How are the mighty fallen. The Nasdaq has had its worst week since March 2020: It is down 28 per cent this year. Scottish Mortgage is down 41 per cent in the year to date — and is no longer the largest investment trust in the UK. The Ark Innovation ETF in the US is

Masayoshi Son was uncharacteristically subdued when he revealed on Thursday that the Vision Fund lost $27bn from its investments last business year. He abstained from tongue-in-cheek slides depicting SoftBank geese laying the golden eggs of the AI revolution or a unicorn with wings flying over the “Valley of Coronavirus”. He did not compare himself to

It was in 2010 that Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s name came prominently to notice again, when his opera The Passenger was staged by the Bregenz Festival. Since then, there has been a slow but determined revival of much of this too-long neglected composer’s music. There is plenty of it to rediscover. Weinberg was prolific, writing seven operas,

The sense of unease that permeates Interpret it Well, Ches Smith’s 10th release, is conjured with minimalist lines, vibrant tones and a strong collective will. It enters with sparse Craig Taborn piano and is sustained until the reverberating twang of Bill Frisell’s guitar fades the album to a close. Smith plays vibraphone on both short

A plan is an abstract thing: a schematic representation of space in the most codified and flattened manner. Yet between those thin dark lines, so much information can be inscribed. “If anything is described by an architectural plan,” wrote historian Robin Evans in his influential 1978 essay “Figures, doors and passages”, “it is the nature

Today, the number of available rental homes in London is 45 per cent lower than the five-year average. And the UK capital is far from an isolated case. Why is that? Two weeks ago, FT House & Home published a story unpacking the global rental squeeze — from the sudden return of demand following the

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What child can resist a secret door, one that leads to another world, magical or menacing? This staple in stories from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter excites the adult imagination, too: it appears, alongside hidden passageways and sliding bookcases, in many spy films and thrillers. But it is not just a fictional trope. European

To fully experience Alexandra Kehayoglou’s new artwork at the Kunsthal KAdE museum in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, you’ll need to take your shoes off. Then the Argentine artist’s textile piece, “Paraná de Las Palmas”, can be walked on, laid upon and even rolled around on. Part of the exhibition Abrasive Paradise (until July 3) and stretching

Russia’s war in Ukraine has created fresh problems for its Caribbean ally Cuba, already shaken by street protests and facing severe financial stress amid tighter US sanctions and a pandemic-induced collapse in tourism. Cubans have contended with chronic shortages of food, medicine and other basic goods for more than two years, owing to the country’s

Nowhere is our bad attitude towards food better illustrated than by a recent incident in the home of Professor Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. During a meal his teenage son threw a piece of cauliflower in the bin because it was a bit burnt. “I said to

Over the past 40 years or so, the face of dictatorship has changed a great deal. The most notorious tyrants of the 20th century — from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Uganda’s Idi Amin and François “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti — ruled by means of mass violence, cults of personality, rigid

Deutsche Telekom has nudged up its guidance for the year, mostly driven by a stronger than expected performance in its US business, as its first-quarter earnings rose almost 7 per cent. The German telecoms business upgraded its full-year earnings forecast on Friday, saying it expects to generate an adjusted €36.6bn before interest, taxes, depreciation and

The American Library, Paris Nestled on a quiet side street under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, this was originally founded as part of an effort to get millions of donated books to American soldiers serving in the first world war, and has been a haven for expats ever since. Edith Wharton was among the library’s first trustees, while Ernest

I first came to Milan when I was nine years old, in 1956 – before that I lived in Mantua. My father relocated here for work and our family moved into a two-floor flat in the Ticinese district. Things have changed tremendously since then. People used to say, “Oh, Milan is boring, nothing happens there.” It was

Boris Johnson has set out plans to cut up to 90,000 civil servants — equivalent to a fifth of Whitehall — in order to reduce UK government spending. The prime minister told cabinet ministers to cut departmental headcounts during an away day in Stoke-on-Trent on Thursday. Johnson told the Daily Mail that reducing the Whitehall

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Australia’s defence minister Peter Dutton has accused China of committing an “act of aggression” after a People’s Liberation Army naval vessel came within 50 nautical miles of a naval communications centre. Australia’s department of defence said the Dongdiao Class intelligence ship Haiwangxing had entered the country’s exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 miles to sea,

For anyone who watches the stock market for a living, the recent car crash in tech stocks has been mesmerising. There are plenty of reasons to believe it isn’t over. This is not so much an issue for Big Tech, though the wealth erased since the start of the year is significant. Between them, the

It is not often one hears from household names who are nudging three figures. Henry Kissinger, who will turn 99 this month, is older than any living world statesman. At the FTWeekend Festival in Washington last Saturday, the cold war grand strategist observed that we are “now living in a totally new era”. Given that