Okay, this week I'm plugging my own brand new book, The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy. At least, a little bit. But I have some other books to tell you about too. One of the joys of writing this book was to be able to pick up two or three wonderful...
Rutger Bregman's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, makes a simple argument: most people, most of the time, are decent. Whether this strikes you as absurd, or obvious, may depend on what side of bed you got out of. Bregman makes a strong case that we've been...
What is it like to be caught up in the middle of an unthinkable disaster? Why are our responses to these extreme and unexpected events themselves often extreme and unexpected? Amanda Ripley began writing this book after interviewing survivors of the 9/11 attacks....
A brief shout-out this week for a brief-but-good book, The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare For Disasters by Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther. Meyer and Kunreuther combine a nice dose of behavioural science with some striking examples: Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane...
here are as many responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as there are people to respond. Some have of us have children to home-school. Some of us have elderly relatives to worry about; some of us are the elderly relatives in question. Some of us have never been busier;...
More than two and a half thousand years ago – so the story goes – King Croesus of Lydia consulted the oracle at Delphi. And the oracle assured him that if he went to war against Persia he would destroy a mighty empire. Reassured, Croesus launched his war, and was...
He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett's career - but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne's opera house. The only piano at the venue was a wreck. His musical contemporaries...
Blitzkrieg means "lightning war", but despite the German name it was not a German invention. Back in 1917 a brilliant English officer developed a revolutionary way to use the latest development in military technology - the tank. The British army squandered the idea...
Not all of them published this year - and of course the list is subjective. Book that did most to change the way I thought - Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women. My long-time producer, Charlotte McDonald, has been trying to get me to engage with the "gender data...