Like Freeman Dyson’s excellent review of Vaclav Smil’s ‘The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change‘ from the NYRB and Richard Florida’s Boho Britain report, ranking Manchester as Britain’s most creative city (I’m reading Florida’s ‘The Rise of the Creative Class‘) and The Observer’s nice piece about Paul Newman’s other great passion and The New Statesman’s handy guide to UK Neo-cons (David Aaronovitch, John Lloyd, Stephen Pollard, Danny Finkelstein, Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips, apparently – you need to pay for the article or subscribe to the print edition to see this) and The Ecologist on arm twisting at the WTO and The Independent on a new Parisian craze for the gourmet pique-nique.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.