A smartphone surrounded by numerous social media posts and like icons, depicting digital interaction
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid Thursday 9th April 2026
Right. LinkedIn.
You know, I was thinking about this the other day, or rather, I was forced to think about it because some algorithm had decided that what I really needed at 7:42 in the morning, while I was still half-asleep and trying to remember why I exist, was yet another notification telling me that Kevin from Supply Chain Optimisation had “viewed my profile.”
Lila de Alba, FT Weekend, New Jersey, Saturday, 7th March 2026
In an age when the airwaves hum with the discordant symphony of populist rage and algorithmic resentment, Martyn de Tours’ Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers emerges not merely as a novel, but as a clarion call for the reclamation of decency in a fractured world. Published amid the lingering echoes of the MAGA era’s toxic legacy, this 428-page hybrid of thriller, manifesto, and philosophical pilgrimage invites readers into a labyrinth where Celtic heritage becomes a bulwark against the encroaching tides of authoritarianism and intellectual decay. De Tours, the pseudonym of the contrarian strategist Martyn Jones, a figure whose prolific output has long danced on the edges of strategy and speculation, crafts a narrative that is as lush as it is urgent, weaving personal introspection with a bold blueprint for collective renewal. It is a book that demands we confront the “dirty war” waged by the far right on the Enlightenment’s fragile gains, while proposing a democratic alternative rooted in plurality, equity, and environmental stewardship. In doing so, it stands as a testament to the enduring power of ideas in an era of manufactured ignorance.
Petula Clarkson, The New Yorker, New Jersey, Saturday, 7th March 2026
In a literary landscape increasingly cluttered with the disposable and the derivative, Martyn de Tours’ Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers arrives like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into a country club. It is a work of breathtaking intellectual audacity, a “Digital Celtic Covenant” that refuses to politely deconstruct the status quo, choosing instead to incinerate it. Part high-octane spy thriller, part “passive Marxist” manifesto, it is the definitive literary antidote to the toxic sludge of the MAGA era and the burgeoning “fetid imperialist conceit” of the extreme right.
Pamela Paddington, Times Literary Supplement, Oxford, Saturday, 7th March 2026
There are novels that announce themselves with a trumpet blast, and others that arrive like weather. Celtic Domination by Martyn de Tours belongs firmly to the latter category: a book that drifts in on a sea-fog of memory, mysticism, political anxiety, and intellectual ambition, and then, rather unexpectedly, begins rearranging the furniture of the reader’s mind.
Heidi Katushka, Times Literary Supplement, Oxford, Saturday, 7th March 2026
In Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers, Martyn de Tours (a pseudonym of the prolific, contrarian strategist Martyn Jones) has produced a work that is at once a novel, a manifesto, a pilgrimage memoir, and a speculative blueprint for pan-Celtic resurgence. Published in 2025 and running to some 428 pages in its paperback edition, the book arrives like a fever dream dispatched from the Camino de Santiago, where the author has evidently spent considerable time walking, talking, and ruminating. The result is a text that defies easy categorization, part sibling reunion laced with intrigue, part philosophical treatise on identity and power, part utopian pamphlet for a “Celtic Union”, and yet it coheres, after a fashion, through sheer audacity and the insistent pulse of its Celtic romanticism.
Review: The Great Data Schism – Why the ‘Schmesh’ is a Schmess
Paula Prada Price, New College Tech Review, Notting Hill, Friday, 6th March 2026
Martyn Jones’s F*CK DATA MESH is a bracing, profane, and essential Broadside against the Silicon Valley hype machine.*
In the glittering circus of modern data tech, where vendors hawk “revolutionary” architectures like snake oil at a Silicon Valley swap meet, Martyn Jones has lobbed what can only be described as a literary Molotov cocktail titled F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge. It’s less a book than a gleefully profane haymaker aimed squarely at the jaw of the industry’s latest sacred cow. And reader, it connects.
Review: The Great Data Schism – Why the ‘Mesh’ is a Mess
Lady Amanda Percival, The Wired Wire, Kensington, Friday, 6th March 2026
Martyn Jones’s F*CK DATA MESH is a bracing, profane, and essential Broadside against the Silicon Valley hype machine.*
In the hushed boardrooms of the Fortune 500, “Data Mesh” has become the latest secular religion. It promises a decentralized utopia where data is treated as a product and domain owners are liberated from the “monolithic” tyranny of the central data warehouse. But according to Martyn Jones, a man whose career has seen the rise and fall of more tech fads than a McKinsey slide deck, this new paradigm is less of a revolution and more of a “fraudulent flim-flam sauce” served up by consultants looking for their next utilization spike.
F*CK DATA MESH: A polemic against fashionable nonsense in the data economy
Alicia Altmann, The Middle Digital Review, Chicago, 5th March 2026.
In the technology industry, few phrases age faster than the latest architectural revolution. “Serverless”, “big data”, “blockchain”, each arrives with evangelical certainty before quietly settling into the background noise of enterprise IT. Into this cycle of hype steps Martyn Jones’s gleefully abrasive book, F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge*. Its title alone signals that this is less a manual than a polemic: a sharply written protest against what the author sees as the fashionable amnesia of modern data discourse.
F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions
Review by Bella Carmela, WiredWiredWired, Silicon Valley, Thursday 5th March 2026
In the hyper-connected, AI-obsessed circus of modern enterprise tech, where every startup pitches a “revolutionary” data paradigm like it’s the next iPhone, Martyn Jones drops a bomb: Fck Data Mesh*. Subtitled The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge, this 2025 manifesto isn’t your typical dry treatise on ETL pipelines or cloud migrations. It’s a rollicking, profane takedown of the industry’s sacred cows… Data Mesh, Lakehouses, and the endless hype cycle that turns solid data strategies into vaporware. Written with the acerbic wit of a Welsh data veteran who’s seen it all (from mainframes to metadata meltdowns), Jones channels the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson meets Dilbert, urging businesses to wake up before their next “transformative” initiative sinks another billion into the swamp.
THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY
By Vanessa Bell, Madrid, 4th March 2026
In Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery, a sprawling and impassioned jeremiad against the moral rot at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, the author diagnoses a profound crisis in the Western liberal order. Published in 2025, the book posits honour not as a quaint Victorian relic but as an indispensable strategic asset, the ethical scaffolding that once underpinned alliances, restrained imperial overreach, and lent credibility to diplomatic endeavours. Its erosion, Jones argues, has precipitated a descent into what he terms “global thuggery”: a world where power is exercised through naked coercion, transactional extortion, and the commodification of international relations into protection rackets. Drawing on an eclectic pantheon of thinkers, from Kant and Lao Tzu to Martin van Creveld and Paul Kennedy, Jones traces this decline from the triumphalism of the post-Cold War era, through the neoconservative adventurism of the Bush administration, to the brazen populism of Trump and his unlikely bedfellows, such as Elon Musk, whom Jones caricatures as a “Bond villain with broadband” fusing Silicon Valley libertarianism with demagogic excess.
GOOD STRATEGY 