The week in which HMV completed its £63 million takeover of Ottakar’s — and announced that Ottakar’s bookshops will be rebranded as Waterstone’s, which HMV already owns — seems a good moment to contemplate the future of the book trade in the virtual and digital age. There is something so unchangeably pleasing about the feel
The village clubhouse at Nikolina Gora, a well-heeled dacha village just outside Moscow, is usually a delightfully sedate place. Local residents Mstislav Rostropovich and Sergei Prokofiev used to give recitals for their neighbours on the clubhouse terrace. On Sunday afternoons lesser musicians still keep up the tradition and the strains of Mozart drift through the
A head of steam is building up behind the campaign to halt the imminent extradition to the US of the NatWest Three, the trio who face trial (and two years in a tough Texas jail before trial) for an alleged $6 million ‘wire fraud’ against NatWest in connection with the sale of a joint venture
In one respect I am like Gladstone, of whom a friend said, ‘He reads as other men breathe.’ To me, reading is my most frequent, enjoyable and essential activity. Not that I put myself on a level with Mr G, even in this respect. He read a portion of the Bible and of Homer every
Reading the papers, with their unremitting tales of human depravity and cruelty, I sometimes feel that the human race is a failed experiment which ought to be brought to an end as expeditiously as possible. We learn from the Book of Genesis that God had the same idea. He ‘saw that the wickedness of man
Charles Dunstone wants Carphone Warehouse to be the Tesco of telephony. ‘You grow your market share, provide the best service at the best price and keep investing the gains you make into the business to make prices even more competitive.’ It is a typical Dunstone statement: simple to say, hard to do. It is no
Had Lou Reed lived in Leeds rather than New York, his signature tune ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ could just as easily have been inspired by the derelict, crime-infested Holbeck area of the city as by the mean streets of Harlem and the Bronx. In the Seventies and Eighties Holbeck, just a five-minute stroll from
Every time one of his doomed money-making schemes collapsed in ignominy, a deluded Derek Trotter in the BBC’s marvellous Only Fools and Horses would insist that despite this latest setback, ‘this time next year we will be millionaires’. Few Brussels apparatchiks have ever ventured to Peckham, but they seem to have learnt a trick or
The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still
The World Cup is not really my bag, but already it’s done its bit to pep up my GWB (that’s ‘general wellbeing’, for those not yet fluent in Cameron-speak). Eleven giant posters have been plastered around Bank station featuring Claudia Schiffer draped in a German flag. They’re part of a campaign to encourage investment in
When I was seven my father gave me a duty-free Timex, my first watch. I loved it, wore for it years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped ticking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t need one. I have a mobile phone and a laptop and I’m always near someone with an iPod
Rupert Murdoch is probably the last person in the world who would use an online social networking service, but he may be the first to make serious money out of the concept. MySpace, which he bought for $580 million in 2005, is one such service, and it may or may not be the coolest thing
Time for a naked protest against global cant and in support of Jeremy Clarkson I was all set to join some of my more liberated neighbours on York’s Naked Bike Ride last Friday, until I discovered that it was yet another protest against ‘global oil dependency’. The debate about climate change, carbon emissions and who
My copy of Schopenhauer’s essays was owned before me also by a doctor, J. Raymond Hinshaw, MD. Hinshaw, a former Rhodes Scholar, was professor of surgery at Rochester, New York, and an expert in the use of lasers in surgery upon which subject he wrote a book. He died in 1993, aged 70, and the
A professional comedian’s desolate vision of hell Since homosexuals were ‘liberated’ in 1967, formed a lobby (some would say the most powerful in the country) and became publicly aggressive and demanding, they have forfeited our sympathy. But it is well to remember the sadness of their lives. Tom Stoppard has drawn attention to newly discovered
A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and
Happy birthday, PartyGaming. Or possibly not. A year ago, the City was divided over whether this online poker and casino group’s stock would soar or plummet. Ahead of next weekend’s anniversary of the flotation, the opposing factions can both claim to have been correct. Not even at the height of the dotcom boom did companies
Never in living memory has there been so much interest in buying art as there is now. Across all categories, from Old Masters to Impressionists to photographs, but mostly in 20th-century paintings, the international appetite for buying art has been steadily building in an art-market bull run that has already lasted 11 years. In the
If a bull market can turn a moron into a genius, the art market deserves government funding. It has done for the elite what the housing boom has done for the lumpen. They all think they deserve a Nobel Prize. What a delight for the art-mongers! The buyers’ pockets are full, their heads are empty,
What do the following have in common: metatarsally challenged footballing wonderkid Wayne Rooney, two-time-Ashes-winning spin bowler Phil Edmonds, one-time Greek oil explorer Frank Timis, and ‘Brian Cohen’, the eponymous hero of The Life of Brian? Is it that they are not messiahs, but in fact rather naughty boys; or that they are all regarded favourably