Life and Death of Jeans

Maxine Bedat tracks the path of a pair of jeans from manufacture to market and uncovers the alarming human cost of the pursuit of mass-produced fashion, exposes the fractures in our global supply chains, an our relationships to each other, ourselves, and the planet.Fashion has never been bigger, cheaper and more dangerous for the planet.…

China fastest growing global superpower

In The Long Game, Rush Doshi, advisor on China in the Biden White House, draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, and memoirs by party leaders, to demonstrate that China is in fact playing a long, methodical game to replace America as a regional and…

Inflation rises to 4.2 per cent

UK inflation rate rises at highest in a decade at 4.2 per cent in October, amid fears over Covid recovery. Th jump, driven largely by rising fuel and energy costs, which puts further pressure on households across the UK. Demand for gas is pushing up energy prices worldwide, recovering from Covid pandemic. The shortages of…

Now Pfizer brings out Covid pill

Paxlovid a Covid experimental pill developed by the US company Pfizer cuts the risk of hospitalisation or death in vulnerable adults, according to their clinical trial. Pfizer says it stopped trials early as the initial results were so positive. The UK has already ordered 250, 000 courses of the new Pfizer treatment along with another…

007 catalyst double Aston Martin revenues

F1 financier Lawrence Stroll who owns Aston Martin Lagonda, the luxury carmaker whose turnaround appear to be picking up speed as its revenues doubled with a little help from  007 James Bond. Aston Martin’s Lagonda played a leading role in new Bond film “ No Time to Die” after  the appearance of four of its…

“Am I Not a Man and a Brother”? Josiah Wedgwood – the Radical Potter

Josiah Wedgwood, the greatest English potter who ever lived, epitomised the best of his age, from his kilns and workshops  in Stoke-on-Trent, which revolutionised the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing and efficiency and retail flair. He was responsible for transforming the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool,…

Keep Buggering on

Winston Churchill’s slogan “Keep Buggering On” became a national catchphrase during the Second World War. Duncan Weldon from The Economist highlights key themes from his brisk history of Britain’s economy since the industrial revolution, taking in everything from the South Sea Bubble to the impact of the financial crisis. According to Weldon the same issues…

Antwerp’s golden heydays of fortune and wheels of trade

  In 1940, dealers agents  thronged  the then Netherlands port would enclose price lists for goods or loans on the City’s Exchange, the Beurs, along with correspondence to their clients. Pyke captures the intrigue, opportunity, chaos, scandal and nonconformist spirit of the sixteenth century Antwerp with exquisite narrative zeal. A clerk for van den  Molen…

Jeans and fashion’s greed for cheap clothes

This is the story of jeans from  cotton plant nested in the soil to the flares hanging in your wardrobes. A revealing book about the birth and death of jeans that exposes the fractures of our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves and the planet. Did you buy your jeans on…

Last Flight to freedom

Part Lebanese, part Brazilian citizen Carlos Ghosn, made the escape of his life at 10:30pm on a cold December night in 2019, by slipping unnoticed through the streets of Tokyo, with the help of a large music equipment box to smuggled him out of Japan and the elation he felt when he landed in his…