Niall ferguson

Why study history? It’s a question which often gets asked, and the historian R. G. Collingwood’s answer – that history should enable us to ‘see more clearly into the situation in which we are compelled to act’- is one of the best responses. The idea that the study of the past should be applicable to the present has directed the career of Niall Ferguson, who was recently bemoaning the degradation of the subject. Discussing the current focus on race, class and gender in history faculties in a recent speech, Ferguson argued that undergraduates are being robbed of the chance to study events of real significance. Faced with a list of politicised options,

So farewell, then, Jonathan Portes. As CoffeeHousers may know, he was chief economist in the Cabinet Office under Gordon Brown but in recent years he has been director of the NIESR, an economic research institute, which he used as a platform to continue leftist attacks against conservatives. He pretty much lives on Twitter, when he’s not bothering press regulators with nit-picking complaints against people with whom he disagrees. The NIESR seems to have finally had enough of being hijacked for his partisan purposes. It has announced his departure ‘by mutual consent and with immediate effect’. Okay, maybe ‘announced’ is overstating things: it has inserted a sly paragraph in the ‘about us’ section of

Two weeks ago I was too ‘obscure to bother with‘ for Professor Niall Ferguson. He’s changed his mind, dedicating an entire article in The Spectator to me. In particular, he is very upset that, after I complained, the FT was obliged to correct his recent article about the UK economy. Professor Ferguson’s article contained one undisputed factual error (about UK business confidence) and one statement which the FT’s independent complaints commissioner found to be misleading, but which Professor Ferguson argues is composed of two ‘true statements’. This was: ‘Weekly earnings are up by more than 8 per cent; in the private sector, the figure is above 10 per cent. Inflation is

In a recent interview, the celebrity historian and Tudor expert David Starkey described Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as a ‘deliberate perversion of fact’. The novel, he said, is ‘a magnificent, wonderful fiction’. listen to ‘David Starkey on Wolf Hall’ on audioBoom But if Oxford has taught me one thing, it’s that all the best history is. Starkey is a Cambridge man, and maybe they do things differently there. But any perceptive Oxford undergraduate will soon realise that a little bit of fiction is the surest way to a First. What the admissions material opaquely describes as ‘historical imagination’ turns out to be an irregular verb: I imagine, you pervert the

The maths of America’s financial problems are fairly simple. Every year the federal government spends more than it brings in so must borrow to fill the gap. This is fine when you’re young and healthy, with great prospects and you are borrowing to invest. But one day your lenders look at you and realise you’re not young and growing any more. You’re middle-aged and knackered. You are borrowing simply to spend and time is running out for you to pay back your debts. It’s an ugly moment for anyone, especially the most powerful country in the world. There are economists like Paul Krugman who argue that America is not like

Is it homophobic to argue that it’s mainly gay men who keep the flame of popular culture alive? If so, then Simon Napier Bell has some grovelling to do. Napier Bell, as I’m sure you all know, is the rock impresario who has managed everyone from the Yardbirds to Wham!, and who a few years ago wrote an excellent book on the music business called Black Vinyl, White Powder. At least I thought it was excellent at the time. What I realise with hindsight, though, is that the book was in fact deeply offensive in its reductive and stereotypical view of homosexual behaviour. It argued that gay men — unburdened

One new institution does not a revolution make. But there’s still something a little revolutionary about the New College of the Humanities that is set to open, in London, in September 2012. Perhaps it’s the idea behind it: a private university that charges fees of £18,000 a year (with bursaries available to those who can’t afford that). Or perhaps it’s the names who are fronting it: AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, etc. They will, apparently, be conducting tutorials themselves. The public academics, it seems, are pitching their tents on the private sector. Mary Beard lists some reasons no to get too excited here. This is, she says, little more