It is said that when the British public is asked, ‘What is your favourite poem?’, the one chosen by most people is Kipling’s ‘If’. Is there any evidence for this? And is it still true? And what would the Americans choose? Walt Whitman’s ‘Captain’? No, obviously not. But then what? Longfellow’s ‘The Ship’, I hope.
Next month I will break the habit of a lifetime and wait until the red reminder before paying my telephone bill. I will do so because BT has decided to charge me £33 a year for the audacity of paying my bill by cheque. BT is penalising people who pay by cheque because it wants
The title of the worst deal in British corporate history is hotly contested. Glaxo and SmithKline were worth £107 billion on the day they announced their merger: eight years later, they’re worth £57 billion, and they’re not quite the ‘kings of science’ their chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier said they would be. Getting on for a
In the end, they may have to auction what’s left of Northern Rock on eBay When the nationalisation of Northern Rock was announced at the beginning of the week, commentators queued up behind the shadow chancellor to declare a return to the dark days of the 1970s and to dance on the ashes of Alistair
I gave up writing novels in my mid-twenties, when I was halfway through my third, convinced I had not enough talent for fiction. Sometimes I wish I had persisted. There is one particular reason. The point is made neatly by W. Somerset Maugham in Cakes and Ale: These remarks need qualification. I’m not sure that
My chocolate chip cookies have arrived at the farm shop. Caroline apologises as I walk in: ‘I’m afraid they’re Fairtrade.’ ‘All the better,’ I reply. ‘Why on earth would that be a problem?’ ‘They’re a little dearer. Some people don’t want to pay the extra pennies.’ Eleven packets equals a few extra pounds, but I’m
A few minutes reading the Daily Mail and you might think that there wasn’t a person left in Britain with a penny to their name. But it isn’t so. Half the nation may have spent the last five years churning credit cards and overpaying for city-centre new-build flats, but the other half has been busy
Dominic Prince says that some of the world’s canniest investors have consolidated their fortunes by moving into cash as soon as economic storm clouds started to gather Six weeks before the stock market crash of 1987 Sir James Goldsmith met the Australian financier Robert Holmes à Court. Then at the height of his financial prowess,
Are you a serial investor, but with more money than time? You like the idea of being a business angel but you’re too busy to research companies yourself? Investment clubs or partnerships may be just what you’re looking for. The basic aim of an investment club is — for a fee — to allow members
Hong Kong’s underperforming Disneyland theme park has high hopes for the Chinese Year of the Rat, which arrived in boisterous style last week. As one of the few businesses heavily invested in rodent symbolism, the creators of Mickey Mouse are offering special discounts for the New Year period and have enlisted local pop stars to
Ian Cowie asks whether high-growth economies such as China’s are a safer bet than those of the debt-laden West Emerging markets have been the most profitable game in town for several years now, even after the setbacks some suffered toward the end of 2007. True, the bears enjoyed a bit of a picnic when China
How many investments can bring you joy as well as financial gain? Unless pure lucre flows in your veins and you’re the sort of person for whom an excursion into the derivatives market is your greatest pleasure, then there are not many. Wine and art spring to mind, but one relatively under-exploited investment opportunity that
Usually the passing of a major UK company into foreign ownership — and with it the ending of British pretensions to global leadership in another industry — is the cue for national soul-searching and recrimination. Not so the demise of Scottish & Newcastle, which finally agreed last month to be carved up by Denmark’s Carlsberg
There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning gift for turning that knowledge into noble repasts. She is quick and graceful too in cooking:
Judi Bevan meets David Young, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet before chairing Cable & Wireless and creating his own successful private-equity business Few 75-year-olds supply and programme their grandchildren’s computers or keep in touch with the younger generation by text. But Lord Young of Graffham — the businessman who was parachuted into the cabinet
My friend Herbie from the Last National Bank of Boot Hill understood about rogue traders. When another hapless bank owned up to losses ‘due to unauthorised trading’, he added: ‘They mean nobody authorised the guy to get it wrong.’ Now that a French trader called Jerome Kerviel has set a new record by losing £3.6
Neil Collins meets Nigel Annett, who runs Welsh Water — a unique utility company which operates without shareholders and distributes profits back to its customers It does sometimes stop raining in Wales. When the sun comes out, it’s pretty stunning, thanks to the green all that rain produces, but much of the time the residents
The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is the woman herself, a true princess of delight and fantasy.
Martin Vander Weyer on the next thing to cause heartburn in the financial markets. The current market crisis sometimes feels like a Scrabble championship between financial pundits, in which most of us hesitate to challenge dubious words and strange jumbles of letters for fear of showing ignorance. First came ‘subprime’, which we learned to define
Oh Boy. If you thought the Société Générale saga was beyond belief – today we learn that Eurex, the derivatives exchange, had been trying to warn the French bank for two months about Jerome Kerviel’s extraordinarily large trading volumes – then I invite you to contemplate the £274 million loss clocked up on hedging transactions by