Jonathan Power

How many tech bloggers writing about cyber crime do you know who can produce a superbly written, eventful, novel on their first attempt? Well, E. R. Ramzipoor has done it.

“Smokescreen is a great yarn, well told, easy on the mind, shaped to last the time of a trans-Atlantic flight and to make the journey pass more quickly.”

“This is a book rich in detail. Its tone is neutral. It doesn’t give the impression that the author wishes to see the CIA abolished, merely controlled.”

“The Infernal Library is truly an imaginative way of looking at history—and it’s by far better written than the words of the leaders Kalder focuses on.”

“Shelley Emling . . . brings Bernadotte to life. Written in an unpretentious style, it portrays close up the . . . most modest of men.

Valerie Jarrett of Chicago was described by the New York Times as “the ultimate Obama Insider.”

"The unexpected lurks at every corner."

Machines Like Me is the result of very special literary brain, the master of all he turns his writing to, fantasying deep into our imagination, a novelist with the ability to turn complex

By 1914 Europeans ruled 84% of the globe. How did they do it? Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater.

“unusual and often gripping novel . . .”

A beautifully written novel, translated from the Italian, with a heartwarming story against a backcloth of misery and degradation, about a priest and a gang of boys and one of the boy’s sister, 16-

“A wall cannot be built to stop immigration. We have to learn to make the best of it.”

"quite a nicely baked short yarn, rather than a novel, but written a bit like a soufflé, rising in the oven but when eaten there isn’t that much substance."

"If [Madhuri Vijay] goes on like this she will enter the first rank along with Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and half a dozen others. We will see much more of her."

“Washington Black is a rich, absorbing tale.”

Fiction as nonfiction. The past master of this is the great Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. But Thomas Mallon in this fascinating novel Landfall has also written in this way.

What do we have to truly fear about President Donald Trump? He pulled off the successful re-negotiation of the North America Free Trade agreement.

“Suppose aliens existed, and that some had been watching our planet for its entire forty-five million centuries, what would they have seen?

Another crime adventure from the Pulitzer prize winning Robert Butler.

At the June 2018 European summit the leaders spent most of the time discussing immigration restrictions. Yet the Syrian rush through the Mediterranean is now a trickle.

A speech of General George Patton, a famous World War II warrior, has an uncanny resemblance to the philosophy of Donald Trump. “All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.

This present pope—Francis—is probably the most powerful man in the world.

What do we in the West know about Islam? Perhaps more than we did before 9/11 but not much.

Looking for a good cause for 2018? Something you can do while sitting in your armchair? Something that needs to be done if we are to live in a “clean” planet?