Ed Miliband could be excused for indulging in some comfort television. Ed Miliband could be excused for indulging in some comfort television. He has returned from honeymoon to find himself torn to shreds in the press, put on probation by anonymous ‘Blairite’ ministers and humiliated by David Cameron in parliament, and his relationship with his
You know those jokes you hear which immediately send you into a furious rage at the fact that you didn’t think them up yourself? At least, I assume you do; I don’t think it’s just a quirk of having a profession whereby your livelihood depends on stuff that other people just do for a hobby.
‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of the work.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, managed to refuse this choice and achieve both. ‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of
Can capitalism care for the old and vulnerable? The collapse of the Southern Cross care homes group is a big story not just because 31,000 elderly residents are waiting to discover whether they still have anyone to look after them when it’s all over, but because it illuminates a pattern of financial engineering that prevailed
