In a night of surprises the greatest revelation of the 89th Academy Awards was that Pricewaterhousecoopers plays a leading role in counting voting. If anyone ever queried the involvement of accountants in Hollywood the Best Picture mix-up has provided sufficient ammo. The knee-jerk statement of regret from PwC, coupled with the obligatory promise to investigate…
Donald Trump may have only been in office for three weeks, but he’s already started to work his entrepreneurial magic. Taking to Twitter to lambaste Nordstrom for withdrawing his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, he unleashed an outpouring of consumer love. The store’s stock finished the day up 4%. Meryl Streep’s performance in “Florence Foster Jenkins”…
No one likes a show-off. Even if you’ve won 19 major trophies in a 20 year football career and have reinvented yourself into a $1bn empire spanning fashion, music and film, it isn’t a good look to cry out for recognition. Yet any obituary of Brand Beckham in light of the email leak is…
Above all else an iconic image is an expression of power. Think of Korda’s photo portrait of Che Guevara –starting life as propaganda for a dynamic young radical it wassucked into the incredible merchandise mill of capitalism. When Korda first photographed the Argentine radical we were exposed to at most 500 images a day. In…
La La Land –the new musical by Damien Chazelle that has got audiences feather stepping out of cinemas- opens with a traffic jam on a freeway ramp. For a glorious moment the honking drone of commuters is suspended for a sequence to rival great dance numbers from Top Hat to Thriller. What makes Chazelle’s film…
Newspapers have been shedding their arts reporting for decades, relegating reviews to dispensable supplements and buried middle-pages. Depressing reports such as last week’s piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the disappearance of full-time arts staffers are a familiar sight. If the professional reviewer is an endangered species then the rise of the blogging geek…
In PR we talk about reaching out and cutting through. We craft messaging that will engage that poised and docile mob we call ‘the public’. In 2016 –a year of Trump and Brexit, outrage and division- this pursuit has never seemed harder. The year will be remembered as one where the mighty fell, the great…
Whether it’s a burka ban in Germany or Trump’s plan for an overhaul of America’s trading relationships much in politics is justified on the ground of ‘our values’. They can be liberal or American, Enlightenment or corporate- what matters is that they are ours and we have to defend them. As analysts of political discourse…
Between the shock of Trump and the likely pummeling of the Italian establishment in the country’s constitutional referendum on Sunday the metropolitan liberal elite have received a small boon in Richmond Park. While the defeat of a Tory former wunderkind is an odd platform for restoring order, the bi-election had become a proxy war between…
Is the thought of Ambassador Farage really beneath contempt for Theresa May? Undoubtedly, the interim Ukip leader would be a live wire. Foreign Office mandarins, already on tenterhooks about Foreign Secretary Johnson, would be livid. But the potential benefits outweigh the risks. If Trump has transformed politics once and for all into reality TV, then diplomacy by selfie and proclamations…