Tarmac Group business was acquired by Anglo American later that year. In 2010, the group was separated into Tarmac Limited and Tarmac Building Products. Anglo American merged Tarmac Limited with the United Kingdom assets of Lafarge in 2013 to form a 50:50 joint venture, Lafarge Tarmac (now Tarmac Holdings). Tarmac Building Products was subsequently sold to Lafarge Tarmac in 2014. The company was originally formed by Edgar Purnell Hooley as the Tar Macadam (Purnell Hooley's Patent) Syndicate Limited in 1903. The distinguishing feature of the new process was that it "tarred" cheap blast furnace slag, a steelworks by-product, rather than expensive roadstone
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage