Journalist Paul Mason (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mason_(journalist)#Books) has become familiar to us in recent months on TV news reports about the Greek debt crisis, and the possibility of Greece crashing out of the Eurozone. His open necked engaging style is delivered with a distinctive Lancashire accent. The author of four previous books on politics and economics, he now […]
Postcapitalism by Paul Mason Read More »
Laura Wilson (http://www.laura-wilson.co.uk/website/) grew up in London and studied English Literature at University College London. She has written history about many different periods for children before turning to historical crime fiction, where she concentrates on the recent past. Her fifth novel, The Lover, set during the London Blitz, won the French Prix du Polar Europeen in
Kazuo Ishiguro (http://www.faber.co.uk/author/kazuo-ishiguro/) is a much loved and admired British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, his family moving to England in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Masters from the University of East Anglia’s creative-writing
Lively interest in the Tudor and Elizabethan ages have been stimulated in recent years by the histories and popularisations of David Starkey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starkey) and Hilary Mantel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel). Should you wish to immerse yourself further into this world you’ll find an excellent new book in God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England. The Catholics of Elizabethan England
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Before retirement Richard Fortey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fortey) was Professor of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum. He is a world expert on the trilobites, a group of ancient marine arthropods resembling woodlice which roamed the oceans for almost 300 million years. That’s three thousand times longer than Homo Sapiens have so far been on the planet. The study of these creatures has contributed hugely
There is much talk these days about artificial intelligence, and whether advanced computer systems could ever really ‘think’. Might they, after we have birthed them, go on to replicate and take over the world? This is not idle speculation, or the draft plot for a science fiction novel. Stephen Hawking is only one of many
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Lindsay Hawdon (http://lhawdon.co.uk/www.lhawdon.co.uk/Home.html) is a writer of travel, adventure and fiction. She began travelling at the age of eighteen. After leaving school, she spent three years roaming around Europe, Africa and India. Her travel column, An Englishwoman Abroad, began in The Sunday Telegraph in 2000 and ran for seven years. Jakob’s Colours is her latest
I’m assuming you don’t spend a lot of time picking out unwanted insects from your best friend’s fur. Yet the function of that activity in apes is exactly what Robin Dunbar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar) believes language does for us. Apes and monkeys, humanity’s closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of their social relationships. All their
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar Read More »
Sometimes you just want to slough off the old world and dance around the bluebell wood in gay abandon. Anything new, anything fresh will do. Why not give Kirsty Logan (http://www.kirstylogan.com/) a go? The summary of her fantasy is as follows. As a ‘Gracekeeper’, Callanish administers shoreside burials, sending the dead to their final resting place in the
