The weight of the world

摘要

In many years as a foreign correspondent, quite often in scrapes, Bagehot only once troubled Her Majesty's representatives overseas for help. This was in Kigali, six years ago, after Rwandan agents looted his hotel room. Ignoring two passports and several hundred dollars in cash, they stole the fruits of a three-week research trip through neighbouring Congo-notebooks filled with accounts of the massacres and rapine carried out by Rwandan soldiers there during the previous decade. Using software that is not commercially available, they also evaded the security settings on a laptop computer belonging to The Economist and erased its contents.