Gus Carter

In the late 1990s, when I was in first grade, a boy in the playground took my Charizard Pokémon card. I remember crying while a teacher told me to relax, it was just a cartoon. Wrong. A 1999 first edition holographic Charizard card has just sold for $1.38 million. What was once a children’s game has become an investment opportunity. A Hong Kong fund called MemeStrategy recently announced that it is seeking to acquire a quarter of the world’s highest graded “Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat” cards, currently selling for about $2,500 a piece. The value of all graded Pokémon cards is thought to be around $9 billion, but those are just the ones sent off for assessment. No one knows what’s hiding in unopened packs and forgotten drawers.

‘It’s basically a dictatorship,’ one insider tells me. If you want to build anything in Britain’s second city, you have to get permission from the so-called ‘Manchester mafia’. These are the officials who have overseen the city’s extraordinary redevelopment. The number of towers in Manchester has increased sevenfold since Andy Burnham became mayor in 2017. You might assume that Burnham is the boss of this mafia family. But you’d be wrong. ‘He just appears at the meetings and says, “Yes, yes, that’s fine”,’ explains a source. ‘His political involvement is minimal,’ confirms Andrew Teacher, a real estate adviser who’s worked in the city. ‘The ship was motoring along well before he arrived.’ The vast redevelopment had almost nothing to do with Burnham.

The Spectator was there at the founding of America. George Washington had six copies of the original 18th-century Spectator at his Mount Vernon estate and read them often. He shared with Joseph Addison, The Spectator’s co-publisher, an interest in how to educate ideal citizens: men and women with wit and grit. Young Washington read The Spectator in the hope of bettering himself, too. Both of his older half-brothers had been educated in England and he wished also for the manners and polish of an English gentleman. For the pioneering, self-improving men who would go on to create an independent America, the 18th-century Spectator was both an education and a guide. ‘I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it,’ wrote Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography.

A century ago, Britain had reason to despair. A generation had been lost to war, influenza was killing those who survived and revolution was sweeping across Europe. A strange new movement called the Blackshirts was marching on Rome just as Russia’s civil war was ending in Soviet victory. Yet Britons were out having fun. The original Bright Young People cavorted across the country, holding scandalous parties. ‘Please wear a bathing suit and bring a bath towel and a bottle,’ read one invitation. The Metropolitan Police filled Bow Street’s cells with hundreds of nightclub revellers, mainly girls in fancy dress. Dancing, according to one clergyman, was a ‘very grave disease which is infecting the country’.