5 September 2009
Roger Howard
For centuries, intrepid explorers went in search of Arctic treasure — but pursued only a mirage. From the time of Marco Polo, numerous expeditions were made to map a mythical Northwest Passage between east and west, but many ended in tragedy and a viable route was never found. Others vainly scoured neighbouring lands for fabulous gems. Martin Frobisher, for example, sailed there in 1577 to find gold but returned only with worthless iron pyrite — infuriating Queen Elizabeth, who lost a large investment.
Today, however, hopes are raised that climate change could at last make such dreams a reality. Many...
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29 August 2009
Janice Warman
There was no doubt about it. I was irretrievably stuck. Each boot was lapped by a shining circle of mud which, as I tried to move, made ominous sucking noises and seemed to increase its grip. I turned in desperation and appealed to a tall man behind me. ‘Can you help me please?’ He looked down at me. ‘Just a minute — I’ve got to take this call.’ He turned away. But moments later I was free: he and another festival-goer had lifted me clear of my Hunters, retrieved them and put me back in them.
Luckily most Brits...
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22 August 2009
Martin Vander Weyer
Sometimes in this job you feel you’re right in the thick of it, setting agendas, kicking butt, lobbing firecrackers into the national debate. Other times you might as well be some no-mates blogger in the middle of the night. Here I was at the start of August, listing positive economic signals that justified a mood of mild optimism as we set off for our holidays, and declaring that worries about an extended recession should be left for September. And what happens? Did postal disruptions prevent that issue reaching Threadneedle Street? Why else would the Governor of the Bank of England...
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15 August 2009
Robert Beaumont
My abiding Bradford memory is of the aftermath of the terrible fire at the Valley Parade football ground in May 1985, which claimed 56 lives. As a young reporter on a Yorkshire paper, I had been sent to the scene to write what was then quaintly called a colour piece. There was precious little colour anywhere when I arrived. The air was thick with the stale stench of smoke and the atmosphere laden with grief. When a hardened Fleet Street hack tried to light his cigarette outside the charred ground, two residents of Manningham Lane screamed at him. In a...
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15 August 2009
James Doran
America’s tortured love affair with the gas-guzzler is finally drawing to a close thanks to the Obama administration’s so-called ‘Cash for Clunkers’ scheme. By promising anyone with a clapped-out old motor as much as $4,500 so long as they spend the rebate on a shiny new fuel-efficient model, Obama has managed to do what a doubling of the price of petrol could not.
Cash for Clunkers was such a success when it launched in July that the initial $1 billion of taxpayers’ money devoted to the scheme ran out in a matter of days and a further $2 billion was...
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8 August 2009
Judi Bevan
Sir Richard Sykes darts across the hallway of the Athenaeum club to greet me. Lightly tanned, thin as a whippet, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline and Imperial College cuts a dash in pinstripes and a tie the colour of crushed raspberries.
Sykes is to ‘change czars’ what Roger Federer is to tennis. In both his former roles he radically changed the institutions he headed. Through the takeover of Wellcome, followed by merger with SmithKline Beecham, he transformed middleweight Glaxo into GlaxoSmithKline, the third largest pharmaceutical group in the world. As rector of Imperial, he dramatically improved standards and secured...
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