[PDF file]: […] ‘affordable’ colour-changing fibre-optic carpets (currently very ‘in’) become available, although if platinum taps hit Homebase any time soon, the billionaires will have to up their game sharply. Mind you, even with this trend it will probably be a while before any of us mere mortals are shopping for helicopters and submarines, as many of […]
[PDF file]: What just happened Crashed How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World Adam Tooze London: Allen Lane, 2018, h/b, £30.00 Robin Ramsay I once heard a history professor describe another history professor I knew as ‘a very good, old-fashioned narrative historian’. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant but I got the pejorative message. […]
[PDF file]: […] force, whilst remaining outside the single market, implies importing a substantial workforce from countries further afield than Europe. Perhaps this is what she and Starmer have in mind. 13 Part of which is the continued belief that the UK has one of the richest economies in the world. Frequently described as being the ‘5th […]
[PDF file]: […] but a man laying down a trail we were supposed to follow….The man’s task appears to have been to make himself unforgettable.’ Other puzzling questions come to mind. Are we to think that the US government simulation of a domestic bioterror attack in June 2001 that blamed Saddam Hussein for sourcing the toxic bacteria […]
[PDF file]: […] (combined with the failure to find any of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that had been used to justify the invasion) tainted Iraq irredeemably in the public mind. Back home, the political scene is viewed through the lens less of the big parties and of ‘Westminster bubble’ stories than by telling the stories of […]
[…] the chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006: ‘If you believe that history has come to an end, you explicitly banish memory from your mind. Greenspan was “shocked”. Like a small child who had ventured into a world beyond his experience or imagination, he did “not fully understand why it had […]
[PDF file]: […] 24 September 2017 he is recording that ‘I have lost my respect for him. He is a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgement. He is an international stain on our reputation’. And to make matters even worse, he ‘thinks he is the next Churchill’. (p. […]
[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]
[PDF file]: […] just giving away part of the power of the state which NuLab were supposed to be trying to articulate in the interests of the British people (never mind the less well off/ disadvantage/deprived/poor/working class – pick a term). Such privatisation speaks of extremely low self-esteem: for we – the state and politicians – are […]
