I’ve just finished the most delightful book I have read in a very long time. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is simply breath-taking in the way it spins its magic. I freely confess to being extremely sentimental, easy to tears in a film or even music, but I don’t recall having wept tears of joy...

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Wackos and ZoomGlüts - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Interesting is such a devalued word. What else to say about this rather fine essay? It explains a lot of things and it explains them well. I particularly sympathised with his experience of the glut of free and wonderful things to do online in th...

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Rebecca Solnit: On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends | Literary Hub

Rebecca Solnit reading fairy stories is not something I’m sure I want to listen to. Rebecca Solnit writing about reading fairy stories is something else again. Full of wonderful insights, this latest essay takes t...

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Episode summary: In a special live edition recorded at the Bristol Festival of Economics we discuss the impact of the technology revolution on democratic politics. Has the rise of automation contributed to the rise of populism? Is China winning the AI wars against the West? And do any democratic pol...

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At the end of September, David Runciman interviewed Ian McEwan on Talking Politics. Their conversation about McEwan's two most recent books was so interesting that I went and bought both almost as soon as I got back home from my walk. I wasn’t disappointed.

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Classic Wodehouse, full of period dialogue, impossible plot contrivances, two-dimensional characters and everything else one might love about old Plum, if one loves old Plum at all. Infectious, too. But here's the thing: all the while I was reading it, I couldn't shake one thought from my mind.

Stanley Featherstonehough Ukridge is without a doubt the original on which Boris Johnson modelled himself.

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A friend happened to meet Edmund de Waal at this year's Venice Biennale, and in telling us about the encounter he was so persuasive about this book, which had made him seek out de Waal, that I resolved to read it. I'm so glad I did. It had been sitting on the shelf here forever, and while I had been aware of it, I thought it was about netsuke. It is, and so much more.

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‘A serial killer stalks the games’ ... Although I do find myself wondering how much of the book was simply inspired by the title. Having come up with that, did the rest of it all fall into place?

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There are a few writers for whom I will read anything they care to offer. Rebecca Solnit is one of them. She never fails to delight me, both with the ways she builds a sentence and, even more so, the way she builds bridges between ideas. Somehow, River of Shadows had eluded me for a while, but the light it throws on the character of Muybridge and Leland Stanford and how their joint obsession ultimately gave rise to the movies is beyond fascinating.

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In the past, building a market required users, products, all that mess—farmers taking their plump pigs to market. What we have now is a means of spinning up any number of auctions, a method for the mass manufacture of middlemen. This is the destiny of Silicon Valley. And with ICOs and Bitcoin exchan...

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