by Jonathan Gifford | May 9, 2020 | Culture
This article was first published on History News Network in 2012. I’ve changed the title to reflect our current realities but I haven’t updated the article itself – which is now a bit of a museum piece! I must confess that I think that...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jun 25, 2012 | Culture, Reviews
I have been reading some of the flakier right wing American thinkers, mainly for entertainment, but also because I am fretting about whether there are some interesting ideas about government hidden beneath the strident ranting of most libertarian thinkers. Wanting...
by Jonathan Gifford | Mar 19, 2012 | Culture
In 2010, a ruling by the Supreme Court of America in the now notorious Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money as ‘independent expenditures’ on political advertising, arguing that...
by Jonathan Gifford | Feb 17, 2012 | Culture
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...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 16, 2011 | Culture
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,...
by Jonathan Gifford | Nov 9, 2010 | Culture
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...
