Economics
Bonds and how they work
This is likely to be very boring, but I’m going to try to explain how the bond market works and why so much attention is paid to the 10 year gilt level. Initial primer Bonds [more…]
Summer 2026
21st Century
Postcard from Mumbai
After a long, hot site visit in Panoli, a small industrial town in Gujarat, the traffic on the main Ahmedabad to Mumbai highway was even more hideous than usual. It was the last day of [more…]
18th Century
Nicholas Wood: The man who wrote the book on railways
He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
Arts
Manouche – Part One
Ernesto sang a beautiful haunting rhumba from his native Brazil, and then Chocote took the guitar to accompany Memé’s singing. Chocote’s big labourer’s fingers were transformed as they danced nimbly around the chords, his other [more…]
European Union
The Avoidable Inferno: How the EU, Eco Lunacy and Bureaucracy Fried France’s Forest
The MSM news tells us that the huge summer wildfire near Bordeaux is clear evidence of an unpreventable “climate catastrophe”. History proves otherwise. The Landes forest near Bordeaux is entirely artificial. It is Europe’s largest [more…]
19th Century
Beamish: the Museum that said yes to everything
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
Holiday
WG’s Summer Cruise, June 2026 – Part Five
Thursday 25th June – At sea Do you ever get the feeling you have done something wrong and you actually haven’t? Well, the information to put the clocks forward to European time went out yesterday, [more…]
Arts
The Summer 2026 Competition
Same rules as the Spring competition. All qualifying articles to be submitted by the middle of August and once the last entry is published I will post the results. No existing series, preferably no AI. [more…]
18th Century
Edward Pease: the Grandfather of the railways
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]