Michael Jacobs

Saturday

Michael Jacobs

Podcast special: Britain’s role in the global economic recovery?

35 min listen

Covid 19 has been a crisis without borders. In a highly interconnected world, every country has felt the impacts of the pandemic, from supply chain disruption to low productivity and high inflationary pressures. Should the post-pandemic economic recovery be a global project? For decades, the UK has been a key player on the economic world stage but is this still relevant today at a time when the UK faces domestic financial challenges and global supply chains are decoupling? Or can the ripple effect of lending a hand to one economy, become a good investment for Britain's future?

Friday

Michael Jacobs

Andalucia: A culinary odyssey

On my most recent visit to Seville — the Andalusian city of proverbial fiestas and sunshine — the rain poured for days without stopping. The streets were almost deserted by lunchtime, with tourists taking refuge in the dozens of colourfully tiled tapas bars clustering under the shadow of the cathedral’s soaring bell tower, the Giralda. One day a local friend of mine took me to a newly opened place right in the heart of this district, yet hidden away on a side street, coldly modern in its design, clearly unappealing to tourists, and still barely known to anybody else. It was called Arenero, and there was just one other couple eating there, who turned out to be the proud parents of the friendly, heavily tattooed young chef.

Saturday

Michael Jacobs

Relics of old Castile

Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. He has certainly written one of the strangest books on the country in recent years. His approach is gloriously and provocatively unfashionable. Whereas other authors on Spain today might dwell on its innovative new chefs, the modernity of Barcelona and Bilbao, the tawdry Costa del Sol, and such persistent Andalucían-based stereotypes as duende, bullfighting and Moorish sensuality, Howse has concentrated on an aspect of the country that was once no less integral to its image — its austere and spiritual side.

Saturday

Michael Jacobs

Glutton for punishment

With its vast areas of barely explored wilderness, and its heady mix of the sublime, the bizarre and the lushly seductive, South America would appear to have all the ingredients to attract the travel writer. Yet the recent travel literature on the continent has been surprisingly scant and taken up by lightweight, gung-ho tales of not especially remarkable adventures. Fortunately there is John Gimlette, whose first South American travel book, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, captured with great wit and learning the quirkiness of Paraguay. He has now produced a no less remarkable portrait of the highly idiosyncratic countries known collectively as Guiana, the ‘Land of Many Waters’.