2014

Eighty million passengers pass through Heathrow each year. Planes take off and land on average every 91 seconds, 18 hours a day. They get bigger and faster. A super jumbo can now transport the population of a medieval town half way around the globe in 24 hours. In 25 years if you want speed and have the money a hypersonic … [Read on]

Researching an article about Mr Huhne recently, I was struck by how many public figures now use diminutives of their names. There have always been a few who have done so, of course, but now it is a mass phenomenon, like drunkenness in public. Chris himself does so. Still, one cannot imagine anyone referring to Gladstone as Bill, to Wellington … [Read on]

It isn’t been easy to avoid the World Cup, impossible if one takes the newspapers. Nor has the competition been entirely without interest: for example, how and why does a man like Luis Suarez become a serial biter of his opponents? Why does he not learn to keep his teeth to himself? I suppose the fact that he earns enough … [Read on]

One of the advantages of living in two countries – in my case Britain and France – is the realisation that modern madness is international. This, of course, is a great consolation for any patriot who sees his own country sliding ever further down the slope of institutionalised idiocy. In France, the Minister of National Education, M. Benoît Hamon, has … [Read on]

Arriving in one of Britain’s pleasanter provincial cities recently, I took a taxi from the station. The driver, I soon discovered, was Somali. He was delighted that I had been to Somalia – only the second such passenger he had ever had, he said. We talked of the good old days of the dictator, Siad Barre. He was too young … [Read on]

Returning home from abroad recently, the airline temporarily lost my luggage and promised to deliver it to my house a little later. It did indeed try to do so, but it was at eight in the evening and I was out in a restaurant having dinner with my neighbours. The delivery man left my case at my next door neighbour … [Read on]

Last week I had occasion to visit one of the poorest parts of Britain known to me. I have been to other, much poorer parts of the world, of course, but somehow the poorest areas of England are to me the most dispirited and dispiriting. Short of famine and epidemic, almost everywhere else seems almost thriving by comparison. At a … [Read on]