Tarmac Group face the recession of the early 1990s. In particular, the housing division continued to invest heavily in land even though the market had peaked, leading to provisions of £132m in that division alone. Like his predecessor before him, Pountain was forced to step down as chief executive to be replaced by Neville Simms, previously in charge of construction. Inevitably, the emphasis moved away from housing in favour of construction. In October 1992, Tarmac acquired the privatised government agency PSA Projects to complement Tarmac Construction. This was initially called TBV Consult (reflecting a short lived partnership between Tarmac and Black &
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