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.…

Who We are and What Unites Us

The British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification, subject of public controversy Sathnam Sanghera, addresses many of the issues that are now urgent subjects of debate- such as Britain’s role in the slave trade and the links between empire and multiculturalism. Sanghera shows how our imperial past is everywhere including how we…

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…

Extra ordinary rise and precipitous fall of Adam Elliot Neumann

Wall Street reporters, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, probes into the saga of ambition by aspiring entrepreneur to hit big time and the reasons why some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? What does the future hold for Silicon Valley “unicorns”? “The Cult of We” explores these questions with…

Connection between Colonial Exploitation and Climate Change

Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. The Nutmeg’s Curse, traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. He argues that the dynamics of climate change today…

Wilbur Smith dies aged 88

Zambian born accountant turned International best-selling author, Wilbur Smith has died  on Saturday afternoon with his wife Niso, by his side, at his home in Cape Town at the age of 88. Smith’s 49 published books have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide, including the publication of his debut novel When the Lion Feeds…

Hong Kong: Freedom under Communist regime

The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule and the outlook for freedom under the communist regime are told with complete insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West. Sheridan’s…

Lockdown-busting walk into the Peak District

On a November evening in 2020 at dusk a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week quarantine period, but she just can’t take it any more – the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. The Moor will be…

Technology risk losing the way we store written word

Famed across the Known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, build up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings – the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, historians at…