It is said that sooner or later the small volcano that is John McCain will blow. The presidential candidate has a famously short temper. At some point, during a long and rough electoral campaign, the wrong question will be asked...
Read moreAt the offices of a high street bank, I was waiting to meet the manager. The door to a boardroom was half-open and, on the wall opposite where I was sitting, there was a blackboard on which various ra-ra business...
Read moreMr Blobby of Crinkly Bottom has spoken. The best thing that could happen at the next election, he says, would be for no one to vote at all. Politicians have had their turn, now the people should have their say....
Read moreIt is time to doff the cap to a developer, to utter grateful thanks to a member of that much-criticised group, the energy companies. They may have resisted a windfall tax and made unfortunate jokes about profiteering from the energy...
Read moreEvery generation over the past 60 years believes that snobbery is on the way out, and without fail each of them turns out to be wrong. Class prejudice never disappears, but merely changes its character. The real division today, for...
Read moreLet us not panic. The news that Sebastian Coe is to launch the Cultural Olympiad by putting on his running shorts and sprinting through Tate Britain may not be encouraging. It might even justify fears that other desperate attempts to...
Read moreIn order for any kind of civic virtue to be taken seriously in 2008, some kind of award must be created for it – a prize to remind us all that, in spite of all the terrible things that are...
Read moreIt is something of an August ritual. The suits and faces from Televisionland migrate to Edinburgh where, infected by the general atmosphere of alternative politics and comic skittishness, they go a little too far during a speech or a question-and-answer...
Read moreFor a moment, as those figures scampered around a double-decker bus in Beijing, like actors in an over-ambitious fringe event at the Edinburgh festival, there was a glimpse of the image which Britain could present to the world in four...
Read moreThere was a time when potentates travelling the world would shoot an animal – a tiger or a lion perhaps – as an expression of diplomatic friendship towards their hosts. The modern equivalent is to trade in endangered animals. Playing...
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