Unlucky 13? The club that defied superstition

Vast companies have crushed our entrepreneurs

The outline of contemporary history is already “congealing in the minds of historians”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg. It goes like this: the “age of neoliberalism” began in the 1970s with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, was consolidated by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and then collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Now, the theory goes, we are entering the “age of big government”. This is not complete bunk, but it’s “bunkish”. Despite all the talk of small government, spending cuts and free markets, the reality is that between 1980 and 2008, governments mostly got “bigger and more intrusive”. Perhaps it should be renamed the “era when people talked a lot about neoliberalism”, but mostly “continued as before”.

A more compelling way to understand these years is that the 1980s and 1990s represent an “age of entrepreneurialism”, in which established giants like Pan Am and British Leyland went bust, and new start-ups like Apple and Microsoft took over. But that era is now finished, replaced by a new “age of consolidation” in which vast companies are “increasingly intertwined with big government”. This is bad. Rather than offering better products and more choices, massive conglomerates prefer “rent-seeking” – using their market power to boost profits. And they protect their patch by spending ever-larger sums lobbying governments: in the US alone the figure almost trebled from $1.4bn a year in the 1990s to $4bn today. And guess what? In 2023, antitrust merger enforcement hit a 20-year low. The problem is not “neoliberalism” but giant companies, business-government alliances and lazy regulators. Time to break up the monopolies and unleash the “animal spirits” of capitalism once more.

The family that spent 38 days adrift in the Pacific

In January 1971, Dougal and Linda Robertson set sail around the world with their four children to “teach them about life”, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. They made it from England to the Galápagos Islands, taking in the Canaries, the Caribbean and Miami. But on their way to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, 18-year-old Douglas heard a huge bang. “Then another. And another.” Their boat was being attacked by a pod of orcas. As they took on water, the family abandoned ship and piled into a small emergency raft. It immediately became apparent “how hopeless the situation was”: they were hundreds of miles from land, with just 10 days’ supply of water and food. On the raft they found a survival manual. The last page read, simply: “Good luck!”

After a brief argument over whether to say the Lord’s Prayer, the family took stock. They pledged not to eat each other, and decided against a (totally insane) plan for Douglas to row a dinghy 250 miles to land. Once their water stores had run out, they survived by drinking turtle blood – a method Douglas had read about in Alistair MacLean’s novel South By Java Head – and sucking fresh water from fish eyes. They killed a shark with an oar and survived off the meat for weeks. Finally, after 38 days adrift, they spotted a Japanese fishing trawler and caught its attention with their last remaining flares. And incredibly, the nightmarish ordeal didn’t put the family off the open seas. Douglas joined the merchant navy within two months of returning home; his father later built a yacht and set off on another round-the-world trip.

Andy Murray makes me “weak at the knees”

“I blame 2005”, the year I graduated from university and Andy Murray played his first Wimbledon, says Claire Cohen in The Times. Here was a talented Scotsman, almost my age, leaping around the grass courts of SW19 swearing at himself. “Slice me off a piece of that haggis,” I thought. Back then, he had the sarky teenage humour and skinny indie boy looks “that Smash Hits magazine told me were peak boyfriend material”. But it was only after he started hitting the gym in about 2009 that more women began to see Andy in “that way”. How his biceps bulge when he pumps his fist triumphantly; the way his mouth makes a perfect rectangle when he shouts in celebration. It’s “the stuff women’s secret crushes are made of”.

Not everyone gets it. A friend asked me recently: “do you even fancy him when he’s pulling that ratty face?” Naturally, I reminded her that we’re bang in the middle of “what has been dubbed the hot rodent summer”. And it isn’t purely about aesthetics. That Andy is the ultimate millennial feminist ally is “a huge part of what makes him irresistible”. The press conference when he corrected a reporter who said Sam Querry was the first US player to reach a major semi-final since 2009 – Murray interrupted with “male player” in his deadpan way – is “catnip” to women on social media. He’s a family man, too. His emotional on-court tribute to his wife Kim at this year’s Wimbledon was “textbook heart-throb business”. Combine it all, “and it’s little wonder we’re a bit weak at the knees”.