“Revising one sentence” is the title on Lydia Davis’s lucid collection and according to her if a short story is a love affair and a novel is a marriage, then her very short stories sometimes just a single sentence is more like a one-night stand. Spanning more than 30 years Essays, the first of two…
Richard Davies in his latest book “Extreme Economies” gives us a global tour of disasters and recovery and studies the irrepressible markets inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary where there’s the mackerel economy –tinned mackerel being light, standardized and durable, and makes a good currency and the dot economy. In the outside world,…
Dorothy L Sayers famous for her Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane detective series, was also equally known during her life for an essay asking “Are Women Human?” Women’s rights were expanding rapidly during Sayers’s lifetime as she and her friend were some of the first women to receive degrees from Oxford although they faced…
Acknowledging the contributions of gardens to our mental and physical wellbeing and often the economic benefits are often overlooked, economic historian Roderick Floud steers to put it right in his latest book “An Economic History of the English Garden”. This is the first book to question how much gardens and gardening have cost, and…
Lisa Taddeo 39-year-old from New Jersey, spent eight years talking to three American women about sex with the aim of registering “ the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn”. Lisa Taddeo’s three real women’s desire focusing on woman’s “Fifty Shades of…
Economist Philippon uses detailed evidence to argue that far from being the home of the free market competition, the US today has less competition than the much maligned EU, particularly in its products markets which are riddled with monopoly and monopsony. Declining competition has raised profits, depressed wages, weakened investment and undermined productivity growth. The…
Mr Bootle the chairman of Capital Economics argues that the automation and advances in AI will be a huge positive influence in our lives in the coming future and economic effects of artificial intelligence may not be as different from those of previous technological transformations as many suppose, that the speed with which the changes…
The chilling conclusion to be drawn from reading Andy Greenberg’s new book Sandworm, on state-sponsored cyber-hacking as we are at war, but not as have known it but all big powers are involved and the potential for cataclysm is great as the hostilities are taking place in real time, undermining a system near you. Democracy…
According to Hillary Clinton’s latest book “Margaret Thatcher did not deserve a place in the book about history’s gutsiest women because she failed to make a positive difference for others” The former first Lady is touring the UK promoting “ “The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience” , which she co-wrote with…
The Great universal connects agriculture and climate to trade and exchange to traditions and cultures to identity and politics. Ned Palmer’s A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, is a canon of food-centric histories begun with Mark Kurlansky’s Cod (1997). How we feed ourselves can tell us as much about who we are and where…