Words of wisdom

Dominic Frisby is an actor best known for voicing the booking.com adverts (‘Booking dot com, booking dot yeah’). Voiceover specialists can earn large fees for a morning’s work and they have endless time in which to ponder where their money ends up. Frisby is irked by the UK tax regime, whose code-book is four times longer than Chilcot. He argues persuasively that our sprawling system should be replaced with a land value tax. Set at the right level this would ensure the abolition of all other duties, and those of us who don’t own property would pay no council tax, no income tax, no VAT, and no duty on fuel, alcohol or inheritance. Ever again. An attractive scheme laid out in a funny, absorbing show full of historical insights. Louis XIV’s finance minister likened the ideal tax system to the efficient plucking of a goose. ‘The largest mass of plumage extracted with the least amount of hissing.’

In a cramped little room in a Cowgate hotel I saw Giacinto Palmieri deliver a talk entitled Nietzsche, Women and I. Every seat was taken and Palmieri read out some of the best-known quotes. They got big laughs. ‘Woman was God’s second mistake’ had everyone in fits. As did this line which Palmieri delivered with a nicely judged pause. ‘Women make the highs higher and the lows… [short silence] more frequent.’ The beauty of the pause was that it invited the audience to supply an imaginary punchline, ‘lower’, which made the pay-off, ‘more frequent’, even stronger. Fans of Nietzsche who know him only through reading are unlikely to realise how amusing he is when performed aloud. After this excellent opening our expert abandoned the German genius and proceeded to discuss the many womenfolk who have affected another titan of European thought, namely Giacinto Palmieri.