Bartimaeus and world development
The Kampuchea crisis in 1979 marked the beginning of my interest in world development. An advertisement on the back of New Statesman prompted me to send £5 from my student grant to assist the aid effort.
The world was, of course, very simple in the eyes of a teenager in the first year at the London School of Economics. There were the people who were right and the people who were wrong – and being right or wrong depended on whether or not I agreed with them.
Solving problems was …