Barometer | 31 January 2013

A desert mystery

Insurgents were reported to have burned tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu as French troops surrounded the city. Timbuktu has long been a byword for a distant and unreachable place. But how did it come to be so?

— No European is known to have visited Timbuktu until Robert Adams, a sailor captured after a shipwreck off the West African coast, claimed to have been taken there as a slave in 1812. He turned up in Tangier the next year, having been sold to tobacco merchants.

— Three years later, he published an account, The Narrative of Robert Adams. Its description of Timbuktu as an ‘unimpressive’ place that failed to live up to its fabled grandeur was widely disbelieved, leading the French Société de Géographie in 1824 to offer a 10,000 franc prize to anyone who could reach the town and return with a convincing description.

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—  A Scotsman, Gordon Laing, managed to reach Timbuktu in 1826 but was killed there. The prize was claimed in 1828 by René Caillié, who agreed with Adams that it wasn’t very impressive.

— Only later was Timbuktu revealed to hold hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts dating from its time as a centre of learning between the 15th and 17th centuries.

Lines of business

The government published the detailed route for HS2 north of Birmingham, which George Osborne called an ‘engine for growth’. Does a high-speed railway necessarily result in more businessmen visiting a city? Here are the percentage changes in business visits on various French routes between 1989 and 1993, after TGV trains were introduced:

Source: Centre for European Regional and Transport Economics, University of Kent

Second-hand Austens

The 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice was celebrated this week.