Dec 25, 2017
Merry christmas everyone!
A fiendishly difficult christmas quiz for you all based on my past episodes - anything better than 50% and you deserve to be on Santa's good list.
Let us know how you got on, and of course have a wonderful Christmas!
Dec 7, 2017
Please don't think I have an obsession with sewers.
In this episode I look at work of Bazalgette, the former Chief Engineer of the London Metropolitan Board of Works, a man who “probably did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian public official”.
Bazalgette probably may claim more credit for...
Nov 26, 2017
Many nations sit on some form of natural resource wealth and, as is their right, they will exploit that wealth. The windfall is often spent nearly as quickly as it is earned with few able to exercise sufficient restraint to save some for a rainy day.
This short-termism is most prevalent in democracies where a dollar...
Nov 19, 2017
The olympics as we know them today are a rather modern phenomenon, peculiarly mixing 'amateur' athletics with a very professionally run programme of events.
The 1904 St. Louis olympics were in every sense amateur. With very few participants generally, and barely any foreign competitors specifically.
Yet one event, the...
Oct 29, 2017
Xi Jinping has been called many things. The Economist describes him as 'the most powerful man in the world', his own party call him 'the core of the Chinese Communist Party', others a 'closet Maoist'.
Whatever your opinions of him, compared to many world leaders comparatively little is known of his background.
In this...