Colin Barrett, a regular in the New Yorker, a prize-winning author of Young Skins, in 2013, introduces chronicler of small-town County Mayo, in rural west Ireland with a serious prose style, brings eight stories, and takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits, and…
The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the Rothschilds were bankers. Joseph Sassoon reveals the secrets behind the family’s phenomenal success, and how a handful of Jewish exiles from Ottoman Baghdad forged a mercantile juggernaut from their new home in colonial Bombay, the vast…
BBC at 100, grew bigger, with the expansion of the boundaries of good taste and sound judgement, pandering to the masses, sometimes out of touch. In 2022, when the BBC celebrates its centenary, its future lies in doubt. Media historian, David Hendy’s tale of creative endeavour and technological innovation, beset by a constant tension…
In the wake of the lackluster employment market and assisted by academic matchmaking agency Matt Knott ventures into teaching the superrich in London, a world where £30 an hour is the base rare, prep school coaching begins at the age of seven and writing UCAS personal statements for university applications is contracted out to…
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliot of The New York Times investigates eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with mega imagination as the skyscrapers, near Brooklyn homeless shelter. Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north, grows up, moving with her tight-knit family shelter to shelter, is named for the…
An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence from Ramachandra Guha, biographer of Mahatma Gandhi and historian of India, tells the little-known story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across late 19th to late 20th century arrive to join…
Czech-born professor and Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba, a world-leading expert on energy and an astonishing polymath, in a thought provoking book “How the World Works”, encounters the influential thinking, crushes complex data, with fundamental importance of energy in human affairs. We never had so much information or disinformation at our…
Once upon a time there were storytellers who wrote folk tales. Award-winning author, Nicholas Jubber reveals all the serendipity at the heart of what we think of as eternal, tales of neglected story-tellers, lives of the dreamers and fascinatingly explores the land from which the great fairy stories emerged, making the stories more resonant, powerful…
Award-winning financial historian delves into character-driven story of venture capital and the world it made. “Innovations rarely came from experts” Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk was not in the auto industry. When it comes to innovation, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at…
The ancient Greek city of Athens the birthplace of Western civilization, and dominated by the pillars and pediments of the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena, goddess of Wisdom, from Runciman Award winner Bruce Clark. Bruce’s tale of a city that occupies a unique place in the cultural memory of the West. Reforms of…