Stephen Fay – författare

In February 1995, the unthinkable happened: one of the oldest and most respected merchant banks in London went bankrupt. The story that "rogue" Barings trader Nick Leeson lost hundreds of millions of pounds speculating in the Far East was front-page news throughout the world. Accused of fraud on a massive scale, Leeson first strenuously opposed being tried in Singapore, then eventually was taken there from his prison in Frankfurt. In December 1995 he pleaded guilty - and the trial began and ended within two days. As a result, the prosecution case against Leeson was not heard. What really happened to cause the downfall of "the Queen's bank," and who was actually responsible?In The Collapse of Barings, Stephen Fay investigates the facts behind the headlines and discovers a closed network of privilege, greed, and incompetence. In the rapidly changing system of global finance, the directors of Barings came to rely on people they hardly knew - like Nick Leeson - to make their fortunes in markets they did not fully understand, like SIMEX in Singapore. The plasterer's son from Watford was still in his mid-twenties when he rose to become the golden boy of Barings, claiming to have made profits of ten million dollars in one week. His London bosses watched passively as a culture of speculation grew until it eventually destroyed them, and changed the face of London's financial heartland.

WINNER OF THE TELEGRAPH CRICKET BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2019 'Beautifully written, meticulously researched and stuffed with rich sporting and social history ... Unputdownable' Mail on SundayAfter the Second World War, as the BBC tightened its grip on the national consciousness, two of the most famous English voices were commentators on games of cricket. John Arlott and E.W. ('Jim') Swanton transformed the broadcasting of the nation’s summer game into a national institution. Arlott and Swanton typified the contrasting aspects of post-war Britain. Because of their strong personalities and distinctive voices – Swanton's crisp and upper-class, Arlott's with its Hampshire burr – each had a loyal following. As England moved from a class-based to a more egalitarian society, nothing stayed the same – including professional cricket. Wise, lively and filled with rich social and sporting history, Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket shows how, as the game entered a new era, these two very different men battled to save the soul of the game._______________________'Magnificent … One of the best cricket books I’ve read in years: it makes long-forgotten matches live and breathe as though they were played yesterday' Daily Mail, Books of the Year'A triumph … [Kynaston and Fay] both have inside-outside sensitivities that keep this near-seamless collaboration shrewd, worldly, balanced and fresh' Times Literary Supplement

Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 The Location of Culture is one of the founding texts of the branch of literary theory called postcolonialism. While postcolonialism has many strands, at its heart lies the question of interpreting and understanding encounters between the western colonial powers and the nations across the globe that they colonized. Colonization was not just an economic, military or political process, but one that radically affected culture and identity across the world. It is a field in which interpretation comes to the fore, and much of its force depends on addressing the complex legacy of colonial encounters by careful, sustained attention to the meaning of the traces that they left on colonized cultures. What Bhabha’s writing, like so much postcolonial thought, shows is that the arts of clarification and definition that underpin good interpretation are rarely the same as simplification. Indeed, good interpretative clarification is often about pointing out and dividing the different kinds of complexity at play in a single process or term. For Bhabha, the object is identity itself, as expressed in the ideas colonial powers had about themselves. In his interpretation, what at first seems to be the coherent set of ideas behind colonialism soon breaks down into a complex mass of shifting stances – yielding something much closer to postcolonial thought than a first glance at his sometimes dauntingly complex suggests.