Sarah Ditum looks back on the Jason Arday tragedy:
I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about. If the plagiarism in his PhD had been dealt with at the time; if Cambridge had vetted his work; if his publisher had factchecked his manuscript and done him the kindness of rejecting it; if the allegations of his academic malpractice had been dealt with openly in the specialist press, rather than hushed up until they became a legitimate scandal — then maybe Arday would have been spared the punishing glare of a public life.
But he wanted it so much. One of the embarrassing qualities of Great and Unfortunate Things is the number of people Arday claims to have encountered who prophesied his greatness. I do not believe that, for example, he met a woman in a Brazilian favela who told him he had a special destiny. I do believe that Arday wanted this to be the truth, and he pursued it, ill-equipped though he was, into the wide-open ocean, fabricating the record of his journey as he went. The unluckiest thing to happen to him was his own success in getting what he thought he deserved.
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