Homes and decorating magazines are the latest victims of the credit crunch. Circulation figures for Living etc, 25 Beautiful Homes and my personal favourite, the musty-bookshelved, gilt-gessoed World of Interiors, are all heading unceremoniously down the CP Hart marble-and-bronze toilet.
This is no doubt due to the fact that a lot of people are sick of looking at rich people’s wetrooms, and are yearning for a more innocent, less rapaciously capitalistic time, when a house was a house, wallpaper was woodchip, and an Arco lamp was something a welder used to …

Something has gone badly wrong with video games. Once the exclusive domain of geeky boys, gaming has become not just socially acceptable but, well, actually quite popular with normal people.
This sad state of affairs is the unfortunate consequence of a long-running de-nerdification of the video games industry:

1947 - The first ever video game, entitled Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, is invented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Ph.D. Due to the high cost of the experimental equipment required, the game can only be played by a handful of top-level government scientists.

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It must have come as a great relief to ‘special relationship’ watchers in the UK that Barack Obama chose Gordon Brown as the first European leader to ring when he assumed office (albeit well after his calls to leaders on other continents). The news that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather had been tortured by the British during the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s had sent them into paroxysms of worry that the US might dump Britain as its special European friend, in favour of the less loaded embrace of France …

One of the big cultural fibs going around today is that this, uniquely, is the Age of the Celebrity; a time that is defined by our fascination with people who are famous, but we’re not entirely sure what for.
There’s actually a long tradition of this, but the difference with the old-style celebs is that we could never define why Peter Ustinov (for example) was famous, because he did so many things, not so few. Apart from the proper jobs (writer, director, actor, artist and so on) he was also good …