Edmund de Waal, a celebrated potter and ceramicist who had one of the literary hits of 2010 with his biographical memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes has now written a study of the remarkable history and nature of porcelain. De Waal has devoted much of his working life to porcelain, and this is not a […]
Charles Murray, in his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission, argues that America’s constitutional checks on the growth of spending, taxation, and regulation have largely been undermined. The result, he fears, is an America moving rapidly toward the kinder, gentler tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville warned about. Murray focuses—wisely in my view—on the […]
Harry Mount is the master of, so to speak, the QI book. Like the authors of the BBC show, he is able to hold our interest in the unlikeliest subjects by telling us things that come as a surprise, even when think ourselves well-read. An eager truffle-hunter, he has snuffled his way in previous books […]
“To know your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist…. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their […]
This is ideal holiday reading, but there is a caveat. It is an anti-social book. You are part of a house party in Provence. There are plans to deploy allied appetite superiority, advance on the village and lunch chez le Patron Mange Ici. You will be strongly tempted to dodge the column and continue reading […]
John Plender, a journalist on the Financial Times, has written a book about capitalism and whether it is a good thing – and that is taking ‘good’ in its broadest sense, to include ‘moral’ as well as ‘useful’. Now, there are those who would object that a journalist on the famously pink paper is the […]
In November 1966 the chief Beatle went to an exhibition at the avant-garde Indica gallery in London and met the Japanese artist Yoko Ono for the first time. Clambering up a set of step ladders, John Lennon used the magnifying glass provided by Ono and read the single word she had fixed to the ceiling. […]
Today’s world is a product of financial innovation, explains Andrew Palmer in his new book Smart Money. Comparing the Mesopotamia era where payments were in the form of livestock, to the aftermath of the second world war where cigarettes were used as means of exchange in the black market, and to present day where almost all exchanges […]
Keeping secrets, sending secrets, stealing secrets: it’s a very ancient trade. The business of intercepting and deciphering communications has been going on for as long as people have had brains enough to profit from knowing more than their enemies. And today, as this bleakly entertaining new book from Gordon Corera reminds us, the branch of intelligence […]
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once famously suggested that, “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” We like to think that the past is a reliable guide to the future, and that intuition and collective wisdom are as robust as the laws of gravity. Ask any central banker or financier of recent years and they’ll […]
On the Sunday of the ninth of September 2007 a meeting was called in the Treasury. It was, as they say, fateful – although none of the participants realised it at the time. That afternoon the course of the UK economy and political life was altered for years to come. If things had been decided […]
“Over there, coffee will feel like a currency.” This is what Suki Kim is told as she prepares to leave her home in New York and live undercover, teaching at a Christian university in North Korea. In Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Korea’s elite, Kim recounts the six […]
“It was right in everyone’s face. Tyler and I just made it visible. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Tyler and I just gave it a name.” Fight Club There has been much talk in America this past year of whether the ‘libertarian moment’ has finally arrived – the political awakening of a movement that […]
Four years ago the popular uprisings which optimists called the Arab Spring swept through North Africa. One after another dictatorial governments collapsed while populations danced in the public squares. But there was one striking regional exception. In Egypt’s southern neighbour Sudan which was and is ruled by a sour-faced soldier called Omar Al-Bashir, there was […]
A new book examines the impact of techies on London’s economy Jobs in creative, digital and online industries have almost made up for those lost in the financial sector. The Flat White Economy is neither a profit machine nor a provider of steady, well-paid jobs. London at the end of 2008 stood as if on […]
One of the most distinguished diplomats of our times has written a very important book. Robin Renwick was not a typical ambassador. Especially after the Suez degringolade, the best British diplomats often exhibited a subtle melancholy. They were helping to manage the affairs of a declining power in a dangerous world. They were usually haunted […]
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