As New York and London wage their battle for the title of number one city on the planet (my hedge funds are bigger than your hedge funds, etc, etc) the FT's Gideon Rachman re-charges his batteries on a trip to humble DC:
As I come to the end of a week in Washington, my overwhelming impression is how incredibly outward-looking intellectual life is in this city compared with London – despite the fact that London flatters itself that it is now the world’s most international city.
On Monday I went to a speaker-meeting at the New American Foundation – one of the plethora of DC-based think tanks, dealing with world affairs. The subject was the future of Pakistan and the speaker was a prominent Pakistani journalist. The room was packed. By contrast, I remember going to a speaker-meeting in London about a year ago with a much more obviously star-studded cast – Bill Kristol, a key neoconservative thinker; Tariq Ramadan, a central figure in the debate about Europe and Islam; and Phil Gordon, one of the leading experts on US foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The meeting attracted maybe 30 people. You could get more people than that to turn up and listen to the deputy head of the OSCE, in Washington.
Or take book sales: Edward Luce, the FT’s Washington bureau chief, recently published a much-acclaimed book on India. You might expect it to do best in Britain - given that Luce is a Brit and given the historical connections between India and the UK. Not at all – "In Spite of the Gods" has sold about 5,000 copies in Britain and almost 30,000 in the US. Britain is interested in India all right – but the interest is essentially backward-looking and nostalgic. I’m sure if Ed had written a book about how his granny shot tigers while riding an elephant through Jaipur, it would have been a huge hit in Britain.
surely the sixfold difference in sales in Us and UK is simply due to the fact that US has 6 times the number of people ?
Posted by: John Robbins | Monday, March 26, 2007 at 09:55 PM