The Week

Leading article

Crunch time

For anyone considering a career in economic forecasting, the Bank of England’s inflation report for August 2007 ought to be required reading. A graph illustrating its Monetary Policy Committee’s ‘best collective judgment’ of annual economic growth two years ahead is fixed around a central prediction of 2.5 per cent, with extreme boundaries of 0.8 per

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 3 August 2017

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appeared to wrest control of plans for Brexit from cabinet rivals, while Theresa May, the Prime Minister, was in Italy and Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was in Australia. Mr Hammond foresaw a ‘transitional deal’ ending by June 2022, when the next general election is due. He

Diary

Diary – 3 August 2017

Diana Spencer has been dead for 20 years. I was a journalist on the Evening Standard in those days and she came to lunch at the newspaper a few months before she died. Apart from her blinding charm, and her overwhelming beauty, it was her perfect manners which were striking. She mastered a few details

Ancient and modern

Beauty and the beasts | 3 August 2017

Doctors have analysed how the mucus of a certain type of slug gives it protection against its being levered off a surface. From this, they have developed a new water-based gel for surgical repairs and wound healing. Aristotle would have been punching the air, had he not been too busy inventing logic, literary critical theory

Letters

Letters | 3 August 2017

No reason for subsidies Sir: For believers in free enterprise like me, it was hugely disappointing to read that Sir James Dyson, probably its most impressive UK exponent, has become a champion for taxpayer-funded subsidies for the farming industry (‘I like making things’, 29 July). He argues that they are necessary due to the cost