The digital revolution, Ray Winstone and the Ladbrokes Life have ruined gambling. It’s time to fight back… Until fairly recently, debates about The Golden Age of Pop Music have been about whether it ended in the 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s. But as I argued here, it is absurd ... Read More...
Business
Seventy years ago today the age of the atom bomb began with the Trinity Test and a gigantic mushroom cloud in the New Mexico desert. The man who led the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, was an 'abrasive and sarcastic S.O.B'. But, writes Seamus Sweeney, he also produced what may be one of the best guides ... Read More...
I don’t know if you’re the same, but whenever I watch coverage of the Glastonbury Festival on the BBC and see the sheer scale of Michael Eavis’ achievement - the array of great music and performers, the creativity, the tradition, the vibe, the extraordinary range and diversity of people all ... Read More...
What's the real minority specialist-interest genre of books - the one that bookshops just can't shift? It's literary fiction, says Steerforth... As a bookseller, one of the first lessons I learned when running the fiction section was that the sales of the first volume of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps ... Read More...
Henry explains how he made a (very) small fortune speculating on wine... Back in 2010 I decided to squander/ invest the last of my redundancy money on some En Primeur Bordeaux. I know that makes me sound like a former Goldman Sachs employee splashing out on a case of Le Pin ... Read More...
Following on from his hugely entertaining post about life as a bookseller, Steerforth pays tribute to the now-extinct breed of Full English-eating, Austin Montego-driving publishers' sales reps... In my last Dabbler post I wrote about my first year in bookselling and casually mentioned that every publisher's sales rep' used to be ... Read More...
Waking before dawn I first reached for my phone to check on England’s latest reassuringly routine cricket thrashing by Australia, then groaned out of bed to descend and in the kitchen force tea and toast into unwelcoming guts. Twice since the last diary I have had long work days in ... Read More...
“Happy New Year!” we say to one another, but do we say it in optimistic expectation or in fearful hopes: beseeching Fate that 2014 is not the year when one’s ordained calamity strikes? A bit of both, but increasingly the latter as we accumulate more new years, I suppose. We ... Read More...
Mr Ferman’s office was on the ground floor of a tall Victorian townhouse near to the centre of Exeter. There was no buzzer so I knocked on the door. ‘Come in,’ said somebody, and I entered a giant heap of files with a few walkways cut through it. I have ... Read More...
The Epicurean Dealmaker writes anonymously, insightfully and wittily on the world of investment banking, the first because he works in the industry as a senior M&A banker. If you want to understand, and even find amusing, the rarefied and controversial world of high finance you won't do much better than ... Read More...
