You sport a huge beard and a towel on your head and in the name of Allah you try to bring down the computer infrastructure on which the world depends. You are, in contemporary argot, a ‘cyber-terrorist’. You wear a button-down shirt and chinos, and in the name of turning a profit you deliberately set
To judge from the media coverage of Northern Rock, one might imagine that the circumstances of a bank collapse have never occurred before — or at least not for 150 years. But this is not the case. There have been several in recent years, including those of Johnson Matthey and Barings. But the closest parallel
Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might
Whenever I return to England from abroad, which is often, a very troubling question comes insistently into mind: why are the people here so ugly? I do not mean by this that I think all foreigners are handsome or beautiful, far from it. One of the tricks that Stepmother Nature has played on humanity is
I must declare an interest from the outset. I was born in Wakefield. I have never been especially forthcoming about my birthplace, not because I am ashamed of it, but because few people know or care much about this little city. Wakefield’s points of reference, ranging from the Battle of Wakefield in 1460 to rhubarb,
Judi Bevan meets BAA chairman Sir Nigel Rudd, an Eighties entrepreneur turned City grandee who still relishes tough challenges — and has met several at Heathrow Sir Nigel Rudd, chairman of BAA and motor group Pendragon and deputy chairman of Barclays Bank, has a reputation for riding towards the sound of gunfire. ‘I like difficult
During the boom years, it was fashionable to say that London owed its success as a financial centre partly to the quality of its regulation. Thanks to the Financial Services Authority’s astonishing internal audit of its supervision of Northern Rock, published last week, we can now see what that means. For Northern Rock, the UK’s
Too early yet to say whether the present financial turmoils will end in a catastrophic maelstrom or simply slip away like an angry tide, leaving puddles. One has no great confidence in the authorities on either side of the Atlantic. Would that J.P. Morgan were still around to take charge of things and recreate order
Australia’s residents are fond of referring to the place as ‘the lucky country’ but most are blissfully unaware of the phrase’s origins. ‘Lucky’ was never meant as a compliment. When the late Donald Horne, a giant of Australian intellectual life, conjured the tag in the 1960s he intended it as a putdown: ‘Australia is a
I think I’ve spotted the ‘trash and cash’ merchants, dining at Mayfair’s best tables A posse of hedge fund managers came round to The Spectator the other day, not to indulge in ‘trash and cash’ — or the even less attractive ‘pump and dump’ — but to participate in a breakfast discussion about how they
It would not surprise me if the present Pope, who is a man of strongly conservative instincts but also highly intelligent, energetic and forceful, abruptly decided to introduce women into the Catholic priesthood, and set about this fundamental reform with all deliberate speed. He would be right to do so, for it is urgent and
Guy Monson and Subitha Subramaniam on how the US Federal Reserve is facing up to recession US policymakers are at war against recession. Since January, the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke has cut interest rates by 1.25 per cent; markets expect another cut of as much as 1 per cent this week. Such dramatic reductions are
I have no objection to washing up. I prefer it to most other chores. When I was very small my mother allowed me to ‘help’ with the washing up. This meant doing the drying. I got praise for the thorough and conscientious way I did it, polishing the delicate pieces of old china till they
For the vociferous band of Tesco-haters, waiting for the supermarket giant to slip up on one of its own homogenised banana skins has been a long and frustrating business. OK, you can clutch on to the failure of Tesco to achieve the 4 per cent year-on-year increase in sales during the Christmas period which analysts
A collapsing property market, slowing consumer spending, rising unemployment and an economy that is fast deflating: that might sound all too much like a forecast for the British economy. But actually it’s a description of the Irish economy right now. For the last decade, Ireland has been the most dynamic economy in Europe, with growth
If you would like to see the kind of out-at-elbow tweed jackets once beloved of schoolmasters before they discovered the joys of earrings and the like, and still by far my preferred apparel, you must go to provincial book fairs. They are smaller and less frequented than they used to be. It is a strange
Philadelphia got a new mayor in January and most residents couldn’t be happier. After being sworn in, Michael Nutter gave a rousing speech about all the great things he planned for the city: less crime, better schools, more jobs. ‘People who have confidence in the future make big plans,’ Nutter declared. ‘This is the new
Jonathan Davis talks to globetrotting investment guru Jim Rogers about the bull market in commodities, China’s rise to superpower status — and how America lost the plot ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ Kipling’s question, with its powerful message that true knowledge of a locality can only come with the perspective
Christopher Fildes on the business dealings at Newbury Forget Cheltenham. That was just a warm-up. The big meeting next week is at Newbury, and it will have everything — fierce contests and driving finishes and bitter objections and stewards’ inquiries and prize-money running well into eight figures — everything, that is, except horses. Trooping into Newbury
The Letters of Lytton Strachey, which I have just been reading, are a mixed joy. Odd that a writer supposedly so fastidious in the use of words should have produced effusions in the 1920s using ‘divine’ or ‘divinely’ half a dozen times in a single letter, just like a Bright Young Person from Vile Bodies.