Amol Rajan



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Journals/Organisation: The Independent

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Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/amol-rajan

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Education: read English at Downing College, Cambridge

Career: previously Deputy Comment Editor at The Independent, and before that Sports News Correspondent and a news reporter at the paper

Current position/role: regular essayist and television critic for The Independent


 * also writes/has written for: London Evening Standard

Other roles/Main role: adviser to Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent titles and London Evening Standard; book reviewer and bi-weekly restaurant critic for The Independent on Sunday; columnist for i. Contributor to The Literary Review and The Salisbury Review

Other activities: trustee of Prospex, a charity for young people in Islington

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Latest work: Twirlymen: the unlikely history of cricket's greatest spin bowlers OCLC706028271, Yellow Jersey Press, May 55h 2011

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Remit/Info: Politics

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Articles: 2012

 * Living Wage campaign's success shows politics at its very best - It's people-powered change that helps the poor and unites politicians - 18th December
 * Max Clifford's top 5 career highlights* - *Or lowlights, if you'd rather - 8th December
 * Spin it any way you like, George Osborne's Autumn Statement proves he is a failure as Chancellor - Even on the most generous interpretation of the data given today, there are no reasonable grounds for accepting his argument that a change of course is undesirable - 6th December
 * Sex doesn't get worse than this: Why Nancy Huston deserved the Bad Sex Award 2012 for Infrared - Among competition that was (ahem) stiffer than usual, the Canadian novelist was a worthy winner for her astonishingly perfunctory erotic passages - 5th December
 * An open letter to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the happy occasion of she, Kate Middleton, being pregnant with their first child - Including a few tips on how to make the issue of their love appeal to the masses - 4th December
 * Of course America's version of The Inbetweeners failed. They don't do teenage filth like our boys do - The failure of the US remake is nothing to do with Yanks not getting irony. It's just British teenage life is much dirtier than the American imagination can bear - 30th November
 * With Prince William and Kate Middleton visiting Cambridge, my wedding plans look a little different - The absurdly titled monarchs have attached the name of this great City to themselves because of principles antithetical to the University that made it famous - 28th November
 * After deleting his Twitter account because of a foul tirade against Jenny Johnson, Chris Brown proved beyond doubt that he is a very modern villain -Everything he does is tailored for a modern media age in which content is king - 27th November
 * Nadine Dorries, I'm a Celebrity, and why the Tory MP's vanity is an insult to everyone in Britain - Think of who she's insulted with this stupid escapade - from Parliament and party to the constituents who employ her. I hope they sack her, just like ITV's viewers did - 23rd November
 * Star Trek schools: education... but not as we know it - Technology to help children learn, both in classrooms and out, has a bold future - 20th November
 * Hungry for education? No thanks: I've already Eton - As a new scheme launches to get poorer pupils into leading schools, we should accept there are better ways to broach Etonian privilege than calling for its destruction - 17th November
 * From Tooting to Islington, our high streets are bereft of buzz and variety - I don't pine for childhood glories, but the disappearance of my old hairdresser is traumatic - and globalisation won't slow down any time soon - 14th November
 * In defence of Newsnight: Why Paxman and co are too good to sacrifice on the altar of the Savile and Lord Macalpine scandals - Don't sacrifice decades of journalistic quality because of two very different mistakes - 13th November
 * A ban on Chanel No 5? This absurd EU intervention really gets up my nose - Are we Brits to pong just because some European body decrees it so? - 9th November
 * The disunited States: why President Obama's negative campaign bodes ill for America - Without a strong mandate for the next four years, the chances of Obama achieving desperately needed bipartisan reform seem remote at best - 7th November
 * This contest is the last English-American election - As Hispanics make up an ever larger percentage of the US population, both Democrats and Republicans will start courting their vote more assiduously - 6th November
 * Sales that leave our high streets in a bit of a pickle - As whole industries leave our shores, Britain's poor are asking an almost unanswerable question: what jobs will we do now? - 3rd November
 * If the Tories want a majority at the next election, they should hurry up and sign Lynton Crosby - The Australian political strategist was a proven winner with John Howard and Boris Johnson. His politics are populist, negative and ugly - but above all effective - 31st October
 * There's nothing funny about demoting people for things they say to friends on Facebook - If you believe in reason and debate as an instrument of civilisation, stand up for the right to tell people what they do not want to hear - 22nd October
 * After this week, how can anyone sustain the pretence that Prince Charles is politically neutral? - True conservatives ought to be horrified that the illusion of neutrality has been exposed yet again. Instead, they're happy for this meddler to keep meddling - 19th October
 * The Taliban brutes who shot Malala Yousufzai in the head did it thinking that God is on their side - What sort of person knows how to pull the trigger of a gun he has aimed at the head of a 14 year-old girl who wants an education? - 16th October
 * The Big Six make profits while the elderly shiver - We need to smash the energy monopoly. So long as these companies control our fuel, customers will lose out and people go cold - 13th October
 * Joe Biden beat Paul Ryan to disrupt Republican momentum in an episode of the Generation Game - By showing greater emotional intensity than Obama did last week, and shifting the focus on to foreign policy and George W Bush, the Democrats won last night - 12th October
 * As Jimmy Savile's gravestone is removed at the request of his family, we should question whether we live in a civilised society - An already very grim story just took a turn for the worse. Let justice run its course - 10th October
 * Why does George Carey think it necessary to invoke Nazism in the debate over same-sex marriage? - At a rally against same-sex marriage in Birmingham today, the former Archbishop of Canterbury proved himself to be spectacularly oblivious to irony - 9th October
 * Kevin Pietersen, a career full of indiscretions, and why we forgive geniuses when we ought not to - The South African should be a batting great. For all I know he's a lovely guy in private. But he has a lot to learn from an Indian contemporary - 5th October
 * Mitt Romney trounced President Obama in the television debate and has halted his momentum - The Republican contender was combative and persuasive, and though Obama retains key advantages, the success of the last month has been abruptly terminated - 4th October
 * Miliband's speech was ok on argument, good on delivery, and bad on Labour's atonement - The party leader was surprisingly funny and confident in Manchester. But predictably enough he addressed the party faithful rather than the country at large - 3rd October
 * Miliband must step up with a powerful message - This week Ed Milliband must make clear he's a plausible Prime Minister. Is there anything to learn from the history of US presidential debates? - 2nd October
 * Nick Clegg's conference speech: 'Tax Wealth, Not Work' should have been the slogan - Property makes people rich through good fortune, not effort. A tax on wealth - not work - is a policy the Lib Dems should be championing - 26th September
 * Nick Clegg's "ask the bank of mum and dad" house deposit plan assumes we all have rich parents - Perhaps it's the inevitable product of a political class dominated by the rich. We should urgently focus on building homes for the poor and needy instead - 24th September



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