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BOCA BEACON - January 30, 2015

PROFILE – A scholar, a news correspondent, a novelist From PAGE 3 “The editor of Pravda came to watch this miracle taking place, me with my little Tandy, sending my story back to The Guardian,” he said. Later, covering the 1992 Clinton election in the U.S., filing his stories via AOL, he saw the progression, considerable in retrospect, from his time in the 1970s covering droughts in subSaharan Africa. Back then, he filed stories by giving longhand copy to a pilot to give to the nearest post office, who would then send it by Telex back to Britain. But, of course, that same ease of access to information saw the industry begin, as Martin put it, to “commit slow suicide” by giving away content. “It was clear that the business model for print journalism was going to be under attack,” he said. It’s difficult not to digress when speaking with someone whose interests mirror your own but, of course, whose experiences have advised those interests and ideas. Martin happily answered several questions about the role of advertising in journalism, politically independent media whose funds are procured by the state, and the abilitiy of journalists to be impartial in a climate where advertisers are a precious commodity. Rather than drag Beacon readers through the entire discussion, I will rather include a remark which seemed to sum up his thoughts on the matter. “You can have fair and honest journalism in the most extraordinary conditions.” He recalled being impressed by

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some Russian and Eastern European publications when he worked in those regions. “Good newspapers, however,” he said, “need freedom and commercial independence, and that can be pretty difficult to achieve.” By the time he left The Guardian he had become an associate editor. He was offered a fellowship by the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. He didn’t want to go into academia and had just published a paper called “The End of the Cold War.” “I wanted to go into a position where I could carry on doing some journalism,” he explained, “and the thinktanks were a perfect place to do that.” He was aware, he said of the sensation of living in a new world. Curious to explore the meaning of that and many other changing international currents such as the rise of India and China to global importance. During that time he published several papers for the Wilson Quarterly, the journal of the Woodrow Wilson Center, such as “Europe’s Mosque Hysteria,” and “The World’s New Numbers,” a piece about aging populations and birth rates as well as what many major media outlets had gotten wrong about those issues. He was subsequently asked by A.T. Kearney, for whom he’d acted as a consultant for several years, to run their think-tank, crucial to their work consulting with international institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the European Central Bank. “I suddenly found myself in this new

world of high-level corporate America, corporate Japan and coroporate Europe,” he said, “trying to understand what was happening … I realized that a lot of these CEOs and bankers were equally baffled at what was happening.” Martin said that in the 1990s, he and his wife, Julia, and two children, Kate and Fanny Sophia, then about to become teenagers, decided to buy a house close to the home of a French journalist he had worked with in Lebanon. The region, which he referred to as the “gastronomic heartland of France,” the Perigord, inspired, among other enterprises such as wine and food tasting and history (the famous Lascaux cave paintings are there, and it was part of the front line during the 100 Years War), his first novel. “It was really a love letter to this part of France,” he said. After that he began writing the Bruno series, about a somewhat provincial policeman (inspired by a tennis partner) who cooks and loves pretty women, as Martin described him, and occasionally brings his unique sensibilities to bear on crimes that have stymied metropolitan police officers. “There is also lots of French history in there,” he said. “This is just stuff I love to write.” He said there’s no gritty, dark streets or brutality. While there may be murders from time to time, he explained, the books are really all about Bruno, his Basset Hound, his horse and his life in the countryside.

That awareness and appreciation of the sort of cloistered small-town life even after spending so much of his life covering international economics and politics comes from his mother, he said. She gave him a sense of pride in his traditional Scottish clan community heritage but also said once that “life is short and the world is big, go out and see as much as you can.” “At the end of the day, all these big political and historical movements – it’s all about people – it’s all about how people’s lives change down on the ground, at the level of the towns, villages, community,” he said. He will speak in Sarasota about international politics, but he will divide his attention while on Boca Grande between his mysteries and current events, such as those related to Islamic movements and terrorism in France – timely in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

e h t r o us f

2nd Annual Boca Grande Lobster Bake Presented by the Boca Grande Area Chamber of Commerce

Enjoy a Valentine’s evening on the Gulf of Mexico with music, lobster and all the traditional fixings with the love of your life. Saturday, Feb. 14, 5 to 8 p.m • Range Light Beach

$75 per person