Gordon Brown after seven years of labouring has given his own account of a significant political career that ended in a crushing electoral defeat in 2010 after he rose to the challenge of the financial crisis. Born in 1951, the son of a Fife Church minister, former Labour Prime Minister, and our longest serving Chancellor,…
Kelly Luce’s suspense novel “Pull Me Under” with a female protagonist that get more right about women, which tells the intriguing story of murder, rage, and explosive family secrets. Chizuru Akitani, a Japanese overweight hafu (“ a half Person” or mixed race) – the daughter of an American white woman and Japanese father- is an…
Joseph Stalin decided that the largest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity, as he managed to force through using profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with power of life or death over hundreds of millions, in conditions of capitalist self-encirclement. Stalin never forgot and never forgave, with…
Medical historian, Lindsey Fitzharris tells a gripping tale of scientific and medical exertion, including the oozing pus and rotting flesh that followed infections in the days before antiseptics. In the past the idea of doctors washing hands before touching them into an open wound would have been considered a waste of his time, until Lister’s…
Carl Safina, a trained seabird ecologist, writes in his new book “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel”, that much published behavioural science continues to adopt neutral language that downplays animal emotion. This can be actively misleading. We should see the value of using the same language for grief, friendship, joy, empathy and other emotions…
Ganga-Mata, the Ganges, purifier of souls Hinduism’s mother goddess, few rivers in the world are more esteemed and sacrosanct and few are more polluted and this paradox which afflicts India’s most famous river, from its glacial beginnings in the mighty Himalayas to its swampy end in the Bay of Bengal. 400 million Indians and 160…
NASA’s Scott Kelly lived 340 consecutive days in the International Space Station between 2015 and 2016, the longest time in zero gravity spent by a US astronaut at that time. Kelly during his exploration carried Alfred Lansing’s book on Ernest Shackleton on board the ISS to read when the isolation of space starts to bother…
Magazine writer Jennifer Egan’s first fictional novel came out in 2010, “A visit from the Goon Squad, a bunch of interconnected short stories, which was rewarded with prizes. In her latest book “Manhattan Beach” Egan describes Brooklyn’s rich maritime past, the East coast elite, social changes, America’s rise to postwar pre-eminence in the world and…
The American short story writer George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo described both unique and extraordinary by 2017 judging panel, has won the Man Booker Prize. The novel is about the night in 1862, the year into the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever, and he buried him in…
The Man Booker prize is one of the most enduring literary prizes, which grew influence and power, among booksellers, publishers and readers alike. Three men and three women Paul Auster, Emily Fridlund, Moshin Hamid, Fiona Mozley, George Saunders and Ali Smith are six shortlisted authors for the 2017 Man Book Prize for Fiction, according to…