Since 2022 City of Words has been a publishing house. But it began life in the 1990s as a column in The Guardian, a UK newspaper. The idea came from Liz Jobey, then The Guardian’s literary editor; its godparent was the paper’s chief political columnist, Hugo Young (1938–2003). The name was taken from the title of a book by the literary scholar Tony Tanner (1935–1998), who borrowed the phrase from a sentence in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire. The column appeared weekly, filed from wherever I was when the deadline fell, the first in May 1995, the last in March 1999.

There was no brief. I wrote about information technology, literature, the arts, anthropology, arms control, sexual politics, natural history – more or less whatever I liked (or, on occasion, disliked). Some pieces were topical, some timeless, some serious, some droll. There were short-form essays, jeux d’esprit, reportage from remote places, profiles, meditations and chronicles of past time. Following their first publication, a number of the columns were recast for syndication or republication elsewhere (these are the versions included here). Others have been revised or expanded, and given more fitting headlines, sometimes with an afterword. Most – though not all – included in this collection are in order of original publication.

The column was eclectic, but there were recurring themes, including street art, body modification, the survival of the printed book, the nature of lists and filing systems, and life in the age of surveillance. Sometimes I wrote about my work as a researcher and aid worker in Eastern Africa, or as a reporter elsewhere. There were sketches of individuals, some living, some dead, including the actress and author Joan Collins, the mediaeval poet and visionary Jelaluddin Rumi, the tag artist Drax, the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998), and the artist formerly known – and now known once again – as Prince (1958–2016).

City of Words wasn’t an opinion column, but it took a position on certain issues, supporting the campaign for a global ban on anti-personnel landmines and the struggle to maintain BBC World Service radio, and arguing for a more concerted international response to war and famine in Sudan. In 1997, following the Ottawa Convention that prohibited the use of landmines, the column proposed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which came to pass a year later. Other pieces argued for the introduction of greater restrictions on the use of motor vehicles in towns and cities, for the protection of pre-industrial forms of human life and for conservation of endangered primate species.

Things have changed; and seldom for the better. In journalism, the fight to maintain standards of accuracy and probity becomes ever more urgent in the expanding universe of online media, where untruth thrives. In the case of the arms trade – arguably the greatest of the evils of our time – campaigns to rid the world of landmines and cluster bombs, and still more diabolical weapons systems, are faltering in a political environment inimical to arms control. (In 2025, ominously, a number of European countries announced their unilateral withdrawal from the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.) In Eastern Africa, in 2011, after decades of conflict, South Sudan finally achieved independence; it is now rapidly on its way to becoming a failed state. To the north, what remains of the old Sudan has been reduced by violent conflict and the erosion of government to the site of one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters.

Authoritarian governments are on the rise; non-governmental organisations increasingly constrained. The UN is diminished. The last sequestered communities succumb to globalisation. The seas are pillaged to feed land-dwellers. The great apes face extinction. Such developments merge into the growing global crisis, and an international order in a state of radical transformation. There’s not much good news. But the world is wide, the road is long, the story not yet over.

In the latter days of print it was often said that newspapers had too many columnists and commentators. Today there are far more, in new media and in established publications. Those who bemoan this surge of views and opinion are likely to be commentators themselves, ie we are hypocrites. Nevertheless, it’s true. There is too much comment; too many scraps of sensation and opinion, designed to distract rather than inform. Too much lifestyle journalism, too much abject endorsement of consumerism and celebrity culture, too much falsehood and spin – too much of nothing.

What there can never be enough of is honest, accurate, responsible, detailed, diligent, shrewd, historically-informed, fact-based, impartial, fearless, independent, responsibly edited, first-hand news reporting. This kind of journalism, once a source of pride for those working in a flawed profession, is becoming, like the great apes, an endangered species. Would there had been more of it in City of Words. Some topics I wrote about there merited investigative journalism rather than a think-piece. But it’s always cheaper and easier to hire a columnist than put a reporter in the field. Thus C.P. Scott’s well-worn adage – ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’ – gives way to the jocular variant: ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive’.

In the era of digital communications, global corporations are the main beneficiaries. It’s harder for the individual content provider (to use corporate terminology) to keep control of their work, and generally harder to make a living from it. But it is also true that the internet has potentially expanded every writer’s audience – mine included – lowering the cost of entry, narrowing the gap between author and reader, and making new kinds of publication and collaboration and literary performance possible.

In the hands of certain writers the newspaper column can rise to the level of literature. Foremost in Britain in my lifetime has been the playwright Michael Frayn. During my schooldays, when he was still working as a journalist, I would read his pieces – first in The Guardian, then in The Observer – with mirth and awe. Two decades later the poet James Fenton’s contributions to The Independent renewed this strain of wit and learning, bringing to it a cosmopolitan vision of world politics. In the 1980s the ‘Remainders’ column in the London Times Literary Supplement, written by the antiquarian bookseller and historian of science Eric Korn (1933–2014), took literary and scientific erudition to a baroque level. And Eric Korn’s successor at the TLS, the poet Hugo Williams, practiced until a few years ago, every other week, in ‘Freelance’, a revelatory art of memory. Today there is a new generation of writers experimenting with mutations of the genre in digital media. Their work is a sign that there’s still something in the form that is worth aspiring to.

Acknowledgements

In the 1990s it was unusual for a columnist to be given the free rein I enjoyed at The Guardian. For this, thanks to Liz Jobey, and a tip of the hat to Alan Rusbridger (then editor of The Guardian, subsequently editor of Prospect), and to the late Georgina Henry (1960–2014). It takes a village – a city even – to write a column, so there are a number of other acknowledgments to be made: to the family members, friends and acquaintances who helped or hosted me when I was writing City of Words, to the readers who read it and responded to it, and the editors who ensured its readability.

First, the editors. In The Guardian’s then-perpetual process of redesign the column was frequently moved from one part of the printed paper to another. A succession of editors and sub-editors shepherded it during its wanderings – most of them have now gone on to higher things, either at The Guardian or elsewhere. Here, for the record, is the roll call: Giles Foden, Murray Armstrong, Jenny Turner, Charlie English, Stephen Moss, Matt Seaton, Fiachra Gibbons, Gertie O’Callaghan, Carrie O’Grady, Veronica Horwell, Sabine Durrant, Claire Armitstead, Simon Hattenstone, Roger Alton and Ian Katz. A number of the columns were re-edited to their benefit by Patrick Ensor (1946–2007) for publication in The Guardian Weekly edition.

In writing the column I had the assistance of the largely anonymous researchers at the Guardian and Observer library, an institution soon transformed, with others like it, by the rise of digital communication. My thanks to them, and to Guardian readers, whose responses, whether sympathetic, combative or corrective, were a consistent source of encouragement. City of Words was, I think, the first column in a UK newspaper to publish the writer’s email address. Some predicted that I would be deluged with messages from lunatics; in the event, salutary corrections, interesting observations and the occasional gratifying commendation were the order of the day. (That’s how it was in the pre-troll era.) Among readers, particular thanks to Alison Leonard, Pat Parris, Philippe Hunt and the late Sarah McAlister.

Despite advice and assistance from experts, editors and readers there were still errors. These errors – and the perennially urgent issue of accuracy in journalism – are discussed in some of the pieces. Two years after I started writing the column, not before time, The Guardian appointed a Readers’ Editor who instituted a feature dealing with readers’ complaints and issues of journalistic ethics. Two corrections to City of Words appeared here. One was apropos Bertrand Russell’s spell in prison (‘Writers as prisoners’); another concerned the Brazilian law on sex change surgery (‘Erotic engineering in Brazil’). These corrections have been noted and incorporated.

There are further acknowledgements to be made, both professional and personal. A number of the pieces were republished in longer versions in The New York Review of Books (these are the versions included here). Publication in The NYRB gave me the opportunity to refine and extend what had originally been written under the pressure of a weekly deadline. It exposed these pieces (and other articles commissioned directly by The NYRB) to the attention of two great editors, Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) and Bob Silvers (1929–2017), co-editors of the Review during its first four decades.

Writing City of Words, needless to say, was a part-time occupation. (As I recollect, The Guardian paid me £350 sterling per week.) I wrote the column in the interstices of a career as a reporter and research anthropologist in Africa and elsewhere. Some of this time I was based in London; but many pieces were written from places outside Britain, where I was travelling as a consultant to aid agencies or human rights organizations, or on assignment for publications other than The Guardian. Over the four-year period the countries included Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, the Sudans, Senegal, Hungary, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Brazil, the Bahamas, Cuba, Canada and the United States. Acknowledgments are due to the following organizations for sending me to these places: Save the Children Fund (UK), The Open Society Institute (now the Open Society Foundations), the Media Development Loan Fund (now the Media Development Investment Fund), the European Community Humanitarian Office, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The New Yorker, the BBC World Service, and Condé Nast Traveller.

In the late 1990s, when I was writing the column, the implications of digital media for the future of journalists and journalism were only beginning to be understood. At that time some of the freelance contributors to The Guardian, myself included, were involved in a dispute with the management of the paper over copyright and syndication. Thanks to the efforts of Carol Lee, Joan Smith, Maureen Duffy, Bernie Corbett, Steve Bell and others this issue was resolved, for the most part in favour of the freelancers. Acknowledgments are also due, in this regard, to the assistance of my then literary agent, Alexandra Pringle, later Publishing Director of Bloomsbury, now director of the writing consultancy Silk Road Slippers.

And there’s more. The debts are many; it’s a pleasant obligation to record them here. During the years I wrote the column friends and relatives were an important source of advice, support and correction. I owe especial thanks to Nick Rankin, Maggie Gee, Emily Walmsley and Wesley Kerr; also to Ken Anderson, Ian Buruma, Isabel Fonseca, Darryl Pinckney, James Fenton, Tani Sumie and Jenny Hughes.

And to those beloved and now deceased, who died before their time: Tim Swales (d. 1991), Eduardo Guimarães (d. 1996), Ramadan Muchoki (d. 1998), Athos Demetriou (d. 1999), and Steven Mathews (d. 1998 – see ‘The Death of Steven’).

Further thanks – for one thing and another – to the following: Sherman Hawthorne, Jok Madut Jok, John Gross (1935–2011), Claire Tomalin, John Hatt, Julian Barnes, Carmen Callil (1938–2022), Sara Marsh, Pat Kavanagh (1940–2008), Julie Kavanagh, Deborah Manzolillo Nightingale, Will Eaves, Sean French, David Jenkins, Melissa North, Tchaik Chassy, Lucretia Stewart, Michael Neve (d. 2019), Fábio Araujo, David Keen, Paul Henley, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Finder, Aryeh Neier, Andrew Timpson (1950–2015), Khalid Nazir (1952–2016), David Leibel, Michael Rutland, John Shannon, Lincoln Reyes, Hamish Tristram, James Campbell, Sarah Spankie, Sarah Miller, Joan Wright (1951–2017), Tom Walmsley, and Clare and Alex Wilks.

Many of the pieces were written while I was away from home. Sometimes I was in Shropshire, visiting my parents, John Creagh Ryle (1915–2000) and Melody Ryle (1917–2007); sometimes staying with one or other of my sisters and brothers-in-law – Anne and Barry Robertson in Ontario, or Caroline and John Walmsley in Hampshire; sometimes with friends abroad: with Philip Winter in Athi River in Kenya, Peter Fry in Rio de Janeiro, Belinda Stewart-Cox in Bangkok, Ken Anderson and Jean-Marie Simon in Washington DC, or Sarah Olney (1960–2020) and Gavin Olney in Mjimwema, Tanzania, and later in Cheltenham, England.

During the academic year 1996–1997 I held a research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford. My thanks to the warden and the fellows and staff of Nuffield, and to the Scott Trust.

Acknowledgment is also due to the specialist writers and researchers that I had occasion to consult, both in print and in person. Among those who responded to my enquiries were Karyl Whitman, Manoj Duraisingh, Wayne Vos, A. R. Thatcher (1926–2010), James Boyle, Steve Goose, Bill Arkin, Julian Evans, Nicholas Shakespeare, Patrick Gilkes, Astier Almedom, Caroline Dakers, Paul Jefferson, and Terence Ranger (1929–2015). Naturally, none of them has any responsibility for errors that remain.

Finally, for their help in the selection of these columns and seeing the book to press, my thanks to Liz Jobey, Deborah Manzolillo Nightingale, Sara Marsh, Max Callimanopulos, Kit Kidner, Joanna Oyediran and Caroline Walmsley. ★