Patrick Radden Keefe

There's a lot of kind of posting of a sort of a kind of aspirational sort where they're, you know, there they are kind of with champagne and beautiful private clubs in London and so forth.

So, yeah.

No, Akbar Shamji appears thus far not to have faced any consequences for lying so extravagantly to the police in this case.

And I should also say Akbar Shamji clearly knows much more about what happened to Zach than anybody else who is alive today and won't tell the Brettlers and won't tell the police and wouldn't tell me and seems to be facing very little scrutiny or accountability for that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And listen, I think you need to look no further than, I mean, even in the cases Litvinenko, the really kind of undeniable cases in which Russian assassins came to Britain and used very powerful weapons to try, and in some cases successfully, to assassinate people,

The diplomatic response, there at least there was a diplomatic response.

But when you look at the diplomatic response itself, it's, you know, they expelled a few diplomats, right?

It wasn't, you know, there was no real sense of kind of consequences.

And then short of that, there are all these other cases in which you have, you know, people kind of dropping left and right in London and a general policy on the part of the Metropolitan Police to say nothing to see here.

It's interesting.

It's something that only a few of the reviewers of my book have picked up on.

But if you're reading closely, empire is a thread that runs all the way through it.

So there are deeper roots to this history.

And I think you could say that a lot of what made the city splendid to begin with was the proceeds of larceny on a grand scale.

You know, listen, I lived in London myself, 2000, 2001.

And I still love London.

I was just there.

I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge just in part, because I'm not a joyless human being, that it's a marvelous place, right?

And I think that the tricky kind of queasy thing to hold in your head is that part of what gives it the kind of dynamism and the energy that it has