Tag: Books

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Vanishing skills and traditions

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Craft Land Britain was once a craft land and for generations what we made with our hands shaped our identities, built our communities and defined our regions. Historian and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, James Fox travels the length of Britain to seek out the country’s last great craftspeople in Craftland and chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that used to govern every aspect of life on these shores. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and Coopers, thatchers, bellfounders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life, one that is not yet … Continue reading Vanishing skills and traditions

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“DOWNTON ABBEY – THE GRAND FINALE”

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“DOWNTON ABBEY – THE GRAND FINALE” IN A CINEMA NEAR YOU – NOW!! 124 minutes, PG Director Richard Curtis Characterisation and careful storytelling spins us another enchanting  yarn in The latest Downton Saga! Plots, plot twists and sub plots feature in this movie, enchanting in the opulent lifestyles portrayed, and the banter and relationships between those above stairs and those below who all seem to get on famously, symbiotic  as their roles are in life in the 30s. It is now 15 years since Downton hit our screens with lots of spin offs and as it is so well loved, I hesitate … Continue reading “DOWNTON ABBEY – THE GRAND FINALE”

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Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

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A young girl, starving and covered with blood, turns up in a general store in a remote village deep in New Zealand. She blurts out her name- Anya – but refuses to say anyting else. A shocking murder in the New Zealand bush and the witness who looks all too familiar draws a woman back to the very place she swore she’d never return to in this breakneck debut thriller. The phone rings for Effie, a police officer who fled that very village under terrifying circumstances 17 years earlier and is now in Scotland. An old friend, Lewis, is on … Continue reading Imperfect Memories: Shocking murder in the Kiwi bushes 

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What tech nerds got up to…

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Seven worried people have gathered for dinner in Notting Hill, London, but it’s the first time six of them have seen one another since 1999, when they spent a heady, intense summer building a website that was meant to revolutionize online dating by making matches based on psychological testing. They presence in Notting Hill to celenrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999. For them it was an unsettling experience, as they lived and worked on a remote countryside estate. Their boss was obsessive and opaque. Following a raucous night in which … Continue reading What tech nerds got up to…

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World of Organised Crime

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A bandit becomes a monarch, a gang becomes a government and organised crime at the heart of every modern state. Homo Criminalis shows the emergence of modern society through the evolution of the underworld and its crimes. From Chinese banditry and eighteenth-century English tea smuggling to today’s cocaine submarines and the high-tech crimes of tomorrow, showing how the world’s dark underbelly shapes us, no matter how we try to outpace it. Mark Galeotti, a prolific author specialising in Russia and organised crime, shows “our dynamic interconnected globalised networked cross-cultural world is so permeated by organised crime. It is very hard … Continue reading World of Organised Crime

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World of Organised Crime

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A bandit becomes a monarch, a gang becomes a government and organised crime at the heart of every modern state. Homo Criminalis shows the emergence of modern society through the evolution of the underworld and its crimes. From Chinese banditry and eighteenth-century English tea smuggling to today’s cocaine submarines and the high-tech crimes of tomorrow, showing how the world’s dark underbelly shapes us, no matter how we try to outpace it. Mark Galeotti, a prolific author specialising in Russia and organised crime, shows “our dynamic interconnected globalised networked cross-cultural world is so permeated by organised crime. It is very hard … Continue reading World of Organised Crime

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Marriage, love, betrayal, infidelity

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Roberta Green, a graduate student on the master of fine arts programme at the fictitious Edward University in upstate New York is presenting a searing thesis project about two married professors tiptoeing towards infidelity, as their transgressions are brought to light in Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian. The facts she is presenting pertain to the romantic lives of two of her tutors: a married couple named Simone and Ethan both in their early forties. Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, … Continue reading Marriage, love, betrayal, infidelity

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Antics of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie

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In Men in Love, action takes place over roughly, three years upto 1990, Welsh has to think himself into an era before smartphones and the internet. Late 1980s, the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain. For the Trainspotting crew, a new era is about to begin- a time for hope, for love, for raving. Leaving heroin behind and separated after a drug deal gone wrong, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie each want feel alive. They fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead; they follow the call of the dance floor, with its promise of joy … Continue reading Antics of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie

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Workplace romance virtually

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Moderation by Elaine Castillo is the real romance in the virtual workplace, a story about the possible future of live. Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places after getting a promotion. Now thanks to the parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground- the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider- she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed moderating the next stage of human interaction. In another … Continue reading Workplace romance virtually

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“I believe that life is not damnation but grace”

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In Misery of Love a spiritual seuquel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and other Imaginary Creatures, Yavan Alabé continues his unflinching interrogation of race and family in modern France. Colonial history haunts this stunning spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures. Alabé focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, blonde, slight, willful- faces her estranged father as her family comes together to bury her grandparents   One of earlier stories suggests there was a double suicide.  Alagbé seamlessly glides between narratives of the family’s past and present, all haunted by the legacy … Continue reading “I believe that life is not damnation but grace”