Summer and Smoke at the Almeida: Tennessee Williams’ complex play is brought to heart-rending life in this fantastic production March 9, 2018 Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke is about opposing forces: the microscopic and the infinite, the physical and the spiritual, anarchy and order, sanity and madness, and the thankless task we humans have trying to work out where exactly we fit into all this. It tackles these swooping metaphysical questions through the prism of unrequited [...]
SEO opportunity still there for PR agencies. But will they take it? March 6, 2018 Just over a year ago, I argued that the UK PR industry was missing the search engine optimisation (SEO) boat as data implied the number of agencies offering SEO services had dropped markedly. One year on, I take a look at how the market is developing. If you’re new to search marketing, how Google – [...]
Investors ignore disruptive weather at their peril March 5, 2018 The "Beast from the East" closed schools, kept trains in their sidings and hit Britain's productivity. But can inclement weather move the stock market by affecting investors' minds? Findings of a research project published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 2015 concluded that financial analysts respond more slowly to the implications of earnings announcements [...]
Bitcoin price (BTC) is back above $10k, but the rise might not last February 23, 2018 Bitcoin rose back above $10,000 today after falling below the psychologically important level yesterday, but analysts continued to strike a bearish tone. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s price was up 4.24 per cent at $10,247.64 according to Coindesk’s aggregate price index, recovering from a low of around $9,500 early this morning. The number one [...]
Fears of evil innovations are as wrong as they’ve always been February 22, 2018 Whenever an impressive new technology comes along, people rush to imagine the havoc it could wreak on society – and they overreact. In the sixteenth century, parliament banned mechanical gig mills, and the hosiers guild ran William Lee out of Britain for inventing a better knitting frame. In the early nineteenth century, Luddite stocking knitters [...]
FTSE 100 and Wall Street bounce back after week of turmoil February 12, 2018 The FTSE 100 and companies on Wall Street rose today after a week of big losses following global stock market turmoil. London’s blue-chip companies gained more than 1.2 per cent by the mid-afternoon, with highs just short of the 7,200 points mark. The S&P 500, the US benchmark, rose by 1.2 per cent at the [...]
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Shoot Them: We went on safari with Kenya’s top photographer February 2, 2018 Normally at hotels I’m rather picky about who joins me for breakfast, but this time I made an exception. Or as much of an exception you can claim to make when a herd of wild Rothchild’s giraffes wander over uninvited to pop their necks through the lodge’s windows in search of a bite to eat. [...]
It’s getting hot out there, and investors need to protect themselves February 2, 2018 In a previous incarnation, I was a theoretical astrophysicist. In that role, I worked on a team that tried to parse how much of global warming could be attributed to the sun and how much to human causes. As someone who worked directly with climate change data, I can assure you: Climate change is real. [...]
More and more pets are taking to the skies to join us abroad, but what happens to our four-legged friends when they fly? January 25, 2018 Air travel, it’s easy to forget, is arcane magic. We strap ourselves into big metal tubes to be voluntarily catapulted thousands of feet into the sky, a place where there’s free sour cream and onion flavoured pretzels and tiny bottles of vodka, and where we’re furious when the wifi doesn’t work. It is only the [...]
Editor’s Notes: Theresa May can benefit from taking on Corbyn’s anti-business agenda, Trump’s thumbs up to data and the ONS’ telecoms glitch January 19, 2018 Theresa May has never been an enthusiastic defender of free-market capitalism, much to the frustration of many in business. However, to give credit where it’s due, the PM pushed back quite hard against Jeremy Corbyn’s latest assault on private business, which was sparked by the collapse of Carillion. After the Labour leader stumbled his way [...]