Ghosts don’t realise they’re dead and wander around screaming because no one is paying them attention. You howl around the corridors of power while the elite march straight through. Rupert Everett tells the story of a soulful and thought-provoking autobiography from one of our best-loved and most talented actors and writer and how he set…
35-year-old Mohammed bin Salman is the pivotal leader of the Arab World, Crown prince who became king in 2015 and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, ended the House of Saud’s consensual model of an absolute monarchy with no absolute monarch, seizing all the reins of power and urged forward social and economic reform. The…
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Help Yourself, hilarious and insightful new collection of three short stories, illuminates human experience, combines a potent blend of biting truths, entertainment and upends our assumption about race, class, envy, and disappointment, gender and celebrity. Suburban friends fall out after a racist encounter at a birthday party is caught on video and…
Human nature has the instinct to fight but War – organised violence – with organised society shaped humanity’s history, social and political institutions, its values and ideas. MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores the glory and misery of war which brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity and reveals the…
An epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world’s highest mountians Himalaya, home to an astonishing diversity of indigenous and local cultures, crossroads of trade, meeting point and conflict zone for the world’s superpowers, where Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, American merchants exchanged musk and gold…
Clarity of statistics amid disinformation and mutant algorithms The threat of pandemic had made us crave data: Millions pore over R numbers, the technicalities of vaccine trials and testing accuracy, once of interest only to biostatisticians, are now daily front page news. Can we really trust the statistics our governments are publishing about the virus? Does…
New History of humankind through the prism of work from the origins of the life on Earth to our ever-more automated present. The work we do bring us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. How did work become the central organisational principle of our…
Louise Gluck, a US Poet has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. She was recognised for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence Universal” said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award. Gluck born in 1943, in New York, lives in Massachusetts, and a professor of English at Yale University.…
Roberto Saviano is an Italian like a fusion of Salman Rushdie and James Ellroy Savage. Just like Rushdie after the Iranian Fatwa, Saviano lives under police protection, as a result of death threats issued against him following the publication of the first Gumarrah in 2006 which sold over 10million copies globally and adapted into a…
Superpowers have always dominated their region by exerting an outsize an overbearing influence like China’s involvement in Southeast Asia, US looms over Latin America, Russia treat ex-Soviet States as its “near abroad”, creating unease among its smaller neighbours. The stunning growth of China has although yanked up the region’s economies, but its militarisation of the…