In 1961 Penguin Books became a listed company, as five months earlier, a jury had cleared Penguin of publishing an “obscene” work: the unexpurgated paperback of DH Lawrence’s late novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the best-known and most resonant works of the twentieth century. Originally considered obscene and unpublishable in numerous countries, its scandalous story of class divide and the English countryside is notorious. But since the 1920s we have repeatedly re-created Lady Chatterley, from film and TV to music and tourism. A record print run of 3 million copies earned Penguin pre-tax profits for 1960 almost quadrupled. The … Continue reading Struggle from freedom of expression

Lucy Caldwell, winner of the EM Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the BBC National Short Story Award winner, in her latest novel Devotions which focuses on the point of live itself – via various unmoored protagonists, from a young widow facing up to the essential hopelessness of existence in “Hamlet, a Love Story” to a forty-something, divorced dad who is clearing his dead mother’s home in “All Grown UP”.  A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. Harmony Hill is about a … Continue reading Understanding of what it might mean to love

Attention-Seeking Behavior is a confession from a liar that exposes the interrelation of language, control, performance, intimacy and love. The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour want to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she’s been seeing: their running jokes, the stories she’s told him. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person’s real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants … Continue reading A liar exposes the interrelation of language, control, performance, intimacy and love

Fidelity, the Boston-based financial group which directly manages $7tn and administers a total of $18tn, serving an estimated 57million people, or one in five American adults through retirement plans, investment funds and brokerage accounts. The private group owned and run by publicly-shy New England dynasty that don’t want to be in the limelight. Abigail Johnson, the CEO and her team have embarked on a massive growth spurt and pushed well past its money management rivals in terms of employees, revenue and profits. Wall Street  and ex-Financial Times Journalist, Justin Baer, in House of Fidelity give us an insight into Fidelity, which … Continue reading Investing was a pursuit reserved for the elite

Adriana Ramirez’s, The Violence is a chronicle of Colombia’s descent into decades of civil war of the 1940s and 1950s, through the lens of an intimate, multigenerational tale of upheaval and betrayal. “Neighbor killed neighbors, after years of potlicks worn shot glasses, and dominoes on shaded terraces” Ramirez writes. President-elect Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, champion of the working class and harbinger of a new era of progressive social change, is assassinated on the eve of Colombia’s 1948 presidential election, the capital is plunged into bloodshed. Gaitán’s assassination unleashed a bloodletting across the city , as Liberals blamed the CIA and the … Continue reading Spectre of violence: Multi-generational tale of upheaval and betrayal

THE MUSE GALLERY 269 PORTOBELLO ROAD W11 1LR “Vanished Memories” Instagram: Muse_@_269 http://www.themuseat269.london Michalis Karaiskos, Naira Mushtaq, Christos Tsimaris The exhibition shows a total of ten works by three artists who have combined a variety of media to portray mesmerising visual statements entitled “vanished memories”. Guess the correct identity of the royal personality in a large work by Michalis Karaiskos entitled “Seated Woman with Nightdress” – executed in oil on linen, view artworks including “Artist Imagining his Own Death” by the same painter. Christos Tsimaris  uses fine art to display his deeply figurative and enchanting pieces persistently testing the boundaries of … Continue reading The Muse Gallery