The English Heritage unveiled blue plaque on the wall of Schomberg House on Pall Mall, London to commemorate the residence of Quobna Ottonah Cugoano, the author and campaigner in 1787 wrote one of the first exposes by an African of slave trading, criticising continued tolerance of horrors of the slave trade by the British Government…
A former competition lawyer telling us after the collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing factory in Bangladesh in 2013 after driven by competition to cut costs and maximise profits quite literally may kill us. The rising levels of power are concentrated in the hands of a few yet no government or organisation has the…
The construction giant Carillion, an outsourcer of huge Government building contracts, leading to one of the greatest financial scandals of modern times following their collapse in January 2018. When it folded it had only £29 million in the bank and debts and other liabilities adding up to a staggering £7 billion, amounting the final…
A highly provocative book by an Indian academic who is the Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, revealing how India is being repackaged into a national brand to be sold to foreign investors, part of ongoing historical shift. “The capitalist transformation of India wherein the logic of capital is…
David Omand, a rising Whitehall official, in 1982, with John Nott carrying top-secret folder intercepts from Government Communications Agency, GCHQ, met with then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to reveal decrypted messaged, sent by the Argentine Navy, showing Leopoldo Galtieri’s junta was set to seize the Falkland Islands. The capital Port Stanley fell a few days…
Dublin-born Brian Dillon has been collecting sentences and describes as “affinity” a scrupulous but perplexing attachment to the written expression with a full stop. In Suppose a Sentence, Dillon makes these mementos into the 27 one-liners, a literary hitchhikers pickup over the course of his research. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence…
In 1719 London, the year began well enough for London’s stock traders, working from their corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley, buying and selling shares-dealing not in things but in numbers – was still new to the city. There was no fixed marketplace for traders in the paper. So those who…
A definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world. From the end of the Watergate scandal to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House…
Former president Jospeh R Biden Jr has been called the luckiest man and the unluckiest – a fifty-year political career that reached the White House also marked by deep personal losses that he suffered. AS Biden’s life has been shaped by drama, powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to…
In the recent US presidential Television debate, Donald Trump’s oneliner was ” China ate your lunch Joe” against challenger Joe Biden. According to Trump’s view, China is a global villain that has visited a “Plague” upon the world while stealing US jobs and intellectual properties, Biden for his part has called XI Jinping, China’s leader, a…