You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to

Lali Kalili, who has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on Special Forces Soldiers turned management consultants. It's a review of Risk, a User's Guide, the latest

business self-help manual by retired general Stanley McChrystal. Lally Kalili is a professor of international

politics at Queen Mary University of London, and her most recent book is Sinews of War and Trade, Shipping and

Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. Hello, Lally, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, Thomas. I'm very excited to be talking to you. So around the time that your piece was going

to press earlier this month, US Special Forces flew into Syria to kill the ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi

al-Kurashi. And it's the sort of thing

they do relatively often in real life and all the time in the movies and on TV. And special

forces operatives hold a particular place, as they seem to, in Western popular culture and the popular

imagination. And how closely does that idea that we have cleaved to the reality of what they do?

Not very at all.

I mean, I think that there is a kind of a fantasy and public relations campaign built up around them.

In fact, I sort of stumbled into some of what I had researched for this space many years ago

when I noticed that there are whole rafts of romance

novels in which special operations forces are sort of the heroes, you know, the goody, the kind

of dark and silent and strong type. And then I, once I started researching that, I also noticed

that there were all these kinds of self-help books for building muscles and for not being a wimp, literally, and books for kids.

And then finally, of course, stumbled onto all of these management type books.

And that was just to me the most exciting bit, in part because management

self-help is such a sort of an interesting genre of writing, and particularly in the US, but also

sells really well here in the UK. And I was really curious about how there was this convergence

...