I'm Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Editor-in-Chief of CapX, columnist at The Sunday Times, and author of 'The Great Acceleration', a book about how technology is speeding up the pace of life and the impact that's having. ('A must-read' - Steve Hilton. 'Punchy and wide-ranging' - Tim Harford. 'Indispensable' - Boris Johnson. 'As fast-paced as its subject matter' - Mark Lynas. 'Really an excellent book' - Daniel Finkelstein.)
You can buy a copy here, or get more details here. To find out more about me, or how to get in touch, see my author page. For the latest news, follow me on Twitter.
Apologies for the radio silence – I've been working away for the past few months, finishing the very final line-dotting on my book (so fingers crossed that nothing about the world changes until April).
As well as working on a few bigger projects (which I can't talk about, but which are very exciting) I've also been writing for various outlets. If you're interested, just follow the links below...
Read MoreTen years ago this week, Arctic Monkeys released their very first single — ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’. Like everything the band did, it was a sensation: their subsequent album, ‘Everything You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’, shattered the record set by Hear’Say (you know, from Popstars) for first-week sales. Even the Telegraph got into them — as I know, because I had to spend most of 2005 and 2006 patiently taking the ‘The’ out of ‘The Arctic Monkeys’ in piece after piece after piece…
At the time, Arctic Monkeys seemed thrilling and new. Here was a band that was using the latest technology — this amazing thing called MySpace — to build up a following. In the process, they seemed to have rendered the record labels completely pointless.
Their songs were raw, personal, heartfelt, packed with a furious energy
More thrilling still, Arctic Monkeys didn’t just have a sound — they had a manifesto. Like the punks of the 1970s, they seemed to be there to save us from tedious, anodyne, manufactured pop, to sweep away Hear’Say and all the rest of Simon Cowell’s plastic androids. Their songs were raw, personal, heartfelt, packed with a furious energy: Oasis meets the Strokes with a dash of John Cooper Clarke. There were serious suggestions that they were the closest thing we’d get to a new version of the Beatles.
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