Join us for our biggest, wildest, craziest and funniest virtual office party ever… featuring the prodigious talents of Professor Elemental and Brian Clegg, together with Ian Winn, Ali Gardner & the combined talents of the chatroom, Dave Bartram, and ringmaster Peter Cox. “What I don’t like about office Christmas parties”, ...read more →

His origins were humble; a working-class boy from a small military town in northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle.  Today, he is one of the most influential figures in the world of literature, because  Peter Englund is Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the ...read more →

Evie Blake is the name, Valentina is her scorching new mega-erotic novel – eat your heart out E.L. James, this is an author who can write! Based on the iconic character created by the Italian artist Guido Crepax, Valentina takes a male-created fantasy figure and gives her a real woman’s ...read more →

He’s been charged by elephants, black-listed by the Malaysian government, caught-up in tribal warfare in New Guinea and been bitten, stung and infected by creatures still unknown to science. Tonight, Rhett Butler (yes, that really is his name and no, we’re not afraid to go there) talks to us. Rhett ...read more →

At the age of 43, a few weeks after he secured British citizenship, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered: the world’s first victim of polonium 210 poisoning.  The Litvinenko killing revealed that London has quietly become not only the single greatest centre of Russian capital outside Moscow, ...read more →

“I wanted to know what went on -what really went on – inside Viacom/CBS… about the collaboration between very big business and very big government.”  So says television legend Dan Rather in this special edition of The Debriefer.   ”I knew that a lot had gone on behind the scenes [in ...read more →

Once every generation or two, a book comes along that incarnates our collective experience of war.  Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was one such: Heller’s Catch-22 was another, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five was one more.  To this distinguished list must be added Ben Fountain‘s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long ...read more →