Greggs shares are on fire, but can it last? May 24, 2019 | City Talk By Graeme Evans from interactive investor. After some great results, shares in fast-growing Greggs have taken just seven months to double in value. Thanks to a social media frenzy and masterclass in PR, the Greggs vegan sausage roll is now surely a thing of stock market folklore. The transformation of the Greggs (LSE:GRG) brand and [...]
Rocketman is an explosively imaginative biopic charting the life of the iconic piano man May 23, 2019 Take the John Lewis Christmas ad that made your sherry-drunk Aunt Pauline cry into her sprouts and stretch it out over a hundred or so minutes and you’ve got yourself Rocketman, the Taron Egerton fronted musical biopic charting the life and travails of bespectacled piano man Elton John. The setting is a booze ‘n’ drugs [...]
Anna at the National Theatre review: A brilliant play about the Stasi that makes you wear headphones May 23, 2019 It’s Stasi-era East Germany and a young woman prepares for a dinner party while a hidden group of shadowy men and women wearing headphones listen in to her every move. The twist? You’re one of them. Anna casts the audience as collaborators in this tale of a young woman caught up in a surveillance operation [...]
DEBATE: Does the Jamie’s Italian chain have only itself to blame for its demise? May 23, 2019 Does the Jamie’s Italian chain have only itself to blame for its demise? Patrick Clover, founder and chief executive of BLACKBX, says YES. It’s a sad story for all involved, not least the 1,000 workers made redundant, but to call Jamie’s Italian a victim of external forces is too simplistic. The climate for mid-market restaurants [...]
This new private members’ club is only for successful start-ups May 21, 2019 "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” Groucho Marx famously said, reputedly resigning from the Friars’ Club in the 1940s. The nature of private members’ clubs has adapted considerably since then, and many are now relaxed as to whom they accept. Bucking this trend, however, is Home [...]
Property Legal Q&A: I am buying a flat and have been advised that the landlord of the building is missing. Should I be worried? May 21, 2019 Often, where the owner of a flat has not heard from the landlord in a while, they will consider the landlord as “missing” but that may not necessarily be the case. Your solicitor should check what enquiries have been made to try and locate the landlord. For example, the landlord may have died and his [...]
How a relationship break-up spurred this founder to build ‘Ebay for travel’ to help flog unwanted holidays May 20, 2019 When you think of unwanted items, holidays don’t tend to spring to mind. But according to Simon Powell, founder of TransferTravel, billions of dollars are wasted globally on unwanted travel every year, while an estimated 220,000 hotel rooms are paid for and never used every day in the US alone, wasting $8.6bn annually. And with [...]
Opinion: Don’t be so quick to abolish no-fault evictions – it is easy to be beguiled by the myth of the underdog May 17, 2019 Everyone loves an underdog. The David and Goliath narrative was prominent in the reporting of the Government’s proposal to abolish Section 21 Notices, which residential landlords can use to end assured shorthold tenancies (“ASTs”) without the tenant being at fault. I would like to sound a dissenting note. Since 1997, the law has gradually moved [...]
Debate: As National Vegetarian Week ends, will this group outnumber meat eaters in the next decade? May 17, 2019 As National Vegetarian Week ends, will this group outnumber meat eaters in the next decade? YES – Sophie Lewis is chief strategy officer at marketing agency VMLY&R. If you’d asked me two years ago, my answer would have been in the negative, but we’ve reached a cultural tipping point when it comes to both vegetarians [...]
Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic review: Casting black actors adds a new dimension to Arthur Miller’s classic May 16, 2019 Such is the power of the racial divide in America that simply casting a black family at the heart of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece presents it in a dark and troubling new light. The Wire’s Wendell Pierce plays Willy Loman, the titular travelling salesman weighed down by economic hardship, social anxiety and a crippling desire [...]