Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practise neither a science nor an art but a bad game of darts. Boozed up on shoddy theory and meaningless statistics, they wobble to the oche of public life, hurl an arrow at the backboard, then blame the flight, the lighting, anything but
Fredericksburg, Virginia Walt Whitman once observed, ‘In America, the men hate the women and the women hate the men.’ That sounds like a commentary on feminism and probably was. Although Whitman was caught up in personal sexual conflicts more befitting a sensitive poet, he lived through most of the 19th century, when women were in
I first visited the Peloponnese in the spring of 1959, at the beginning of my gap year. I was 18. Having been accepted for university as a classicist, I decided I might as well combine business and pleasure by visiting the great sites of the Mycenaean era before going on to my studies. It was
‘On va manger anglais ce soir?’ — ‘Shall we eat English tonight?’ — is not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear a Frenchman say, especially a chef. But my friend was quite clear on the phone. ‘Le restaurant, c’est anglais, comme toi.’ My initial disbelief gave way to suspicion. I remembered that he
A very long time ago, still in my teens, I knew a beautiful Athenian girl whose eyes were green and her hair golden blonde, and she was madly in love with a friend of mine. He loved her just as passionately but then he went away to school in Switzerland, and you can guess the
I’ve a question. You’ll see in a moment why I’m tempted to call it a Trivial Pursuit question. Can you tell me when the worst suicide bombing in Europe since the 7/7 murders took place? I doubt you’d believe me if I said it was last week. I can hear your response: ‘What suicide bombing?
The English like nothing better than the idea that the French hate us. Bradley Wiggins, an Englishman, wins the Tour de France, and we are full of in-votre-face triumphalism. British journalists search the French media for sour grapes. How the frogs must be fuming! Beaten by a rosbif on their own turf! Yet if the
Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my
Many a Conservative MP will spend the summer dreaming happily about what the party should do in office once it has freed itself from the shackles of coalition. Few even consider the painful truth — that the coalition party most likely to survive the next election is not the Conservatives but the Lib Dems. Imagine
Spain was always going to be where the doom of the euro would be determined. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus amount, together, to less than 5 per cent of the EU’s economy. They can be rescued without emptying the bailout fund. Alternatively, their defaults can be managed as controlled explosions. Spain is in a different
Daniel Kahneman is a very modest man — amazingly so for someone who has won the Nobel prize in economics. When I met him in the lobby of a London hotel, he never used his very great intelligence in the way that some very distinguished economists do, to bully or to intimidate. ‘But then I
Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a
Ghastly moment, isn’t it, when at a supper party (worse, at editorial conference or in a meeting with clients) some drawling know-all asks ‘so what do you think about QE?’ Everyone at the table swivels in your direction. Your mental turbines stall, your eyeballs sweat. QE? Is that a conference centre? Cruise liner? A fashionable
As I for one predicted, the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi last November in a palace coup orchestrated by Europe’s bores has made no difference. Italy may well be governed by a dour former economics professor, Eurocrat and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, Mario Monti, but Italy is still in a total mess. So I greeted
This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested
As the world turns to London it may still imagine us a serious, taciturn people. If so, the world is in for a shock. For Britain has become a land all but denuded of grown-ups. We are in the grip of a full-scale, double-dip regression. We were not surprised that our Prime Minister should be
When an earthquake hit Washington DC last August, it seemed a freakish event. But in retrospect the damage caused to national symbols such as the Washington Monument seems to have been a portent of the literal collapse of America. The monument will be enshrouded in scaffolding until at least 2014. Even if the cenotaph were
With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the
For centuries, the people of Timbuktu have sought guidance from their Sufi saints. They took pride in the mausoleums of these medieval Muslim holy men, who spread their faith around the world from a city built on the profits of gold, salt and slaves. When I visited six years ago, a teenager showed me around,
I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course