Jonathan Powell is a British diplomat who served as Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1997 to 2007. During this period, he was also Britain’s chief negotiator for Northern Ireland. These days, Powell runs a charity called Inter Mediate, which works as a go-between among terrorist organizations and governments around the globe. David Cameron appointed
During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the village where an estimated 2,500 prisoners loyal to Franco were executed by leftish militiamen between November and December 1936. Even though the facts of this massacre are now widely known, one question still remains: who
Alistair Campbell began his career as a journalist. He started working for The Daily Mirror in 1982 and then moved onto Today, a former British leftwing tabloid. In 1994 Tony Blair asked him to become his press secretary, and Campbell worked on Labour’s media campaign, where he helped them achieve a landslide victory in 1997.
Richard Murphy was born in County Mayo in Ireland in 1927. He spent part of his childhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where his father was the last British mayor of Colombo. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools in Ireland and England, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford. In 1959 Murphy moved
Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Sen’s previous books include: Development as Freedom; Rationality and Freedom; The Argumentative Indian; Identity and Violence, and The Idea of Justice. In 1998 Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Much of the work done by the Indian
More books have been written about Winston Churchill than perhaps any other figure in British history. Do we really need another volume added to the existing library? In Churchill and Empire, the historian Lawrence James makes a strong case for justifying another book for Churchillian bibliophiles. The narrative begins by looking back at Churchill’s career
Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He first came to prominence with his debut novel The Commitments, which he self-published in Ireland in 1987. The book was then published in the UK in 1988 by William Heinemann. The two books which followed, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), completed his Barrytown Trilogy.
In the early morning hours of June 25, 1950 the opening shots of the Korean War were fired. At the time, few could have predicted how seminal this event would be in shaping world history. While the Korean War itself was only fought over a period of three years, no peace agreement was ever reached.
George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, a book that received several prizes. Packer’s other non-fiction books include, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, the latter winning the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author
Steve Jones is Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College London. Some of his previous books include: The Language of Genes, Y: The Descent of Men, The Single Helix, and Darwin’s Island. Jones’ latest book is called The Serpent’s Promise: the Bible Retold by Science. The title suggests that Jones uses the Bible as a
When he arrived in London, Burke had a very brief career in law. He soon dedicated his time to critical thinking, writing and politics. Burke published a number of ground breaking books, including: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Reflections on the Revolution in France. In
Michael Sandel is a political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his ‘Justice’ course, which he has taught for over two decades. Sandel first came to prominence in 1982 with his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. The book offers a critique of liberalism, arguing that individuals’ needs
Jared Cohen is Director of Google Ideas, a think tank set up by Google dedicated to understanding global challenges by applying technological solutions. Cohen is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, working as a close advisor
The anarchist movement in the United States has had the support of leading libertarian intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky; but it has lacked a figure who could transform its guiding principles into something resembling a political movement. In the autumn of 2011, David Graeber seemed to be the man who could drag anarchism into mainstream
Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is set in the suburban streets of south Dublin in 1984. The story is narrated by Jim Finnegan: an innocent 13-year-old boy who lives in a carefree world that consists of hanging out in the local park and going on nightly bike rides with his geeky friend Gary. But
The salubrious surroundings of the Waldorf Hotel seem like a very apt setting to interview a master of style and sophistication. When I arrive in the lobby, John Banville is nowhere to be seen. Peeping into the bar, I notice a grey haired man with a moustache, wearing a tuxedo, softly playing a grand piano.
In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we continue on our present path, where we think of computers as passive tools, instead of machines that real people create, our myopia will
In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states. Diamond says that if states only came into existence 5,400 years ago, and agriculture in the last 11,000, human beings have been wandering nomads for most of history. Therefore,
In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of writers such as J.G. Ballard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens and others, Gray looks at how we can reinvent meaning
Following in the footsteps of the great tradition of paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, and evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin, professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has spent a considerable part of his career discovering fossils around various parts of the world. These have
