Business
The elusive celebrity of the political conference season – like a scandal-hit soap star, pursued by paparazzi – was the word ‘cuts’. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg prefaced it, just once, with ‘savage’, and was forced into retreat by horrified colleagues. Gordon Brown, after a decade of using it only to describe secret Tory intentions, startled the TUC by declaring that Labour would ‘cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower-priority budgets’. But in his Brighton party conference speech barely a week later, ‘cuts’ turned back into a Tory mantra, and ‘choices’ was the key word for Labour’s...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
Dominic Midgley
Londongrad. From Russia With Cash: The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Fourth Estate £12.99, 402 pages
ISBN 9780007278862
✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
Near the beginning of this book, the authors of Londongrad quote a particularly good joke doing the rounds in Moscow: Stalin’s ghost appears to Putin in a dream in which he [Putin] asks for his help in running the country. Stalin advises, ‘Round up and shoot all the Democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue’. ‘Why blue?’ Putin asks....
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
Laura Staples
UK Economy
Beating expectations
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that the UK economy’s rate of contraction in the three months between April and June slowed from the previous quarter. GDP fell by 0.6 per cent, compared to the January to March period, beating estimates of a contraction of 0.7 per cent. GDP from manufacturing fell 0.1 per cent in the second quarter, only half the amount previously forecast. Meanwhile, the rate of decline in construction was 0.8 per cent, instead of the 2.2 per cent estimated.
The pound fell to its lowest level since April against the...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
Clint Witchalls
The 50th Law
50 Cent and Robert Greene
Profile Books £15, 291 pages
ISBN 9781846680687
✆ £13 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Diego Gambetta
Princeton £24.95, 334 pages
ISBN 9780691119373
✆ £19.96 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
Criminals can’t advertise their products on QVC, yet the mafia and the yakuza have prospered longer than most Fortune 500 companies. In Codes of the Underworld, sociologist Diego Gambetta examines how criminals communicate without being caught, how they build trust in a world where everyone is...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
Chris Blackhurst
When Kraft said it wanted to buy Cadbury – and the chocolate maker rejected the opening offer – a dance not seen in the City for many a year began. Investment bankers from both sides assembled their teams. Lawyers and accountants were drafted in. PRs were let loose to win hearts and minds. Rival food companies and their advisers studied the action carefully. Fund managers did their sums. The Takeover Panel, that most august of City bodies, was on alert. The tactics meetings, conference calls, briefings and counter-briefings began in earnest.
It was exciting, exhilarating even: the sort of blood-and-guts...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
3 October 2009
Patagonia
Lucinda Baring
Arriving in Patagonia, the region spanning Argentina and Chile at the southernmost tip of South America, I really felt I’d reached the end of the earth. The journey is an epic but rewarding one – this was the most spectacular scenery I’d ever seen. My destination was Hotel Explora in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. This small enclave of comfort, surrounded by wide green lagoons and sheltered by snow-capped mountains, is designed specifically to cosset you after a day spent amongst the elements. Windows span the length of every room and with no...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
Previous
