day one,” says Modcell
Passivhaus Plus standard (Passivhaus in 2013 at a cost of about €1,800 per Kierulf. So far 32,000 sq m of walling — founder, Craig White.
standard with additional on-site renew- sq m after tax, about 15 per cent more equating to some 260 homes — has been Research continues on the potential
able energy, usually solar panels) than a conventional build. According to constructed using EcoCocon panels, of new straw crops. The Institute of
thanks in part to the highly insulating architect Antoine Pagnoux of ASP mostly in Europe. One sq m panel con- Biological, Environmental and Rural
properties of thick straw walls. Architecture, this premium is soon off- tains 48kg of straw and has sequestered Sciences (IBERS) at the University of
In France, a seven-storey block of flats set by small energy bills. A similar 10- 97kg of CO2, says Kierulf. Aberystwyth has studied elephant
has been constructed in a similar way, storey straw bale and timber tower “Even taking into account the trans- grass (miscanthus) which grows
block is presently under construction. port emissions to deliver the panels, an prolifically even on poor-quality land.
“France is at least 10 years ahead of EcoCocon home will be significantly Unlike cereal crops, miscanthus
the UK in straw bale building,” says carbon negative,” he says. The highest doesn’t need to be sown annually, thus
Jones. “They have the land, the straw, building so far is three storeys “but five minimising carbon emissions from
the farming co-ops and the political or six is possible”. ploughing and soil degradation. IBERS
framework. People see what straw The panels meet stringent EU fire reg- helped with the construction of
buildings are like and want to live in ulations, resisting burning for 120 min- the world’s first miscanthus bale house
them. If we’re to build affordable, high- utes at temperatures of over 1,000C. in 2017.
quality straw houses for ordinary peo- “Compacted straw just chars on the out- “After COP26, with everyone talking
ple here in the UK, the way forward is side,” says Kierulf. “There isn’t enough about decarbonising, building with
the newest method of construction: air for a fire to take hold.” straw is the way to go,” says White.
prefabricated panels filled with com- The fear of fire, even if unfounded, is a “[Building with plants] is ‘carbon cap-
pressed straw.” hurdle in the UK. “After the Grenfell ture and storage’ in the built environ-
EcoCocon began production of its pre- tragedy, insurers are jumpy about any- ment. The best thing you can do with
fab panels in 2008 in Lithuania. The thing that is different,” says Jones. There carbon is to build with it.”
10 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

House Home

Hot property
Australia’s east coast
K House, Gold Coast,
Queensland, A$3.95m ($2.8m)
Where On tiny Cronin Island,
situated on the subtropical
Gold Coast. Brisbane airport is an
hour away by car.
By Nicole Douglas-Morris What Built in 1996, this four-
bedroom, three-bathroom
waterside home has its own
pontoon for vessels up to 70ft
long. Other offerings include a
home cinema, wine cellar and
double-height ceilings in the foyer.
Outdoors, there is a pool with
a sheltered terrace, a vertical
garden and fish ponds.
Why Wave-seekers need look
no further. Surfers Paradise
Beach is a five-minute drive from
the property.
Who Sotheby’s International Realty

I Apartment, Palm Cove,

Queensland, A$2m ($1.42m)

Where In the Munbilla Estate in

the town of Palm Cove, a half-hour
drive north of Cairns and its
international airport.
What A three-bedroom apartment
with treetop and ocean views,
occupying 300 sq m over an
entire floor.
Why Easy access to nature. The
apartment is a half-hour drive from
Port Douglas Marina, from where
boats head to the Great Barrier
Reef, and less than two hours’
drive from Daintree Rainforest.
Who Belle Property

B Penthouse, Little Cove, Noosa, bathrooms, a custom-built kitchen

Queensland, offers from A$5.5m
($3.91m)
Where On the Sunshine Coast
140km north of Brisbane, about
1h 40m by car from the city and its
international airport.
What A three-bedroom, two-
bathroom penthouse fitted with
travertine flooring, marble
and a built-in sound system.
The apartment also has a balcony
and a double garage with extra
parking spaces outside.
Why Situated between Little
Cove Beach and the edge of
Noosa National Park, the
apartment has a wealth of leafy
ocean views.
Who Century 21 Noosa

K Penthouse, Barangaroo, K House, Maroubra, Sydney,

Sydney, offers over A$100m A$20m ($14.3m)
($71.3m)
Where In Maroubra, a coastal
Where Thirty metres from Sydney suburb to the east of Sydney.
Harbour. Sydney Kingsford Smith The city’s international airport is
international airport is 9km away, a 15-minute drive away.
less than 20 minutes by car. What A five-bedroom, four-
What An 800 sq m six-bedroom bathroom house built in 2004.
penthouse occupying two floors of The four-storey home has a pool,
the Crown Sydney Residences. It spa, lift, wine cellar and private
has a plunge pool, cinema and parking for up to 12 cars.
gym, and access to the facilities of Why The cliffside house overlooks
the Crown Sydney hotel, including the Pacific Ocean and Lurline Bay,
two pools, a tennis court and spa. and uses terraces and full-length
Why There are panoramic views windows to make the most of its
across Sydney Harbour, the Blue ocean views.
Mountains and Darling Harbour. Who Sotheby’s International
Who Knight Frank Realty
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 11

Property Gallery UK Office: +44 20 7873 4907 | US Office: +1 212 641 6500 | ASIA Office: +852 2905 5579
www.ft.com/house&home
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12
House Home
How a budding New Jersey
gardener transformed a
‘good-for-nothing’ morass of
weeds into a soul-nourishing
refuge. By Sharon Smith
‘To me, a garden is about mystery and beauty,
life and death. It is a spiritual experience.
A garden reminds us to have humility,’
says Golden
Rousham gardens: a lifestyle rather than just a garden
For James Golden, Rousham gardens
in Oxfordshire, designed by William
Kent, perfectly encapsulates the
emotionally immersive experience he
has sought to create at Federal Twist.
“It’s my favourite garden in England
because it’s so full of mystery,” he says.
He cites its “simple informality, its
subtle entrance via a dark hole in the
shrubbery into shaded, wandering
pathways. Its dramatic use of dark and
light, the way in which borders can
dissolve and give the illusion of
distance, the pathways leading to
classical buildings and statues, and an
extraordinary rill of water flowing into
a cold bath, like a magical pool.”
Rousham is one of England’s most
important examples of the early
English Landscape style and is
thought to be the only one by Kent
★ FTWeekend
A naturalistic nirvana
F
or a man who hates gardening,
James Golden is not doing too
badly. His New Jersey garden
— Federal Twist — is described
by the UK gardening guru
Monty Don as “one of the best I have
ever visited anywhere in the world” and
has featured in several books, including
Don’s own American Gardens (2020),
Christopher Woods’ Gardenlust (2018)
and Dreamscapes by Claire Takacs
(2018). Golden has just published his
own book, The View From Federal Twist.
Golden, 76, modestly bats away the
praise. But he admits that when he and
his husband Phillip Saperia
bought their home in New
Jersey 16 years ago, its 1.5
acres were not promis-
ing. A gloomy morass
of rampant weeds
and unchecked
woodland, its per-
manently water-
logged clay was
described by a land-
scape architect as the
worst he had ever
encountered. The gar-
den takes the name of the
road, thought to come from the
tobacco chewed by immigrant Irish
labourers who worked on canals by the
Delaware River.
It was a daunting prospect for Golden,
whose experience of gardening at that
time was virtually zilch. Saperia, who
worked in the mental health sector,
knew even less. Before their move to
New Jersey the couple lived for years in a
16.5ft-wide house in Brooklyn, New
York, with a “small vest pocket garden”
of decking and paving.
Golden’s conversion came in 2005
when the couple’s property in Brook-
lyn’s Forte Green rocketed in value after
the area became fashionable. “When we
first moved to Fort Greene its reputation
was so bad that if we had a night out in
Manhattan no taxi driver would take us
home,” he says.
The couple decided to sell up and look
for a house in the country. Golden was
close to retiring from his technical writ-
ing job at an engineering firm and
decided that for the first time in his life
he wanted a proper garden.
(1685-1748) that is virtually unchanged.
Its naturalistic style incorporates the
landscape beyond as part of the visual
experience. Kent did this by building a
sham ruin — known as the Eyecatcher —
on the skyline across the River Cherwell,
which runs alongside the garden.
A seamlessness Golden sought to
emulate at Federal Twist: “I recognised
that the landscape had a characterful
identity and atmosphere and any garden
I made would have to work with that. I
wanted to anchor the garden in the
landscape, with no visible boundary.”
Ann Starling, head gardener at
Rousham, says that Kent created a sense
of romance and mystery by designing the
garden so visitors would round a corner
and see something different each time.
She says that the gardens have remained
virtually unaltered due to the estate
4 December/5 December 2021
He started preparing for their move (Above from the woods, cut back the worst under-
by reading books on garden design. Piet left) James growth, then selected a range of strongly
Oudolf quickly became a favourite. Golden at competitive plant species and plonked
“I felt an explosion of emotion when I Federal Twist, them into the mass of weeds.
read Piet’s books. I loved his style his New Jersey The aim was to experiment and dis-
because his gardens appeared naturalis- garden; plants cover what could hold its own. It was the
tic and rather wild with not much struc- that have wait-and-see approach of UK landscape
ture in them,” he says. “I wanted a Piet thrived in the designer Dan Pearson, says Golden.
Oudolf-style garden.” inhospitable “What I’ve got from Dan is to try to use a
This fantasy lasted until the moment terrain are a mix light hand and see what the land and
Golden and Saperia came up against of natives and landscape are asking to be.”
Federal Twist’s weed-infested, sodden foreign imports The plants that have survived are a
clay. “We fell in love with the house, but including (left, mix of natives and foreign imports. Mis-
then I looked out of the window and from top) canthus and Filipendula rubra Venusta
thought, ‘This is a very bad place to Rudbeckia have thrived, as have very tall, flowering
make a garden,’ ” says Golden. maxima, Inula perennials including Silphium lacinia-
But he de cide d to racemosa tum; Hemerocallis altissima and Rud-
embrace the challenge. Sonnenspeer, beckia maxima.
“I’d worked all my life Callicarpa While delighted to have found plants
in a job I didn’t really dichotoma Issai; tough enough to cope, Golden was dis-
enjoy because liv- (insets, from mayed that so many of them had yellow
ing in New York left) Acer flowers. “I didn’t want any yellow in my
was expensive and japonicum and garden because I considered it brash and
the lifestyle had to Filipendula I wanted to create something more sub-
be paid for. Now I rubra Venusta tle. But now I have a garden full of yellow
looked beyond Katherine Wolkoff for the FT;
NomisH/Alamy; Martin
so I’ve had to make my peace with it.”
work and saw some- Hughes-Jones/Alamy Golden has written a book about the
thing I really wanted garden to encourage other beginners
to do, to create a garden.” faced with similar challenges. He
Nor was he deterred by advises to first assess how you view a
the fact that the challenge garden in relation to yourself and to
looked like being his alone. “Phillip’s nature, and then to let the design follow.
supportive but not interested in gar- “I wrote it to present a garden as a
dens. If he remembers the name of a source of emotion, like a poem or work
plant he feels very proud of himself.” of art, pretentious as that sounds. I
Golden realised that an Oudolf-style wanted to make it a way of living.
garden was a non-runner because such Perhaps we need to think less about
plants would not survive there. He knew what a garden can be and more about
not to waste his energy trying to turn a what it can do. Can a garden do some-
difficult spot into something alien to its thing to change us?”
wild character. It would have to be a nat- For Golden, the change has been of a
uralistic and ecological garden by spiritual nature. He agrees with a visi-
default because of its severe limitations. tor’s description of Federal Twist as a
Casting around for how to start, he “good for nothing” garden in the utili-
found the answer in The New Perennial tarian sense, but says that while it
Garden by Noel Kingsbury. Following does not offer a pool or outdoor din-
Kingsbury’s advice, Golden did not ing to satisfy the physical appe-
attempt to clear the whole site and tite, maybe it can still nourish
improve the soil but instead chopped the soul.
down 70 junipers to create a clearing in “To me, a garden is about
mystery and beauty, life and
‘Think less about what a death. It is a spiritual experi-
ence. A garden reminds us to
garden can be and more have humility. Each morning I
about what it can do. Can it make a double espresso and
watch the sunrise through the trees.
do something to change us?’ I’m living in my garden emotionally.”
Not that employing a light touch is
easy, he warns. Maintaining control
entails a constant vigil and physical
exertion of the sort Golden so dislikes.
“I enjoy reading books about gardens
remaining in the same family, with modern equipment. But Starling and but I hate the labour of gardening. Some
current owners Charles and Angela her team still do most of their work by people get immense pleasure from
Cottrell-Dormer determined to preserve hand, including pruning laurel hedges weeding and digging holes but I don’t.”
their inheritance. “They fight all their with secateurs to avoid the damage He leaves all the dirty work to his gar-
own battles on this,” she says. hedge-cutters inflict. dener Milton, and between the two of
“Battles” have included planting trees Preserving Kent’s legacy means them they keep on top of what could
to blot out modern incursions such as avoiding — as at Federal Twist — any otherwise very easily run out of control.
road traffic and a railway line. But cutting commercialisation or bossiness that To Monty Don, Federal Twist
back existing trees and shrubs to would detract from the “unspoilt “expresses one man’s love and passion
prevent them from blocking Kent’s views peace and quiet” visitors come for, and a very personal relationship with
take up a far greater share of the says Starling. This means no signs, this space”.
workload of Starling, 60, and her team of bins, designated picnic areas or shops. The downside to such an accolade is
three gardeners. The team is responsible Extra income is derived from events one of continuity, says Golden. “Federal
for Kent’s 22-acre garden and also for the including weddings and shooting films, Twist exists only because I create it from
5-acre, 17th-century walled gardens of vetted by the Cottrell-Dormers. day to day. When I die Federal Twist will
fruit and vegetables, both of which are As with Federal Twist, Starling says cease to exist. If someone comes along
open to the public 365 days a year. They Rousham is a lifestyle rather than just and buys the house and wants to keep
also tend private gardens on the a garden. Rousham also shares the garden, that’s good, but it’ll become
1,800-acre estate. In Kent’s time, another link with Golden and Federal a different garden.”
Rousham employed 18 full-time Twist: it is Monty Don’s favourite
gardeners, not having the luxury of garden in England. SS “The View From Federal Twist” by James
Golden, Filbert Press, £40
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 13

House Home
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14
House Home
It’s never too late to become less dictatorial and
more open-minded about weeds, even in the
well-ordered gardens of Oxford university
A
year into reshaping an
established and rather
overgrown garden, I have
an important decision to
make. How much do
I want to control the flora within it?
Thanks to my partner being the
subdean of Christ Church College, I live
within the grounds of perhaps the
grandest Oxford college, where the
more public garden areas are expertly
managed by head gardener John James.
I regularly enjoy a stroll around the
Masters’ Garden, a rectilinear space
with a large monoculture of grass
surrounded by four borders.
The path between lawn
and bed offers a crisp
boundary and walking
it is a masterclass in
combining garden
plants for different
aspects with scarcely a
weed to be found.
Nip up some steps and
through a gateway atop
the south-facing boundary
wall and you find yourself in a
different world. This is Corpus Christi
College, where the gardens are
managed by David Leake, who cuts
Mother Nature considerably more
slack. I had trouble tracking him down.
“He doesn’t do email or have a
mobile,” I am told several times.
I finally find him sat on a bench, on a
mild November day, about to tuck into
a fine college lunch, and sporting his
trademark long grey hair and beard.
He is keen to show me around the
largest space within this compact
institution, the College Garden.
The early 18th-century neoclassical
Fellows’ Building overlooks the space
and it is flanked by a long border that is
a study in calculated neglect. Under
wall-trained specimens of bottlebrush,
strawberry tree, winter jasmine and a
sprawling wisteria is a host of purple
toadflax. They still display their slim
spikes of little “snapdragons”.
Alongside them are low rosettes of
foxglove plants that will form a similar
though chunkier silhouette next
Trinity term. Wild marjoram jostles
with ox-eye daisies. The border
planting encroaches halfway across
a hoggin path and the exuberance
would no doubt be repeated on the
southern side of the walkway if it were
not mown and kept as a lawn for
entertaining, tutorials and many a
summer croquet match.
The far side of the lawn is kept uncut
for the first half of each year to allow
the buttercups and cow parsley to
flower in summer. It merges into a
wild-flower border where, among
poppies, evening primrose
and feverfew, a clump of
rosebay willow herb
stands proud. Leake
admits he perennially
checks its vegetative
spread by digging
some of the rhizomes
out. It proliferates by
fluffy windblown seed
too, around 80,000 per
plant. The last few are
parachuting down on to the
ordered beds of Christ Church and
I feel conflicted.
It is fairly customary for the
peripheral areas of gardens to have a
looser, wilder feel but I was expecting
Leake’s laissez-faire attitude to have
been reined in by college officials in the
main quadrangle at Corpus. Not a bit!
The Front Quad is a paved area with
borders of exotics such as Salvia
involucrata Bethellii and Euphorbia
mellifera, cosy in the microclimate
within the college buildings.
At ground level, every crack and
crevice has been inhabited. I spot
teasel, feverfew, verbascums, common
mallow, greater celandine and valerian.
The footfall of students acts as a natural
control, much as grazing animals would
in a wild ecosystem. During last year’s
lockdown, when life at the college had
slowed to near standstill, the interstitial
community of plants flourished giving
the effect of a meadow from the
overlooking library and hall.
★ FTWeekend
Wild flower
— or weed?
(Above) The Corpus Christi College My visit to the free-spirited Corpus
garden, Oxford, managed by gardens left me feeling that Leake, at
David Leake (left), with its border 75, and 42 years into his deployment,
that is ‘a study in calculated neglect’; was ahead of his time. I begin to
(right) purple toadflax question whether the term “weed” is
Harry Lawlor for the FT
helpful and turned to a copy of a new
book, The Ecological Gardener by Matt
Rees-Warren. The author laments that
weeding has “become a byword for
neatness and order when it should be
about selectiveness and restraint”.
He goes on to argue that “all
indigenous plants are wild flowers and
all non-native invasive introductions
are weeds”. He notes that traditionally
the non-native lady’s mantle
(Alchemilla mollis) has been readily
planted and encouraged by gardeners
whereas our indigenous daisy (Bellis
perennis) has been viewed as an
invasive weed and removed.
I reflect on what I have already
removed from the sub-deanery garden.
The cousin of forget-me-not, green
Jim Cable alkanet has been in my sights since we
moved in. It attempted to win me over
with its beguiling blue flowers back in
On gardens May but its frightening vigour and
coarse hispid leaves failed to impress.
I have removed wheelbarrows full of it
with as much of the deep chunky roots
as I could excavate. I also spent
considerable time dismantling a
rockery and digging out a huge tangle
of hedge bindweed roots before making
a new gravel garden.
I confess to Rees-Warren via email.
“Attacking green alkanet, as an
introduced species, makes sense as it
will outcompete native varieties,” he
explains. “Bindweed is the hardest of
all wild flowers for gardeners to love,
but I like to give it a place away from
perennial borders rather than
eradicating it completely.” Rees-
4 December/5 December 2021
Warren suggests giving it a support
to climb and containing its roots
with a barrier as you would mint
or bamboo.
Since I no longer use glyphosate
weedkiller, I had no hope of eradicating
either alkanet or bindweed but I do
want to maintain a balance. I am
encouraging signature wild flowers in
my Oxford garden — nettle-leaved
bellflower, greater celandine, creeping
comfrey and red campion.
Rees-Warren commends me for an
“open mind” when it comes to the
garden. “Those species listed are
stunning indigenous wild flowers that
are routinely ‘weeded’ out at the
juvenile stage with little thought to the
beauty and pleasure they will bring —
let alone the benefit to wildlife.”
I feel heartened. My changing
attitude towards our indigenous plant
flora has coincided with a desire to
create a more naturalistic feel. Rather
than large blocks flowering in relay, I
have been lifting whole clumps of over-
‘Stunning indigenous wild
flowers are “weeded” out
with little thought to the
pleasure they will bring’
exuberant herbaceous plants such as
goldenrod, asters and hardy
geraniums, dividing them into pieces,
replanting a proportion to form a
haphazard tapestry and composting
the rest.
This is my take on matrix planting,
which blurs the line between wild and
cultivated. Relaxing my attitude to
wild flowers will only enhance this
effect. Rees-Warren agrees: “If you look
at a hedgerow or meadow, you don’t
see blocks or Jekyll drifts but random
freckles of species.”
Gareth Richards also offers useful
advice in his book RHS Weeds: The
Beauty and Uses of 50 Vagabond Plants.
“Often the only crime a plant has
committed is growing too well,” he
remarks. “Weeds are much more a
perception than a definition.” In the
ongoing dialogue with my garden, I am
becoming less dictatorial. I want it to
be busy and full of surprises. There is
ample room for a few vagabonds.
Follow Jim on Instagram @hortijamie
Robin Lane Fox returns next week
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ † FTWeekend 1

H OM E | B OOKS | F ASH I O N | J EWELLERY | B EAUTY

Nancy Silverton, photographed in Los Angeles — Adam Amengual

2 ★ † FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Holiday Gift Guide

‘I do like to
pick things
for the table’
Nancy Silverton | The LA-based
restaurateur loves to bring elegance
to her friends’ dining tables and
hunt flea markets for a perfect piece

T
he circle of those who I buy
gifts for is much larger than
when I was buying gifts for
just my family. I give gifts to
upper management at my
restaurants to give them extra thanks
for a great year. And that has gone from
six people to upwards of 35 people.
That’s a lot of people to shop for!
It’s really important for it to be per-
sonal, and that doesn’t mean a different
thing for each person, sometimes one
thing will be right for four people. But it
has to mean something. That can mean
Gifts for entertaining at home
so many trips to the store. That first trip
is all about assessing what’s out there
and then you go back. What really helps
is to have those half-a-dozen places that
have a taste that’s similar to yours.
For example, here in LA there’s this
beautiful store for clothing [and acces-
sories] called Noodle Stories that takes
all the pain and angst out of shopping.
Heath [Ceramics] is a great store to find
something for someone who loves any-
thing to do with the table, whether it be
‘If you need a little
hostess gift, I think it’s
great to show up with
some nice chocolates’
a bowl, a wooden spoon, or a great vase.
Everything they have is beautiful
shapes, tasteful colours.
A lot of the cooks in my kitchens are
obviously going to appreciate anything
for the table. But there’s a whole slew of
people that don’t have anything to do
with the kitchen that also are going to
appreciate beautiful napkins or a table-
cloth or glasses. I do like to pick things
for the table, because it makes sense,
instead of me giving, like, a garden hose.
Another place I love is called Nickey
Kehoe. There’s such a range of gifts to
buy people — I just bought a bunch of
beautiful English pitchers that are in
animal shapes and are just gorgeous.
They have wonderful tablecloths, place-
mats and these handblown glasses, it’s
really hard to restrain yourself in there.
Whenever I go, it’s like here’s one for you
and one for me. Oh, and if you need a lit-
tle hostess gift, I think it’s great to show
I Nancy Silverton up with some nice chocolates. I like this
Bakeware set, £201, place called Valerie’s in Echo Park.
madeincookware.com I love going to the flea markets in Italy
(I have a little house in Umbria) and
there are two very large ones, I think
they’re on the first Sunday of the month
— one in a town called Arezzo and
K Lisa Corti another in Pissignano. To be able to
Corolla Frida shop at those flea markets and really
tablecloth, find a one-of-a-kind gift for somebody is
£142, nickey the most special of all. The problem is
kehoe.com that that could be a whole day’s worth of
looking for one gift. Going into a store is
a lot easier. But you feel like a champion
when you get that gift that’s like wow,
this is the most perfect gift.
I’ve always thought that a holiday gift
B John Jelfs B Milton Brook should never be an obligation. It should
Medium jug, £95, Pestle and mortar, £36, be something you want to do to show
davidmellordesign.com davidmellordesign.com appreciation.
My parents were both Jewish but I
wasn’t raised with religion. The holiday
K Nancy Silverton I celebrated with my kids was Christmas
Bakeware set, because there’s just that thrill of waking
£201, madein up in the morning, there’s something so
cookware.com special about that ritual. I used to buy
them stockings and fill them up — not
with, like, plastic harmonicas, but a
whole set of small gifts. I always made
sure everything was wrapped properly,
even though they just got ripped up.
As told to Max Berlinger
Nancy Silverton founded the celebrated
Italian eatery Campanile and La Brea Bak-
ery. A James Beard Award winner, she co-
owns the Mozza family of restaurants and
B Quail Hare jug, £28, B Valerie Confections Durango Chi Spacca in Los Angeles. Most recently,
B Heath Ceramics Shallow salad bowl, £116, heathceramics.com libertylondon.com Bark, £15, valerieconfections.com she opened steakhouse The Barish at the
Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Make it last, and make merry

Teo van den Broeke brings his sense Gifts for men
of style to bear on the perfect gifts M RM Williams urban turnout K Connolly driving K Berry Bros & Rudd I Begg x Co Arran Solid M Homme Plissé Issey Miyake
for the man or men in your life boots, £375, rmwilliams.com vest, £290, Italian reds six-bottle cashmere scarf, £260, tweed pleated trousers, £515, uk-
The best thing about storied connollyengland. mixed case, £135, beggxco.com store. isseymiyake.com

N
Australian boot brand RM com bbr.com Handcrafted in Scotland from The latest innovation from the
ow that I’m in my mid-30s, I’ve finally Williams is that the in-house The ultimate I was given one of these responsibly sourced Japanese house of
reached the age when the pleasure of aftercare team will repair and mid-layer boxes of delicious cashmere, and finished Issey Miyake is an
giving gifts far outstrips the joy of restore any and all pairs of for an Italian reds from St with hand-harvested ultra-insulating
receiving them. I think it has much to boots, old or new. Which unpredictable James’s best wine Italian teasels, Begg x Co’s pleated tweed that
do with the fact that once one accrues a means you British winter, merchant, Berry Bros & scarves are not only has been cleverly
certain number of years, the accumulation of too can wear Connolly’s ultra- Rudd, by a generous stupidly soft, they transformed into
much stuff starts to feel a bit spiritually null and them for the insulating driving friend of mine during also come in these tracksuit
void. Shoes are great and all, but one can’t build a length of your vests are made in lockdown part two, and it uncommonly rich shades bottoms-cum-
home out of Gucci loafers (trust me, I’ve tried). life. These Vibram- the UK. Perfect for only lasted the best part — the best are in formal trousers.
So I’m making a concerted effort to remember soled beauties are throwing over a sweater of a week. The reason? midnight blue and teal. Elegant and
this as we descend into the festive shopping season. top of my list. when its mild and zipping Each and every bottle You can get your scarf comfortable,
This year, I’m determined to buy meaningful gifts up under one of the (the Barolo, in monogrammed for an wear them to
that will either last the test of time — or be con- brand’s cashmere particular) is absolutely extra £20, which is a lunch, and slob
sumed before the new year rolls around (I’m look- overcoats when it’s bitter. delicious. bargain if you ask me. around after.
ing at you Berry Bros & Rudd Italian reds gift box).
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ † FTWeekend 3

Holiday Gift Guide

More than just a

girl’s best friend
Jewellery | While not always easy to choose, gems encapsulate
the charm that makes Christmas magical, says Annachiara Biondi

I
have always loved Christmas and
the magical anticipation that runs
through the month of December.
As a kid, I would impatiently wait
for December 8, a holiday day in
Italy that was traditionally spent deco-
rating our Christmas tree with multiple
strings of lights and baubles collected
throughout the years. It was hard work,
involving at least three hours helping
my mum and sister working on precari-
ous ladders, but it always filled me with
satisfaction. Once done, we would sit on
the sofa with the lights off, just admiring
our creation.
Now that I live in London, the 8th is a
Left: Marilyn day like any other, but early December,
Monroe with when the first decorations start appear-
Jack Benny ing across city streets and peeking from
(left) and Eddie windows, remains one of my favourite
Anderson, c1953 times of the year. Light is what makes
— Eyevine
Christmas magical — the artificial one
transforming any street in a spectacle of
sparkles, but also the warm one of the
fire burning on Christmas Eve.
I love to give gifts that have meaning
and, I hope, will be kept for a long time.
Jewellery is not always an easy gift to
give, but I’ve found that it can encapsu-
late the charm, fascination and signifi-
cance that Christmas has for me and
pass it on to the ones I love.

Bold baubles

shapes inspired by flowers

and sea creatures.

I M Cohen Silver Tone

B Mondo Mondo Magician ring,
£215, mondo-mondo.com
One of my most prized
possessions is a mood
ring that a friend gave
to me a couple of
years ago and this
Mondo Mondo
ring, with its
multicoloured opal
nestled in
beautifully worked
sterling silver, has
the same
otherworldly
personality. The
brand’s modern
heirlooms are custom
made by designer
Natasha Ghosn using
traditional metalsmithing
techniques.
MVanessa Schindler single chain
earrings, £160,
apoc-store.com
Designer Vanessa Schindler
has developed her own
bioresin process to
create sinuous and
colourful resin
earrings that are
handmade in her studio
in Switzerland. Most of
her pieces are made to order,
but can also be purchased
through the Apoc store, a
beautifully curated online
marketplace that supports
emerging artists and designers.
M Kenneth Jay Lane alligator
1970s bracelet, £175,
1stdibs.co.uk
Celebrated
costume
jeweller
Kenneth Jay
Lane was an
expert in
creating
theatrical but
wearable objects beloved by
the likes of Elizabeth Taylor
and Jacqueline Kennedy. This
gold-plated alligator bracelet
from the 1970s will add a
touch of drama to the
simplest of looks.
M Tétier Bijoux
Flower hair
comb, £411,
vault.gucci.com
Tétier Bijoux is
the eclectic
jewellery line created
by Florence Tétier,
founder of Novembre
magazine and creative director
of Jean Paul Gaultier. All
products are made using
upcycled materials such as
plastics, discarded toys and
found objects and incorporate
bold, neon colours with organic
Matchstick pendant
earring £200,
brownsfashion.com
Shaped like a burnt
matchstick complete with
delicately traced wood grain,
this single earring by Israeli
designer Maor Cohen
resembles a treasured
memento collected from a
campfire. The piece is a
singular but elegant
addition to
anyone’s
collection of
jewellery.
K Georgia
Kemball Chunky
Slub necklace, £875,
georgiakemball.com
Designer Georgia
Kemball sees jewellery
as having a protective
and talismanic power,
and the raw and fierce
aesthetic of her designs
perfectly fits this vision.
This sterling silver necklace
features hand-carved links,
a
large pin and multiple charm
pendants and, as with all of the
designer’s items, is made to
order.
M Hatton Labs sterling
silver freshwater pearl
and crystal bracelet,
£305,
brownsfashion.com
Worn by the likes of
Skepta and Palace’s founder
Lev Tanju, Hatton Labs has
brought a breath of fresh air to
London’s traditional jewellery
district, Hatton Gardens. Its pieces
meet men’s newfound interest in
gender-fluid dressing by adding
flowers, pearls and other delicate
details to chains and signet rings.
M Completedworks Gold
Vermeil, Pearl and
Ceramic earrings,
£295,
completed
works.com
Pieces from
Completedworks
are instantly
recognisable. Their shapes
fold, twist and flow, creating the
illusion of softness in materials
such as gold, silver and
ceramics. These
mismatched earrings
in gold vermeil and
ceramic beads,
freshwater and
baroque pearls
combine all the
trademarks of the
London-based
jewellery brand.
4 ★ †
‘I like gifts with
a human touch’
Kenneth Ize | The prizewinning, Lagos-born
designer likes to bring the bright colours of Africa
to the wardrobes and tables of family and friends
I
n my family, Christmas has always
been about celebrating and sharing
food with lots of people. When I was
growing up we spent the holidays in
Lagos. On December 24 my mother
would buy a ram from the market and
the butcher would come over to her
house, which was always covered in
multicoloured lights both inside and
out. She spent the whole night cooking
the meat, preparing mine and my
brother’s favourite dishes of egusi and
banga soup.
On Christmas Day we hosted as many
as 30 friends and family at any given
time. I never saw a distinction between
Christianity and Islam; our closest
friends were Muslim so we would go to
the mosque with them and they would
join us at church; it was especially beau-
tiful to share the festive period with
them eating around one table together.
Although I was born in Lagos, I lived
on and off in Austria from the age of
seven. During my years studying at the
University of Applied Arts Vienna, we
spent a few Christmases in the city. In
Europe, I think the holidays are a quiet
time that people spend with their own
families, whereas in Nigeria it is much
more open, and I have to say I prefer it
that way.
Christmas planning would begin in
November, when my mother started
thinking about our outfits. She bought
west African textiles such as floral lace,
tie-and-dye and adire, and had them
tailored into traditional outfits —
bubas, sokotos and agbadas. I’m going to
revive this ritual this year — dressing
up gives such a good feeling and these
memories have formed the foundation
of my brand.
Since establishing Kenneth Ize, I have
given my close friends scarves made
from handwoven aso oke textiles —
something I hope they will wear for a
‘Our closest friends were
Muslim so we went to the
mosque with them, they
would join us at church’
FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021
Holiday Gift Guide
lifetime. The designs are special because
they are completely unique; I never
make the same motif or colourway
again once I have given it as a present. I
feel like I am offering a part of myself to
the people I love.
When it comes to receiving gifts, don’t
get me wrong — I love diamonds and
expensive things, but I haven’t received
them yet! Maybe someone is going to
surprise me this year!
One of the most treasured gifts I have
received is a photograph a friend gave
me of her newly born baby with a hand-
written note. As my friends start getting
married and having kids it feels so spe-
cial to be invited to be part of these
moments.
As you can probably tell, I like gifts
with a human touch, which is something
Emily Bode does so well. We were final-
ists in the 2019 LVMH Prize together. I
particularly love Bode’s corduroy
designs featuring custom illustrations,
which are based on a tradition started
by Purdue University seniors in 1904, as
well as her crochet work.
I am sending a lot of my friends who
are stuck for what gifts to buy to Bev-
erly’s in New York. Because we are still
in a time where people around the world
are experiencing different lockdown
restrictions, I suggest buying beautiful
homewares that will bring a sense of
calm — Egyptian cotton towels or linen
bed sheets, for instance.
Or maybe it is about introducing
something to your loved ones’ routine:
encourage a flair for cooking by buying
them a baking set, or how about a tea
ceremony set? Sparking new interests is
the greatest gift you can give because
they live beyond Christmas.
As told to Liam Freeman
LVMH Prize-winning Nigerian designer
Kenneth Ize is known for bright,
elegantly tailored clothes that
champion African craft Kenneth Ize, photographed in Lagos — Joshua Woods
Crafts and cultural gifts
M Alighieri
Zodiac
necklace, £195,
alighieri.com
B Estelle Chemouny B Bode Custom Senior Cord
Mirror, £220, gift certificate, £3,239,
paradisegaragestore.com bodenewyork.com
K Adire African
Textiles
Vintage eagle
Fante Asafo flag,
£750,
adireafrican
textiles.com
I Bianca
Saunders
Remember
Me scarf,
£150, bianca
saunders.com
B Bode I Gala Colivet Dennison
Manchester crochet Sterling silver and walrus
overshirt, £450, tusk brooch, £680,
bodenewyork.com objetdemotion.com
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 5

Holiday Gift Guide

When it comes to beauty, people do
love a wellness gift like a massage, a
good black mascara and a great mois-
turiser. I love Augustinus Bader mois-
turiser, and the eye cream from Jones
Road is great for guys because it absorbs
really well. I am so proud of my Jones
Road brand that I do give it as a gift, I
take the products out of the boxes and
put it in a pouch for busy people. We are
also putting together different kits that
do the work for you.
Bobbi Brown | The American I have received a lot of things that I
don’t necessarily want and a lot of them
cosmetics entrepreneur likes have to do with fragrance, such as room
sprays and candles. I don’t like candles
because I am worried about not blowing
to keep things simple when them out. I have woken up and smelled
smoke, and it was a candle catching fire
on a pile of books.
celebrating in the Bahamas Fragrance can be tough. I love Byredo
bath products. The brand looks very
chic, and some of their scents are more

W
gentle, like Sunday Cologne, which
e usually celebrate the
holidays in the Baha-
mas and are hoping to ‘We have always done
be there this year. Our
house was damaged
stockings for the dogs
during the hurricane, so we might be because we figure the
camping out in it, but I would rather be
there with a cooler next to my bed than
dogs aren’t Jewish’
not at all. I celebrate with my posse.
which is growing. There’s my three sons,
my nephews, and now they all have girl- is very citrusy and not so polarising.
friends and wives. I usually decorate my For stocking fillers everything little is
home in New Jersey but when I get to the cute: I love little teeny nips of vodka or
Bahamas, even though we are celebrat- tequila, mini Himalayan salt or mini
ing the holidays, I like it very minimal. I olive oil. I have been using Brightland
breathe. I look at that blue sea. olive oil, which is crisp and delicious.
In our family the Jewish holidays are The best gift I ever got arrived from a
in September, then it’s Halloween, we homeware company and there was a
have 30 people for Thanksgiving, my fork and something for the blender,
husband’s birthday is at the start of something for the turkey. I thought it
December, then it’s the holidays. It’s a was the weirdest gift, but then I realised

‘Everything little is cute’

sprint. We celebrate Hanukkah and
Christmas because there’s nothing like
stockings and a Christmas tree, even if
you are Jewish. We have always done
stockings for the dogs because we figure
the dogs aren’t Jewish.
My kids and I are in the mood of try-
ing to simplify and downsize and think
what gifts actually matter. We do a
Secret Santa, although we call it a
Hanukkah Harry. I try to buy one thing
that they wouldn’t normally buy them-
selves — I am buying a cashmere hoodie
for one of my sons and my husband a
special pizza oven.
My family thinks I am difficult to buy
for, but what I really want this year is for
a professional visual organiser to come
into my house and help me reimagine
what I have and make it look beautiful. I
am this crazy organised person but it
could look better.
I have also been searching for a stylist
to help me repurpose my closet: what
needs to be tailored, what items go
together. I don’t want new clothes, I
want to make the best of what I have. I
would also like someone to come in once
Above: Bobbi Brown is
keen to simplify and
downsize, making the
best of what she has
Brian Ach for Worth magazine
a week and drop off containers of really
simple food. Quinoa, steamed broccoli,
great blended soups.
My husband has bought me some
beautiful gifts over the years, the most
beautiful jewellery from Ted Muehling
who does modern pearls. Once when I
was on a trip, he sent me a video of my
kids saying how much they missed me
and “open this box” and there were
pearls inside. However, I had to say stop
because how many pearls can I wear?
Pyjamas and bed linen make lovely
presents. You can have people’s initials
embroidered on them, but then they
can’t re-gift them. I have so many bags
with my initials that I don’t want but
how do I give them away? I also like
cashmere socks. Who buys themselves
cashmere socks? Not a lot of people.
someone stayed at my home in Colo-
rado for a week and she took the time to
write down all the things I needed but
didn’t have. Personal gifts like that are
amazing. But you know if someone
comes towards me with a Hermès box
or a Chanel box then I’m also thrilled.
As told to Carola Long
Make-up artist turned entrepreneur
Bobbi Brown started her namesake
company in 1991. Synonymous with the
natural look, it was acquired by The Estée
Lauder Companies in 1995. Brown left in
2016 and in 2020 she started her new
“clean” make-up line, Jones Road, focusing
on easy-to-use products that suit all ages,
skin types and skin tones.

Gifts for lounging at home

I Tweezerman Classic slant
tweezers, £22, tweezerman.co.uk

M Jones Road Beauty

Miracle Balm in
tawny, £34,
jonesroadbeauty.com

K Augustinus
Bader
The Cream,
from £65
for 15ml,
augustinus
bader.com

I Sam
McKnight
Lazy Girl dry
shampoo,
£19, sam
mcknight.
com

I Comme Si
Cashmere
sock selection,
£161,
commesi.com

M Merci
Linen sheets,
£109, merci-
merci.com

I Soho Home
Women’s silk
pyjamas, £310,
sohohome.com

B Jones Road
Beauty The
Mascara, £24,
jonesroad
beauty.com

K Anya
Hindmarch
In-flight case,
£225, anya
hindmarch.
com
6 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021

Holiday Gift Guide

‘I’m kind of
a gift
hoarder’
Simone Rocha | The London-based
designer loves to engage the intellect
as well as the heart with practical
tokens and reminders of home

I
t has always been very important
for me to break at Christmas and
step away from my London studio. I
usually spend a little less than two
weeks in Ireland, visiting family
and friends. There is a pub in Dublin
called Grogan’s that I go to pretty much
every Christmas Eve, as does half of
Dublin. We also spend some time in the
countryside, either in County Cork or in
Kerry, but always in the west of Ireland,
looking out to the Atlantic Ocean.
I personally love this time of year. I
think it’s a real reset. I feel the season
changing, that shift to the end of the
year with the anticipation of the year to
come. I always try to swim in the sea on
New Year’s Day as a cleanse.
This year my family is a little bigger as
I had a second daughter, so we will be
splitting Christmas between Ireland and
London for the first time. I live in De
Beauvoir, in east London, and I’m look-

‘Since I was a kid I have

been given book
vouchers as gifts, that
was always our “thing” ’
Simone Rocha: ‘I ‘like to give gifts that keep on giving and are not disposable’ — Lydia Goldblatt
ing forward to walking from east to
west along the Regent’s Canal. It will of pastels is such a nice gift to receive, town and pick any book of your choice them. It’s a good gift for any Irish person
be my first Christmas in our own fam- you don’t have to be an artist to with your voucher. My daughter who lives abroad, like myself. It is very
ily home. I enjoy decorating the appreciate it. recently got a book voucher from her nice to have something in your hand
house. We always have a live Christ- I usually give things that are close school and she was like “Oh my God, I that feels like home.
mas tree, which over the past few to me and inspiring, but also practi- can go and pick my own book”, and it The best gift I have ever given is a ring
years we have decorated with my cal, like the DR Harris toothbrush, made me so happy to see that the feeling with a harp on it that represents Ireland.
daughter’s drawings. I love little which is beautifully made. My is still there. I gave it to my partner and I like that I
wooden figures, too, and more kitsch brother’s new restaurant, Café Climax is an amazing website run by get to see him wearing it every day. I love
playful ornaments like the ones from Cecilia, makes a batch of olive oil Isabella Burley where you can find these antique jewellery. I’ve been given many
Choosing Keeping, which have an old- and that makes another beautiful brilliant, one-off books. I think that if antique pieces with my initials on them
worldy feeling to them. gift, especially because so much of you find a book that you appreciate, like and I always find the idea that they rep-
When it comes to gifts, if I see some- the holiday tradition is breaking There’s a Camera Between Man and resent my identity but were represent-
thing that really suits somebody I bread with family and friends. Woman by Nobuyoshi Araki, you should ing someone else’s very interesting. I
would always buy it then and there and I also like to give gifts that keep give it to someone because whether they also have a ring made of an etched piece
save it — I’m kind of a gift hoarder. on giving and are not disposable, like it or not, they’ll learn something. of glass which says “Erin go bragh”,
Wrapping gifts is a highlight for me and such as a membership to the West One of my most absolute precious gifts which means “Ireland forever” in Irish. I
I love to match postcards and cards with Reservoir Centre in Hackney, is a personalised, handmade book by think it’s amazing when you have these
the paper. I’m a fan of the whole process. which allows you to swim in the artist Roni Horn. pieces that have a history in them.
If you don’t know exactly what a person reservoir as much as you like, or One thing my brother introduced me As told to Annachiara Biondi
wants, I think it’s important to give the Daunt Books subscription, to is the Machine Learning Irish Poetry
something that you would like. There is through which you get a new book book, a collection of AI-generated Irish Designer Simone Rocha launched her
a beautiful traditional art materials in the post once a month. Since I poetry. It’s amazing how they put all of eponymous line in London in 2010. Rooted
shop called L Cornelissen & Son in Lon- was a kid I have been given book this information into a computer and in a Romantic-meets-Gothic aesthetic that
don and they have so many nice things, vouchers as gifts, that was always how it regurgitated texts with recognisa- transcends trends, the label has stores in
from paper to oil and brushes. Their set our “thing”. You would walk into ble beauty and fluidity running through London, New York and Hong Kong.

Gifts that keep on giving

M DR Harris & Co. K Simone K Simone
Hard bristle toothbrush, Rocha Rocha
£20, drharris.co.uk Leather biker Pearl micro
jacket, £1,350, egg bag, £475,
shop.simone shop.simone
rocha.com rocha.com

M Frédéric Malle
Carnal Flower by
Dominique Ropion, £172, M Nobuyoshi Araki
B Choosing Keeping fredericmalle.co.uk
Christmas ornament, £95, ‘There’s a Camera Between
choosingkeeping.com B Astier de Villatte Man and Woman’, £80, B Kojaque
Regence large deep plate, climaxbooks.com Black hoodie, £35,
£78, astierdevillatte.com kojaque.pias.com
K ’Machine
Learning
Irish Poetry’
Book, £10, I Apple I Unison 36
passage iPad Mini, standard
tomb.com £479, pastels, £114,
johnlewis.com cornelissen.
com

I Daunt Books
Paperback subscription,
£180, dauntbooks.co.uk
4 December/5 December 2021
‘You don’t have
to buy new’
Nicholas Daley | When not crafting clothes to
gift to mum and dad, the menswear designer
heads to Portobello Market, Soho and Sheffield
F
or Christmas this year I will be
going home to where I grew up
in Leicester, getting together
with family, relaxing, and lis-
tening to music: we have this
album of really bad reggae covers of
Christmas songs. Normally the Christ-
mas period is cut a bit short for me by
men’s fashion week in January but now
it’s moved and merged with the
women’s so I’m hoping to spend a day or
two longer with family. Last Christmas
was challenging with plans being
changed, or not being able to meet up.
My mum and dad have an allotment
and have been growing a lot of vegeta-
bles so the year before last we had mum
Gifts for comfort and reflection
B Nicholas Daley x Lavenham Sashiko
jacket, £725, lavenhamjackets.com
B Fortnum & Mason Traditional Dundee
cake, £19, fortnumandmason.com
K Nicholas
Daley
Forgotten Fury
scarf, £40,
nicholasdaley.
net
and dad’s parsnips, potatoes and brussel
sprouts. With my mum being from Dun-
dee in Scotland she makes a lot of jams
and chutneys and my sister and I get
involved as she tries to pass on the tradi-
tion. Our take on the traditional Christ-
mas dinner has influences from both
sides of the family, as my dad is from
Jamaica. My mum might make jerk
lamb with some Caribbean spices, my
dad might make rice and peas, or maybe
turkey, with vegetarian stuffing — I’m
vegetarian. There’s always a bit of Scot-
tish shortbread kicking about.
If I want to feel a bit festive and in
touch with my Celtic roots I might wear
my kilt hose from Lochcarron of Scot-
land. They come up
past the calf, a bit like
football socks. I nor-
mally just wear them
with my trousers
because I am saving the
kilt for my wedding day
in August. But they
aren’t something that I
bust out on a regular
basis, it’s nostalgia.
We do try to keep a
limit on the presents,
and I always like to
make gifts. I have made
my mum bespoke tar-
tan dresses and jackets
from leftover fabric,
my dad always gets
something from the
range. I also like a
present to have a func- Nicholas Daley, photographed in London — Lydia Goldblatt
M Cremate Incense
range, Middle Way tin,
£20, cremate.london
K Prick
Cereus candle
and cactus
combo, £30,
prickldn.com
M Sub Sun
SUB002 sunglasses, £120,
goodhoodstore.com
K Gilles
Peterson
‘Lockdown
FM:
Broadcasting
in a
Pandemic’,
£40,
worldwidefm.
ochre.store
★ FTWeekend 7
Holiday Gift Guide
tion, something classic like a nice leath-
er-bound notebook, or for a specific
sport or hobby. The personal touch is
important. I created a montage of pic-
tures of my sister and I when we were
kids and put it in a nice frame. You also
don’t have to buy new, you can add a
DIY touch.
For secondhand finds, Portobello
Market is great, but go on a Friday, Sat-
urday can be very busy. You could pick
up a British military parka coat, a shear-
ling, a bit of a vintage tee. JoJo’s General
Store is a good vintage dealer, based in
Sheffield, I’ve bought things for myself
there and I like to support a northern
vintage dealer.
When it comes to actually going to
shops I generally go to Soho for records
at Rough Trade, Sounds of the Universe
and Phonica, and the Japan Centre near
Leicester Square have a great selection
of teas and Japanese snacks — the
matcha bread loaf is my favourite.
I also love New Beacon Books in
‘If I want to feel festive and
in touch with my Celtic
roots I might wear my kilt
hose from Lochcarron’
Stroud Green, who have specialised in
African and Caribbean literature since
1966. It has one of the richest selection
of books exploring the black diaspora
from cultural theorist Stuart Hall to
Ghanaian photographer James Barnor.
For me it’s important to support other
black-owned businesses or businesses
started by people from minority back-
grounds. We are currently collaborating
with an incense brand called Cremate,
started by Junior Adesanya who
interned with me. He creates some
amazing notes into room sprays and
incense. I work with incense burning
and music playing in the studio so hav-
ing the right environment is important.
As told to Carola Long
Nicholas Daley launched his eponymous
label in 2015. Of Scottish and Jamaican
heritage, he explores the idea of multi-
culturalism within the British identity. He
works with international artisans to create
bespoke textiles and fabrics for every
collection, such as the Japanese wax resist
pattern in his spring/summer 2020
collection Blue Quilt.
K Gaurab Thakali
‘Cloudy’, £120,
gaurabthakali
shop.com
M Haeckels Bacilli
gift set, £120,
haeckels.co.uk
B The Little Coffee Company
Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee,
£25, socialsupermarket.org
M Benjamin
Zephaniah ‘The Life
and Rhymes of
Benjamin
Zephaniah’, £10,
benjamin
zephaniah.com
8 ★
Beata Heuman | For the Swedish interior designer,
London’s markets and antique shops are the place
to find one-of-a-kind gifts for a classic Christmas
I
grew up on a farm in the south of
Sweden, which is where I’ve spent
most Christmases in my life. Nor-
mally we stay with my parents but
we just got a house there. There’s a
small village with a little church, which
we go to with my three siblings.
[Between us] we have eight little chil-
dren ages two to seven, it’s a bit stressful
at times, but also really sweet. I’ve lived
in London for about 17 years and don’t
go back to Sweden a huge amount, but
Christmas is always one of those times I
go home and embrace the family tradi-
tions.
It’s a lot about food. For lunch we do a
smorgasbord — cold ham, herring,
bread, schnapps, and some warmer
things like meatballs, potato gratin with
anchovies in it. My [English] husband
doesn’t like it at all. On the 23rd, the day
before our big celebration on Christmas
Eve, we always cook the ham — and then
we do mashed potatoes, green cabbage,
all these things I’ve eaten all my life and
really love. There’s mulled wine, ginger-
bread and ginger snaps. When decorat-
ing for the holidays, I like to keep things
simple and classic, with a Christmas tree
and white candles.
We exchange presents in the evening
‘After the festivities, enjoy a festive hike’
Outdoors Now based in
London, Grace Cook seeks
inspiration from her roots
in England’s Lake District
G
rowing up in a tiny village
on the wild, western coast
of Cumbria, Christmastime
for me is as much about the
outdoors as it is about
gifting, family gatherings and gorging
on miniature chocolates while watching
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All
The Way — arguably one of the best
festive films ever made.
On the morning of December 25, to
shake off the after-effects of Christmas
Eve in the tinsel-festooned pubs, we
wrap up and stroll to the beachfront to
get wind-whipped by the Irish Sea,
before the day’s multi-household
socialising begins.
Now living in London, I look forward
to the festive hikes even more than the
festivities; getting above the clouds and
feeling the earth underfoot is a cleanse
from a life spent surrounded by
concrete. And, having enjoyed an entire
summer schlepping up some sort of
mountain, I’ve perfected the kit that
works well up a mountain peak and
looks good in a South London pub, in
order to satisfy my dual lifestyle — and
minimal closet space. (Top tip: Uniqlo’s
Heattech roll necks, £15, are the
ultimate foundational layer.) Stay
toasty out there.
of the 24th, which is the day we cele-
brate [Christmas] in Sweden. We’re
quite strict, we watch each person
unwrap each present.
I have several times a year a recurring
nightmare where’s it’s time to give
presents and I realise I’ve forgotten to
get them. It haunts me, not being organ-
ised. The best thing is to buy nice things
as you see them throughout the year, or
at least jot down ideas on your phone
‘The best thing is to
buy nice things as you
see them throughout
the year’
you can look at later.
I do really like giving vintage things.
At markets or antique shops you can get
something unique and it doesn’t cost
that much.
In London, Portobello Road Market is
quite good for little trinkets, also a shop
in Chiswick called The Old Cinema has
good things for home. There’s a market
at Kempton [held the second and last
Tuesday every month], I literally go
Gifts for the wilderness or an urban adventure
I Danner Mountain 600
£180, global.danner.com
Outfitter to the US military,
Danner knows a thing or
two about sturdy soles.
Its Mountain 600 is a
boot-sneaker hybrid,
softer and lighter than most boots,
and they need no breaking-in.
I Parks Project socks (two-pack),
£15, parksproject.us
Outdoorsy clobber with give-back
initiatives to protect America’s
National parks; so far it has
contributed $2m. Sales proceeds
help fund trips for America’s
underprivileged.
I Object Beauty soap bars
kit £40, objectbeauty.com
When hand sanitiser just
won’t cut it, these zero-
plastic, natural soaps are
ideal for a backpack — and
it comes with a nifty tin too.
I Arc’teryx Beta jacket, £350,
workingclassheroes.co.uk
Arc’teryx’s boxy designs are
sleek enough for the city. Shy
away from navy or black and
opt for an Instagrammable
colourway that would make
you more visible (in a worst-case
scenario) to Mountain Rescue.
FTWeekend
Holiday Gift Guide
‘I like to
give vintage
things’
there at 6am with headlights on. There
are also auctions which you can find
online on The Saleroom.
For the person who has everything,
the trick is to find that something they
wouldn’t be able to find themselves. If
it’s vintage or antique or there’s only one
of them, that’s a good place to look, or
something personalised. [Artist] Alma
Berrow she does these little ceramic
pieces you can commission, that’s a nice
way of doing something personal that’s
unique. Or Suermondt. She buys old
secondhand [knits], unravels them and
makes them into [cardigans, hats and
jumpers]. There are a lot of people on
Instagram now doing things really spe-
I Gramicci hiking shorts £60,
workingclassheroes.co.uk
US brand Gramicci’s
cotton utility
shorts feature
an elasticated
waist that
allows for extra movement. It
also offers pleat-front trouser
versions that are chic even out of
context.
I Taion V-neck button
down gilet, £61,
workingclassheroes.co.uk
The higher you ascend, the
hotter you get; a sleeveless,
slimline puffer is a key part of
any mountain arsenal, thanks
to its easy layering under
waterproofs. Keeps you
toasty when the
outerwear has to come off.
I Millican duffle bag £195,
homeofmillican.com
This overnight bag from Lake
District brand Millican
makes packing easy.
With a 28-litre capacity,
it opens like a holdall
for easy access and
comes with three
waterproof packing
cubes to keep kit and
clothing separate.
4 December/5 December 2021
Gifts that age gracefully
M Moro Dabron M Mikaela Lyons
Herbarium Lioness double coin
candle, £135, pendant, £195,
moro-dabron.com mikaelalyons.com
B Claudia Rankin
Swan sculpture, £620,
wsjgallery.com
K Beata Heuman
‘Every Room Should Sing’,
signed copy, £45,
shoppa.beataheuman.com
B Ohnishi Seisakusho Koi pond fountain pen, £175,
choosingkeeping.com
I Pentreath & Hall
Grand Tour intaglio case
by Birdie Hall, £375,
pentreath-hall.com
M Alma Berrow
Plate, £4,500,
Nino Mier Gallery
Beata Heuman, cial, so you can get something really per-
photographed at
home in London
sonalised.
For me, I really want this intaglio case
— Chris Gloag
from Pentreath & Hall. And sunglasses.
Also a jacket from Loretta Caponi in
Italy, they have most beautiful fashion
shop [in Florence]. It’s sold on Matches-
Fashion, but I prefer what they have in
the shop, all tailored in Italy, very old- M London Velvet The
fashioned. I saw this incredible robe
Oversized Corduroy Tote,
when I was there last week - there are £235, londonvelvet.co.uk
beautiful smock dresses too. My hus- B Beata Heuman
band got me something from there last Florentine coasters, £216,
year. shoppa.beataheuman.com
The best gift I ever received was this
amazing prawn earring from my hus-
band, from a Parisian jewellery designer
called Yvonne Léon. I wear it almost all
of the time, it’s just quite special, you
don’t see what it is til you look quite
closely, it’s a nice bit of jewellery but
quite fine in a way, also feels kind of
relaxed. And I like that there’s only one,
it’s a bit more cool.
Last year I completely failed with my
M Loretta Caponi Guido
double-breasted jacket,
children’s gifts. I had really beautiful
£1,361, shop.lorettacaponi.it
dresses and nice books, things I really
like, but they loved things they could B Campbell-Rey Cosima
play with. Murano coupes, £630
This year I bought this ice cream shop, for six, 1stdibs.com
all made out of wood, you can scoop ice
cream out and hand out menus, I really
recommend it for anyone with toddlers.
As told to Lauren Indvik
Beata Heuman is an interior designer
celebrated for her elegant, imaginative
spaces informed by her Swedish heritage
and early tutelage under the outré British
designer Nicky Haslam. This year she B DR Harris & Co. Lavender
published her first book with Rizzoli, bath soap, £33, drharris.co.uk
‘Every Room Should Sing’
I Rototo neck that would otherwise be
warmer £39, out of bounds for
northern-fells.com amateurs, learning
There’s never been how to use ice axes,
a better time for a crampons — and what to do
neck warmer that if there’s an avalanche.
not only protects B Reebok Beatnik
against biting winds, but shoes, £90, K Pro Cycling Trumps Climbs
also double ups as a face reebok .co.uk edition, £9.99, etsy.com
covering. This cozy version from RoToTo, With padded water-resistant Inspire wanderlust with a
purveyor of the best Japanese socks, is uppers and a velcro back, these mountain version of Top Trumps
not itchy and won’t slip down. mules keep feet dry from dewy that’s as fun played at home as
grass when padding across to in a tent during a storm.
I Girls of Dust alpaca wool the bathroom. Wet socks in a
vest, £200, tent are no fun. M Story MFG Growing Peace T-
eatdustclothing.com shirt, £96, storymfg.com
A sleeveless chunky I Black+Blum This baggy unisex
knit is my go-to food flask, £25, tee by sustainable
after a walk — in black-blum.com British brand Story
my non-expert Nothing warms MFG is screen-
opinion, it helps the cockles up printed using
body temperature the top of a fell planet-friendly,
reacclimatise. This boxy vest is like a hot and water-based
as easily worn with roll necks hearty lunch. Neat ink.
and jeans as it is over PJs in a tent. in design, this flask keeps food hot
for six hours, or cool for eight. Also good
I Snow Peak field for those office days when you can’t
barista, £64, face a store-bought sandwich.
snowpeak.co.uk
Snow Peak’s field I One-day winter skills
barista set packs course, £95,
flat for handy lakelandmountain-
transportation, so guides.co.uk
it saves on A winter skills course is sure
cupboard space to be an unforgettable gift.
at home too. Hikers will ascend snowy fells
4 December/5 December 2021 ★ FTWeekend 9

Holiday Gift Guide

Gifts of rare beauty

M Soapsmith K Claus Porto Soap on a ultra-rich cream would suit

Bloomsbury bath Rope, £20, liberty.co.uk someone with dry skin who
soak, £25, Plastic-free packaging spends a lot of time outside.
soapsmith.com means this woody- It’s affordable enough to be a
Soapsmith’s bath smelling soap is a more stocking filler but better than
products are environmentally friendly many more expensive products,
inspired by areas choice than most shower especially because the lack of
of London. gels, while the rope fragrance means it’s less likely to
Bloomsbury bath allows it to air dry and irritate sensitive skin.
soak has the last longer.
dreamy scent of K Hershesons Zhoosh foam,
rose and leaves M Wild refillable £12, hershesons.com
skin soft and not deodorant, from £12, Give good hair days with this
stripped. werarewild.com amazing multipurpose product
I tried quite a few natural that adds volume and texture,
deodorants before I discovered and absorbs grease more
one that actually works. You buy a effectively than dry shampoo if
Margot Hielscher in a shot for Riz cosmetics (c1954) — United Archives/ Getty Images refillable case, then use you don’t have time to
refills of solid deodorant wash your hair. My

Magic potions
made without husband is a convert
aluminium, parabens or too, despite thinking
sulphates, in mousse is a pudding
compostable packagaing. and not an ’80s styling
My favourite scent is product having a
fresh cotton and sea salt, welcome upgrade.
but there are more exciting
ones such as sandalwood K Tim Lake beaker,
and patchouli. £25, toa.st
Beauty | If you know someone well, make-up is a M Dior Backstage face
Created by Wales-based
potter Tim Lake, this
M Westman Atelier Le Box, £106, brush, £38, dior.com stoneware beaker is just
risky but rewarding present — just don’t stray westman-atelier.com While this little brush the thing for holding
Make-up artist Gucci Westman’s clean might not have the toothbrushes and
beauty range is a fashion insider elegance of a long-handled toothpaste, and would
too far from their colour palette, says Carola Long favourite, and the Lip Suede palette is a version, it makes applying give a crafty, artisanal
real beauty bag multitasker, offering foundation or tinted touch to any
four flattering, customisable colours, moisturiser a breeze and bathroom.

I
’ve always appreciated getting
“lotions and potions” for Christ-
mas, as my mum would describe
them. And as any lover of beauty
products knows, there’s more to
indulgent unguents than meets the eye -
or the nose. A jar of aromatic bath salts
is an invitation to relax, decadently, and
a message to the recipient to take time
for themselves. An ornate make-up pal-
ette or luxurious red lipstick, given to a
good friend, signals you know that they
know how to have fun.
Bath and shower products are the saf-
est bet; make-up is more risky. But if
you know someone really well, and dis-
cuss products regularly, then choosing
the right shades to suit them can be a
sign that you understand their taste.
Just look closely at the shades they wear
and don’t stray far from that palette.
including poppy red and a deep gives a flawless finish. A
Not that I’m averse to practical prod- aubergine. complexion game changer. K Verden
ucts, as long as they are lovely to use. If D’Orangerie
someone had introduced me to Wild’s M Lumene Arctic Hydra hand and
refillable deodorant for example, Care Moisture and Relief body wash,
before I discovered it myself, I would Rich Night Balm, £27, £35,
have been chuffed. Prioritising lookfantastic.com verden.world
things that can be refilled and My go-to moisturiser in winter, this Meaning ‘the
recycled is important too. world’ or ‘the
Lastly, the big question in Earth’ in
beauty gifting: to-go gift set or indi- Danish, Verdun
vidual products? I’d go with a smaller is a new range
set of say two products that will def- of bath and
initely get used, rather than a body products
random assortment in too from founders of cult skincare brand
much packaging. Or select a Votary. Using fresh natural fragrances
few things that can be individ- (D’Orangerie is invigorating and
ually wrapped - perhaps in citrusy), products are formulated to
some of Pentreath and Hall’s match skin pH to prevent drying.
chic malachite or marble paper. Packaging is recycled and recyclable.
What’s not to like about unwrap-
ping several treats?

’Tis the season for green fingers

F
Gardening Get bud to or the first time in my adult life
I have a garden: an east-
blossom and fruit to facing patch in north London
fruition with Lauren that is — partly due to the
machinations of a root-dig-
Indvik’s pick of gifts for ging, branch-chomping, one-year-old
novice gardeners puppy — rather worse-looking than the
previous inhabitants left it.
It’s a trend I’m hoping to reverse this
spring. Usefully, my mum took a degree
in horticulture, and last Christmas plied
me with bulbs and seeds — truly the best
thing to find in one’s stocking — as well
as books and tools to help me on my
way. (You could also curate a podcast
list — I recommend Sarah Raven and
Arthur Parkinson’s Grow, Cook, Eat,
Arrange; Sarah Wilson’s Roots and All;
and the Royal Horticultural Society’s
Gardening with the RHS.) A year later,
this is what I’d recommend to a fellow
novice gardener.

Gifts for budding gardeners

I Carrier Company is the one I wish I’d read first. Published
garden kneeler, £39, by the Royal Horticultural Society, it
carriercompany.co. outlines the very basics: learning
uk your soil (speaking of — a soil pH
This padded tote tester makes a good stocking
says I care about your stuffer), caring for what’s already in
garden and your your garden, how to choose the
knees. right plants and what to grow when
and where.
M Implementations
Castor trowel, £38, M Flora Animalia worker’s apron,
implementations.co.uk £143, floraanimalia.com
I use this bronze trowel This 100 per cent linen apron,
for everything. It’s also made in LA by the newish
really pretty, which garden-and-workwear label
justifies the price. If you’re Flora Animalia, comes in
looking for something wonderful colours like
slimmer, my thoroughly clay, flax and moss, which
green-thumbed friend promise to look even
Alastair recommends the better with a bit
Hori Hori trowel from Niwaki of dirt on them. It
(£32, niwaki.com). has pockets for
keeping tools up front
and a metal ring for
hanging small tools over
the hip.

K Betakut secateurs, B Sarah Raven

£38, terracotta pots, £37, sarahraven.com
labourandwait I am constantly short on terracotta
.co.uk pots, which would look much smarter
I bought my than the plastic liners lining the
perfectly stairs into the garden. If you like
serviceable your gifts second-hand, Etsy has
Felco secateurs some terrific options at
on Amazon (£35, bargain prices.
amazon.co.uk), but
I wish I’d bought this K Canvas holdall,
Italian-made version, B Tarred jute £122, labourandwait
because it is gorgeous twine, £7, .co.uk
(and well-reviewed). labourandwait On my wishlist for this
.co.uk year is a carryall for
B ‘How to Garden Twine in a natural storing and porting my
When You’re New to fibre such as jute is trowel, secateurs, gloves
Gardening’, £17, environmentally friendly and useful all and packets of seeds. This comes in
shop.rhs.org.uk around the garden. Extra helpfully, this navy and olive with interior and
Of the dozen or so version is “tarred” to repel slugs and exterior pockets, and also promises to
books in my arsenal, this snails. look better with age.
10 ★ FTWeekend 4 December/5 December 2021