What we are now learning to call Covid-19 is taking an ever tighter grip on the world. In every country, as cases of the disease are recognised, government intervention increases. What would Ayn Rand have made of it all?

The water level in the River Lugg, a couple of hundred metres away, is now falling. Four days ago it was three to four metres above normal ….

Ayn Rand wrote in America and for Americans, butI avoid in principle commenting on American issues. However, even foreigners are entitled to comment on today’s release of a flood of emails between Boeing employees about the 737 Max, because so many of us fly in Boeing aircraft.

The Gladestry Old Men’s Lunch was unanimous in its opinion that there was not one person in the upper levels of any of the three main political parties for whom one could feel the slightest shred of respect. Ayn Rand would, of course, have agreed …..

It seems that Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks that the people who died in the Grenfell fire did so because they lacked common-sense, and that Andrew Bridgen, his apologist who has now himself apologised, thinks that Mogg would have survived because he is clever.

In Atlas Shrugged there are three types of people who matter. There are the god-like ‘rational men’, whose every action is dictated by reasoned self interest, there are the ‘moochers’ who seek to be parasitic on them, pleading always for hand-outs based on their ‘need’, and there are the ‘looters’, who want much more and take action, sometimes violent, to ensure that they get it.

One result of the chaos created in the UK over the last few years by old Etonians (with some help from the alumni of other ‘public’ schools such as Dulwich and Durham) has been a renewal of calls for the dismantling of our dual approach to education,

So, the frenzy of the Brecon & Radnor by-election is now behind us and we can all move on. A frenzy, it has to be said, that was more apparent in the pages of the national press than it ever was here on the ground in East Radnorshire. Faced with a line-up of five of the most lack-lustre prospective MPs ever presented to voters in what was billed as a crucial by-election…

If I had been following the theatre more consistently, I would have known some weeks ago, when I was writing the previous blog, that Ivo van Hove’s theatrical realisation of Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ was about to hit Manchester. Ten days ago it was on stage at The Lowry, as part of the city’s International Festival…

According to an article by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator of 11 February 2017, “Just before Christmas, Sajid Javid performed a ritual he has observed twice a year throughout his adult life: he read the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead.” Nelson also reported that “As a student, Javid read the passage to his now-wife, but only once — she told him she’d have nothing more to do with him if he tried it again.” A sensible woman, obviously…