A pioneering AI expert and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an imperative question How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years? Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, joins forces with celebrated novelist and sci-fi writer, Chen Qiufan to imagine our…
The new virus news emerging from China in December 2018, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow Covid-19’s wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked…
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,…
Samuel Moyn, Prominent historian, reveals the dark side of making war more humane. In the years after 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war, with very little debate or discussion,as the United States carries out military operations around the globe, and it hardly matters who the president is or liberals, or conservatives operate…
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…
Baraca is simply one of the most influential organisations on the planet which is also the world’s most popular sports club, with over 250 million followers on social media and 4 million visitors to the Camp Nou Stadium each year, it is more than a club. In the past three decades, Barcelona has transformed from…
Investment banker and professor Jonathan Knee argues the truth, about the secrets to the success of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, and illustrates the nuances and complexities posed by their emergence, and explains a disparate portfolio of structural advantages buttressed by shrewd acquisitions, strong management, tax regulation and often encouraging…
Michael Bracewell, novelist and critic, gives an elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance, a poetic evocation, and a vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 1980s – the last years prior to the rise of the digital city, neglected in between times between 1979 and 1986, with the music of a golden era. His…
The village of Great Wyrley near Birmingham, someone is mutilating horses, and also sending threatening letters to the vicarage, where the vicar of Great Wyrley, a man born in Bombay of Parsi descent, Shahpur Edalj, a convert to Christianity and the first Indian to have a parish in England. A mother who was the…
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…