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Re-ignite your imagination to emerge unabashed emotion, playfulness and awaken your old hungers… 

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Award-winning children’s book writer and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Katherine Rundell, explores how children’s books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children’s fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, and awaken old hungers and create new perspective on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers. Why aren’t children’s books seen as part of literature? Why would most adults feel embarrassed to be caught reading a young adult classic? When we leave children’s book behind, we do so at our peril, suggests Rundell, “for we discard in adulthood a casket of wonders that, read … Continue reading Re-ignite your imagination to emerge unabashed emotion, playfulness and awaken your old hungers… 

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Waves of undersea cables vulnerable to attack

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Every nation, button, house and financial market depends on a massive, unseen hidden web of cables across the ocean floor, that sustains our world, but it’s no longer safe. Power cables and pipelines on the seafloor provide the world with energy. This is the newest battlefield where countries must protect their interests – and the functioning of daily life- while rivals test their limits. From the Baltic to the Pacific, sinister ruptures, mysterious vessels and submarine incursions mark a conflict already under way. Elisabeth Braw captures the fragility of an infrastructure that underpins everything from mortgages to cancer research and … Continue reading Waves of undersea cables vulnerable to attack

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Retrain your brain to stop limiting your full potential

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If your new idea or a goal that excites you but no enough time to execute it what will you do?  What about a goal you really want to accomplish but can’t because instead of taking action, you procrastinate? Do you feel like the only way things are going to get done is if you do them? But what if it wasn’t that way? What if you had a team of people around you that helped you to accomplish your goals ( while you helped them accomplish theirs?) When we want something done, we’ve been trained to ask ourselves: “How can … Continue reading Retrain your brain to stop limiting your full potential

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Meet the enigmatic music mistress

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Sebastian Faulk’s  protagonist, Philip Deval, is a quite youth with a degree in philosophy and a soldier recently returned from the beaches of Normandy, arrives in Palestine on a peace-keeping mission in the final days of the British Mandate. The Sea of Galilee glitters in the distance as war-weary troops marvel at the novelty of oranges and sun- a paradise that belies a fierce new conflict about to erupt. Some years later, Philip begins work teaching at a school in the English countryside and meets the enigmatic music mistress, Frances Darwood. Over long evenings spent listening to records in her music … Continue reading Meet the enigmatic music mistress

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Sharpen your critical thinking with Maths and Science

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Imagine a world transformed by artificial intelligence, and what should my children do? AI is rewriting the rules in the classroom, the job market and the workplace, leaving parents, teachers, students and all types of workers unsure about how best to prepare for what lies ahead. Globally renowned economist Daniel Susskind, author of Growth, one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2024, cuts through the outdated advice to reveal to us what young people actually need to succeed now. “We cannot be sure the advice we give our children last year still works for the next” Susskind explains by offering … Continue reading Sharpen your critical thinking with Maths and Science

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Missiles in the wrong hands

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An Enemy within, a female spy is on the trial of a cache of missing missiles stolen in Ukraine – weapons also coveted by an American terrorist group that is planning a cataclysmic attack on the heart of the government. Conway takes the reader on a rip-roaring journey from the front lines of Ukraine to Turkey, Afghanistan , Britain, Florida and America’s corridor of power. A former British army officer who has also worked clearing mines, he deploys his war-zone experience to bring a powerful sense of verisimilitude to this dark, excellent thriller.  Amid a sinister political conspiracy with battlefield … Continue reading Missiles in the wrong hands

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A novel about connection

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Imagine the place of  future technology in American, as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust turns to the future with an extraordinary novel that examines the palce of technology in the American imagination. Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to co-exit with nature. Following a childhood defined loss, survival and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone … Continue reading A novel about connection

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How culture survives when we suffer from a deficit of meaning

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The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, is one of the most important and oldest international art exhibition as the tide of change is surging, the map of Europe is redrawn, the artist ride the wave with a spirited seriousness and exuberant originality. Every two years, a selected curator is given the unique opportunity to prepare an exhibition that reflects their vision of the contemporary art of their times with artists from around the world  and that is visited by hundreds of thousands of art afficionados. Though painted red and festooned with gaudy flags and stars, the Russian pavilion contains piles of … Continue reading How culture survives when we suffer from a deficit of meaning

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Disarmingly tender, slyly funny world of surrogacy

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Fallow is a fictional novel of a debt-laden young woman who had  seven pregnancies in 10 years, after signing up to be the world’s first in-house professional surrogate for a corporate behemoth, then finds herself caught in a social experiment of another kind. Natalie knows one truth, there is no such thing as a good job. As the clock ticks away at the workplace harassment call centre, she tries to ignore the increasing pain in her jaw. She has no dental insurance. She has no skills or ambitions. She has student loans. And, minute by minute, she hears the many ways … Continue reading Disarmingly tender, slyly funny world of surrogacy

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Portobello Film Festival  2026 – A Return to the Radical

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The 31st Portobello Film festival screens for free more than 200 new independent films, documentaries and music films from Thursday 3 to Sunday 20 September at the Muse Portobello, 6- 10:30 pm Exploding Galaxies, Pink Floyd, David Hockney, Collecting Art Making. For more than three decades Portobello Film Festival has been celebrating independent film making and Festival culture at the original epicentre of the British Underground. Free to enter and free to attend, the festival is an annual reminder of a time when Ladbroke Grove was to London what San Francisco was to America. The area has provided the perfect condition … Continue reading Portobello Film Festival  2026 – A Return to the Radical