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@brushingboots Well deserved. To me, it feels like the successor volume to David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. After the decline ended what did they do? Eleanor Doughty tells us.

Today I experienced the incredibly flattering novelty of seeing someone else’s copy of a book that I have written filled with post its and it produced a warm glow like no other

@brushingboots I agree - I am reading it now and very much enjoying the stories it tells and the insights that it provides into a part of our culture that is very interesting. Cogitating whether it is too big to carry onto a long haul flight on Saturday.

It’s #WorldBookDay and I am off to talk to my old school about writing books! Why not treat yourself to my book, HEIRS AND GRACES? The paperback is available to preorder but if you can’t wait get the hardback. It is SUCH good value + it’ll come tomorrow!! penguin.co.uk/books/453305/h…

@brushingboots @AlwynTurner Really enjoying it. Read a fair deal about it all over the years but this book pulls it altogether nicely and is well written. Thank you!

‘This is a marvellous book’ Heirs and Graces is reviewed in today’s Times and I am feeling rather emotional, again. Thank you @AlwynTurner thetimes.com/article/68f240…

@mrcharlesamos Love this article. It makes the case that everyone else misses burnished main one: morality. Thank you for presenting the argument so lucidly.

My case against a wealth tax where I undermine the belief in equality as the root of envy, and, question the Laffer Curve as any serious objection to redistribution. I call the wealth tax what it really is: Theft. thecritic.co.uk/right-wingers-…

@NeilDotObrien I absolutely loved your article in the Critic about just starting by making Britain orderly again. I live in Singapore and have often thought that starting there, as Lee Kuan Yew did, making the nation smarter, cleaner, greener, nicer is a good start. Thank you for the piece.

My starters for ten on how to Make Britain Vaguely Civilised Again neilobrien.co.uk/p/an-orderly-a…

@dwarkesh_sp Do you really think too that Lee would have signed up for ECHR, devolved power to Scotland, outsourced justice to a Supreme Court, brought in a minimum wage, or conceded in N Ireland like he did? I don’t think so.

Tony Blair explains the 3 key decisions Lee Kuan Yew took that made Singapore rich. “Each one of them now seems obvious. Each one at the time was deeply contested.”

@dwarkesh_sp There were many others too - however, how does he reconcile the need to attract intellectual and managerial capital with the high tax rates for success that he promulgated.

@unherd @si_rubinstein Really enjoyed this.

‘The world around him is a Rorschach test, and he only ever sees one thing.’ Sathnam Sanghera’s books play an endless game of ‘spot the colonial inheritance’, writes @si_rubinstein: 👇unherd.com/2024/01/the-em…

@lewis_baston High standards and common sense. These are universal values and could be applied in the UK and the UK would benefit if they were.

Hello from the departure area of Singapore airport, with a few thoughts on why anyone talking about ‘Singapore on Thames’ doesn’t know what they’re talking about…

@lewis_baston While there are grains of truth in this analysis in the main it distorts and misrepresents life in Singapore. Lives are not micro managed. There is no Public Housing. There is no minimum wage. Plastic straws abound. And so on. The Singapore model is one built on self reliance,