Search results for ""Author Clark McGinn""

This annual celebration of the life and works of the poet Robert Burns is held in Scotland and across the globe around the anniversary of the poet’s birthday in the form of a convivial dinner with particular, some may say peculiar, ritual traditions. Robert Burns: Scotland’s national poet.Burns Supper: the celebration of the life and poetry of Robert Burns, on or around his birthday on 25 January every year. When the Reverend Hamilton Paul agreed to arrange the first anniversary dinner for Robert Burns’ patrons and friends in July 1801, he began a tradition that quite soon became a global celebration. Over two hundred years later, Burns Suppers are held all over the world to commemorate the life and work of a poet beloved wherever people celebrate life, love and liberty. From its beginning with nine Scotsmen in Burns Cottage, to today, where over nine million people join in the Burns Supper festivities, from the USA to Russia, Australia to China, and somewhere near you. The long and happy story of Burns Night is explored in this history of the annual event which has been called ‘the biggest party in the world’.

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Cliches are the fossils of wisdom. That's why we ignore them. Particularly those with warnings ('the value of your investments may go down as well as up') and especially in the happy days of a financial boom. Shock! Horror! The cliche was true and we are left staring into a crater once known as the financial markets. This has happened before - this bust is a whopper but it shares the symptoms of the crash in which your parents lost money, and their parents and theirs before them. So don't believe this is the last credit crunch - there are teenage optimists alive now who will reach maturity and guide our children into the next boom and its collapse. Collective Amnesia ensures that the long view is smothered as we watch the pendulum swing from greed to fear and back again. This isn't just a disease of a shadowy group of bankers but is a communal blunder in which we all share - financiers, regulators, politicians, even ordinary savers or buyers of houses, cars and consumer goods, we all chased the market up the hill and over the cliff and we all end up out of pocket. Written by a senior banker with many years' experience, this book takes the long view. It shows how simple the basics of banking are and tells the stories of how we lost money in similar ways over the centuries. Read it and you might just lose less money next time!

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