Uncategorized- Page 3

On the basis of the old adage that if you have nothing nice to say it’s better not to say anything at all, let me begin with a positive thought or two

In 1959, Lou Groen, president of the Cincinnati Restaurant Association, opened the first branch of McDonald’s in the area. Immediately he ran into a problem: sales of hamburgers dropped sharply every Friday.

In 2010, Ben Summerskill, the chief executive of Stonewall, Britain’s biggest gay-rights group, said that the organisation took “no view” on whether same-sex marriage should be legalised. Set up in 1989 to

Donald Trump’s 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass is not normally cited in the study of international relations. But it contains a pithy summary of the zero-sum worldview of the most

When the whole nation is taking a huge punt on whether (or how) to leave the EU, a gambler’s memoirs are timely. Particularly when the author has spent large chunks of a

Ross Babbage served for 16 years in Australian government positions. He is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) in Washington DC. Joan Bakewell is a

John Mortimer once wrote that “high among the great British contributions to world civilisation, the plays of Shakespeare, the full breakfast, the herbaceous border and the presumption of innocence, must rank our

A museum opened this summer in the south of France to commemorate the most popular French actor of all time. Not Gerard Depardieu, not Catherine Deneuve, but a short, bald, pretty much

Being a Brexiteer in mixed society in London means keeping your trap shut; being an Irish Brexiteer or even professing in Ireland that you can see the point of Brexit is right

Recently, I was interviewed for a BBC documentary and I made some disobliging observations. Disobliging because they did not sit comfortably with the opinion of both the presenter and the other interviewees.