"It was by then I think too late."

"I discovered he had made everything up. He was presenting fiction as fact."

"Who? Start at the beginning."

"A young, dynamic researcher arrived at the university here in London. Called himself Michel Harambee, but everyone in the department knew he had made that up. Along with the accent. Some suspected him of working for the US Government. He had the confidence and charm of an Intelligence Scholar, that was for sure. That was the start. You know, he was a little too good to be true. Obviously, most researchers make up a percentage of their results, it is expected. Reality never conforms to theory unless you hide the ragged edges. And anthropology is famous for its counterfeiting. It's not just the remains of human ancestors that are faked, but myths about foreigners, about otherness and superior races, and about the whole idea of human nature itself. The biggest lies are to be found in anthropology; in history, perhaps, you might fake a date or a name or the creation of a nation, or deny that something ever happened because it is just too awful for the imagination, but here you can lie about the whole of mankind. A study of humanity cannot help but be founded on illusion; mankind's dominant evolutionary trait is that we must pretend, we must fool ourselves with a reason for our cleverness - it is what separates us from the animals, to quote another anthropocentric myth.

"With this guy, things were a little too neat. I didn't like him to start with, but that didn't stop me having talks with him in the senior common room. He was charismatic in that way. Claimed he was an expert in fusion philosophy - that's the vogue now, a salad bowl of ideas to pick at rather than a dialectic. Fits into people's lifestyles more easily. Oh, he's there briefly, enough to make an impression. He has funding from somewhere to go do some research on how boredom is assuaged in pre-capitalist societies. Off he went. He was back pretty soon; usually you take a few months to do any kind of ethnography. But he was back pretty soon, looking relaxed and like he'd had a very good time. There were rumours in the department that he was nothing more than the culture industry version of a bioprospector, a hired mercenary in the gold rush to grab what was left of traditional arts and crafts in the world and sell them as authentic commodities to the ethical shoppers of the west.

"And once again, he was bound for the bestseller list with the results of his supposed researches. He was producing a self-help book called From Boredom to Wisdom. He had manufactured fantasies of elsewhere, cultures that don't even exist anymore, probably never existed, so westerners can indulge their idle hours with amusements from around the globe. He had joked to me about how he had been advised by his publishers to use the word wisdom in his interpretations of other cultures. It was perceived as a little more fluffy and caring than colder, more measurable words like knowledge and intelligence. These words scared people, sounded like hard work, involvement. Wisdom had a easy, gentle ring; a slow, no effort learning, satisfying the need for coherent understanding against the infinite complexities of specialisations and expert data.

"Likewise, he had laughed and told me about the self-help misnomer. It is a multimillion dollar sector of the entertainment industry. There were easy pickings if you could just hit on a popular anxiety. As observers of culture, it should be particularly easy for us. In the civilisation of excess that we live in, where belief has been destroyed and there is little self-confidence, he said the best area to aim for was the Mind, Body & Spirit shelves. You know, the sort of thing your mother is always talking of, Laura. People browse there for an easy answer, the leftovers of the New Age, away from the contradictory myths of science and politics and the tyrannous monotheisms. That whole holistic sector, the philosophy of which people had once hoped might form a potent counterculture with its alternative living arrangements, its leading figures blending deep ecology and spirituality, small-is-beautiful economics, complimentary medicines and substitutes for technocratic hegemony, had been brilliantly co-opted into a subdiscipline of self-help. The human scale approach left it defenceless. Like People's Park, what was once the scene of revolt and optimism became a refuge for the spiritually homeless. That, he said, was capitalism at its most cynical, at its most sublime.

"So, through jealousy I suppose, I took it on myself to check up on some of the evidence that he'd used to support his venture. I could only really make comparisons to what previous researchers had said and what Michel said.

"I contacted his publisher, and only through an accident of mistaken identity did they investigate Michel's claims. I rang on the off chance of speaking to someone in connection with the book, and on the side of it to perhaps find out if they would be interested in my work, which was at that time nearing completion. The woman I spoke to assumed I was ringing on behalf of the university, and as I didn't have control of the conversation, I just let the assumption carry on. They agreed to investigate the matter further. They would suspend the publication. They were at that time not interested in any similar work.

"It didn't take long for the paper trail to lead to me once Michel found out about the problems at the publisher. He certainly cleared up the mistaken identity. And then I found out I was involved in something far bigger than I expected. I am to this day not sure how far up the university hierarchy the involvement went. No one had expected any complications, especially not from somewhere on campus. They thought there was a consensus that we were all on the same side. They were genuinely shocked, a gentleman's shock at finding out about unsporting behaviour.

"Of course they knew it was me, and to start with, they arranged to meet me in the senior common room and we had words. Times are changing, Lindon, they said. There is a hunger for this stuff. This is our bread and butter, Lindon. The turnover that pays for the real stuff. We're not going to fund real research without being a little profitable, harmlessly profitable in other areas. The academic world is on the brink of merger with the entertainment industry. TV, books, magazines. The people out there are interested, but they can't understand actual studies. Few of us can, eh, Lindon! So what if we mix it 1 part fact, 1 part controversy, 3 parts entertainment? Put on a show. Popularity isn't wrong, is it? Commercial can be constructive. Intelligent, committed people like yourself are sometimes too busy, too involved to see that, eh, Lindon?

"This was difficult for us old-timers, who thought only of monographs and citations, an elusive approach to the truth, and hopefully a sinecure somewhere away from the students. These young researchers wanted to be experts on TV by the time they were thirty. Suddenly there was money and celebrity in the academic world. But I said nothing for a long time; there seemed no need to. The implication was to keep quiet. Things had gone stale with the publisher, and they had started to question what was going on. They were more interested in the cause of the whole situation. They seemed to have smelled out the 1 part controversy; they saw the real story. They even had someone in the university, already, contracted to write the expose. It wasn't me.

"But formal proceedings within the university did mean that I could not work anymore. I would not retract any of the things I had said at the start of the whole affair. I thought if I maintained my integrity, I would eventually emerge victorious. But this is not how history works, at least not in the lifetime of the person concerned. You can take your principles to the grave with you, and maybe sometime posthumously you'll be patted on the back for your rectitude. Which isn't really something you can put on your resume.

"Things began to get a little ugly, and I started to think it would be best if I didn't hang around the campus too much. On far too many occasions had I been talking to colleagues, and they had just gone silent. They'd suddenly had social calendars that not even celebrities could have maintained. I was followed home once or twice by people you wouldn't argue with. I got a little nervous about the family, about myself. We moved house. There were some letters, some very well written, but nonetheless very intimidating letters that warned me to renounce any outstanding accusations I had. It was by then I think too late."