Thanks for that article @Choux
Very interesting.
A few thought provoking standouts (It's a long article) :
“The problem is that finance is useless. The solution is to try and do something useful with the only thing it produces: the money it makes for the winners … Meaning has to be found in what they subsequently do with the money they have made. For many of them, the most valuable thing they can do with their riches is establish a reputation outside the world of finance which matches the image they have in their own heads. It is for this reason that so many people in finance, after achieving their fortune, become obsessed with wanting to be the thing they know themselves to be: a philosopher king.”
"Appraisals of philanthropy might be assembled around the following themes: the dominance of the giver; issues of control, accountability and legitimacy; conditions attached to the giving; the self-aggrandisement of the donor; actual as opposed to asserted or imagined impact; the ethical foundations upon which the philanthropist’s wealth was built; and the more subtle – but no less powerfully insidious – feelings or obligations of indebtedness and being beholden to the source of the gift. Arguably, there is no such thing as a ‘pure gift’ as all such transactions create power relationships between the donor and the recipient."
" it is difficult to convey the spirit, the mood and the aesthetic of the place which Wace – and his many highly skilled employees – have created there. Not least of these difficulties is that all staff and visitors have had to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), thus preventing or inhibiting the communication of their experiences to the outside world. When asked about the reasons for the NDAs Wace, or his spokespeople, resort to saying ‘Tanera may seem like a mysterious place sometimes, but this is largely to keep the mystique and magic for those who visit’"
"Like many powerful and rich men, Wace attempts to control this public narrative, and has thus far been successful in doing so."
"What might constitute ‘caring’ is not up for debate and consultation with Coigach inhabitants has played no part in shaping decisions which will directly affect their future(s). They have not been invited to articulate their priorities in terms of the economic, cultural and social wellbeing of the peninsula. From our conversations, comments like these were not untypical: ‘I am increasingly feeling displaced or unplaced since Wace bought the Badentarbat estate’, ‘I think a lot of us were taken in by him to begin with. He was different when he first came, but he has changed quite a bit and is now showing his true self’. The complexity here is that this control is – at best – nuanced, inflected and complicated by the language of philanthropy and of ‘doing good’. I sense that it is this dimension of how Wace operates which unnerves and irks people the most. The question of control extends beyond the powers that accompany ownership but also to matters around publicity, who tells the story and how that story is told. Those who might be able to ‘tell the story’ from their own experience of actually working on Tanera are forbidden to do so by virtue of having to sign an NDA. "
My chief takeaway - lots of secrecy and NDA's , a lot of information is hard to come by. Just Harry's sort of man.
I am even more sure that Jonathan Wace of the Running Grave is based on Ian Wace although hopefully Ian Wace isn't involved in criminality and sexual exploitation. I'm not sure he's the kind of person JKR would be overly friendly with. Maybe she is friends with the ex wife. 😉