A poster on the District Line at Earls Court inviting me to holiday in ‘the 24-hour Mediterranean city, Tel Aviv’ made me want to know more about the local economic impact of the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The rather severe-looking bikini-clad model in the poster is probably in uniform by now, and if Hezbollah’s
During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint
It was a typical west London dinner party, of the kind where the guests agree not to talk about house prices but then do so anyway. One smug homeowner was in the middle of explaining why buying property makes sense when my usually placid Japanese friend Takashi suddenly jumped up in anger. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he
The Valhalla which is Hong Kong’s low and simple taxation system is set to be demolished. The government of the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic has come up with the bright idea of getting its people to share the festering sore which in Britain goes by the name of Value Added Tax and
From a distance, the new Wembley Stadium looks like a stately cruise liner forced by rough seas to dock in some tatty West African port. With its gleaming surfaces and huge vaulting arch, the stadium is all glamour, yet it is moored in a desolate landscape littered with kebab shops and second-hand car dealerships, with
Twenty-seven years ago, a shy 29-year-old engineering graduate from Cambridge University left his job as a trainee fund manager at an obscure South African investment company in London. In a move that some of his colleagues regarded as foolhardy, he had accepted an offer to join a little-known private American firm that had never sold
As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to
Jacques Chirac hit the nail on the head in 2002 when he opened a factory making components for the Airbus A380. The aircraft was, he said, ‘A symbol of what Europe can achieve.’ I could not put it better myself. As the vast 550-seat superjumbo wowed the crowd at Farnborough Air Show this week, there
It’s not that the Saudis aren’t pleased to see foreign visitors, it’s just that they use the first possible opportunity to issue a death threat. ‘Traffickers will be killed’ promises the landing card distributed before we touch down in Jeddah. It’s a reminder of Saudi Arabia’s tough stance on crime and its direct approach to
I don’t much care for Napoleon, but I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for Napoleon III. His boundless ambition combined with an ultimate lack of ruthlessness, his self-importance and vanity combined with flashes of insight into his own personal insignificance, make him a far nicer man than his odious uncle. I mean no self-praise when
Nothing separates men from women more significantly than riding a bicycle. Whenever I see a man on a bike in London, he is invariably breaking the law: riding on the pavement, whizzing through a red light, pedalling arrogantly along our one-way street in the forbidden direction. I have never seen a woman doing any of
In the bookcase in George Soros’s South Kensington drawing-room, neatly lined up beside works on Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Popper, are multiple copies of Open Society, written by one of today’s aspiring philosophers: Soros himself. The literary line-up is testament to the Hungarian–American billionaire’s search for something that money can’t buy — acceptance at
‘A piece of sh*t’ was the non-technical term used by Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget to describe a dotcom stock called 24/7 Media, back in October 2000. To him, it was just another ‘new paradigm’ company to foist on an overheating market. To some observers today, the flotation on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) of
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