Business

The reinvention of the brasserie

John Mitchinson

Is restaurant size an accurate indicator of economic prosperity? Put more simply, do we still, in these straitened times, want to eat in big restaurants? There is something life-affirming about a large space filled with other people’s revelry. But you have to be in the right mood. You can’t easily summon that ‘steak-frites and a crate of vin rouge’ bonhomie out of a day spent watching falling share prices: the cavernous brasserie can feel too redolent of the sins of the recent past. Who’d give you money for a stolen Quaglino’s ashtray now? Not even, one suspects, El Tel himself:...

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New York’s grey mayor

James Doran

Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics
Joyce Purnick
Public Affairs £13.59, 272 pages
ISBN 1586485776
✆ £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

It is election season in New York City, and it is impossible to turn around without bumping into Mike Bloomberg, the media mogul turned politician who is running for a controversial third term as mayor.

Given the Mikey-mania currently overwhelming the city, Joyce Purnick timed the publication of her forthcoming biography, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, very well.

And you would think that someone as accomplished as Bloomberg would make a superb subject for...

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Key words for the coming campaign: from ‘choices’ to ‘cuts’ to ‘recovery’

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...

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The merry-go-round of Moscow-on-Thames

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....

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Need to know

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...

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Business the gangsta way

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...

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