Cometh the Hour

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History has no "right side." It follows no predetermined path and has no inevitable endpoint. This may dismay those hoping to find some meaning in the march of time, but the logical consequence of its absence is to leave room for an individual to make a significant difference to the course of history.

In Personality and Power, Ian Kershaw, the distinguished British historian best known for his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, identifies 12 people who managed just that over one period in one place….

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ESG’s Bad (But Not Bad Enough) Year

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The year 2022 was not the best of years for ESG (an investment discipline under which portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance standards). To take one example, as of January 5, the price of BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF had declined by around 22 percent over twelve months, underperforming the S&P 500, which fell by around 20 percent. Those are only one year’s results (and they would have been marginally improved by dividends), but it’s still not the greatest of looks for an investment approach often sold (typically with higher fees) as a way of doing well by doing good. Making matters more embarrassing still, stocks in those wicked fossil fuel companies (in which ESG investors tend to be underweight) did well. The S&P 500 Energy sector index rose by around 44 percent over the same period…

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Roxy Music’s Avant-Garde Origin Story

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The stylus descends on the first LP by a new band. “You’ve never heard anything like this,” says a friend one day in 1972 — half a century ago, good Lord.

Track one, side one: Glasses clink, conversation, a cocktail party. A piano starts up: insistent, repetitive, fast. Drums pound, guitars surge, a singer begins, his voice distinctive, mannered.

A chorus joins in, an enigmatic, vaguely retro chant — “CPL593H.” Later, the command, “Show me.” A sax wails and shrieks, the volume heads towards eleven, and the pace accelerates. Something electronic is going on in the background, and the singer returns to his earlier lament…

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On the Ground in Ukraine

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Walking home after dinner in Kyiv on Feb. 23, British journalist Luke Harding answers his phone: The Russian attack, he is told, is expected within hours. “Invasion” is his account of the war that ensued. Gripping and often moving, the book is primarily journalistic but goes beyond mere reportage as Mr. Harding draws on his knowledge of the region and a background that includes serving as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau.

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Hard times

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There is something peculiarly unnerving about glimpses of lives being lived without any awareness of approaching catastrophe—film footage of Edwardian England, say, or jfk at Love Field. This can be true too in fiction. Profoundly moving and, at times, surprisingly lyrical, Grey Bees, by the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, is gently powerful, and made even more so by what has happened since it was first published in 2018 (the American edition, translated by Boris Dralyuk, was released this year)…

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The Death of the Thatcherite Rebirth

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Last week, Britain’s newly minted (and now newly departing) prime minister, Liz Truss, replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) with Jeremy Hunt, a figure from the soggy Tory Party’s soggy center who was widely seen as “a safe pair of hands.” Hunt’s allies claimed that he would be CEO to Truss’s chairman, and that is how it turned out….

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To Be Anti-ESG Is to Be against Free Market Capitalism? Not So Much.

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With environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…

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How Europe Invited Its Energy Crisis

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The historian Barbara Tuchman famously compared European civilization before the First World War to a “proud tower” but showed how that tower was more rickety than those at its summit imagined. The pride was overdone, the hubris all too real.

If Europe today can be symbolized by a similarly proud tower, one candidate might be a giant North Sea wind turbine in September 2021, its blades barely turning thanks to winds that had dropped, unexpectedly, for weeks. This unproductive calm had led to a scramble for other sources of power to remedy the shortfall. But the price of one obvious alternative, natural gas, was already soaring (the European benchmark, Dutch front-month gas, was around five times as high as it had been two years before)…

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Restoring The Fed's Credibility?

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If any central banker, both literally and figuratively, bestrode, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the…world like a colossus,” it was the 6-foot-7 Paul Volcker.  But, perversely, the giant shadow he cast helps explain our not-so-transitory inflationary mess…

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Liz Truss: Winning the Poisoned Chalice

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There have, it is true, been stickier moments to become Britain’s prime minister: May 1940, for one, when Winston Churchill took the top job. Nevertheless, however glowingly Boris Johnson may, in his farewell speech, have spoken of his legacy (“foundations that will stand the test of time,” “great solid masonry,” the “path to prosperity” paved, and so on), the reality is that Liz Truss, his successor, has inherited one hell of a mess, politically and economically, and time is already running out for her to fix it…

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