In 2015 , Leila Slimani’s debut novel, an unsparing account of sex addiction, won 200,000 dirhams ( $22,000), the La Mamounia literary award ( prix de La Mamounia) in Marrakesh – a prize for French-language fiction by Moroccan authors awarded and donated by the La Mamounia hotel in the hotel where Winston Churchill loved to…
What measures will governments and people take in response to such tectonic economic and cultural shift and how to avoid the prospect of undermining the very foundations of prosperity? The US President’ strongest supporters live in the declining states. The UK’s Brexit backers are mostly from struggling regions, as in rich countries the divide that…
The Bedroom is an essay, a working through of Perrot’s various thoughts and literary entanglements, on the bedroom, the room turned askance and viewed via its various uses , turns into a history of privacy and what, exactly, identity, comfort , sequestration and ownership might have meant though the ages to writers as diverse as…
With the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street in 1979 a major privatisation drive began not only selling industrial holdings, transport infrastructure, the telephone system but also the land and public buildings erected on it. Land makes a major chunk of national wealth and an estimate by the Office for National Statistics concluded…
A Bangalore based educational (edtech) and online tutoring firm founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran, an engineer from Azhikode a costal village in Kerala, India’s largest online tutoring startup and recent entrant to the “unicorn club” is looking to expand into international markets with its latest acquisition of US-based Osmo, a Palo Alto, California startup…
The UK Deed Poll Service has seen a sharp rise in the number of parent paying £35 to alter their child’s title from “Miss to Master” or “Master to Miss” in the past five years, with at least one child under-16-year-old making the change every day. These changes are followed by the renouncing of…
“Mr Five Per Cent” the godfather of Iraq’s oil industry, Calouste Gulbenkian’s art of negotiation with minutiae of complex legal agreements, and haggling until the breaking point of an opponent’s patience was reached, is in line with his motto “ Check, check, Check”. When he died in 1955, aged 86, he was the world’s richest…
“Genetics is the most important factor shaping who we are” write Robet Plomin a behavioural geneticist at King’s College London recognised globally for his research into the genetics of intelligence. “ It explains more of the psychological differences between us thane everything else put together, the most important environmental factors, such as our families and…
In Zuboff ‘s view Google’s original aim of making all the world’s information accessible mutated into a ruthless domineering to make money by exploiting and modifying human behaviour, by serving up ads to users just when they are most susceptible to persuasion and generating wants they did not know they had. Google is following a…
Anne Boden had left UK’s top banks as she was disillusioned with the sector. The financial crash and emerging technologies presented vast opportunity for change, but change it would not, and Boden was increasingly frustrated and decided to do something radical and set up her own bank. In her latest book Anne reveals how she…