The guides are the first aid. The books are the architecture.

The Extraction Pattern

Vaughan Smith · Foreword by Professor Katalin Gothard

Turn on the news and you are watching arrivals: the strongman, the courtroom, the square. Autocrats do not arrive and then hollow out a country. They arrive because it has already been hollowed. The years before are where it is decided. We are living in the years before.

Twenty-five chapters. The framework's full statement. The book diagnoses no one. It names a behaviour instead. Extraction: taking more than you give and answering for none of it. It runs in a marriage, a company, a market and a state, and it does not merely exploit weakened institutions. It is what weakens them. And it is not a counsel of despair. The book ends with how a society rebuilds the walls that hold the pattern in check, and why nobody has to wait for better leaders to start. Contain the pattern. Regard the person.

The book convenes the work of approximately twenty-eight scholars across clinical personality research, evolutionary anthropology, primatology, neuroscience, moral philosophy, Reconstruction history and dark-money architecture. Each saw something within their discipline. None saw what they all see together. The integration is the picture that comes from reading them in one room.

Foreword by Katalin Gothard, Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona, who reviewed the book's neuroscience. Much of it comes from her laboratory and her research on the neural basis of social behaviour, trust and empathy.

Paperback · Kindle · Frontline Club Books · Published 22 July 2026

The Line on the Hull

How the few take, and the many can hold them
Vaughan Smith · Frontline Club Pamphlets · No. 1

The argument in fifteen minutes: the mark Britain painted on every hull 150 years ago, and what it teaches everyone now. Read it, then pass it on.

A hundred and fifty years ago Samuel Plimsoll put a line on the side of every British merchant ship: a mark, visible from the dock, past which an owner could not load the vessel and drown the crew for the insurance. Not a plea for better men. A mark anyone could see. The pamphlet is that lesson, told for now. The entry point for readers who want the argument before the evidence.

Madison's Line

How the few take, and how Americans can hold them
Vaughan Smith · Frontline Club Pamphlets · No. 2

Pamphlet No. 2, written for American readers. The same mark, drawn for politics: the Madison Pledge, seven commitments asked of every candidate at every election, and the register that records the signatures and the refusals.

The seven commitments, with what each demands, are on the Pledge page, where the register is kept.

The publishing programme

True Regard is a publishing programme, not a single book. The four artefacts above are the first statement. Further publications from Frontline Club Books will be announced here as they are confirmed.