The current Terence Conran exhibition at the London Design Museum reminds us of the startling impact that Habitat had on the tastes and lifestyles of Britons in the 1960s. As The Guardian’s video contribution to the current wave of Conran reportage says, ‘He transformed the high street!’ It’s true. Shopping for furniture and interior design [...]
Bankers have always been viewed with suspicion or dislike: we have an ambivalent attitude to the people who control access to the capital we need in order to make our business dreams a reality. But some of history’s great banking families—the medieval Italian Medici family, for example—have achieved, or enabled, a great many things for [...]
In your guts, you know he’s nuts!
When politicians try to find a compelling name for a new initiative that they are about to launch, the results are nearly always both inept and inapt: the act of conscious deliberation by various policy wonks and spin doctors seems, unsurprisingly, to doom the newly-named programme to eventual or [...]
There are definitely a few porky-pies in Carly Fiorina’s book, Tough Choices.
Have you ever wondered why some leaders are so keen to make a big fuss about the ‘tough choices’ that they face? Poor babies. I especially like the conversation that Greg Dyke reported between John Birt, Greg’s predecessor as Director-General of the BBC, and [...]
If you were called upon to describe one visual image that defines the city of London – one skyline – I would guess that it would be the Palace of Westminster. The clock tower of Big Ben; the spires of the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’; the House of Commons and the House of Lords; the [...]
The great eighteenth century warrior-king, Frederick the Great of Prussia, was fighting the Austrians at Kolin, near Prague, in 1757 during the drawn-out conflict between the major European powers that we call The Seven Years War. The conflict had erupted in North America in what is known as the French and Indian War, which had [...]
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