My latest piece for the Commentator looks at the way we have relied either on gold or politicians to give us Honest Money down the ages (almost invariably with disastrous results in the latter case), and wonders whether the time is coming to create a new form of money based instead […]
Last week I had the pleasure of going to Blenheim Palace to watch Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski deliver a powerful speech about Europe – and the UK’s increasingly unhappy role in it. Here is the full text. Some extracts: While you are an important market for the rest of […]
If you have not heard behaired US shock-jock Howard Stern in full flow, now is the time to start. He asks various African-American voters (overwhelmingly Obama supporters) whether they support Obama or Romney and why. It turns out that some of them are, ahem, rather light when it comes to detailed […]
The topless Femen activists are profiled (so to speak) in the Guardian. A new generation of militant über-feminists? Or preening nudist ninnies? Read the rich vein of comments and decide for yourself.
Hmm. Is the UK going to try to ‘repatriate’ powers from Brussels? And if so, what are the chances of success? It isn’t clear to me why the other EU member states would go along with this, unless we block something horribly important to them (such as the next Budget) […]
What would happen if the state took aim at national energy policy where investment decisions and later outputs have to be calculated over decades – and decided to go for something Completely Different? Exhibit USA. Exhibit Europe.
I have written here previously on Message, Structure, Story and Signposts in public speaking. See eg here. This piece (c/o the ever-excellent Browser) is a super look at how to structure a movie plot by telling a simple story. It works for speeches too: Here is my detailed description of […]
This Tweet is so nice and unexpected I think that I need to share it: Stephen Pollard@stephenpollard I must say @CharlesCrawford really is superb. Tweets and blog posts are always really worth reading. Stephen himself is no slouch when it comes to good writing – including resorting as needed to the old trick […]
A super resource for looking at demographic trends as between 1950 and 2100 – a graph that allows you to follow the trends in 50 countries and world regions and easily make comparisons. Thus (say) in 1950 Egypt and Pakistan combined had some 60 million people, not that many more than the […]
An interesting and instructive visit to Riga for this year’s Riga Conference. Thoughts. First, Riga itself. Latvia took an enormous (and partly self-imposed) hit as the Euro zone crisis began, opting for radical austerity measures. Views now differ. Yes, the economy is growing once again at a pretty good rate. […]
