The Reading Room

Each month a member of the team reviews a book of their choosing, irrelevant of genre or publishing date.

The moonstone

Wilkie Collins

Published: 1868, reprinted by Penguin Classiscs (1998)

The Moonstone is one of the first true works of detective fiction, in which Wilkie Collins established the groundwork for the genre itself. The intricate plot and modern technique of multiple narrators made Wilkie Collins’s 1868 work a huge success in the Victorian sensation genre.

The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Published: 2010, Penguin

This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they’re impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalise them.

Only the paranoid survive

Andrew S.Grove

Published: 1997, HarperCollins Business

How to exploit crisis points that challenge every company and career. The President and CEO of Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, reveals how to identify and exploit the key moments of change in any industry that generates either drastic failure or incredible success.