With the advent of artificial intelligence, the question of what separates the human mind form a algorithm that grows remains to be answered. Joanna Kavenna’s Zed novel makes references to King Lear’s “unnecessary letter” as an unknowable quantity the way that people after behaving predictably for years can suddenly go crazy. Zed describes a world…
The grandfather of English literature is strong patriot as Victorian writers saw him as indicative of an Englishness they wished to recapture, modern day journalists describe Brexiters as Chaucerian. Chaucer had a foreign wife and was mostly dependent on contemporary continental literature to inspire his own. Chaucer was a writer fro 1343-1400 who Shakespeare after…
Older people own the wealth –housing and pensions and for the first time in British history, pensioner incomes after housing costs have caught up with those of working-age families. While government and the opposition wants to build more houses for young people – though they do want to keep free TV licences for the over…
Capitalism is under fire and corporate bosses start their pronouncements with a confession of sin that has compulsively expatiate on the broken system. Capitalism is like aristocracy and requires a spin doctor for selling. Today’s many diverse owners of capital might be real parasites who do not toil and we are all guilty of capitalism,…
At The Pond is collection of essays by 14 women who swim at Kenwood, and grouped by season. Pond lovers include Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, Deborah Mogach, Leanne Shapton, Jessica Lee among others. Eli Goldstone’s whose essay “like a Rat” os about the pond, but trying to find one’s place in the big city. She’s…
This book gives us an incisive look at austerity measure that succeed and those that don’t by using pragmatic evidence to assess the effects of fiscal austerity through spending cuts versus tax increases and concludes the negative effect on output of spending cuts are far smaller than tax increases, by assessing costs only in terms…
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived in Somerset neighbours to Coleridge and his young wife Sara Fricker in 1797. The four never formed a quartet of equal minds. Adam Nicolson demonstrates what Coleridge had actually written in this spellbinding recreation of the making of Romantic poetry amid the Somerset Quantock Hills – was that “tho’…
Engineering and infrastructure with stimulating and significant ideas in the latest John Browne’s book with empathy for history and place including 15th century Venice highlighting in addition to its trade, ships , glass and architecture, printing centre pioneering the spread of ideas in a Renaissance version of today’s internet and iPhone. L Serenissima was…
America is continent populated by migrants who either displaced or killed the indigenous people and it is interesting historians tell the story of America through a particular movement or group. Joshua Specht examine the industries that helped make America rich and prosperous as well as environmental and political pattern have come back to bite America…