Daily Archives: September 2, 2006

Just googled out

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This morning’s Observer column…

Why does Google remind one of Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls for 20 years and arguably the most inventive judge of his time, forever generating new precedents and concepts and requiring the weekly updating of legal textbooks? Things got so bad that a law student once famously wrote to the Times requesting that the Master of the Rolls should stop making new law until the Bar exams were over.

Google is like Denning on steroids. Scarcely a week goes by without it unveiling yet another wheeze to put someone else out of business. The converse also applies: if Google says it wants to be your friend – as with eBay recently – your share price goes up. But in the main most of Google’s announcements involve plans to eat somebody’s lunch…

Lunch with the FT

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I read the Financial Times every Saturday, mainly because its magazine still contains some of the best book reviews. One of its more quirky features is “Lunch with the FT”, in which a journalist takes some grandee out to lunch at the paper’s expense and, under cover of that, conducts a half-baked interview. This week, the guest was Professor Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian. The lunch was in Wilton’s, a ludicrously expensive restaurant just off Jermyn Street in London. What interested me about the piece was not so much the content (which was pretty banal) as the bill:

1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bernaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x expresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume

Total: £169.88