Name: Book Launch: The Extraction Pattern, with Vaughan Smith and David Loyn
Start: 2026-07-22T19:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-07-22T20:30:00+01:00
Location: Frontline Club

David Loyn

Vaughan Smith

Professor Katalin Gothard

Book Launch: The Extraction Pattern, with Vaughan Smith and David Loyn

We areFrontline Club,a social enterprise started in a Paddington warehouse in 2003, originally  a gathering place for conflict journalists, writers and  friends, now boast international members from various related sectors, photographers, artists and captains of industry, all with an interest in current affairs. We run an annual events programme of  current affairs  and deliver important unreported stories of our world, in the form of talks, documentaries, books & screenings, funded by our ground floor public restaurant, membership donations & event ticket sales. Raising our own funds has enabled us to operate and champion independently journalism & freedom of speech.

Frontline Club

Journalist David Loyn in conversation with Vaughan Smith, Frontline Club Founder

Frontline Club 2026

Championing Independent Journalism & Freedom of Speech around  the Globe. Founded in Paddington London 13 Norfolk Place W2 1QJ Frontline Club is a UK Registered Charity, each event you attend pays it forward for another event.

For twenty-four years Vaughan Smith worked behind a camera in the world's war zones, from Vukovar to Kabul. He watched societies come apart, wars play out and power shift hands.After a while he started to notice something that puzzled him. The same pattern kept turning up. The countries were different, so were the cultures and the conflicts, but underneath it all the dynamics looked oddly alike. It began as a hunch and turned into something closer to an obsession. He wanted to know whether there was a hidden thread connecting war zones to the way societies rise or fall.Answering that took him a long way from journalism, into history, psychology, economics and neuroscience. The theory he arrived at questions a good deal of what we tend to assume about human nature. The Extraction Pattern, which carries a foreword by Professor Katalin Gothard of the University of Arizona, argues that what breaks societies is not compassion or cooperation. It is a recurring pattern in which a small minority draws off the wealth, power and trust of the many until the whole system starts to give way. The surprise is the remedy. Not a hunt for villains, but the rebuilding of an ordinary architecture, older than any of us, that once held the pattern in check.On the launch night of his first book, Vaughan will be in conversation with the writer and former BBC correspondent David Loyn. They will talk about how a single observation in wartime grew into a theory about the way nations, institutions and communities take shape, and what it might take to contain the pattern.Entry is free, which regulars will notice is not how we usually do things. It is also Vaughan's birthday, and he has asked for no presents: we have skipped the ticket on the understanding that you will mark the evening by buying The Extraction Pattern online during launch week (a QR code will be waiting on the night) and, once you have read it, leave an honest review on Amazon, kind or cruel. It costs about what the ticket would have, lasts considerably longer and comes with a signed bookplate on the night.You will be welcome either way; the bar takes no view, and we will raise a glass to book and birthday afterwards.

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Book Launch: The Extraction Pattern, with Vaughan Smith and David Loyn

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