Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian businessman who became Russia’s richest man, was rising fast in the capitalist free-for-all unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. In The Russia Conundrum Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once an oil tycoon of Yukos Oil company which has been sold piecemeal to a state rival headed by Putin…
Andrew Roberts, historian, visiting professor at the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, visiting research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a lecturer at the New York Historical Society, and biographer of Churchill, Napoleon, and George III delivers an authoritative volume on the life of Britain’s mightiest and most controversial press baron,…
Norwegian writer and chef Andreas Viestad can tell the history of the entire humanity by the titular meal you eat. He potted the history of the globe from the development of its population, via the rise and fall of its empires, to the improvement of its economies. Viestad’s regular Italian meal, focusing on staples like…
Two American academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley forecasts a scenario of superpower conflict with China. America and China are running a “superpower marathon” that may last a century. Chinas has entered the most perilous period in the life of great power. It has gained the capability to upend the existing international order but is…
Handel and Rameau were busy composing in 1749, Darwin arrived in South America abroad with the Beagle, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a cultural colossus, a figure ranked alongside Shakespeare and Dante. By the 1790s this group of extraordinary friends changes the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution’s rapid collapse into tyranny, what they…
Pearson, a British industrialist, had done a deal with the anti-American government of Mexico for a 50-year oil concession that covered much of the state of Veracruz, a 1839 feet ( 558 meters ) Dos Bocas well exploded into a broiling fountain of oil that rose 1000 feet into the air. Keith Fisher’s new book…
Over the past decades, the US and India have had several diplomatic ties. But Russia and India have long been friends too, with a relationship forged during the cold war and sustained by steady trade in energy and weapons, dealing with Indian Rupees rather than US Dollars. West is frustrated at India’s response to the…
Behind Closed Doors is the result of a decade of research and writing on London clubs, based on exclusive behind-the-scenes access to archives and proceedings, as well as a love of gossip and scandal. The ups and downs of London Clubland which grew to spread around the world, with its four hundred clubs, and how…
Petroleum has always been used by humans, from time immemorial as a waterproofing agent in Noah’s Ark, as a weapon during the Crusades, and as an adhesive for Neanderthals. Its eventual extraction from the earth in vast quantities transformed into light, heat, and power. A Pipeline Runs Through it, looks at the social, economic, political,…
Jennifer Ziegler’s “Worser” centers a socially awkward, 12-year-old, word-loving boy William Orser, whose life is upended by his single mother’s recent stroke, but finds glimmers of hope when it turns out there are friends to be found who also share his love of wordplay. Worser explores both the beauty and power of words and how…