Any other business

Medicine and letters | 19 July 2006

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

A summer rhapsody for a pedal-bike

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

‘Bill Gates is just a figurehead. I am actively engaged’

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 compost heap of hot stocks

‘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 price of protection in a lawless land

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

Read any good books lately? Not novels, alas

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

‘I’m absolutely not interested in why it can’t happen’

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

Only fools and Europhiles

Every time one of his doomed money-making schemes collapsed in ignominy, a deluded Derek Trotter in the BBC’s marvellous Only Fools and Horses would insist that despite this latest setback, ‘this time next year we will be millionaires’. Few Brussels apparatchiks have ever ventured to Peckham, but they seem to have learnt a trick or

Is that a bug under your boardroom table?

The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still

Watches? Not for me

When I was seven my father gave me a duty-free Timex, my first watch. I loved it, wore for it years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped ticking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t need one. I have a mobile phone and a laptop and I’m always near someone with an iPod

Rupert Murdoch’s cool new thing

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

Medicine and letters | 14 June 2006

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

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

The Hooray who became a middle-class style guru

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