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Growing up in Britain

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Yiewsley exposes Daljit Nagra’s experiences growing up as the son of immigrants in the white, working-class suburban town of Yiewsley close to Heathrow airport in outer London, from the 1960s to 80s, as Britain transitions from a post-war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher period and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps. The poems being to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India who arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: “Devout realists-already, and always, knuckled into work”. They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the “messy English” … Continue reading Growing up in Britain

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Monsters within her…

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Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care … Continue reading Monsters within her…

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Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Erica Wagner’s Wash tells the story of a boy Washington Roebling growing up in Pennsylvania under the eye of a brutal but brilliant father. He is a young man at college, enduring the choices that have been made for him and finding brightness and beauty all the same. He is a soldier in a dreadful war who- despite that awful conflict- finds an extraordinary woman who was the love of his life, and her tale inextricably twines with is. He is an engineer who builds one of the great wonders of the modern world. His life holds the possible and … Continue reading Eponymous hero, Man of Steel displaying duty and desire, love and obligation

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Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Tahmima Anam’s Uprising reveals a group of children witnessing their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude on a desolate sinking island off the coast of Bangladesh. Bought and sold by Amma, the ruthless madam who was once herself sold into slavery, as the victim becomes the perpetrator, the women have accepted their fates as sex workers. Yet their children weave fantastic tales, imagining that someday they will escape the island and enjoy a life of freedom.  When Kusum Khan, a young educated woman from the city, is brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. … Continue reading Oppression turns into rebellion as children stripped of their innocence

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Lanes of London

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London Lanes is an attempt to enumerate, name and describe, as far as possible, all the lanes old and new of London. Alan Stapleton examines over 900 London Lzness and writes “In the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth the houses of London certainly climbed skywards along the narrow lanes. These houses were half-timbered buildings of sometimes eight storeys. But each storey bulged out over the next lower, so that the people on the topmost storey could almost shake hands with their neighbours across the way. Up to the end of the eighteenth century the citizens of London lived in … Continue reading Lanes of London

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Trump lands in Beijing two trillion dollar leverage

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American President Donald Trump is not politician but a businessman, landed in Beijing. When a president makes travels to a diplomatic summit a state visit, he brings diplomats, advisers and officials. Trump brought Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla & SpaceXKelly), Larry Fink (Black Rock),Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan), Nvidia (Jensen Huang),  Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Laurence Culp Jr. ( GE Aerospace), Ryan McInerney (Mastercard), Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), Stephen Schwarzman(Blackstone), Brian Sikes (Cargill) David Solomon(Goldman Sachs), Jacob Thaysen (Illumina Conciliatory measures), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm) including 17 American CEOs. You don’t bring the most powerful private sector CEOs on earth to a foreign capital … Continue reading Trump lands in Beijing two trillion dollar leverage

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From the slums of Bogotá to its luxurious villas

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Night Shift working Dr Laura Strong, an A&E doctor struggling with each soaring debts and a severely disabled brother to look after. She needs a miracle to stop her life collapsing around her. One day Rafael Fernandez, a handsome Colombian businessman, appears with is young son Max, who is suffering badly from Crolin’s disease. When Fernandez offers to pay her vast sums of money to leave her job and move to Bogot[i]á to care for Max, which Strong eventually accepts. But if somethings appears to be too good to be true, then it probably is. Behind the façade of Rafa’s … Continue reading From the slums of Bogotá to its luxurious villas

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Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Henry Snow, US Labour and economic historian, reminds us that he idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother Samuel, who fascinated by shipbuilding, undertook a high-level apprenticeship in the late 18th century that equipped him with “both a trademan’s knowledge and bourgeois European science”. Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon Warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers- and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor … Continue reading Extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives

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Do we have the courage to learn amid “Existential risk”?, a survival kit for the gloomy world

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Award-winning journalist, John Kampfner travel to ten countries confronting our shared challenges with bravery and imagination provides a “survival kit” for a world enveloped in gloom. Kampfner’s Braver New World reveals ground breaking exploration of the countries solving the world’s most pressing problems differently and the lessons for the rest of the world. Democracies often gets paralyzed by fear and populations are turning inward. In Japan, he discovers inter-generational care homes ensuring dignity in later life. He visits Vienna’s century-old housing projects where 60 per cent of resident live in subsidised accommodation without stigma and communities thrive. Taiwan’s health system … Continue reading Do we have the courage to learn amid “Existential risk”?, a survival kit for the gloomy world

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Dreams of crumbling mansion

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Christina Li’s haunting novel “The Manor of Dreams”, is about the secrets that lie in waiting in the crumbling mansion of a former Hollywood starlet, and the intertwined fates of the two Chinese American families fighting to inherit it. Vivian Yin is dead. The first Chinese actress to win an Oscar , the trailblazing ingénue rose to fame in the eighties, only to disappear from the spotlight at the height of her career and lvie out the rest of her life as a recluse. Now her remaining family members are gathered for the reading of her will and her daughters … Continue reading Dreams of crumbling mansion