thegreglowe.com

To say that disgraced politician cum author, Lord Jeffrey Archer, is a controversial character is an understatement. He has been imprisoned for perjury and perverting the court of justice; breached parole conditions; stolen coats in Canada; been accused of insider trading and ripping off charities; and was implicated in Simon Mann’s planned coup in Equatorial […]

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U-THANT’S GRANDSON SPEAKS: The family’s ardent love for Burma lives on Despite being born in New York in the 1960s, Thant Myint-U’s memories are of a childhood steeped inBurmese culture. Life in his maternal grandfather U-Thant’s house in Riverdale, just outside of Manhattan, was a stark contrast to the icy, snowy winters and bright lights […]

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It’s Friday afternoon, and after a particularly busy week, with only a few things to wrap up, I try and scratch off the last important thing on my list of things to do – interview author/journalist Tom Hodgkinson. First I try his London office a number of times, only to get the following answer-phone message: […]

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Life is full of paradoxes for dissident Chinese author Ma Jian. Creative exile in England allows him to write more freely about his homeland. his banned status in China boosts his sales in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and creates a sales angle for his books in English. read more…

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Four times Booker Prize nominee and one time winner – Schindler’s Ark, 1982 – Thomas Keneally intelligently investigates the dehumanizing effect of transforming real people into the homogenous, singular entity of “asylum seekers” in his book The Tyrant’s Novel. The story revolves around the protagonist Alan Sheriff, a refugee locked up in a detention centre […]

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Reform Islam. Put western governments on trial. End media censorship. Promote equal rights. These are just some of the actions Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi says are essential in establishing global peace. Freedom of expression and human dignity are central to her worldview and she has been battling to establish these in her homeland of […]

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In the 50 odd years since he left the catholic mission that was his childhood home, Carlos Fillipe Ximenes Belo has come a long way. From Wailakama village on Timor’s north coast, he traveled through seminaries in Rome and Portugal, only to return to a homeland that was under the tyranny of Indonesian occupation, where […]

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In the 50 odd years since he left the catholic mission that was his childhood home, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo has come a long way. From Wailakama village on Timor’s north coast, he travelled through seminaries in Rome and Portugal, only to return to a homeland that was under the tyranny of Indonesian occupation, where […]

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Truth is often cited as the first casualty of war. For former chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix, the US-led invasion of Iraq left another ideal seriously wounded – critical thought. In a world increasingly fragmented along religious, economic and geopolitical lines, he says the need for governments to examine complex issues through rational thought, […]

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Punctuation vigilante Championing the rights of the apostrophe to exist may not seem a likely way to gain literary stardom, but author Lynne Truss has done just that with her book Eats, Shoots And Leaves, writes Greg Lowe.

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