-Tali Sharot, TED

The Optimism Bias

Optimism bias is the belief that the future will be better, much better, than the past or present. And most of us display this bias. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot wants to know why: What is it about our brains that makes us overestimate the positive? She explores the question in her book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. 

Tali Sharot

In the book (and a 2011 TIME magazine cover story), she reviewed findings from both social science and neuroscience that point to an interesting conclusion: “our brains aren’t just stamped by the past. They are constantly being shaped by the future.” In her own work, she’s interested in how our natural optimism actually shapes what we remember, and her interesting range of papers encompasses behavioral research (how likely we are to misremember major events) as well as medical findings — like searching for the places in the brain where optimism lives. Sharot is a faculty member of the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences at University College London.

The Optimism Bias is published by Constable & Robinson and is available to buy here

Wilbur Smith

Corona Pictures has secured the television and film rights to three of the best-selling books by world-renowned author Wilbur Smith – BIRDS OF PREY, MONSOON and BLUE HORIZON, all published by Pan Macmillan.

A dynastic family saga of epic proportions, the series of novels tells the story of three generations of the Courtney family as it battles to secure its fortunes and its place in history in the New World that is Africa in the 17^th century. Starting with the coming-of-age story of teenager Hal Courtney’s adventures alongside the life and death of his legendary father Francis, the series chronicles a world where unimaginable treasures lie waiting for those who are first to take them. It is a time of primal ambition with extraordinary battles for this land of riches between sea-faring empires, marauding pirates, and the people who already live there…

The company plans toadapt the books over several series for a worldwide television audience. Wilbur Smith, one of the world’s most consistently bestselling authors, is published in over twenty-six languages, in 52 countries and has been a No. 1 bestseller for many years in the UK.  His estimated global sales are now over 130 million copies.    His 34^th novel,Vicious Circle, will be published by Pan Macmillan in early 2013.

Jeremy Trevathan, Wilbur Smith’s Publisher at Pan Macmillan, said: “It’s terrific to see that the potential for film and TV drama in Wilbur’s fiction is being recognised and we’re delighted to be working with Corona to bring the Courtney novels to a new generation whether it be on the small screen or through his fantastic backlist.”

Corona principals Richard Johns and Rupert Jermyn commented: “We are absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to bring Wilbur’s work to the screen. So many people in so many countries have loved his books, and we now see a great new audience for his stories.”

Kevin Conroy Scott, MD of Wilbur Smith’s literary agency, Charles Pick Consultancy Ltd, added: “Ensuring Wilbur’s legacy and the continued growth of his fan-base is of primary interest to us and the scale and ambition of Corona’s plans for a high-quality TV franchise, built around this group of titles, seemed a perfect fit.”

Praise for BIRDS OF PREY:

Birds of Prey by Wilbur Smith

“Far more than your typical pirate script … A fascinating account … Smith deftly evokes not only the horrific but also the beautiful, particularly the lush landscape of Africa.” –  The Washington Post Book World

“A rousing adventure story … Smith is a captivating storyteller. His writing is fast-paced yet richly textured. His characters are unique and intriguing … this latest epic transcends the average action-adventure yarn.” – The Orlando Sentinel

 “The scope is magnificent and the epic scale breathtaking….” – The Times

Praise for MONSOON:

Monsoon by Wilbur Smith

‘A grand tale of intrigue, deception, true love and exile.‘ – Denver Post

‘An epic… Smith joins the ranks of the grand masters ‘ – Tulsa World

“Let yourself be blown away by the hurricane of storytelling that is Monsoon.” – Sunday Times

Praise for BLUE HORIZON:

Blue Horizon by Wilbur Smith

“This is popular fiction constructed on an epic scale.” – Sunday Telegraph

“Good, clean fun: a rumbustious, colourful adventure story, crammed full of incident.” – Evening Standard

“Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared.” – The Times

Corona Pictures is a London-based production company making films and television for worldwide audiences, run by principals Richard Johns and Rupert Jermyn. Simultaneously with this rights acquisition the company has established a new division focussing solely on television production, Corona Television Limited.

Corona Pictures has recently completed darkly comic thriller film The Liability, directed by Craig Viveiros and starring Tim Roth, Jack O’Connell, Talulah Riley, KierstonWareing and Peter Mullan, which will receive its first market screenings in the Marché du Film at Cannes 2012.

Elephant Man (dir. David Lynch)

What if a library was to function like a novel or a film?

The Library is on Fire will occupy the New Soft Room at the Architectural Association over three days with a programme of texts, images and sounds: an experimental form of reading room.

Material from the collection will be available for reference during the course of the day.

Programmed by Charles Arsène-Henry & Shumon Basar

PART I: CREATURE

Thursday 3 May

12.00–6.00

Reading &Screening Room

6.00

Presentation by Charles Arsène-Henry

The fictional librarian will be introduced: a creature that searches inside books and film for the form of its intelligence.

Part II: VOLUME

Friday 4 May

12.00–6.00

Reading & Screening Room

6.00

Presentation by Shumon Basar

The Library’s ways of acquiring and organising its collection will be described, using institutional precedents that appear in films such as Toute la mémoire du monde and Wings of Desire, as well as other vessels of space/time volume.

PART III: TRACKING SHOT

Saturday 5 May

1.00

Seminar and screenings

by Michael Brooke

The film critic and theorist Michael Brooke will conduct a seminar on the language of the ‘tracking shot’ in the history of cinema, including Days of Being Wild, Week-end and The Night is Young.

 For more information, please visit http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1867

*The Library is on Fire is the second hemisphere of the future LUMA  Foundation library.

• The Guardian, Saturday 21 April 2012

Thirty years after his mother asked his father to leave and not come back, Colin Grant set out to find the man he could only remember for his anger, his gambling – and his impeccable dress sense

Colin Grant's father Bageye

In our family album a fading black and white photo of a baby is cut out so that he appears, with no background, only in outline. He seems to be hovering in mid-air. That baby is me. In the original studio portrait, I was held up by my father. But a pair of scissors was taken to the photo: he was excised. After our parent’s separation, the urge to extinguish the deleterious effect of the man that my mother, my siblings and I called “Satan” – he was a terrifying, over-zealous authoritarian – extended to every portrait of him.

My father’s absence in the image sparked a curiosity, though not about whether he might have been proudly holding aloft his child, but what he would have been wearing at the time. The importance of style was the one abiding lesson that we learned from our father, Clinton George “Bageye” Grant, a Jamaican immigrant to the UK in the late 1950s.

Bageye (whose nickname derived from his baggy eyes) regularly warned all of us children to beware that we were being observed. “You are being watched,” he said, “to see which way you turn.” By that, he meant not just how we looked but that we were being scrutinised by our English hosts to see whether we conformed to their stereotype of us as feckless wastrels. To that end, we were to adopt a kind of Jamaican bella figura – to show our best face to the world. Our father led the way, with his collection of paisley ties, cravats and a hat for every day of the week.

It was to further confound those negative domain assumptions that Bageye, who scraped together a living for his expanding family as a machinist on the production line at Vauxhall Motors, woke one morning in 1972 with the brilliant and most unlikely idea of sending my brother and me to private school.

Our father would not have been aware of the term “social mobility” but that was his aim. We were already part of a social experiment in an enlightened housing scheme in Luton, on the generously proportioned Farley Hill council estate with roads as wide as avenues, recreational parks and bluebell woods, built primarily for Irish labourers and their families.

The Irish were the main story. We, fewer than half a dozen West Indian families on the estate, were the sub-plot. But Bageye was at pains to point out the distinction that though we lived on the estate, we not from there. Our existence there was temporary: we were only passing through. No matter how we came to find ourselves on Farley Hill, the usual road of further education whether for West Indian or Irish children, led to the local comprehensive. In preparation for Bageye’s alternative grand scheme, we were to discontinue any practice to perpetuate the stereotype. Extracurricular sporting activities were outlawed, especially boxing or football. After all, Bageye was not going to make the hugefinancial sacrifice just so that we could end up academically just like him, a man whom his wife said, “couldn’t even pass worms”.

The first term approached and Bageye’s enthusiasm, perhaps not unreasonably, cooled. He began to behave like a gambler burdened with a huge debt that he was obliged to honour but without the means to do so. In any event, there were other more attractive debts to service first.

After collecting their weekly Vauxhall’s wages, the first port of call for Bageye and his West Indian friends was always Mrs Knight’s all-weekendpoker game. Over Friday and Saturday night, rum and ganja anaesthetised Bageye to his losses but the effect would wear off by Sunday morning when he emerged, blinking into the sunlight, penniless.

A little moonlighting as an unofficial minicab driver offset some of the damage, though he never bothered with the inconvenience of acquiring a driving license. The way Bageye saw it, he knew how to drive. Why did he need the state’s validation? I was never wily enough to escape being volunteered to act as Bageye’s navigator. To drive around Luton in the secondhand Mini Cooper estate with him was not to accompany a carefree soul but rather to be trapped in the presence of an unexploded bomb. Over time, you could work out how to defuse the incendiary device. First, make sure when you got in the car that you always closed the door appropriately – with sufficient strength to shut it but not so forcefully that it slammed; and, though you were meant to navigate, never ask where we were going.

Our father dressed to a point beyond distinction – as was fitting. Bageye was a connoisseur of life. He did everything with an impressive virtuosity. Even peeling an orange, so that the kiss curl of skin remained intact until the end, was conducted with elan; and you couldn’t help but admire the theatricality of his punishments, the way he managed to fold the leather belt in two, pushing each end slowly into a bulge and then snapping it back crisply before use.

Yes, Bageye had style, if nothing else. Perhaps, in the end, there was nothing else to hang on to: he kept his style – even when there was no one around to admire it. I never joined in the delicious plots to poison his coffee, or at least to spit in it. The risk was too great. Perhaps, because of this, I was sometimes regarded with suspicion by my siblings. But each of us was constantly on our guard against upsetting him. The biggest peril around the house centred on his need for absolute silence after school; before he left to begin the night shift at the car plant.

At times there was so much whispering and shushing that I often imagined us kids to be the crew of a U-boat creeping along the bottom of the ocean; while upstairs, the destroyer, HMS Bageye, was ready to drop depth charges or fire off torpedoes at the first sound of a disturbance.

There were also bewildering inconsistencies to contend with; myriad opportunities for transgression of Bageye’s idiosyncratic code. The lavatory seat was problematic. Sometimes leaving the seat up was deemed a criminal act but on other occasions putting the seat down was also reprehensible. His ire was perhaps a proxy for a larger concern. For no matter how hard he tried to wriggle out of the foolish commitment to private school, my mother wouldn’t allow it. Bageye held on to the hope that we would fail the entrance exam. His shock when we passed was palpable.

In the end the challenge, the financial recklessness of it, appealed to him. As well as moonlighting as a minicab driver, Bageye further used his car to supplement his income by trading in illicit goods; for example, smuggling booze (knocked down in price from a nearby American military base) in the boot. Though our mother lived in fear of a policeman’s knock on the door, Bageye had an amused and daring approach to any contact with Babylon (the police). If stopped, when out and about in the Mini, he would simply promote the constable immediately, so that by the end of the encounter the detective inspector happily waved him on.

The thought of sending us to private school actually gave Bageye a bigger idea of himself that he grew into; he came to inhabit it like an expensive coat that he always considered taking back to the department store until one day he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and thought: “What the hell!’ I’m worth it.”

I began to see that there were two Bageyes: a house version and one for the road. But ultimately, the terror started to take its toll, such that the sound our ears became most often tuned to, as keenly as a safe cracker’s, was the click of the front door closing that announced his departure. Bageye’s violence, often bizarre, was most often directed at my big sister: the occasion when he trapped her in an arm lock and, taking a pair of scissors, forcefully cut her nails, was not atypical. Even so, the threshold of violence that would prompt our mother to seek outside intervention was very high. Then she would call the police but balk at pressing charges.

Over time, her husband’s fits of apoplexy were thankfully accompanied by extended absences from the house. Then one day our mother summoned the courage to ask him to leave and not come back. He was not gracious. Having helped launch us into private school, Bageye was not around to finish the job. Somehow our mother, working now herself at Vauxhall Motors (all the hours permitted), scraped and saved enough to find the school fees. We thrived.

The idea of my father, as a flawed but noble man, was breached beyond repair. The antipathy towards him solidified over the next 30 years, until I reached the age he’d been when we had taken to the road in the Mini. Now I had a 10-year-old son.

I dared to consider that perhaps Bageye should not be damned permanently; that he, too, may have been wounded in that house of terror, and was a candidate for compassion. Bageye was now 82 and still living in Luton. One day in March last year, I tracked him down. I knocked on the door to his flat. A tiny, sprightly man with baggy but lambent eyes opened it. I had never known my father smile: it was disconcerting.

An elderly friend, whom I remembered fondly from Farley Hill, was waiting in the living room. They exchanged some “old-time talk”, leaving space for me to join in. Bageye beamed, telling his friend proudly: “This boy and me go back, you know; have a deep, deep connection.” The friend nodded sagely. I did not enlarge on the sentiment. The pulse of that connection might have beaten strongly in Bageye but I did not feel it: if there was a pulse, it was weak and hardly registered.

Forgiveness might have been possible but I had not mastered the art of forgetting. In those first few minutes, Bageye shook his head continually in delighted disbelief at my presence, and our reunion. He kept glancing over to me as if he feared I might disappear as miraculously as I’d arrived. And I had the peculiar feeling that I was somehow auditioning to be his son. To lessen the intensity of the polite but strained conversation, we decided to go for a walk.

It took a fair few minutes before my father settled on a hat from his impressive selection. He led the way. I was reminded of all our walks together; of me trailing behind as a child, though I now towered above him. I knew instinctively that, despite our unexpected rapprochement, I would not return: this was likely to be my only visit. We passed through the streets silently and I was pleased to see

• The Guardian, Saturday 21 April 2012

Thirty years after his mother asked his father to leave and not come back, Colin Grant set out to find the man he could only remember for his anger, his gambling – and his impeccable dress sense

In our family album a fading black and white photo of a baby is cut out so that he appears, with no background, only in outline. He seems to be hovering in mid-air. That baby is me. In the original studio portrait, I was held up by my father. But a pair of scissors was taken to the photo: he was excised. After our parent’s separation, the urge to extinguish the deleterious effect of the man that my mother, my siblings and I called “Satan” – he was a terrifying, over-zealous authoritarian – extended to every portrait of him.

My father’s absence in the image sparked a curiosity, though not about whether he might have been proudly holding aloft his child, but what he would have been wearing at the time. The importance of style was the one abiding lesson that we learned from our father, Clinton George “Bageye” Grant, a Jamaican immigrant to the UK in the late 1950s.

Bageye (whose nickname derived from his baggy eyes) regularly warned all of us children to beware that we were being observed. “You are being watched,” he said, “to see which way you turn.” By that, he meant not just how we looked but that we were being scrutinised by our English hosts to see whether we conformed to their stereotype of us as feckless wastrels. To that end, we were to adopt a kind of Jamaican bella figura – to show our best face to the world. Our father led the way, with his collection of paisley ties, cravats and a hat for every day of the week.

It was to further confound those negative domain assumptions that Bageye, who scraped together a living for his expanding family as a machinist on the production line at Vauxhall Motors, woke one morning in 1972 with the brilliant and most unlikely idea of sending my brother and me to private school.

Our father would not have been aware of the term “social mobility” but that was his aim. We were already part of a social experiment in an enlightened housing scheme in Luton, on the generously proportioned Farley Hill council estate with roads as wide as avenues, recreational parks and bluebell woods, built primarily for Irish labourers and their families.

The Irish were the main story. We, fewer than half a dozen West Indian families on the estate, were the sub-plot. But Bageye was at pains to point out the distinction that though we lived on the estate, we not from there. Our existence there was temporary: we were only passing through. No matter how we came to find ourselves on Farley Hill, the usual road of further education whether for West Indian or Irish children, led to the local comprehensive. In preparation for Bageye’s alternative grand scheme, we were to discontinue any practice to perpetuate the stereotype. Extracurricular sporting activities were outlawed, especially boxing or football. After all, Bageye was not going to make the hugefinancial sacrifice just so that we could end up academically just like him, a man whom his wife said, “couldn’t even pass worms”.

The first term approached and Bageye’s enthusiasm, perhaps not unreasonably, cooled. He began to behave like a gambler burdened with a huge debt that he was obliged to honour but without the means to do so. In any event, there were other more attractive debts to service first.

After collecting their weekly Vauxhall’s wages, the first port of call for Bageye and his West Indian friends was always Mrs Knight’s all-weekendpoker game. Over Friday and Saturday night, rum and ganja anaesthetised Bageye to his losses but the effect would wear off by Sunday morning when he emerged, blinking into the sunlight, penniless.

A little moonlighting as an unofficial minicab driver offset some of the damage, though he never bothered with the inconvenience of acquiring a driving license. The way Bageye saw it, he knew how to drive. Why did he need the state’s validation? I was never wily enough to escape being volunteered to act as Bageye’s navigator. To drive around Luton in the secondhand Mini Cooper estate with him was not to accompany a carefree soul but rather to be trapped in the presence of an unexploded bomb. Over time, you could work out how to defuse the incendiary device. First, make sure when you got in the car that you always closed the door appropriately – with sufficient strength to shut it but not so forcefully that it slammed; and, though you were meant to navigate, never ask where we were going.

Our father dressed to a point beyond distinction – as was fitting. Bageye was a connoisseur of life. He did everything with an impressive virtuosity. Even peeling an orange, so that the kiss curl of skin remained intact until the end, was conducted with elan; and you couldn’t help but admire the theatricality of his punishments, the way he managed to fold the leather belt in two, pushing each end slowly into a bulge and then snapping it back crisply before use.

Yes, Bageye had style, if nothing else. Perhaps, in the end, there was nothing else to hang on to: he kept his style – even when there was no one around to admire it. I never joined in the delicious plots to poison his coffee, or at least to spit in it. The risk was too great. Perhaps, because of this, I was sometimes regarded with suspicion by my siblings. But each of us was constantly on our guard against upsetting him. The biggest peril around the house centred on his need for absolute silence after school; before he left to begin the night shift at the car plant.

At times there was so much whispering and shushing that I often imagined us kids to be the crew of a U-boat creeping along the bottom of the ocean; while upstairs, the destroyer, HMS Bageye, was ready to drop depth charges or fire off torpedoes at the first sound of a disturbance.

There were also bewildering inconsistencies to contend with; myriad opportunities for transgression of Bageye’s idiosyncratic code. The lavatory seat was problematic. Sometimes leaving the seat up was deemed a criminal act but on other occasions putting the seat down was also reprehensible. His ire was perhaps a proxy for a larger concern. For no matter how hard he tried to wriggle out of the foolish commitment to private school, my mother wouldn’t allow it. Bageye held on to the hope that we would fail the entrance exam. His shock when we passed was palpable.

In the end the challenge, the financial recklessness of it, appealed to him. As well as moonlighting as a minicab driver, Bageye further used his car to supplement his income by trading in illicit goods; for example, smuggling booze (knocked down in price from a nearby American military base) in the boot. Though our mother lived in fear of a policeman’s knock on the door, Bageye had an amused and daring approach to any contact with Babylon (the police). If stopped, when out and about in the Mini, he would simply promote the constable immediately, so that by the end of the encounter the detective inspector happily waved him on.

The thought of sending us to private school actually gave Bageye a bigger idea of himself that he grew into; he came to inhabit it like an expensive coat that he always considered taking back to the department store until one day he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and thought: “What the hell!’ I’m worth it.”

I began to see that there were two Bageyes: a house version and one for the road. But ultimately, the terror started to take its toll, such that the sound our ears became most often tuned to, as keenly as a safe cracker’s, was the click of the front door closing that announced his departure. Bageye’s violence, often bizarre, was most often directed at my big sister: the occasion when he trapped her in an arm lock and, taking a pair of scissors, forcefully cut her nails, was not atypical. Even so, the threshold of violence that would prompt our mother to seek outside intervention was very high. Then she would call the police but balk at pressing charges.

Over time, her husband’s fits of apoplexy were thankfully accompanied by extended absences from the house. Then one day our mother summoned the courage to ask him to leave and not come back. He was not gracious. Having helped launch us into private school, Bageye was not around to finish the job. Somehow our mother, working now herself at Vauxhall Motors (all the hours permitted), scraped and saved enough to find the school fees. We thrived.

The idea of my father, as a flawed but noble man, was breached beyond repair. The antipathy towards him solidified over the next 30 years, until I reached the age he’d been when we had taken to the road in the Mini. Now I had a 10-year-old son.

I dared to consider that perhaps Bageye should not be damned permanently; that he, too, may have been wounded in that house of terror, and was a candidate for compassion. Bageye was now 82 and still living in Luton. One day in March last year, I tracked him down. I knocked on the door to his flat. A tiny, sprightly man with baggy but lambent eyes opened it. I had never known my father smile: it was disconcerting.

An elderly friend, whom I remembered fondly from Farley Hill, was waiting in the living room. They exchanged some “old-time talk”, leaving space for me to join in. Bageye beamed, telling his friend proudly: “This boy and me go back, you know; have a deep, deep connection.” The friend nodded sagely. I did not enlarge on the sentiment. The pulse of that connection might have beaten strongly in Bageye but I did not feel it: if there was a pulse, it was weak and hardly registered.

Forgiveness might have been possible but I had not mastered the art of forgetting. In those first few minutes, Bageye shook his head continually in delighted disbelief at my presence, and our reunion. He kept glancing over to me as if he feared I might disappear as miraculously as I’d arrived. And I had the peculiar feeling that I was somehow auditioning to be his son. To lessen the intensity of the polite but strained conversation, we decided to go for a walk.

It took a fair few minutes before my father settled on a hat from his impressive selection. He led the way. I was reminded of all our walks together; of me trailing behind as a child, though I now towered above him. I knew instinctively that, despite our unexpected rapprochement, I would not return: this was likely to be my only visit. We passed through the streets silently and I was pleased to see that he had retained his sense of style. Bageye walked with the resigned majesty of a footballer on the losing side in an FA Cup final making his way up the steps to collect his runners-up consolation medal. There was dignity in defeat.

Bageye at the Wheel, by Colin Grant, is published by Jonthan Cape

I'm Not Really Here

Paul Lake’s autobiography has been shortlisted for this year’s British Sports Book Awards, Football Book of the Year now in it’s 10th year, with I’m Not Really Here. 

The winners will be announced at the Savoy Hotel in London on 21st May, with all category winners then entered into an online public vote to find the overall British sports book of the year. The award organisers are currently negotiating with SkySports TV for highlights of the ceremony to be televised, with a 30-minute programme anticipated on 25th May and repeated over the weekend of 26th/27th May.

I’m Not Really Here is out in paperback in August 2012 published by Century

Football Book of the Year
A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng (Yellow Jersey)
Got, Not Got: The A-Z of Lost Football Culture, Treasures and Pleasures by Derek Hammond & Gary Silke (Pitch Publishing)
I’m Not Really Here: A Life of Two Halves by Paul Lake (Century)
The Management: Scotland’s Great Football Bosses by Michael Grant & Rob Robertson (Birlinn)
The Smell of Football by Mick Rathbone (Vision Sports Publishing)
There’s a Golden Sky: How Twenty Years of the Premier League has Changed Football Forever by Ian Ridley (Bloomsbury)

Read the shortlists in full here