Deviens ce que tu es. Become who you are. That was the advice of Lacoste about 30 years ago, lifted directly from Nietzsche, master of the self. For sure when I wore my first overpriced polo shirt with its little alligator on the breast, it made me feel different, someone apart (bet in retrospect not in the least more me).

Every decade or so reinsurers get fixated on a bit of tech wizardry, and pursue it with vigour. In the 20-teens it was Blockchain. Now it’s AI. Back in the 90s, the internet was the next must-have technological innovation.

Chernobyl’s nuclear accident was a defining event for many people of a certain age. As a boy, I literally lost sleep over my worry that France would suffer a plague of radiation sickness when the toxic clouds blew over us, raining death from the skies.

No one is sure, but the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is said by some to have been first to declare that the three types of falsehood are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Little in France was ever more controversial than Superphénix. My dad couldn’t stop talking about it, because it was supposed to make its own fuel.

About halfway through the storm-induced, two-hour interruption of the France-Iraq match, I began to think about an Insurance Technology Diary entry.

Claude was down for about an hour yesterday. I don’t mean my great aunt’s fiancé (although Uncle Claude did occasionally pop in for a natter).

People of a certain age remember word processers. These computing devices were not computers per se. Unlike the modern desktop…

I flew around Europe quite a lot during my years as an underwriter. As every business traveller knows, being among the workplace jet-set adds up…