People in finance do not create wealth. They preside over it, and suck it away. That is one central point in this excellent new analysis by Rana Foroohar (Time magazine assistant managing editor and economics columnist). Eight years on from the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, the key lessons of the crisis of 2008 […]
Makers and Takers by Rana Foroohar Read More »
Midnight tonight (31 December 2016) will be one moment in the continuing flow of time, no different essentially from any other. Only because human societies are organised by collective effort, and require punctuation marks in their narratives, midnight will be made significant. The calendar will change to a new year. There will be fireworks, sentimentality,
Timekeepers by Simon Garfield Read More »
Much as life in Lanark and dear old Blighty is unsatisfactory we do not fear being snatched away to a detention centre and tortured because the government does not share our opinions. There are, of course, plenty of regimes in this world where that is the case. In 1990, Jaballa Matar, an exiled Lybian dissident
The Return by Hisham Matar Read More »
Ann Patchett’s (http://www.annpatchett.com/about/) new novel is an American family saga involving six children, 50 years and many coincidences. It opens with Bert, a father of three with another baby on the way, sneaking a kiss from Beverly, a married woman hosting a christening party for her second child, Frances. They’re drunk and it’s the Sixties;
As we say goodbye to 2016, commentators are suggesting that the past 12 months have been a threshold year. It could be that the twentieth century ended in 2016 in the same way as historians regard the nineteenth century as ending at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. One of the transformations
The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent Read More »
Stephen Leather (http://www.stephenleather.com/) has been entertaining us for nearly 20 years with his novels of crime, imprisonment, military service, and terrorism. He’s certainly tapped into the zeitgeist because our daily news is saturated with crime, war, terrorism, death and destruction. Every night brings further gory detail about the bloodbath in The Middle East. The appetite for
Subtitled ‘Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae’, His Bloody Project contains the memoir of a 17-year-old crofter, written while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869 for three brutal murders, and ‘discovered’ by the author while researching his own Highland roots. This manuscript, we are informed, divided the Edinburgh literati of the time, who feared
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet Read More »
Standard histories of philosophy treat the subject in a methodical and scholarly fashion, attempting to encapsulate the whole business in a short number of volumes. Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy‘, Freddie Copleston’s ‘A History of Philosophy’ (11 vols.), and Anthony Kenny’s ‘A New History of Western Philosophy‘ (originally 3 volumes) have been ready to
The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb Read More »
It has sometimes been noted that Lanark is a resolutely conservative place. Conservative with a small ‘c’, that is. There are few actual Tories, of course. Instead it is a small town working class conservatism whose rallying cry glories in the phrase ‘it’s aye been!!’. Well, it may have ‘aye been’, but originality is the lifeblood of
Originals by Adam Grant Read More »
