Tag: Change
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Global leadership opinion: Where will the West turn for its survival?
WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was…
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Global leadership opinion: Searching for virtues in the US administration’s New World Order
WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO CANADA from New York State, USA there is a sense of coming home for the English traveller. Food portions are saner, grass greener, and they say ‘sorry’ nearly as much. Despite the US government’s desire to despoil Canada, I could easily be an American. Half the English spirit is spent coping…
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TRUMP II’s existential politics: ‘MAGA’dom versus the university men and women’
THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will ‘MAGA’dom’ bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who…
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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity
AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip. François Hollande, in…
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‘Great Tidal Waves of Energy’: Music’s Revolutionary Zeal
‘The oddest person… and at the same time the most rare and consistently witty’ is how Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have ‘praised’ his French contemporary Erik Satie (1866-1925)*. Music is not just tolerant of eccentricity. It seems to embrace it in ways that other domains iron out. Paul Kildea’s new biography on…
DR STEPHEN GIBBS 