capitalism

Western economies are failing – but capitalism isn’t the problem

25 May 2024 9:00 am

Left-wing polemicists accuse neoliberals, inspired by Friedrich Hayek, of secretly running the world – but if so, they’re not concealing the whole sinister project very well

Milton Friedman – economic visionary or scourge of the world?

13 January 2024 9:00 am

Monetarism, with which his name is associated, has long defined economic policy. But what would Friedman have made of the banking collapse, so soon after his death in 2006?

The astonishing truth about 007

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The world would never be quite the same again after we first glimpsed the casino of Royale-les-Eaux at three in the morning, says Philip Hensher

Modern capitalism has failed my son

9 April 2022 9:00 am

A light was on in the caravan site office so I went over to try and buy a gas canister.…

Small but perfectly formed: the Royal College of Music Museum reopening reviewed

30 October 2021 9:00 am

Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…

The economic illiteracy of anti-capitalists

29 June 2021 10:05 pm

Back in October, World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart recommended that countries borrow heavily during the pandemic. ‘First, you worry…

There's nothing wrong with profiting from a vaccine

17 November 2020 3:14 am

A couple of shots to the arm and this will all be over. With today’s news from Moderna, last week’s…

What angry young French men want

27 June 2020 9:00 am

Chatting on the café terrace with my new friends Didier and Emile made me aware that certain political ideas, which…

Is the world speeding up or slowing down? Depending on your politics, you can argue either way

11 April 2020 9:00 am

Ah well. It was a nice try. A few years ago I wrote a book called The Great Acceleration, arguing…

How capitalism killed sleep

7 December 2019 9:00 am

What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder…

Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to

29 September 2018 9:00 am

It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be…

Welcome to the hard centre – and the future of British politics

22 September 2018 9:00 am

The Conservative party has to move beyond Brexit and leaders: what is it going to be about? I suggest it…

Family fortunes: Ben Miles, Adam Godley and Simon Russell Beale in The Lehman Trilogy

Extraordinary power and simplicity: Lehman Trilogy reviewed

21 July 2018 9:00 am

Stefano Massini’s play opens with a man in a frock-coat reaching New York after six weeks at sea. The year…

Interview: Meet Mariana Mazzucato, big-state capitalism’s new champion

28 April 2018 9:00 am

‘It was Plato who said storytellers rule the world,’ observes Mariana Mazzucato, her powerful voice tempered with a beaming smile,…

In 1985 it was ‘the most expensive building ever built’: HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters designed by Norman Foster

From Stansted to corporate swank: superstructuralism has a lot to answer for

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of…

Letters

7 October 2017 9:00 am

What do the Tories offer? Sir: I have been hoping that someone more eloquent than me would respond to your…

The Korean war was the single greatest calamity of the period. Residents of Inchon surrender to American troops in 1950

Armageddon averted

9 September 2017 9:00 am

From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…

Well of sorrows

2 September 2017 9:00 am

The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…

Heavy-handed

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Oliver Cotton is an RSC stalwart who looks like a man born to greatness. Google him. He has the fearless…

Lily James as Juliet and Richard Madden as Romeo

Derek Jacobi as Mercutio is half-genius, half-prank: Romeo and Juliet at the Garrick reviewed

4 June 2016 9:00 am

Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite…

How capitalism really works

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Deirdre McCloskey has been at work for many years on a huge project: to explain why the world has become…

We don’t need research to change banking culture. We need jail sentences

9 January 2016 9:00 am

Was the Financial Conduct Authority leaned on by the Chancellor to scrap its ‘review of banking culture’? Or did it…

(Photo: Getty)

How hard should we fight Black Friday?

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Should we make peace with this imported festival of consumerism?

Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’

14 November 2015 9:00 am

An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read…

An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda - which is why the luvvies love it

19 September 2015 8:00 am

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…