euro|topics - Libby Purves

22/11/2008

English
Deutsch
Français

Español

Purves, Libby

Times columnist, radio and television presenter.

3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.

The Times - United Kingdom | 08/04/2008

The Olympic flame wavers in Europe

"Who says Sunday's Olympic torch relay in London was a shambles ? Who says the police were 'humiliated' ? A triumph, I call it. What are the Olympics about if not persistence, courage and goodwill towards foreigners (in this case Tibetans)?" asks columnist Libby Purves. "Western democracies had no need to go along with this relay. The international flame-tour is not time-honoured. Hitler invented it in 1936 with the torch coming from Greece to Germany as a pan-Aryan gesture. It did not catch on for 64 years, until Sydney touted it round the Pacific rim, again for political reasons. ... Joining in China's triumphalism is not necessary. Not right now, not with the suffering and injustice rife in Tibet. This torch procession is nakedly political and should not have been encouraged by our leaders... . Luckily, when the guttering flame reached London there were enough spirited protesters to save our national honour."

The Times - United Kingdom | 10/07/2007

Debt management in the classroom

Libby Purves lauds the announcement that 'economic wellbeing and financial capability' will be introduced into British mathematics curricula. "New Labour has spent ten years presiding over an avalanche of unprecedented personal debt: fuelling the economy with consumer madness, teaching 18-year-olds that owing tens of thousands is cool, making insolvency easy, promoting lotteries and casinos, sucking up to the super-rich and forgiving its friends for financial sins. Now the goddess Prudence rises, roaring, from the depths to smite the feckless. Teenagers will be taught interest, mortgages, pensions, taxes, money management. They'll get the hard financial facts of life again. Good. ... We tolerate[d] a smoke-and-mirrors financial illusion, and generations will pay the price of thinking, momentarily, that there is such a thing as free money."

The Times - United Kingdom | 16/01/2007

What if France formed a union with the UK in 1956?

"Much was made yesterday of Radio 4's enchanting scoop: a document showing that in 1956 the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, asked Anthony Eden for formal union between the UK and France. Eden blushingly turned him down ("Why, M Mollet! this is so sudden!”)", notes the journalist Libby Purves who imagines what would have happened if a 'Frangland' had been created. "Would we have taught them binge drinking, or would they have taught our young to sip? Would Englishwomen be thinner, Frenchwomen fatter? ... Would there by now be a militant French Separatist movement, or indeed a British one, and how would this affect the smaller separatisms of Scotland and the Basques? Would government have been less inclined to post-imperial guilt and anxious multiculturalism, and more like the brutally pragmatic French, who ban hijabs and interrogate terrorist suspects without a lawyer? ... Large questions and small ones cluster in, all equally beguiling."

» Index of Authors

Bookmark this page at