If he is to succeed, America’s next president needs to inherit at least a modicum of the character and talent that FDR brought to his tasks“MY POLICY is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities. In this impressive new biography, H.W. Brands, who has written books about Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin, stresses the contrast between Roosevelt’s aristocratic origins and his ...

A birthday party for an African classicCHINUA ACHEBE’S “Things Fall Apart”, which celebrates its golden jubilee this year, is Africa’s best known work of literature. The slim novel has been translated into 50 languages and has sold 10m copies. Never once has it been out of print.Africa was on the cusp of change when the book first came out. A handful of African countries had already become independent by 1958, but few people would have ...

What a parrot taught a scientist about language, life and loveTHE young Irene Pepperberg was not the only child to have been enthralled by the “Dr Dolittle” stories, in which a doctor is taught the language of animals by his parrot. But it is unlikely that anyone will match her tenacity in trying to make the stories come true. For the past 30 years, Dr Pepperberg, who studies parrots at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has ...

A distinguished author examines indebtedness and human developmentWITHOUT debt there would be no capitalism; mankind would be living in caves and eating whatever it killed. But Margaret Atwood’s elegant and erudite canter round the literary, cultural and historical aspects of borrowing, lending, owing and repaying has less to do with economics than with human nature. Her new book is a collection of radio talks, conceived and delivered long before the current crisis, but its publication ...

How to be wealthy and unhappyMORMONS, military and McKinsey are the three Ms said to characterise the student body at Harvard Business School (HBS). Philip Delves Broughton, a British journalist, was none of the above, yet he was prepared to spend $175,000 for a chance to attend this "factory for unhappy people". He never completely fitted in, perhaps because he largely shunned the prodigious alcohol-driven networking for which MBAs are famous, or perhaps because he ...