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
The markets are jumpy, the dollar is tired, and Alan Greenspan has sunk below the horizon. Now more than ever the dollar needs a top-class spokesman, and in Hank the Tank it may have found one. Henry Paulson, boss of Goldman Sachs, lion of Wall Street, took some persuading to jump ship and serve as
I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I
Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George
Listing page content here ‘We all have different ways of doing things,’ says David Jones, when I ask him what makes a good captain of a corporate ship. He certainly has his own way of preparing for a high-pressure day like the one he had last week at the annual general meeting of Wm Morrisons,
Listing page content here About this time last month I was at a party at The Spectator, drunkenly urging anyone who’d listen to buy into this amazing share I’d discovered called Tullow Oil. I’d done exceptionally well by this little gem over the last 12 months and I wanted as many people as possible to
This year’s corporate colour is green. Even Rupert Murdoch has placed a lime tint over the screens at BSkyB, declaring it to be the first carbon-neutral media company. Anyone with a portfolio of shares is already aware of this year’s fashion. Investors are receiving a colour supplement with their annual reports — a ‘corporate responsibility’
The Rosewall affair signifies everything that is wrong with Royal Mail. The two-and-a-half ton Rosewall sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth was acquired by the Ministry of Works and the Post Office in 1963 for a new Post Office Pension Fund building in Chesterfield, where it became a landmark — until last October, when it took
Herbert Smith, a firm of City solicitors, last month announced that it had hired its first ‘inclusivity manager’. There were chortles all round, and the Times ran a short piece about the appointment under the headline ‘Political correctness seems to have broken out at one of London’s top legal firms’. The caravan swiftly moved on,
There is a popular book for new parents called What to Expect the First Year by Arlene Eisenberg. In the chapter on what to expect during the third month there is a list of things your baby should be able to do. One of these is ‘pay attention to a raisin or other very small
Corporate success can generally be measured by the size and strength of the campaign to boycott your business. But until very recently there was a remarkable exception to this rule: Tesco. For a supermarket group which now accounts for a remarkable one in every eight pounds taken by retailers in Britain, opposition has been remarkably
On 12 May I sat down at a café on the square, ordered coffee and Perrier, and began to sketch the west front of Strasbourg Cathedral. This was presumptuous: the complexity of the facade would have baffled the skill even of Muirhead Bone, who taught my father to draw, and who was the greatest architectural