Tom Standage take us through the beginning around 3000 BC with the wheel and moving through the era of horsepower, trains, bicycles, and the rise of the car – and the future of urban transport – into a broader historical context. Our society has been shaped by the car in innumerable ways , many of…
In 1940, dealers agents thronged the then Netherlands port would enclose price lists for goods or loans on the City’s Exchange, the Beurs, along with correspondence to their clients. Pyke captures the intrigue, opportunity, chaos, scandal and nonconformist spirit of the sixteenth century Antwerp with exquisite narrative zeal. A clerk for van den Molen…
Billy Summers is a sniper who can take deadly headshot at 1, 200 yards. Billy Summers is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. Billy Summers learned his craft as a US Marine and honed it in the…
Zhao Lijian, who has 1 million followers on Twitter and legions of supporters inside China, was slapped down by hi superiors although he was the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, quoted on Twitter in March that “the Covid-19 virus had originated in the US and suggested that Washington was engaged in a cover-up. When did…
In cities, we stand silent in buses and train carriages, ignoring each other. Online, we retreat into silos and carefully create who we interact with. In politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But imagine what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of our problems, were actually…
John Boyne skewers the brutalities of social media and the incongruities of wokeness for those who value friendship more than followers. Boyne’s characteristic humour and razor-sharp observations, follows five members of the Cleverley family who lived a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, only one tweet away from disaster, during a week…
The Darkest hour of Pandemic arrived on September 21, 2020 for Jeremy Farrar, a global expert in infectious disease control, one of the UK’s leading scientists, head of the Wellcome Trust, and a member of the SAGE emergency committee, describes how it feels as one of the key scientists at the sharp end of a…
Novelist, and former American academic, living in UK, Rick Gekoski in search of rare book trade for the last fifty years as a bookseller seeking scarce, world of first editions, revealing anecdotes and a hint of steel. By chance in 1971, he stumbled across a tranche of DH Lawrence first editions in Brooklyn on a…
Cal Newport debunks the jargon “follow your passion” by revealing have little to do with how most people end up loving their work after spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and other who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work. Newport takes the lid off strategies they used…
This is the story of jeans from cotton plant nested in the soil to the flares hanging in your wardrobes. A revealing book about the birth and death of jeans that exposes the fractures of our global supply chains, and our relationships to each other, ourselves and the planet. Did you buy your jeans on…