No other country is so divided over its own past as Russia and how the Russians came to tell their 1000-year-old story and reinvent it as they went along, are vital aspects of their history, their culture, and beliefs. To grasp what Putin’s regime means for Russia and the world – we need to unravel…
Before 1870, most people lived in dire poverty, the benefits of the slow crawl of invention continually offset by a growing population. Then invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation, and creatively destroying the economy again and again. In Slouching Towards Utopia, Bradford DeLong, one of the world’s leading economists, economics professor, former…
Since the late 1970s is China’s “reform and opening up” been key to the country’s spectacular growth? Or are they smoke screen for retrograde statist control to bolster the last major communist regime on Earth as the late Mao era became a potent global rival to the US – perhaps the dominant superpower of the…
The fate of the world is in our hands and one has to identify what is important to us, by a method of isolation, as Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our unwritten future could last for millions more – or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of…
Dame Hilary Mantel, author of the best-selling Wolf Hall Trilogy and won the Booker Prize twice for 2009’s Wolf Hall, the first in the Thomas Cromwell series and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies, died on Thursday aged 70. Dame Hilary was an intense and troubling writer, and her subjects were odd and…
Seven years of bloody and violent civil fighting, beginning in 1642 took place before the arrest of Charles 1 appeared in court to be told he was sentenced to death as a “Tyrant and Traitor’. He laughed at this and during the reading of the charge, the head of his cane broke off and fell to the floor.…
Act of Oblivion is a spellbinding historical novel that brilliantly imagines one of the greatest manhunts in history: the search of two Englishmen involved in the killing of King Charles I and the implacable foe on their trail- an epic journey into the wilds of seventeenth-century New England. 1660 England, General Edward Whalley, and his…
Jamie Flore Higgins, one of the few women at the highest ranks of Goldman Sachs, spurred on by the obligation to her working-class immigrant family, rose through the ranks and saw it all: out-of-control, lavish parties flowing with never-ending drinks, affairs flouted in the office, rampant drug abuse, and most pervasively, a discriminatory culture…
After the end of the cold war, western democracies collided with the rise of a generation of autocrats and populists. The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death as entire societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt…
The Himalayas spanning for over two thousand kilometers through several countries from Pakistan to Myanmar via Nepal, India, Tibet, and Bhutan, where the world’s religions of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are interspersed with ancient shamanic beliefs, where different cultures exist in these isolated mountain valleys, Modernity and tradition collide while the great powers fight for…