Last Sunday a group from Winster, a lovely nearby village in Derbyshire, had invited me to open their roadshow at 11 a.m. The group, Sustainable Winster, had organised a Climate Change Awareness Day. The area climate-change bus had arrived for the occasion, there were displays, posters, free linen bags containing packs of expandable chips to
This week, my family celebrated a century of continuous occupation of the house in Sussex where my sister now lives. The place came into the family in the 19th century, but was let to the Church of England Temperance Society as a home for 38 ‘adult male inebriates’ until my great-grandfather and his second wife
‘A triumph for the European Commission’ (as USA Today chose to describe it) is not something usually to be celebrated here. But yesterday’s finding by the European Court of Justice against Germany’s ‘VW law’ – protecting Volkswagen against takeover via a blocking minority vote held by the state – really does look like a blow
My favourite spot in London is the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like to sit there, preferably early in the morning, and watch the waterfowl. They are of three kinds. The swans are rulers of the pond, as they must be. I once counted no fewer than 90 of them on the water, but
Matthew Lynn says shareholder activist Eric Knight is right to castigate HSBC’s strategy, and that the bank’s deeply religious chairman Stephen Green now faces a battle to hang on to his job When he isn’t running the world’s second biggest bank, Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, is an ordained priest and amateur theologian. In
I have a new hero. He is called Lemuel Boulware, of America’s General Electric Company. According to a fascinating new book by Thomas W. Evans*, Boulware should be credited not only with a role in defeating the intellectual apparatus of communism, but with the creation of one of the most successful US presidents of all
Even being soaked by driving rain isn’t enough to dampen Jonathan Kestenbaum’s passion for innovation. Even being soaked by driving rain isn’t enough to dampen Jonathan Kestenbaum’s passion for innovation. The chief executive of Britain’s largest source of endowment funds (£350 million and counting) arrives in the Notting Hill coffee shop where we are meeting,
South Africa is buzzing — and not just in the afterglow of victory in the Rugby World Cup. Johannesburg, built in the 1880s on the back of mineral excavation, is experiencing a contemporary form of gold rush. At the gleaming international airport, yuppies of every hue shape deals on their laptops. A ride into town
