Tag: capitalism
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Against sport
My title will offend, I know. Almost as much as would a blog of 1800, if one existed, that carried the title ‘Against religion’. But bear with me, even if sport is your religion. I want to argue, why, contrary to a virtually unquestioned consensus, I think the current fetishisation of competitive sport is a…
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Cadbury capitalism
All my life I’ve been a chocolate addict. The high point of a visit to my granny’s at Howden was when she would open a secret drawer and give me some. At home my mother used to hide bars in a high cupboard, well away from a small boy’s fingers. I repeated the trick when…
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The religion of inequality
The other day, for no apparent reason, I pulled off the shelf my old second-hand copy of R.H. Tawney’s book Equality. It still has a ragged and discoloured dust jacket, with a tea stain on the front, and it was well used before I bought it, for £1, on a date, unusually, I failed to…
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Bigism
The Big Mac, which celebrates its fortieth birthday this year, must have started it. The obsession with bigness. By now we take it for granted, without a conscious thought. Everything you get is going to be big, by default, unless you make a special plea for small. Even then you might get something that’s only…
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Barbarians and idiots
It’s Saturday evening, and the three of us are sitting round the kitchen table after a meal, with the remains of a bottle of cheap but perfectly good red wine from Bulgaria. Its label says, ‘from the Thracian lowlands’. A. recalls that he went to Bulgaria on holiday, many years ago, in communist times. All…