Featured in the podcast
Alain de Botton (Author)
Today, the news occupies the same dominant position in our lives as religion once did. But rarely do we consider how it touches us. Here, Alain de Botton examines a number of archetypal news stories - a plane crash, a murder, a political scandal, a celebrity interview - from a fresh perspective to ask intriguing questions: why do disaster stories titillate? why obsess over love lives of the famous? why smile when a politician falls from grace? In so doing, he brings clear sight and understanding to a force which, above all others, informs our view of reality.
Coleen Nolan (Author)
Coleen Nolan has lived her entire life in the spotlight. From touring the world in the Nolan Sisters to being one of our favourite TV presenters, she always creates headlines. But in No Regrets, her latest number one bestselling memoir, Coleen talks candidly for the first time about the tragic early death of her beloved sister Bernie, heart-breaking family feuds and how she had to walk away from her TV career to heal herself after the life she knew was torn apart.
Danny Dorling (Author)
In All That is Solid Danny Dorling offers an agenda-shaping look at the UK's dangerous relationship with housing - and how it's all going to come crashing down
Housing was at the heart of the financial collapse, and our economy is now precariously reliant on the housing market. In this ground-breaking book, Danny Dorling argues that housing is the defining issue of our times. Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, All That Is Solid shows that the solution to our problems - rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership - is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome.
'An urgent book about an urgent topic' - Lynsey Hanley, New Statesman
'A brilliantly original study of our national obsession' - Nick Cohen, Observer
Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor in Geography at the University of Oxford. He has worked both with the British government and the World Health Organization and is frequently asked to comment on current issues on TV and the radio. He has published more than twenty-five books, including Injustice: Why Social Inequality Exists, So You Think You Know About Britain? and The 32 Stops for Penguin Underground Lines.
Rebecca Gowers (Author)
,
Ernest Gowers (Author)
'Be short, be simple, be human.'
When Sir Ernest Gowers first wrote Plain Words, it was intended simply as a guide to the proper use of English for the Civil Service. Within a year, however, its humour, charm and authority had made it a bestseller. Since then it has never been out of print.
Six decades on, writer Rebecca Gowers has created a new edition of this now-classic work that both revises and celebrates her great-grandfather's original. Plain Words has been updated to reflect numerous changes in English usage, yet Sir Ernest's distinctive, witty voice is undimmed. And his message remains vital: our writing should be as clear and comprehensible as possible, avoiding superfluous words and clichés - from the jargon of 'commercialese' to the murky euphemisms of politicians.
In a new preface, this edition draws on an extensive private archive, previously hidden away in family cupboards and attics, to tell the story behind a book that has become an institution: the essential guide to making yourself understood.
Michael Lewis (Author)
If you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead.
Now, the world's money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don't know what's happening to it. And the very few who do aren't about to tell - because they're making a killing.
This is a market that's rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you'll miss it.
In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It's the story of what it's like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It's about taking on an entire system. And it's about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today.
You won't believe it until you've read it.
Mohsin Hamid (Author)
This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you've never in your life seen any of these things . . .
Elizabeth Fremantle (Author)
The court of Henry VIII is rife with intrigue, rivalries and romance - and none are better placed to understand this than the women at its heart.
Katherine Parr, widowed for the second time aged thirty-one, is obliged to return to court but, suspicious of the aging king and those who surround him, she does so with reluctance. Nevertheless, when she finds herself caught up in a passionate affair with the dashing and seductive Thomas Seymour, she believes she might finally be able to marry for love. But her presence at court has attracted the attentions of another . . .
Captivated by her honesty and intelligence, Henry Tudor has his own plans for Katherine and no one is in the position to refuse a proposal from the king. So with her charismatic lover dispatched to the continent, Katherine must accept the hand of the ailing egotistical monarch and become Henry's sixth wife - and yet she has still not quite given up on love.
