On Tuesday I was asked to review a generic letter to clients that had been "professionally" translated from Hebrew to English. Wielding my red pen with the hungry anticipation of a famished vampire, I proceeded to correct just about everything on the page except the spaces between the paragraphs. Not being able to resist the kind…
Tax Wars: The Authorities Strike Back
Suicide is not a laughing matter. Last week marked fifty years since American poet, Sylvia Plath, took her own life, and the benefit-of-hindsight news stories on the subject were uniformly depressing. It is interesting, therefore, that one of the most successful comedy series in television history opened each week with a song about suicide. Thirty years ago…
The perfect spy
Monologue or soliloquy: that is the question. When Shakespeare's Richard III - as opposed to the bloke of that name who has been illegally parked in Leicester for the last 500 years - first ambled awkwardly onto the stage back in Elizabethan times, he delivered a soliloquy. Now, a soliloquy is what I deliver when I think I…
What a wonderful world
Although we are a family of fairly avid readers, other than a few coffee-table staples, books do not feature in our living room. Well-leafed and generally abused volumes are neatly filed on bookshelves in bedrooms and on our upstairs landing, or unceremoniously dumped in unlikely corners of the house (I stumbled on a haphazard pile on the staircase…
Tax Break 