Lara Feigel, an academic at King’s College, London asked two of her friends at the dance floor fill up, after reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the 1962 feminist novel about mid-century women’s attempts to live freely and about the artistic and sexual life of Anna Wulf, a character whose experiences mirror many of Lessing’s…
Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als in his first book reveals a provocative collection of race, class, sexuality and identity in America. His “ white girls” features the like of Michael Jackson, Eminem, Louise Brooks, Malcolm X, Truman Capote, Richard Pryor and Flannery O’Connor. Using his subjects to analyse literature, photography, films, music, television, performance, race,…
Laura Bates considers herself lucky not have been sexually assaulted although she had met harassers, masturbators and gropers. She recounts the time when a stranger in a crowd in Covent Garden was pressing into her only to find he had ejaculated down her back. This is timely book after the stories of abuse which…
Taleb, a financial options trader turned author and flaneur who delights in blitzing the many intellectuals he disrespects. He Devotes one section of Skin in the Game to criticising the practice of “those who can do; those who can’t, teach” complaint. In Taleb’s earlier bestselling book of Fooled by Randomness (2001), a groundbreaking and farsighted…
The former Sunday Times dating columnist, Dolly Alderton’s memoir irons out the mythology of modern love, by recollecting dodgy hook-ups, failed relationships and weird flings with unfiltered honesty. Her tale of drunken romps through London, drug dealers called Fergus and Pricey late-night cab rides up the M1, She lists email parodies and recipes like the…
Urban ecologist Schilthuizen studying how our manmade environments and in a world of adapt or die, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is being forced to adopt fascinating new ways of surviving and often thriving. Darwin Comes to Town paints several eye-popping examples to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which human…
The San Francisco-based host of TV show Bloomberg Technology, Emily Chang’s Brotopia offers an important examination of why technology industry is so dominated by men – and how women are pushing back, and have gone from whispering about sexism in the Valley to yelling about it. Chang’s journey to the memory lane and history of…
According to Catherine Price, a science journalist and author and her essays have appeared in The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times and Popular Science, we have fallen headlong into our relationship with phones without taking time to think about our behaviour. So before doing ourselves more damage, we should follow a 30-day…
Renzo Piano, the architect of the Shard, Western Europe’s tallest building, the engineering feats are revealed by the inspirational female engineer Roma Agrawal, who looks at how construction has evolved from the mud huts of our ancestors to skyscrapers of steel that reach several hundreds of meters into the sky. She reveals how engineers have…
Allan Chappelow, writer and Fabian socialist and biographer of George Bernard Shaw was found savagely beaten to death in May 2006, at his north-we London home in Hampstead. The neighbours took it for granted the 86-year-old as a recluse, if always polite. Chappelow’s body lay undiscovered for over four weeks. Several blows with a hammer…