Tim Worstall

And Argentine railway bonds - now there’s Edwardian for you…

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This might in fact not be all that bad an idea.

Silvio Berlusconi’s wife added her voice yesterday to the growing calls for Italy to be partitioned.

It’s only been a united country for what, 140 years or so? Is there anything about the current system of internal borders, the current situation of the world, which has […]

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I’m not entirely convinced by this, you know?

Plans to deploy to the Eastern Front had been delayed for what became known as the Baedeker Raids because Hitler chose his targets from the popular tourist guides. Richard Flohr-Swann, Mr Schludecker’s translator and co-pilot on what he expects to be his final mission to Bath, said: “The […]

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A Second World War Luftwaffe pilot who last saw the city of Bath from the cockpit of a Dornier bomber is to return for the first time in 66 years next month to apologise.
Willi Schludecker, now 87, took part in three raids on the city that killed 400 and destroyed scores of Georgian buildings in […]

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What goes around comes around.

The artist’s impression looks like something out of a science fiction film. But a hypersonic passenger plane that could fly to Australia from northern Europe in less than five hours has been designed in Britain. With funding from the European Space Agency, a team of engineers and scientists has come up […]

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Leave aside that Winston Churchill nationalised BP

When did that happen?
I know there was a large shareholding, but nationalisation? Did I miss something?

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OK, I know George Orwell died of TB. Looking it up it was in 1950.
I’ve also been aware that although penicillin had been discovered in the late 20s (? That right?) it wasn’t in anything like regular supply until after WWII. Looking around I see that he first antibiotic for TB treatment was Streptomycin. 

The first […]

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I agree, I’m not as knowledgeable about the minutiae of American politics as some others, but thi really did surprise me:

The invitees included two young anti-draft Congressmen, Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wisconsin) and Donald Rumsfeld (R-Illinois), and one pro-draft Senator, Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts).

Don Rumsfeld? That Don Rumsfeld? Unknown Unknowns Rumsfeld? Was anti-draft in the 1960s?
That Kennedy would […]

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News that a close relative of Homo Sapiens had harems, rather like the modern gorilla:

An ancient human relative may have had a love life much like the modern gorilla, with single dominant males keeping “harems” of females, research has suggested.
A study of 35 fossilised specimens of Paranthropus robustus – a hominin that lived between 1.5 […]

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We adjusting for inflation here or not?

Cotton is trading at 53 cents a pound. It fetched 30 cents in 1860.

1860 New York prices appear to be around 12-13 cents a pound, another estimate is 15 cents for 1857.
Given the inflation rate over the past 150 years it’s difficult to see it coming out at 30 […]

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The Telegraph runs some extracts from a book on the Ancient Egyptians.

Peasants ate bread that was so coarse it wore away their teeth.

Err, that was pretty much true of everyone who ate bread made from flour ground between stones, wasn’t it?

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Very nice indeed:

Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,
Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges […]

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