Poetry & prose by Alex Hickman
On my (empty’ish) British Airways flight out to Mumbai, I read a worrying piece in the Financial Times (“Lack of aviation ties to emerging world expected to cost (UK) £14bn”). New research commissioned by BAA, the UK airport operator, has shown that Heathrow operates 22 daily flights to growth markets like China and India, less than Paris (25) […]
Read More…I’ve learnt a little about India since 2006; enough to understand the size of the opportunity, and the problem, its complexity, the talent of its people and how little I really know about them. My first proper look at India was through the prism of UK policy. Organising David Cameron’s visit here in 2006 gave me an […]
Read More…I am in Goa, at a week-end meeting of the British Business Group in India (my firm has just opened an office in Mumbai). I had wanted to start the morning with a swim in the Arabian Sea, which is blood warm, but I was warned about the high levels of raw sewage, and the […]
Read More…It was always going to be tough to (i) follow the tv series and (ii) compress Smiley’s odyssey of detective work, Kremlinology and reminiscence into 130 minutes. In fact, as I walked out of the cinema my first sensation was a hunger pang for the BBC series starring Alec Guinness. This I will act on […]
Read More…Does the United Kingdom have a foreign policy? I mean a clear sense of our international priorities, reflecting our strengths and weaknesses relative to other nations. And a national consensus on our global role (or lack of one) – a clarity of purpose that an ‘A’ Level student could explain to a stranger. Ask a […]
Read More…Cycling home from the station last night, I kept interrupting my journey to pick fat blackberries. They were delicious, and I was hungry. And the pleasure of foraging is intense – found food feels like a prize. It is fun feeling resourceful, and the food is good for you. I stood by a hazel tree, […]
Read More…During the late 1990s, when I was asked what I did by my neighbour at the twenty-something dinner parties which for a time seemed like an unavoidable component of my social life, my response was so toxic it sometimes hushed the table. “Business for Sterling?”. Tony Blair was in Number Ten, and preparations to stage […]
Read More…Nine years ago I flew to Russia to pick up the body of one of my closest friends. Roddy Scott was a freelance journalist. He was killed on 26th September 2002 by a Russian soldier. He was in Chechnya, travelling with a group of guerillas whom he was filming. The group was ambushed by Russian forces and […]
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