Friday 27 November 2009

Prepare for a Japanese-style lost decade

Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate

Zombie banks and high unemployment look set to curse our economy as they did Japan’s, say Fraser Nelson and Mark Bathgate. A Conservative government could avoid disaster, but only if it is prepared to face the painful reality

Coffeehouse

The Red Tory

James Forsyth

Phillip Blond has been attracting a lot of publicity in the past few weeks and it was standing room only at the launch of his new think tank Res Publica.

cappuccinoculture

‘Deconstructing’ Paul Auster

David Blackburn

Only Lord Denning wrote with the skeletal concision of Paul Auster. In fact, I’m convinced that Auster imitates Denning’s determined loathing of the subordinate clause:

‘It was a warm

Blogs

The smoking iceberg?


Data that has been hacked from the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University – one of the principal academic centres behind anthropogenic global warming theory

Books

A lost masterpiece?

Philip Hensher

These long anticipated literary mysteries never end in anything very significant — one thinks of Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul, falling totally flat after decades of sycophantic pre-publicity, or Truman

Arts & Culture

Feast for the senses

Lloyd Evans

Do you love theatre and hate musicals? Let me recommend the work of Robin Soans. In the past five years Soans has established himself as the most successful practitioner of

Food & Drink

Buckets and Spades

Araminta Eyre

Southwest London – leafy, quiet streets of Victorian houses. North Cornwall – the bone-chilling Atlantic wind, massive breakers and tiny beach houses clinging onto the cliffs for dear life. What

Events
Spectator

How eugenics poisoned the welfare state

Dennis Sewell

We live in a country where the poorest members of society are literally trapped. We pay them millions not to work, simply maintaining them at subsistence level like prisoners of

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