Outrageous Fortune

A Harvard-trained economist's startling predictions reveal critical challenges in the decades ahead, helping individuals, businesses, and governments to make smarter decisions As individuals, companies, and countries struggle to recover from the economic crisis, many are narrowly focused on forecasts for the next week, month, or quarter. Yet they should be asking what the global economy will look like in the years to come—where will the long-term risks and opportunities arise? These are the questions that Daniel Altman confronts in his provocative and indispensable book. The fate of the global economy, Altman argues, will be determined by deeper factors than those that move markets from moment to moment. His incisive analysis brings together hidden trends, societal pressures, and policy endgames to make twelve surprising but logical predictions about the years ahead. And his forecasts for the future raise a pressing question for today: With so many challenges awaiting us, are our political and economic institutions up to the task? Outrageous Fortunes tells which industries will grow, which economies will crumble, which investments will pay off, and where the next big crisis may occur. Altman's carefully reasoned text is an essential guide for the road ahead.

Leeds Castle, once home to kings and queens, was a place of spectacular opulence and luxury, and it was here that Anthony Russell spent his childhood; a childhood beyond the reaches of ordinary imagination. Away from the extravagance, the embrace of his nanny and the strong but distant love of his mother, Anthony's childhood was often lonely and fraught with the pressures of upholding the 'Castle Way', unwritten rules that were, perhaps, not the best preparation for life outside the castle walls. The polite reserve of his sheltered existence was inevitably ruptured by the arrival of the 1960s, with its new music, mores, and social freedoms; things both alluring and alarming to a young man who had spent his youth in splendid isolation. Uniquely entertaining, Outrageous Fortune is an extraordinary memoir, an accessible and personable account of how the 'other half ' lives, and a real-life Downton Abbey. As he documents his life at Leeds Castle, Anthony Russell gives us a vivid and intimate glimpse into a fascinating world gone by.

Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it has managed to do since it began to ‘modernize’ and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world? These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, and comments too on what he terms the ‘neo-naturalism’ of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.

In this outrageously funny, outrageously inventive debut, one of the most outrageously talented new writers to break onto the sci-fi scene in decades asks the most loaded question of all . . . “Don’t you hate it when this happens?” . . . that’s what the business card asks Jonny X67, dream architect to the rich and jaded. It’s all the thieves who stole his house left behind. And if that weren’t bad enough, a saleswoman named Caroline E61 drops from the sky to sell him a set of encyclopedias and won’t take no for an answer. Can his luck get any worse? In this rip-roaring roller-coaster ride through a brilliantly imagined future of paranoid absurdity, Jonny X will learn the answer soon enough when he falls afoul of a lunatic motorcycle gang nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a relentless Belgian assassin, and his own irate girlfriend. Traversing a cityscape whose neighborhoods are organized by musical genres, running into joke-telling elevators and holographic computer viruses, Jonny is about to learn what a nightmare it’s going to be to get his old life back in a reality warping faster than the speed of the imagination. Outrageous Fortune heralds a marvelous new talent sure to be delightfully altering the minds of readers for years to come.

Navigating through troubled times is often fearful, terrifying, and disappointing. We want to make decisions that move us along, but we are also fearful about making the wrong choice. Especially, during this pandemic we are fearful about our lives being touched by others, but with a deep desire to stay connected. These meditations trace the emotional upheaval of our struggle as well as provide hopeful solace in the struggle itself. Philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and theologians are useful sources to this journey. In my endeavor to clarify and advance the singularity of our struggle, I have gleaned from many of those listed above. But most of all I have endeavored to dive into my own vulnerability, connecting myself to the human struggle for security and love.

“I enjoyed Outrageous Fortune immensely. Its wonderful mix of the personal and the legal makes it hugely gripping and very moving. It’s a terrific read.” David Hare “A harrowing tale of one man’s long - and ultimately losing - struggle against the legal system and its representatives. One would like to think that what Terence Frisby went through couldn’t happen today - but can we be sure?” Marcel Berlins, Legal Columnist, The Guardian, Law in Action, Radio 4 “Mr Frisby’s shocking account corroborates my belief that our divorce system merely serves to damage families, multiply areas of conflict and line the pockets of the legal profession. An enthralling read.” Michael Mansfield, QC ”Touching and impressive, an horrific indictment of British justice.” Prunella Scales, CBE “An enthrallingly personal history of love and treachery - moving and deeply worrying.” Timothy West, CBE This is a controversial, passionate and wittily written account of a leading playwright’s success, marriage, divorce and his personal encounter with legal stupidity, malice and thirteen years of litigation. A young actor/playwright, a nobody from nowhere, met a beautiful aspiring model. They fell in love, married; he wrote an international smash hit play and film comedy and made their fortune with There’s A Girl in My Soup. It was a familiar, intoxicating rags-to-riches story until it all went wrong. Frisby tells the tale of his own fascinating world of theatre and film with style, wit and passion. It is a cautionary tale of sixties’ permissiveness - intimate, revealing and funny. Divorce is common enough but this story takes on an original dimension when Frisby becomes a litigant-in-person. We are plunged into a new world of writs and affidavits, solicitors, barristers and judges. He becomes involved in thirteen appalling and extraordinary years of litigation - exactly twice the length of his marriage. He tells a story of our legal system and the professionals who run it that makes any fictional courtroom drama seem dull, as he tries to save his marriage, his fortune and maintain access to his son. With Frisby’s divorce left behind, he becomes entangled in a web of legal double-dealing and inhumanity. From the unique perspective of a person representing himself in the mincing machine that is our legal system, he paints a nightmarish - yet often hilarious - picture of our legal processes, of judicial incompetence and lawyers’ stupidity. This book is a powerful argument, not only for the removal of lawyers from the painful process of divorce, but for reform of the policing of our legal profession, from the judges downward.

In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?