I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg
My old friend ‘Posh Ed’ Stourton begins his new book about political correctness (It’s a PC World, Hodder and Stoughton) with an anecdote about the Queen Mother. She told him, in private, that the EEC would never work, because of all those ‘Huns, Wops and Dagoes’. Ed was displeased: ‘I thought that what she had
James Doran assesses the qualities needed to be Obama’s Treasury secretary at a time of unprecedented crisis, and wonders whether the front-runners measure up As situations vacant go, the position of Secretary of the United States Treasury is unique. The job requires a politician of presidential fortitude, a world-class economist and a magician capable of
So many ways to say we’re in trouble Without an Inuit thesaurus I have no way of checking how many words the Eskimos really have for snow, but each day’s newspapers reveal just how large a lexicon we have for an economy going into reverse. Recession, depression, downturn, decline, disinflation, slump, slowdown, squeeze, freeze, meltdown,
Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to
Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every
