Latest news with #MaxHastings
Business Standard
6 days ago
- Politics
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: How we manage change can turn the future around
Today's columnists assess change, and the various forms it takes - from Trump's flip-flops to changing the ideal of what a company should do, to the Indian cricket team's leadership churn Listen to This Article Hello, and welcome to BS Views, our daily wrap of the opinion page. Today's columnists assess change, and the various forms it takes - from Trump's flip-flops to changing the ideal of what a company should do, to the Indian cricket team's leadership churn, from data that throws up new realities to new realities that must force change on our borders. Read on. In our lead column today, Max Hastings argues that US President Donald Trump's dislike of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as his penchant for deal-making, has given Russia's President Vladimir Putin a clear upper hand at the negotiating
NZ Herald
28-05-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Sword by Max Hastings
Advertisement Advertise with NZME. Publishers and military historians don't allow a significant anniversary to pass without offering something new. It is 80 years since VE Day, marking Germany's surrender in World War II. Sir Max Hastings has chosen as his contribution a 'micro-history' of the British army's role in the Normandy invasion of June
Mint
28-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Comparing apples and oranges. And also small caged mammals
Cod-liver oil (1947-51), mercifully, passed away swiftly. Liver (1947-98) lasted a little longer. Avocados didn't arrive until 1993—but have thrived since then. To read the contents list of the basket of goods, updated this week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is an intriguing experience. For economists it offers a sober measure of consumer-price inflation. For everyone else it is a births-and-deaths column for British consumerism, announcing the arrival of some objects and acting, for others, as their epitaph. Thus this week the list noted the arrival of 'men's sliders" and the demise of newspaper advertisements. It has previously recorded the demise of linoleum (in 1980), of corsets (1970) and of oil lamps (1947). Its very name is a relic: that word 'basket" sounding like something that might have hung from the arm of a British housewife as she went to the shops in her mackintosh (1947-52) to buy Brussels sprouts (1947-2006). Sometimes, it is an enigma: in the 2000s a 'small caged mammal" appeared, unexpectedly, in the ONS's calculations. The basket itself, in its modern form, was born in 1947. The political mood was tense. British families, who had paid a high price—in some cases the ultimate one—for the war were angry at the high prices they had to pay for everything else in the peace. The era of macroeconomic theory had begun (Britain's first official national accounts were published in 1941). Now Britain's beancounters needed microeconomic data, on things like the price of beans (canned beans: 1947-), to apply those theories. And that meant shoe-leather reporting (shoe repairs: 1947-2003). It still does: every month the ONS's 280 price collectors set out to shops in around 140 places across Britain to collect 180,000 prices of hundreds of goods and services (they also look online). Those prices are then gathered into categories (thus 'small caged mammal" goes to make up a larger category on 'pets"). Then changes in price are calculated, to enable the government to know about inflation, and at least something about the price of eggs (1947-). As well as about many other, more unappetising things. The 1947 list, at the height of rationing, shows a nation surviving on Brussels sprouts, margarine and the ominously oblique 'compound cooking fat". This, Evelyn Waugh later wrote, was 'a bleak period of present privation" and, he added, even more bleakly, 'of soya beans". Rationed food was 'unbelievably dreary", says Max Hastings, a historian. It did not fill stomachs but did, oddly, fill books. In the 'hungry novels" of wartime and post-war Britain, British novelists with poor diets and rich imaginations allowed their characters to gorge on the foods which they could not. In 'Brideshead Revisited" Sebastian Flyte eats strawberries and sips Château Peyraguey beneath a spreading summer elm. It 'isn't a wine you've ever tasted," he says. Given that 'Brideshead" was published in 1945, and 'table wine" didn't appear until 1980, this was probably true. The ONS records offer a picture not merely of national consumerism but of national character; few novelists draw in such detail. The writer Julian Barnes once said that to build a character you must 'start with the shoes". And the basket does give you Britons' footwear—from men's leather Oxfords (1947) to plimsolls (1947-87) to the casually late arrival of the trainer (1987). But it also gives detail on Britons' underwear (which in 1962 included a 'girdle"); its nightwear ('winceyette" in 1947) and on where Britons spend their time (climbing walls have replaced bingo halls). The basket is at once detailed—and doomed. Britain's economists are not quite comparing apples and oranges: both apples (1947-) and oranges (1947-) have been in since the beginning, so each can be compared with themselves. But it is all but impossible to equate the value of a 'rubber-roller table mangle" (1947-52) with a tumble drier (1993-); or of a telegram (1956-80) with a mobile phone (2005-). Using price indices over long periods is, says Diane Coyle, a professor of economics at Cambridge, 'a bit of a mug's game". The introduction of wholly new products in medicine is particularly problematic for prices. Gouty King George IV 'lived like a king", says William Nordhaus, an economist, but 'was a miserable man because his feet were killing him". Today, a pill could cure him; yet such changes are 'simply…not captured" by indices. It is not only the lists' items that have changed but their length. Early lists are not just nasty (that cod-liver oil) and occasionally brutish (1952 offers 'home-killed mutton and lamb"). They are also short: the 1947 basket has only 200 items. The current one has 750. This is typical: one study found that in the early 1970s Americans could choose between five types of running shoe. By the late 1990s they had 285. 'The real privilege of our lives today is that we have choice," says Sir Max. Choice in everything, from whether or not to fight in a war, to whether to spend your money on avocados, or climbing walls or even, should you wish, on small caged mammals. For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
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Business Standard
17-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: How we manage change can turn the future around
Hello, and welcome to BS Views, our daily wrap of the opinion page. Today's columnists assess change, and the various forms it takes - from Trump's flip-flops to changing the ideal of what a company should do, to the Indian cricket team's leadership churn, from data that throws up new realities to new realities that must force change on our borders. Read on. In our lead column today, Max Hastings argues that US President Donald Trump's dislike of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as his penchant for deal-making, has given Russia's President Vladimir Putin a clear upper hand at the negotiating table. Witness how Trump refused to show up for the peace talks because Putin wasn't going to be there. The Russian president is probably gambling that if he hangs on, the transactional US president will sooner or later walk away, because he sees nothing in Ukraine for himself, allowing Russia to eventually become the hegemon in the region. In today's National Interest, Shekhar Gupta notes that Pakistan and its proxies are prone to a predictable seven-year itch. In other words, India gets about seven years of deterrent capability after each terror attack. Will this near-war, India's strongest military response so far, buy India another seven years of deterrence? While it was a formidable punitive package, the facts and history, are yet to convince that an Indian deterrence against use of terror as state policy has been established. To do this, he writes, after this is over, India must look generations ahead and invest in one front only. A big economy with faith in its future needs defence that isn't just impregnable, but deters at least one of its two adversaries. Done right, this one front will cease to matter. R Gopalakrishnan considers the old debate about family-managed versus professional-run companies and comes away convinced that the future belongs to 'professional entrepreneurial managers', a mix of efficiency and startup thinking. Nonetheless, he remains committed to so-called 'deergha ayush' (long lived) enterprises because of their social as well as economic value as long as they remain purposeful. As a cautionary tale, he points to a technically deerga-ayush company, Credit Suisse, that proved it is expensive for society to extend the life of a company that is no longer capable or purposeful. Devangshu Datta looks to an unlikely source of data to understand underreporting of Covid fatalities and its impact, and over-reporting of Maha Kumbh visitors: Indian Railways. The number of passengers on IR is yet to reach it's pre-Covid levels, he points out. The undercounting of deaths has knock-on effects such as insurance payouts as well as allocation of health resources. Similarly, he finds that Railways data doesn't really register a jump during the Maha Kumbh, suggesting that the state government's claims of a revenue windfall may not hold water. Vishal Menon notes that Australian tours appear to have a decisive role in concluding the careers of Indian batting greats. In 2012, a good 13 years ago, India's calamitous tour of Australia ended the careers of Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, he recalls, and draws a parallel to the current exits of stalwarts Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. With no clear frontleader for the top job, the job now must fall to Gambhir to instil the virtues of playing Test cricket in a generation of players raised on an IPL diet. In essence, he says, Gambhir has a stiff task ahead: Turn boys into men.
Spectator
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Max Hastings on the real story of D-Day – The Book Club live
As a subscriber-only special, get exclusive access to The Spectator's Book Club Live: an evening with Max Hastings. Join The Spectator's literary editor, Sam Leith, and the military historian and former Telegraph editor-in-chief Max Hastings, to uncover the real story of D-Day. They will be discussing Max's new book, Sword: D-Day – Trial by Battle, which explores – with extraordinary vividness – the actions of the Commando brigade, Montgomery's 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions at Sword beach in June 1944. It will also be an opportunity to celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Following the discussion, attendees will have the opportunity to put their own questions to Max – and perhaps discover the incredible story of the brigadier who was fired for letting Churchill down.
