Time, a commodity

I always thought that a commodity was an article that could be traded, and that time (99-year lease, delivery in October, they’ve already started rotting) was a major determinant of price. Not so in the Guardian, where Hugh Muir writes of Simon Hughes’ moribund campaign to become London mayor that The Liberal Democrats need a…

Victorian paternalism

We already knew from a footnote in Marx’s Capital that the Scottish industrialist Peter Fairbairn, who based his life and business in Leeds and was city mayor, “discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of machines as a result of strikes in his own factory.” Now Oxford has digitised a number of…

Flash mobs

… are going from bad to worse. First there was the defeat of a tawdry bunch of Manchester liberals by a rabble of saucepan- and mobile-wielding Marxists. Then 70K kids left behind 20 tons of rubbish in a couple of Seville suburbs during an impromptu spring party – organised by phone. And now a colleague’s…

Walls

The good, the bad, and the quite ridiculously ugly.