Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. The Nutmeg’s Curse, traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. He argues that the dynamics of climate change today…
Zambian born accountant turned International best-selling author, Wilbur Smith has died on Saturday afternoon with his wife Niso, by his side, at his home in Cape Town at the age of 88. Smith’s 49 published books have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide, including the publication of his debut novel When the Lion Feeds…
The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule and the outlook for freedom under the communist regime are told with complete insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West. Sheridan’s…
Entrepreneur, acclaimed model, actress and global social media phenomenon, Emily Ratajkowski, who has shared her image with the world, at the age of twenty-one, created a furor with her provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. My Body, a collection of 12 essays, offers lucid examination of mirrors in…
On a November evening in 2020 at dusk a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week quarantine period, but she just can’t take it any more – the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. The Moor will be…
Famed across the Known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, build up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings – the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, historians at…
Suspension of Owen Paterson halted as MPs vote to review the system. Boris Johnson wants the independent system of combating sleaze in Parliament yesterday as he threw the government’s weight behind protecting Tory MP who was found to have repeatedly breached lobbying rules. This MP took £ 500, 000 from firms he lobbied for breaching…
Brazil, China, Canada, Russia, Indonesia, the US, the UK and the Democratic Republic of Congo, was among the signatories on Tuesday to reverse deforestation by 2030. The pledge includes almost £14.4 bn ($19.2bn) of public and private funds, although the previous deal in 2014 had “failed to slow deforestation at all”, and in fact deforestation…
One of the leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance systems, and anthropologist at the University of Washington, Darren Byler’s study of China’s camps in Xinjiang evokes past evils with a definite technological edge, reveals how China used a vast network of technology provided by private companies – facial surveillance, voice recognition, smartphone data,…