Connor O’Clery, tells the story of the Soviet century-spanning Stalin to Putin era. Stanislav Suvorov, a bespoke shoemaker, had a full order book and a growing clientele, he had it all modern luxuries like Television, camera, Fridge but lived in the wrong country. In Europe or US, he would have been a Yuppie, upwardly mobile…
Robert Holland one of the World’ s leading historians describes the impact of the Mediterranean on British culture and shaped the British imagination. Ranging from Byron’s poetry to Damien Hirst’s installations, who sought form it the inspiration, beauty and fulfilment that evaded them at home. Referred to aas “Magick Land” by one traveller, dreams about…
The year was 1947, when the US was still struggling to find a solution to deal with both the post war devastation of Europe and its former ally the Soviet Union. In China the nationalist government still controlled the country, India and Pakistan were under British Imperial rule and the state of Israel did not…
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, the Noble prize-winning author, has died at the age of 85, who was a master stylist story-teller with a clear vision for the ironies, tragedies, sufferings and was a great writer of the simple English sentence. His travel writing was honest, refusing to glamorise the developing world and his fiction was…
Brazil’s failure to achieve stable growth, legal norms and protection for all its citiznes, in the very short term has been tragic. On August 24, 1954, Getulio Vargas, Brazil’s president retired to his room at the Catete Palace in Rio de Janeiro, lay down on the bed and put a pistol to the left…
In the mid-sixteenth century, England was indeed a relatively insignificant small kingdom on the periphery of Europe. Group merchants formed the world’s first joint-stock company and set out seek new markets and trading partners. Archival research and bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. paints a portrait of life in London, on…
The Prize-winning author of True crime Midnight in Peking, in his new book City of Devils, portrays Shanghai through its historical criminals a bunch of rascals. He does not write memoirs of ambassadors, businessmen and missionaries, and in the City of Devils, French’s heroes are the low-life foreigners who came to the city when it…
David Edgerton, a historian, examines our modern history from the outside, “ as we might study that of Germany or the Soviet Union.” Egerton’s new survey of the last century feels like a summation of a lifetime’s reading and reflection, According to him much of what we think we know about our recent past…
India is now the world’s fastest-growing economy and about to become the third largest economy in terms of purchasing power as foreign investors are rushing in. In The Billionaire Raj, to make India more accessible to the Western Investor, Crabtree draws an analogy between America’s gilded age at the end of the 19th century with…
Barry Hatton highlights Lisbon’s geographical position at the point where on Europe’s longest rivers meets the Atlantic with a majestic yawn ( 12.43 miles across). A 19th-century homage to Lisbon’s Roman past, a unique design that features black basalt rippling across a sea of shiny white tiles, replicated all over Portugal’s once mighty global…