Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy,
Given that Gordon Brown spent his adult life plotting to get into 10 Downing Street, he has been understandably quiet about his decision to leave it. Tony Blair’s old office certainly brought him rotten luck, and his new open-plan base in Number 12 has far better feng shui for a man of his disposition. There
‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002. ‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous
My hopes for America lie less in Obama- mania, more in Vaud and the Villains Long before I became a journalist I taught myself to absorb the essence of an unfamiliar city by staying alert in the taxi from the airport: Los Angeles offers a particularly vivid first encounter. As the yellow cab barrels out
At times of financial crisis there is often a feeling that all the old certainties have been blown away. But what is striking about the entire history of stock-market crises is that they fall into a pattern — and this pattern makes it possible to make broad predictions about the panic cycles that have been
Judi Bevan meets Sir John Parker, who chairs National Grid and the Court of the Bank of England — and takes an optimistic view of the deepening recession Few people would have dared to walk out of lunch at the Savoy Grill leaving behind the irascible Lord King. Sir John Parker, the softly spoken Irish
Now that I am in my 81st year I have been wondering what to do about my art library, which has more or less taken over my country house in Over Stowey and occupies all the available space there. I originally began collecting it seriously 30 years ago, to help me write a general history
The other day, the 9.56 bus to the nearest train station was late and the people at the stop — of whom I was by far the youngest — began to grumble a little. Then, looming out of the mist, appeared the driver. The other day, the 9.56 bus to the nearest train station was
