A decade ago, while attending a conference in an unprecedentedly prosperous and westernised Moscow, I went to interview the British KGB double agent George Blake in his dacha outside town. It was meant to be just a newspaper article, but it spiralled out of control, and my biography of him appeared last year. Other recent books of mine emerged from running into the right people at conferences in Doha and Istanbul, another city that has since almost dropped out of the international ideas exchange.
Conferences are essential to that exchange, and now they are restarting. I recently attended my first in two years (where I didn’t find a book, but did catch Covid-19). These events can change your thinking, or even your life. But so poor are most people’s presentation skills that sitting in a conference hall is the closest I’ve come as an adult to being a 13-year-old bored out of my skull in physics class. In a bid to boost quality, here’s my advice for would-be speakers:
Know that the audience is bored even before you open your mouth. You are also competing with the phone in each person’s lap. Your first redundant words — “Right, so, well, errr, as Sheila says, I’m going to be talking about . . . ” — are a signal to them to switch you off. Your mission is to prevent that.