There is a concept in tech and innovation – branded by an expensive consultancy company, naturally – known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any innovation, be it NFTs (a means of owning ‘unique’ digital art), blockchains (the technology powering crypto-currencies like bitcoin), self-driving cars or wearable tech, will go through distinct (buzzword-heavy) stages before it
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood. But her grandfather, ‘an oak of a man’ with his high-waisted trousers and ‘smelling of butter, honey and dust’, occupies no romantic sepia image in her memory. A tenant farmer, proud to have provided for
Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a ‘best of’ articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and
In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set in the liminal landscape of Norfolk’s tidal wetlands, it’s an urgent, roiling tale of gay love, suppressed traumas and lives cut short. A working-class writer with no formal education, Norfolk-raised Ransom wrote the first draft
It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length – but the Po has always exerted a fertile grip on the Italian imagination. Virgil called it ‘the king of rivers’; Dante died in its marsh estuary, having earlier described in Purgatorio how Jacopo del
Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts (if you pass Polytechnic you’ve gone too far). From there, it’s a brisk 20-minute walk along the birch-lined Avenue of the Unvanquished to Piskaryovskoye cemetery, home to some 186 mass graves and almost half a
We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and an almost certain recession. But we don’t know quite how painful it’s going to be and we don’t know how to apportion blame between bad decisions and ‘black swans’. Clearly the coming train crash has
