Jude Piesse’s biography “ The Ghost in the Garden” traces the origins of the theory of evolution and uncovers the lost histories that inspired it, ultimately evoking the interconnectedness of all things. The Garden at Down House in Kent, a former parsonage to which Charles Darwin moved in 1842 after marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood,…
Heavy Light is the story of a mental breakdown, a journey through mania, psychosis, and treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and onwards to release, recovery and healing. Heavy Light deal with a lifetime of ups and downs, from hypomania in the Alps to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, explaining how…
Three generations of the Sackler dynasty and their roles in the stories of the opioid Valium, and Opioid OxyContin, revealing misery, greed and pliant regulators and the abuse of philanthropy. Patrick Radden Keefe, a New Yorker writer and prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing, reveals the inside story. In 1980s, a small UK drugs company…
How Napoleon secured the privileged place of Catholicism in France but reinforced Vatican’s control Amid French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the church with the state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalising an agreement in 1801, relations between them…
Pickled cucumbers were dyed green with copper-based dyes, which most people failed to realise that the green copper dyes were extremely poisonous, in Victorian England. Fertilizer produced by sucking nitrogen out of the air now sustains about half the population of the globe, as farmers worldwide depend on the data spewing from 160 environmental satellite…
Former Sky News Diplomatic Editor Tim Marshall in his earlier 2015 book Prisoner’s of Geography explored how the plans of national leaders are often shaped by their nations mountains, Oceans and rivers. China’s obsession with the height of Tibetan plateau stems largely from a deep seated fear that India would otherwise seek to control it,…
Edward Said, an influential individualistic, celebrated public intellectual, and distinguished literary and cultural critic, who is associated with Orientalism, a ground breaking study, an indictment of English and French scholars for tattling a false image of the East, as a static backward and uncivilised for placing their knowledge at the service of Western imperialism. He…
A lesbian art graduate’s biographical, candid and darkly funny fiction tell us Eva Baltasar is a Catalan poet who lives a simple life with her wife and two daughters in a village near the mountains. Permaforst is about lives of three women Boulder, about ship’s cook who has an IVF baby appeared in Catalan last…
Years between 1870 and the end of World War II, several prominent French Jews pillars of an embattled community invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. James McAuley explores the role…
Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and losing in one-click America, highlights with empathy and breadth, what drives economic populism and the division between a sliver of the professional-managerial elite in winner-takes-all cities and everyone else, also the hidden human costs of other inequality not the growing gap between the rich and poor, but the gap between…