A conspiracy removed Margaret Thatcher states Charles Moore almost in slow motion. The volume starts in 1987 with Thatcher’s third general election victory covers her fall from power in 1990, and her subsequent decline. In the previous two volumes Moore has worked 20 years covering her childhood and early years, then her first victory…
Google, the world’s most popular search engine, is adopting artificial intelligence in its ranking algorithm. The change which Google explains as the most significant revision in at least five year, uses a new form of language analysis to understand users’ queries better and will affect its responses to one in `10 searches , according to…
Edward IV who “upside-downed his brother and drowned him, dead in a butt of malmsey “was youthful war hero turned seedy sun-king, having seized the throne in 1461 just shy of his 19th birthday, and presided over a court that tottered bibulously on the line between chivalric self-glorification and flat-out debauchery. Edward was needled by…
Alarms already sounded by Bill Gates, late Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, about artificial intelligence and how one day super-intelligent robots will one day wipe out or enslave humanity. Superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just human relationships and jobs but civilisation itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as…
In the era of Jane Austen only the eldest sons could inherit wealth, and how a single man not in possession of good fortune, will just have to roll up his sleeves and work for his living. Rory Muir reveals the customs of English aristocrats and their bourgeois imitators was to leave all their wealth…
Afghan born Pakistani poetess and writer Fatima Bhutto who studied at Columbia University writes about vast cultural movement emerging from beyond the Western world, displaying truly global in its range and allure, challenging Hollywood, McDonalds and blue jeans. K-Pop from Korea provide universal satisfaction – not merely as entertainment but on an emotional level too.…
Five years ago Jacques Testard visited Frankfurt Book Fair and acquired the English-language rights for a book by a Ukrainian-born author shunned by mainstream publishers. Little did he know, a year later that £3, 500 investment, the biggest advance paid by his newly formed Fitzcarraldo Publishing House – paid off handsomely when Svetlana Alexievich won…
Gretchen McCulloch, a Canadian linguist, making sense of the ways we communicate online “ how internet is making us more nuanced and inventive writers”, in her latest book she writes “ because of internet, through a revolutionary period in linguistic history, where writing quickly, within character limits and deploying ever-changing internet slang, is enriching…
The Guardian newspaper investigative journalist Amelia Gentleman, received an email from a charity with a message describing how the UK government was trying to deport a 61-year-old grandmother who had arrived from Jamaica aged 10, but had no documents to prove that she had entered Britain legally. Months of investigation revealed that this was not…
A Tunisian friend of Justin Marozzi told him, “I’m embarrassed to be an Arab these days. Everywhere you look there’s chaos, fighting, bloodshed, dictatorship, corruption, injustice, unemployment. The only thing we’re leading the world in is terrorism”. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its…