Expanding the Legacy
SME: Engineering Perfection
Perfection is often the outcome of fortuitous circumstance – not necessarily of a carefully traced design process. That’s how a West Sussex precision engineering company ended up as the manufacturer of the world’s best tonearms – the mechanical contraption that guides the cartridge over a vinyl record. Formed in 1946...
Tannoy: At Home in Country Manors, Concert Halls, and on Racetracks
Whenever a brand becomes so ubiquitous that its name is turned into both a verb and noun, competitors cringe and turn blue with envy. And well they may: in business since 1926, Tannoy – manufacturer of loudspeakers – admits little to no competition. For decades on end, the company’s public...
Gibson: Guitar Legend on the Ropes
One of the three Kings of the Blues Guitar alongside Albert King and Freddie King, BB King was born under a good sign on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1925. Riley B King (1925-2015) acquired a taste for music in church and launched his career in local barrelhouses and on...
Music the Old-Fashioned Way
The news of its death was greatly exaggerated. Sales of vinyl records are spinning through the roof. According to Nielsen – an American company that monitors global media usage – sales of records are on track to exceed six million in 2014, up fully forty percent over 2013 – the year in which digital music sales, peddled by the likes of iTunes, took its first dip ever, sliding 5.7%. The only media segment growing at a higher rate than vinyl is on-demand streaming (up 42%).
Where is Woodrow when you need him?
Perhaps one of the last non-cynical world leaders, Woodrow Wilson just couldn’t be bothered with lofty philosophical musings about the nature of government – Plato and Aristotle were lost on him. The 28th US president didn’t need the classical world to tell right from wrong.
Rich Man, Poor Man: A Clash Foretold
The embarrassment of riches is mostly lost on today’s billionaires. The phrase was originally coined by British historian Simon Schama to denote public morals in the 17th century Dutch Republic. While the rich were widely admired for their accomplishments, any public display of wealth met with sharp disapproval. This Calvinistic take on the behavioural responsibilities of the well-heeled has been replaced by shameless voyeurism in which the have-nots drown their own misery gaping at the profligate haves as they play with expensive toys and dwell in palatial mansions whilst showcasing both material excess and intellectual dearth.
On Savages, Revolutionaries, and Idiots
Driven by nostalgia for times that never were, victimised by foes that never existed, and waiting for an enlightened leader who never arrives: most political thinkers of Latin America have perfected the art of the blame game. The continent’s permanent state of underdevelopment is everyone’s fault – from ignorant colonial powers to arrogant Yankees and heartless capitalists.
From Dakar with Love
A self-described creative Marxist, Samir Amin (84) is a French-Egyptian economist who lives in Senegal and firmly believes that world capitalism – defined as the rule of oligopolies based in rich countries – maintains its power through five monopolies: technology, natural resources, finance, global media, and red buttons.
A Sojourn in Davos
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Vintage Classics – 752pp – £11.25 – ISBN: 978-0-7493-8642-9) For all its potential as a canvas for the display of human suffering, sick-lit never quite made it as a genre. In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf expressed dismay at the near-universal...
A Balance Disturbed
Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else by James Meek (Verso Books – 238pp – £8.55 – ISBN 978-1-7847-8206-1) It remains somewhat of a mystery how Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne manages the UK government’s financial affairs. Presiding over a buoyant economy, planning the biggest privatisation exercise...
