Part I

An article by J. Ashworth in The Times

Stripped of its glamour, headhunting is just another sales job; no different to selling timeshare or double-glazing. It relies heavily on cold-calling and holds no guarantees that the money will come in. City analysts and brokers, endlessly fielding calls, tend to regard headhunters as a sort of jurassic fungus. The full fee is paid over only once the candidate has taken up their new post, and some of the money may be clawed back if the company is not happy six months down the line. Still, two or three 'hits' a year is all it takes.

Part II

'The Lost Heart of Asia' by Colin Thubron

I got out and started to walk. The land looked violently unnatural, almost featureless. For a long time only the curious quality of the earth – a terrible, powdery deadness – betrayed that I was treading through the entrails of a city. It might have been sieved through the bodies of insects, so fine was it: the two-thousand-year detritus of pulverised brick, cloth, bone. It spirted beneath every footstep with a tiny explosion. Everywhere it was heaped into obscure shapes which might once have been walks, pathways, rooms, or nothing. They were bearded with grey goosefoot and camel-thorn, and seamed with a rubbled earth which had disintegrated beyond meaning, but was not virgin.