Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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Wanna free subscription to the London Review of Books?
As a subscriber to the LRB I’m allowed to give a free subscription to a friend but, since you can’t have more than one freebie, my candidate friends are all…
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What’s a Mook?
The Guardian is promoting a new partnership with postal video rental outfit Movietrak. I tried it out and got Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets, a movie I haven’t watched in a…
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The Anglosphere defined
This is what I pay my licence fee for. Dennis Sewell with Jonathan Freedland from The Guardian, Anne McElvoy from The Evening Standard, Stephen Pollard from stephenpollard.net and Michael Gove…
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Is this what they call an ‘experience brand’?
Brands can be complicated things. This one may be a business but it’s also a national sporting figurehead wired tightly into the Italian psyche, a rich man’s plaything that most…
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A temporal web?The semantic web is a powerful thing but it’s… well… semantic. Trying to imagine the net in the future, it becomes obvious that we’re going to need a temporal web…
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What every impoverished, campaigning magazine needs: a millionaire editor
Turns out The Ecologist magazine is edited (and underwritten) by millionaire and eco-fanatic Zac Goldsmith. I just came across the magazine myself and thought it good enough to subscribe. They…
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3G debt and gross vanity
Crushing debt and an evaporating market: it must be bracing working in the 3G arm of a mobile operator these days. A couple of good features from yesterday’s FT (I…
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And watch out for those pea-soupers…
Strange ‘insider tips’ from The Economist’s London City Guide that came through my letterbox the other day, apparently cut and pasted from a 1950s travel guide: Table manners are keenly…
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“a striking new bird for the future”
The last time Penguin gave its Puffin kids’ imprint a new logo was in the year I was born, 1963. In the same year Puffin published Maurice Sendak’s Where the…
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Things are getting better
Will Hutton’s a pretty stern critic of the Blair project but you’d be hard put to read this article from The Observer as anything other than an endorsement of Labour’s…
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Phones that go bling
Nokia are betting they can create a super-luxury mobile phone brand. It’s called Vertu. £15,000 buys you a pretty ordinary GSM phone (called an ‘instrument’) in a hand-tooled platinum, white…