Billy Summers is a sniper who can take deadly headshot at 1, 200 yards. Billy Summers is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. Billy Summers learned his craft as a US Marine and honed it in the…
Zhao Lijian, who has 1 million followers on Twitter and legions of supporters inside China, was slapped down by hi superiors although he was the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, quoted on Twitter in March that “the Covid-19 virus had originated in the US and suggested that Washington was engaged in a cover-up. When did…
In cities, we stand silent in buses and train carriages, ignoring each other. Online, we retreat into silos and carefully create who we interact with. In politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But imagine what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of our problems, were actually…
John Boyne skewers the brutalities of social media and the incongruities of wokeness for those who value friendship more than followers. Boyne’s characteristic humour and razor-sharp observations, follows five members of the Cleverley family who lived a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, only one tweet away from disaster, during a week…
Novelist, and former American academic, living in UK, Rick Gekoski in search of rare book trade for the last fifty years as a bookseller seeking scarce, world of first editions, revealing anecdotes and a hint of steel. By chance in 1971, he stumbled across a tranche of DH Lawrence first editions in Brooklyn on a…
Cal Newport debunks the jargon “follow your passion” by revealing have little to do with how most people end up loving their work after spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and other who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work. Newport takes the lid off strategies they used…
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…
Ciaran Thapar, a youth worker in South London, highlights the sharp end of Britain’s serious life of youth violence epidemic which the media turns into statistics of knife crime. At the secondary school in Elephant and Castle, a vulnerable, pitiful boy named Freddie is permanently excluded, after being threatened he brought a bread knife to…
Jan-Werner Muller, political philosopher and a German teaching history and political philosophy for Princeton University, in his latest Democracy Rules, gives a brisk account about the state of liberal democracy. As the cold war ended the hopes for democracy’s rapid spread to non-democracies dwindled. Concern for its health grew amid backsliding in existing democracies notably …
Funny memoir about sex, dating, and relationships in the digital age, intertwined with investigation into the challenges to love and intimacy wrought by dating apps by 49-yar-old famed Vanity Fair writer and New York Times-bestselling author Nancy Jo Sales asks who to blame for the modern dating malaise:tech companies. Jo Sales award-winning journalist and single…