Tag: Books

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Mother who raised and inspired two superstars

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Tina Knowles, the mother of icons Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: the woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. A life of grief and tragedy, love and heartbreak, the nurturing of her superstar daughters, and the perseverance and audacity it takes for a girl from Galveston, Texas to change the world. Why half of Destiny’s Child Beyoncé’s original four piece, left the group in 2000 in a flurry of bad-mouthing and lawsuits: we’re just old that “Beyoncé saw … Continue reading Mother who raised and inspired two superstars

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Eternal City, that bring its people to life

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Rome for centuries was an essential stop on the Grand Tour, part of the education of well-born visitors such as the great chronicler of Gilded Age, Edith Wharton.  A collection of short stories, set in Italy, France and America, with powerful portraits of women who live in “the world of propriety” at the turn of century, displaying emotions women feel in love, in jealousy, when they long for children or seek independence – and when their passions lead them to overstep the bounds laid down by exacting conventions. We see too what happens to those strong enough to break the … Continue reading Eternal City, that bring its people to life

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Consequences of our choices

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A brother and sister lost and found, in a novel from the author of the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St Aubyn’s Parallel Lines, the novel seizes your heart and enthrals your mind. “We set off in opposite directions and walked around the world until we met, and I’m very pleased we have…”. It is summer. Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a bigger to connect with the mother who abandoned him. His therapist, Martin Carr, also faces challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological … Continue reading Consequences of our choices

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Albatross loses its bearings to turn into an unmoored wanderer

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Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel’s novel Still Born, about motherhood, shortlisted fort the 2023, International Booker Prize, “Being a mother means being worried about someone else all the time”, mused its narrator Laura, explaining why she preferred to remain childless. Her latest book The Accidentals feature Mothers and labours of parenthood, where conventions of family life are examined, challenged and subverted. The protagonists of these eight stories each find the ordinary courses of their lives disrupted by an unexpected event are pushed into unfamiliar terrain: a girl encounters her uncle in hospital, who was cast out of the family for reasons unknown, … Continue reading Albatross loses its bearings to turn into an unmoored wanderer

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World’s first Agony Aunt column about love, sex and relatonships

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The Athenian Mercury – a London-based broadsheet, one-page, two-sided periodical, brainchild of John Dunton, a printer, not a therapist whose main aim was to make money. Walking in a London park one day, it occurred to him that the (male) patrons of London’s fashionable coffee houses might like to gin up their intellectual discussions with questions posed to a panel of experts – just Dunton and his brothers-in-law- and would pay to see the answers. Published and advertised as “Resolving all the most Nice and Curious Questions Proposed by the ingenious of Either Sex”, in 1690s London which included the … Continue reading World’s first Agony Aunt column about love, sex and relatonships

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Surviving to become the biggest toy company in the world

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Lego A/s  (The Lego Group), a Danish construction by production company based in Billund, Denmark, manufacturer of interlocking ABS plastic and rubber bricks. The company founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen,  a carpenter whose primary business of producing household goods had suffered due to the Great Depression.  He produced initially wooden toys, and developed interlocking bricks by 1947, naming it Lego, based on a Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well”. The name also means in Latin either “ I collect”, “ I compose”, “I choose”, “ I read”. After a fire in the woodworking department, Ole’s son, Godfred, decided to stop … Continue reading Surviving to become the biggest toy company in the world

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Feast of Memory and Trauma

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German Novelist Judith Hermann weaves together themes of psychology and friendship, unconventional childhoods, summers of the North German Sea shore in a series of three interconnected stories. Children are born and grown up, careers established and abandoned, love affairs, marriages and friendships made and dismantled.  Contemporaries sicken and die, parents get old. “Every story has its first line. Not the line with which the story begins in the book; the line with which it begins in my mind”. This is a literary narrative reflection on when life becomes fiction, now dependable memory can be, and how close one’s dreams can come … Continue reading Feast of Memory and Trauma

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Correlating rigid thinking to political extremes

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  Political Neuroscientist attached to Cambridge University, Dr Leor Zmigrod discovers the biological factor that drive ideologies to extremes and her research into the physical and psychological origins of extremism. Her definition of ideology is a rigid and dogmatic way of thinking that discourages thought in favour of a pre-determined and hermetically sealed belief system. Her findings “Prejudiced children’s rigidities were not constrained to one domain: they were everywhere. Rightly spilled into every response, every reasoned thought and miscalculation.” Zmigrod reveals the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours. She using powerful tools of neuroscience to show that our political … Continue reading Correlating rigid thinking to political extremes

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Brief Liaison encounter

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All lives are nothing more than the chronicle of countless stinging might-have-beens that continue to haunt us. In the scorching heat, a hundred people wait to be selected as jurors. Paul, a lawyer reading Wall Street Journal. Catherine, a psychiatrist reading Wuthering Heights. So, begins a whirlwind flirtation over cappuccinos in Manhattan and gallery trips to Chelsea. Paul and Catherine, strike up a conversation and leap to judgements. Catherine thinks she could read him like a book, Wall Street, Park Avenue, Ivy League – arrogant self-satisfied, clearly prejudiced and knows it too. With lawyerly precision, Paul sums her up as … Continue reading Brief Liaison encounter

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Voice to Voiceless and Hope to the Hopeless

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Introduction to DARK HOLY GROUND by Linda Granville DARK HOLY GROUND: A Journey into Activism to Give Voice to the Voiceless and Hope to the Hopeless is a deeply personal and politically potent memoir from British activist and writer Linda Granville. Set in Middlesbrough, a once-thriving industrial town devastated by deindustrialization and economic abandonment, this book is both a testimony of survival and a call to moral action. Granville’s story begins in the heart of hardship: an unemployed single mother navigating life on society’s margins in a town where iron and steel, shipbuilding and the chemical industry once provided prosperity but now lie … Continue reading Voice to Voiceless and Hope to the Hopeless