Sarah Standing battles to board a plane bound for Ibiza Needs must and I’ve become extremely skilled at booking cheap, credit-crunching flights on easyJet. The volume of hours, energy, blood, sweat and tears I’ve devoted to acquiring dream e-tickets for my family ought to qualify me for some sort of tenacious travel operator award. This summer
Monday I wish people would stop sending in complaints about the cost of hotels in Birmingham. I am not the English Tourist Board! But as we’re on the subject, let’s be clear — the point of having conference there is not to save money, or have fun. It’s so we can get out to parts
Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of
Denver, Colorado Just as high street stores send spies to the Paris fashion shows in order to copy all the latest designs, so British political parties send agents to American conventions in search of ideas and inspiration. Several Brits were skulking around the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week, carefully noting the new soundbites
Demoralised Labour backbenchers, watching helplessly as their government disintegrates and the prospect of electoral humiliation looms, have at last found a cause to which they can rally: higher taxes on the ‘super-rich’, both private and corporate. In the first of those categories, the target is anyone with an annual income of £250,000 or more. In
We did it, not the state Sir: I am not a social historian but surely Liam Byrne fatally undermines his whole argument when he praises the founding of various organisations and movements 150 years ago to deal with the ‘huge change which swept millions from the countryside to the cities’ (‘Give us back our Big
