Trouble in paradise: England facing familiar problems with brittle batting after 381-run thrashing by West Indies January 27, 2019 The start of England’s opening Test match against the West Indies in Barbados on Wednesday was dominated by discussion around the tourists’ selection. How would the pitch play? Did they really need two spinners? Should Stuart Broad be in the side? By Saturday evening those debates seemed irrelevant and a lifetime away. A completely inept [...]
Card clash: Mastercard UK’s Mark Barnett on the battle for payments market share October 15, 2018 The likelihood is that, reading this, you have a Visa debit card somewhere on your person. Only two per cent of Britons currently have a Mastercard debit card, but that will change shortly after a string of wins for the US giant which will see its market share increase by 10 times. TSB and Santander [...]
Ashwin Bhardwaj travels to the cultural heart of Russia, to eat and drink with the locals of St Petersburg April 17, 2019 There are not many places that have left me literally gobsmacked, but the moment I stepped outside the Finljandski Train Station in St Petersburg, I knew that I had arrived somewhere special. It was here, in 1917, that Vladimir Lenin stepped back onto Russian soil after nearly 20 years of exile. He had taken the [...]
Back on track: McLaren CEO Zak Brown ready to return the Formula One team to their glory days March 12, 2019 There was never going to be a quick fix to McLaren's problems but, with the start of the new Formula One season upon us, the team find themselves ably prepared to return their prestigious name to the front of the grid in the coming years. They are some way off ousting Mercedes and Ferrari in [...]
Christian Marclay: The Clock review – a bizarre, brilliant piece of video art that’s a perfect metaphor for life September 14, 2018 The Clock is a bizarre, brilliant piece of video art that's already travelled from London to New York and back since its completion in 2010. And yet it feels like it’s found its home in the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing, with its focus on video and performance art. It’s an astonishing 24-hour montage of clips from movies spanning [...]
Christian Marclay: The Clock review – a bizarre, brilliant piece of video art that’s a perfect metaphor for life September 14, 2018 The Clock is a bizarre, brilliant piece of video art that's already travelled from London to New York and back since its completion in 2010. And yet it feels like it’s found its home in the Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing, with its focus on video and performance art. It’s an astonishing 24-hour montage of clips from movies spanning [...]
Desert X is Coachella’s lesser known contemporary art festival and it’s drawing 200,000 art lovers to the area January 4, 2019 The locals were… curious. For the past few weeks, as they’d gone about their business around the nine cities that make up Greater Palm Springs, or hiking in the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, strange things were afoot. A deep hole was being dug into the desert floor close to the small resort town [...]
Kleinman: Beat Barxit? Jes he can – for now November 16, 2018 Come again? The fawning of business leaders who dialled into a conference call with the chancellor and business secretary after Theresa May’s Brexit deal announcement on Tuesday was stunning in its obsequiousness. Particularly odd was Sir Gerry Grimstone who – sitting alongside fellow Barclays board members John McFarlane and Sir Ian Cheshire – took it [...]
US President Donald Trump claims Nato spending to increase “substantially” amid warnings over US membership | City A.M. July 12, 2018 Donald Trump announced that Nato members will significantly increase their military spending, after he apparently threatened to pull the US out. In an impromptu press conference this morning, Trump said he had “told people he would be very unhappy if they did not up their commitments very substantially”. He claimed the combined additional sum would [...]
Can Interserve clean up its mess, or is it destined for the same fate as its failed rival Carillion? December 11, 2018 It feels like we’ve been here before, doesn’t it? It was almost a year ago when outsourcing giant Carillion collapsed, and now there are some worrying signs that rival FTSE firm Interserve could wind up suffering the same fate, serving a huge blow to UK businesses and the livelihoods of its 75,000 employees. On Sunday [...]