Finding fault with Ai Weiwei has become somewhat of a challenge to critics. For such a bold, deliberately polemic artist who takes on projects of such massive scale he should have left a few openings vulnerable to attack. Annoyingly for the art world, it is not that easy. Mark Hudson writing for the Telegraph came […]
I have never quite understood why libertarians are considered right wing. They believe in small government because they trust people, distrust elites, are suspicious of Leviathan and value freedom. In what sense is any of that either conservative or reactionary? In the nineteenth-century, support for free trade, small government and individual autonomy went together almost […]
“It’s not too far,” says Alastair Robertson, chairman of port shippers Taylor’s as he points to a small classical folly, jutting out on a high ridge above the river Douro. It’s dusk and having just arrived, via train, to this remote outpost of the upper Douro valley I’m keen to stretch my legs. Besides, Alastair […]
Something Rotten, St. James Theatre, New York, NY What to see, as a Londoner in New York with one night to spare? Using an utterly random set of criteria (new, not on in the West End, no difficulty finding seats), I ended up at Something Rotten, a show helpfully described to me as “a musical […]
Review of Crosseyed Heart, the third solo album by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. EMI, RRP £7.99 It is usually a bad idea to write about one’s heroes. You probably don’t want to read me extolling the virtues of the Rolling Stone’s chief bad boy and guitar-wielding genius, especially if you preferred the Beatles, or […]
The Devil’s Financial Dictionary. Jason Zweig, Public Affairs, RRP £12.99 Jason Zweig, the popular public speaker and personal finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal wrote Your Money and Your Brain (Simon & Schuster, 2007), one of the first books to explore the neuroscience of investing. Now he’s back, publishing The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, Your […]
Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Tom Holland, Little, Brown Book Group, RRP £25 “When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is more likely to come into their minds. There is no other period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling […]
Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon. Ed Caesar, Viking, RRP £16.99 Personally, I could not be less interested in marathons. While 26 miles is undoubtedly a long way on foot, and it is an enormous achievement to run that distance, the business of marathons looks strangely unexciting. The sport is long on endurance […]
I don’t know what they’re drinking over at Omega these days, but it’s definitely not pints of lager any longer, and whatever it is it’s working. After too many years of producing over-sized, garish golf club bling, someone at Omega seems to have remembered that it is in fact one of the great houses of […]
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants. Charles Moore, Allen Lane, RRP £30 In the summer of 1983, Margaret Thatcher appeared to be the mistress of all she surveyed. Four years earlier, she had thrust herself into global events, to the dismay of those who had been in charge. Carter, Schmidt, Giscard, Roy […]
To say that Adele’s comeback single is a hit is a bit like saying that Cristiano Ronaldo knows his way around a football pitch. ‘Hello’ is a monster: the first single to be downloaded more than a million times in a week; more than a quarter of a billion views on YouTube; the best US […]
The cellar was cool and damp, a reminder that in Burgundy autumn had arrived. Inside the air was filled with that familiar stone-dust, flinty smell one associates with old country churches. Stood around a barrel were myself, a buyer for a large UK wine merchants’, a negociant and the vigneron, carefully administering small glasses of delicately flavoured […]
You approach a new James Bond film with finely blended expectations of excitement and concern and dread. Excitement at the prospect of the second most expensive action film ever produced, concern at the health of a venerated British institution, and dread at the prospect of yet another prime turkey in the turkey-infested realm of the […]
Dan Ariely is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. He attributes his ability to observe and reflect on human nature to his injury and its continuing effects: having suffered third degree burns from an accident as […]
Horrible Histories, the children’s books and TV programmes, have arguably created Britain’s most historically literate generation. British children no longer learn the order of England’s kings and queens by reciting “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste…” Rather, they chant the Chas-and-Dave style number from the show: “I’m William the Conqueror, my enemies stood no chance…” Cleopatra’s murderous […]
Thatcher’s Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader. Kwasi Kwarteng, Bloomsbury Publishing, RRP £21.99 History is written backwards. Before he embarks on the story, the historian already knows the ending. That can cause a problem. It is possible to slip into the complacency of hindsight and conclude that outcomes were inevitable when they were anything but. For […]
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