English Heritage has over 400 historic monuments including buildings, places from world-famous prehistoric sites to grand medieval castles and Roman forts but not British concrete buildings that seek to rehabilitate as much-maligned architectural style. Concrete is coming back to fashion, as Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre was voted Britain’s most-hated building. Architect and historian at…
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborn, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all not just colleagues, but they are peers, rivals, and friends and they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. These smirking Oxonians think that…
India speaks, writes, and thinks in many tongues with more than 400 listed languages, including English, spoken by more than a million native speakers, and some languages like Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu are nearly 4, 500 years old. Indian poets who wrote in English, a language that arrived in the 17th century, joined others…
David Lieven’s In the shadow of Gods looks into the history of empires from Mughal to British and questions what made them the dominant form of government for several centuries. When the empires disintegrate statutes fall or are defaced with paint, and names of towns and universities are changed to eliminate imperial references. David Lieven…
In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things, as maps divide the walled Old City into four quarters, yet the division doesn’t reflect the reality of mixed and diverse neighborhoods. Beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, much of the Old City remains little known to visitors,…
Tina Brown, a former Editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and author of the bestselling “ The Diana Chronicles (2007)”. The Palace Papers, take the readers on a tour that shows the Queens’s stoic resolve as she copes with the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and her partner for seven…
Although premonitions are impossible, they come true all the time. Two nights before the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when 116 children died as an amount of coal waste slid across a Welsh mining village, a 10-year-old girl called Eryl Maijones, had a premonition saying “ I dreamt I went to school and there was no…
Alice Urbach was an Austrian Jewish cookery writer and teacher who had her own cooking school in Vienna, although she was forced to flee to England in 1938. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis.…
Professor Devi Sridhar’s vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable, she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the Covid-19 pandemic including her personal experience as a scientist, and set out a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from…
An illuminating exploration of the atomic age through the history of six nuclear disasters by the best-selling historian, a Ukrainian now teaching at Harvard, Serhii Polkhy. In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, the explosions would rip buildings apart three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, and classified…