Winter Hill, Cookham

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New world in the making

Joseph Joffe [left]  reviews Fareed Zakaria's "relentlessly intelligent" book about America's global role and the rising power of Asia's new giant. One arresting statistic: today's China now exports as much in a single day as it managed in the whole of 1978. For all that, Joffe - now a fellow at Stanford - doesn't believe US is doomed to decline. And nor, it seems, does Zakaria. "His point is not the demise of Gulliver, but the 'rise of the rest.'"

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Notebook

The Spanish depended completely on such iron objects as shovels, pickes, axes, hammers, anvils, tool. They needed to make horseshoes and affix them, to repair weapons, to replace things broken. Every nail, every piece of iron, was precious, because it had to come from Spain. A horseshoe cost 30 pesos; nails, 80 pesos the hundred. Many a horseman found it cheaper to have his animal shod with gold.

David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

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Friday evening interlude: Sinatra sings bossa

I thought I'd end the day in much the same way I began. While there's no shortage of English-language bossa nova travesties on the market, the album that Frank Sinatra made with the great Antonio Carlos Jobim has some gorgeous moments. Their TV medley includes "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars" (Gene Lees's  translation of "Corcovado"),  a so-so treatment of Irving Berlin's "Change Partners" and the best number on the LP, Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You". No prizes for guessing what they end with. Jobim strums gentle guitar chords, Frank puffs away on his cigarette. Those were the days. 

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Cameron & the Tory press

Peering across the aisle, the Statesman's media commentator, Brian Cathcart is puzzled by what he sees as a grudging reaction to the election gains:

The conservative press is less than happy today because it does not like or trust David Cameron, even after he has delivered them their first piece of good electoral news since 1992. The news pages and the political correspondents may suggest jubilation and optimism, but that is not the view at the hearts of these papers...He may look a winner now, but he is not their man... And they are having trouble coming to terms with their lack of control.

We keep being told that current events mirror those of 1995, when John Major's Conservatives were crushed in local elections, pointing the way towards the 1997 landslide. The mirror may be truer than we imagine, for back then who on the left liked or trusted Tony Blair?

Interesting point. I have almost exactly the same allergic reaction to Mr C that I had with the early version of Blair. Maybe it's not him. Maybe I just don't understand the rules of the game.

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