The hidden Romanticism of Enoch Powell

How old is old?

When Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were recorded speculating about people living to 150, says Jane Shilling in The Daily Telegraph, they were essentially grappling with the same question that perplexed Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago: “How old is old?” It may come as disappointing news to these two septuagenarians, who would far rather think of themselves as being in the “bloom of vigorous mid-life”, but when children aged seven to 16 were asked when old age begins, they plumped for a sprightly 49. Among the supposed signs of being ancient were: drinking tea, doing crosswords, listening to the radio and complaining about the weather.

Those kids aren’t the only ones with a pessimistic view of what constitutes old age. Cicero thought it kicked off at a mere 46; the nine-year-old novelist Daisy Ashford described her book’s hero as “an elderly man of 42”. What all this musing about the definition of “oldness” misses is that life is not a linear timeline – youth at one end and “crossword-grappling” at the other. It’s a “set of Russian dolls”, made up of different aspects of yourself at every age. Norman Mailer said he “carried different ages within him” – parts of him were 81 years old, others 57 or 19. When Virginia Woolf was described, aged 55, as “a noble lady with a shock of white hair”, she wrote: “Lord, are we as old as all that? I feel about six and a half.” As longevity research advances and the number of centenarians steadily increases, perhaps we should look to the approach of the author Henry Miller. “Who wants to live to be 100?” he asked. “A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.”

The AI boom is masking America’s real problems

Since Donald Trump returned to office, the US economy has “followed a pattern”, says Natasha Sarin in The New York Times: the president says or does something outlandish – global tariffs, attempting to sack a Federal Reserve governor – and economists warn solemnly of “deep risks”. Then, the economy keeps “chugging along”. The reason is artificial intelligence. AI firms account for 80% of the gains in US stocks so far this year, and the money firms are spending on the tech makes up an astonishing 40% of all GDP growth. AI capital investment alone – data centres, chips and so on – makes up 2% of the entire GDP.

The situation is worse than having all your economic eggs in one basket. It’s closer to putting all your eggs in one basket, then “stomping on all the other baskets”. There are already signs the non-AI economy is beginning to suffer. As happened in the 1990s internet boom, unflashy parts of the economy are being held back because all the capital is flowing to AI firms. At the same time, as predicted, tariffs are pushing up inflation and dragging down growth. Hiring has stalled, particularly for those trying to enter the workforce (youth unemployment is over 10%). AI is only going to make this worse – it takes a lot of money to build a data centre, but not many workers to run it. Boosters argue that AI will be so incredible no one will mind it eating everything else. But as history shows, technological revolutions bring “economic chaos” before they change the world. For now, financial gains for a few are masking the “real problems” to come.

🫧😬 The signs that AI is an investment bubble are already pretty clear, says Derek Thompson on Substack. Thinking Machines, a start-up founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has just raised $2bn in funding at a $10bn valuation, despite not having released a product and refusing to tell investors what they’re even trying to build. “It was the most absurd pitch meeting,” said one investor who met Murati. “She was like: ‘So we’re doing an AI company with the best AI people, but we can’t answer any questions.’”

Go-karting with Princess Diana

Before menus became QR codes, back when meals were more than Instagram fodder, dining out was “raucous, glamorous and really great fun”, says Simon Mills in The Times. And Jeremy King’s London restaurants “did it best”. Whenever you sat down in the Wolseley, the Ivy or Le Caprice, there would be a handful of Vogue staffers, an American film star doing a West End play, a Viscount, a playboy or two, “and always Nicky Haslam”. I once watched a friend dining with Kylie Minogue, who dumped him halfway through his main. If Lucien Freud, a regular at the Wolseley, didn’t like what was going on at a nearby table, he’d pick up a breadstick, “line it up Eric Bristow-style”, and send the doughy dart directly toward the offending guest’s forehead. As King says, “he never missed his target”.

Princess Diana became a regular at Le Caprice. King always gave her a corner table out of the way of potentially fawning guests and developed elaborate plans to ensure a seamless arrival and departure. He would blind the paparazzi’s lenses using a pair of high-powered torches; pretend to water the flower boxes, ready at any second to turn the hosepipe on the cameras; and allow her to confuse the photographers by driving out of the underground car park via the entrance ramp. He also took pleasure in calling out “prissy Hollywood fakery”. When Dustin Hoffman’s agent once phoned to ask for similar treatment, King replied: “If that’s what you really want, it’s probably best if you stay at home and I send the food over to your house.” Pause. “But you don’t really want that, do you?” Hoffman and his agent kept the booking.

🏎️🏆 Diana was so fond of King and his team that she once arranged a Le Caprice staff vs royalty go-karting event near Croydon. The palace team, made up of Diana (a “spirited and aggressive” driver) and her security detail, took the team award. The individual winner was a kitchen porter, who, as King says, was “astonished to find himself being warmly hugged by the princess upon his victory”.