When former US President Herbert Hoover flew down to Argentina in 1946 it was to request that the newly elected President Juan Peron order a massive grain shipment to Europe aimed at staving off a post-war famine. Following his successful mission, he commented that Peron's young wife, Eva, had the brains of Eleanor Roosevelt and…
Territorial expansion
M.A.D. has to be the best acronym ever. "Mutual Assured Destruction" is what the world looked like it was heading for 50 years ago this week when the young John F Kennedy faced down Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis. October 16, 1962 has gone down in history as the morning National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy…
Faulty Powers
A month shy of the 40th anniversary of its first broadcast, I was impressed when my teenage son asked me last week whether I had ever seen the Cheese Shop sketch. He was astounded when I started quoting from it and informed him that Monty Python had defined humour for my generation (sorry Yanks, it…
Left luggage
It was during the Bosnian War that the BBC's Martin Bell and his colleagues developed the concept of Journalism of Attachment. While war correspondents stretching back to William Howard Russell a century and a half earlier had reported the good and evil of war, it was this new generation that took sides and, effectively, became unarmed combatants on behalf…
Composing tax laws
Returning to the gym last weekend after a fortnight, literally, off the treadmill, my rendition of "I'm back" in a passable Austro-Californian accent failed to register any reaction on the face of the young lady manning the reception desk. Instead, she merely ordered me to furnish my annual medical certificate that covers them if I suddenly keel over pulseless on…
One small step for Mitt
Neil Armstrong, who died last week, was one of my childhood heroes. It was not that I aspired to be an astronaut - I was a sedentary kid for whom "space" was what separated the sofa from the TV set - but I knew how to recognize greatness when I saw it. There were plenty of…
French toast
The French are the masters of indignation. Staring at an offender from the top of his Gallic aquiline nose, a Frenchman can turn any opponent to blancmange faster than a speeding escargot. You don't cross the French. Marking Bastille Day last weekend with a cafe-au-lait and croissant in the comfort of my salon, my mind wandered back to…
Raising the energy bar
In my salad days, apart from holding down a regular job as an elementary school student, I had some house jobs. Returning home in the freezing dark each winter's eve, my chafed thighs burning from the cold, I would make straight for the soot encrusted scuttle standing guard outside the kitchen door. Carrying it across the yard to the squat bunker opposite I would scoop coal into…
Teaching Mrs Merkel German
Nostalgia ruled for most of last week. While the British indulged in a House of Windsor love fest, the world delighted in snippets of the Queen over her sixty year reign. It was Prince Charles, the King-in-Waiting, who stated the obvious at the Buckingham Palace Doorstep Concert noting that for many people this was the…
God save the queen from taxes!
The Queen (there is only one "Queen") was often lampooned in the 1980s TV series "Spitting Image" . It starred a bunch of incredibly elastic, outrageously exaggerated latex puppets. My favourite sketch had the Queen at her desk, surrounded by her totally dysfunctional latex family, writing Christmas cards to foreign countries. Completing the last card she announced…
Tax Break 