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…
They shoot horses, don’t they?
"It's under starter's orders - and they're off!" 2013 has scarcely made it out of the stalls and two stories are already vying for a place in the Winner's Enclosure at the annual Let's-Knacker-The-Taxpayer Steeplechase. First to gallop off the page and nearly knock out my eye was the disclosure by the Wall Street Journal that the Indian…
I did it their way
Less than a month after my rare downing of a beer in an English pub, I was at it again – this time in New York. Served an ice-cold bottle of lager, I looked around furtively for the glass. Then I remembered: John Wayne didn’t do glasses. Swigging from the bottle – a practice I…
The 2012/13 Overture
In the '70s and '80s there was a major movement worldwide to gently nudge the Soviet authorities to "Let my people go". Mass rallies, protests and disruption of Russian cultural events were the order of the day from London to New York to Sydney. With the collapse of Communism, the '90s saw the influx to Israel…
Beating about the Bush tax cuts
I believe it was John the Baptist who coined the phrase, "In the beginning was the Word". Whatever your creed, words have definitely had a pretty serious effect on the world from time immemorial. For me, the mere mention of the word "War", in all its mono-syllabic, animal-like simplicity, is enough to strike fear into my…
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet
I have never been one for beer or pubs. Boasting one Scottish parent, my tipple has always been whisky - my interest stretching back to long-forgotten Hogmanay parties when, as we rang in the New Year, a relative would knock on the front door and "first foot" carrying a piece of coal in one hand and…
And so this is Christmas
In London for a client meeting last week, I decided to take in the Oxford Street Christmas Lights on my way to the airport. While, back in the smog-filled Decembers of my childhood, the lights adorning the length of Britain's premier shopping street carried fairy tale themes of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, this…
Is the clock ticking for Switzerland?
Towards the end of 2010, in one of his last interviews, John F Kennedy's iconic speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, shared a previously unpublicized titbit concerning the 1960 Presidential Election. At 3am on Election Night, Richard Nixon gave a not-exactly- concession speech (he officially conceded the following afternoon). Watching the event on TV, Kennedy turned to Sorensen and…
A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum
As a kid, did you ever dream of an extra tap in the kitchen that dispensed endless lashings of Coca Cola and Strawberry Milkshake? Or what about being let loose for an afternoon inside a locked, and deserted, sweet shop? Well, the not-so-juvenile tax practitioners of Bungabungaland woke up on November 21 to a dream come true. A…
Tax Break 