Podularity Books Podcast: Recent Episodes
George Miller
W H Auden wrote: when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, but what I see is a limestone landscape Fiona Sampson too hears the murmur of underground streams. She describes at the start of her recent book Limestone Country the shock, the epiphany, of realising that most of her favourite places were made from, and in and on, limestone: a cottage in West Oxfordshire; a hamlet in Périgord in southern France; the Karst region of western Slovenia; the city of Jerusalem. She writes: ‘Really living in these landscapes means paying radical attention to how they behave. It means knowing their wildlife as well as ways of farming, observing how water and vegetation respond to the mineral facts of rock and soil as much as how humans live in and with them.’ Responding ‘to the mineral facts’ – that might be a good way of thinking about her book. When I met Fiona earlier this year, I was keen to hear …
This is a podcast I produced for Notting Hill Editions with Alison Leslie Gold, who is perhaps best known for her book Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Miep Gies, one of the people who protected the Frank family during the war. Before her collaboration on that book, Alison had experienced a lost decade, in which she descended into alcohol addiction. Writing the Anne Frank book represented a return to life, a rediscovery of interest in other people and their stories. Other stories were to follow. She became, as she puts it, ‘a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories’. But, as she writes in the Prologue to her new book, Found and Lost: She goes on: When I met Alison in London last autumn she began by telling me more about the book’s origins: Alison Leslie Gold The book started as a kind of treatise on close friends dying. It’s in five parts and it’s about six deaths; the first part was initially published by a small press connected to …
And here is the part of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in which I talk to him about his short story collection, Nocturnes. This was recorded first (hence it’s part 1) but six years on, my feeling is that Part 2 is in fact the best place to start as he sets his earlier books in context.
Half a dozen years ago, I was delighted to be asked by Faber & Faber to interview Kazuo Ishiguro for a special two-part podcast to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories, Nocturnes. In the first part, we focused on the new book, and in the second I asked him about his background, previous novels, and the effects of early success (and intriguingly, he makes what I think must have been one of his first public indication that he was working on an idea which would become the 2015 novel, The Buried Giant). To listen to the podcasts, click on the links below. To whet your appetite, here are a couple of extracts from our conversation. Kazuo Ishiguro Early on, when I was six or seven, I very much thought of Japan as my home and I very much thought we were about to return at any moment. And I was much more in touch with Japanese culture then. I was being sent comics and books so there was an attempt to …
I heard an interesting interview with Robert Ferguson on the New York Times Books podcast at the weekend in which he talked about his new book on Scandinavia (“an engaging, layered look into a culture,” New York Times). It reminded me that I did an interview with Robert a few years ago when his new history of the Vikings, The Hammer and the Cross, came out. I listened again to that interview this morning on the dog walk and thought I’d repost it here. In the interview, Robert told me: “One of the most important reasons for the outbreak of the age [of Viking raids and conquests] was acts of cultural self-defence. Almost – it is anachronistic – but almost terrorism. They couldn’t defeat the might of the [Christianizing] Frankish empire on the battlefield, so they resorted, as many a small culture will do when it’s under cultural threat, to terrorist-like activities, violent manifestations on frankly soft targets, monasteries and so on. “And of course there was money to be had and things to be …
I see that Philip Hoare is publishing the third volume of his trilogy about the sea next week. RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR comes nine years after his award-winning book on the culture and history of whales, Leviathan, so I though I would re-present the interview I did with Philip about that book back then in a coffee shop in Bath (to listen click on the player above or download here)… As the publisher’s blurb puts it: The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book …
What would it have been like to spend five days attending the ancient Greek Olympics in 388 BC? That’s what Neil Faulkner‘s book sets out to explore. You can listen to the interview, which I recorded with Neil in the spring of 2012, shortly before the London games, by clicking on the media players above or below. And there’s more information about the book on Yale University Press’s website here. In the interview, Neil tells me: ‘Ancient Greece is a highly divided and competitive world, and it’s a world that puts huge emphasis on sport, partly because all of Greece’s city states depend for their armed forces on a citizen militia made up of their adult male citizens. So there’s a sense in which Greek sport is war without the shooting. It’s preparation for war in a highly divided and competitive world.’ And we also produced a short video of Neil talking about the book: Neil Faulkner on his Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics from George Miller on Vimeo.
With the same inevitability as the shifting tectonic plates perhaps, my podcast backlist seems to have drifted off iTunes and disappeared beneath the waves. So I am intending to use the opportunity, which did not initially come as welcome news, to gradually re-present all my interviews from the past ten years. They may not all arrive in chronological order, but this was definitely the first interview with which Podularity kicked off on Hallowe’en 2007. Here’s what I said about the podcast first time round: Ten billion years in the life of our planet. That’s the subject of this first Podularity podcast. And all in a little over 17 minutes … Alert readers may already object that it’s impossible to cover 10 billion years, as the Earth is only six billion years old. (If you are objecting that the Earth is a great deal younger than that, then this podcast is probably not going to appeal to you.) However, Ted Nield’s new book, Supercontinent, looks not only deep into the past by examining the geological record, …
“I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn’t require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age.” My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of …
In September I met up with Carol Gilligan at Polity‘s offices in Cambridge to record this two-part interview in which she talked about her childhood, writing her landmark study In a Different Voice (1982), her most recent book Joining the Resistance, and her thoughts on what has been achieved in the three decades since In a Different Voice appeared. She also talks about what remains to be done to achieve a post-patriarchal world in which individuals’ voices are both heard and respected. “I am a woman who listens,” Carol writes in her new book. That is certainly true. She is also a woman who speaks eloquently and passionately about the ideas that animate her, often linking them in to her own life experiences. To listen to part 1 of the interview, click here. And for part 2, click here.
My daughters, Livi and Abby, interviewed Joanna Nadin (far right below, with fellow authors after the Queens of Teen event) before her talk at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival last month. Click here to listen to the interview. [9:56]
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique I talk to Eric Alterman about his piece on Barack Obama in the October edition of the paper, entitled “The compromiser-in-chief”. Eric’s piece begins with a reminder of the Mario Cuomo quote: “campaign in poetry but govern in prose” and goes on to look at the ways in which Obama’s record is looking decidedly prosaic. “Deal-maker not world-shaker” is Alterman’s verdict, and the terms of the deals being made in Washington are increasingly being set by the Republicans. I began by asking Eric about the disappointment felt by those who elected a president who promised “bold and swift” action. To listen to the podcast, click here. Complete archive of LMD podcasts here. Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute and the World Policy Institute.
Earlier this year, just before Oxford University Press’s flagship medical title, the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, went online for the first time, I met all three editors of the book and interviewed them about it. The book attempts no less than a full digest of the current state of medical knowledge, and is therefore a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking. I was keen to find out more about the values which underpinned the book and also the practical side – how is it possible to stay on top of such a vast and ever-changing field, what does the future hold for the book now that it has gone online, and what are the pleasures of working on such a long-term project? Though the book is intended primarily for professionals, it also finds its way into other contexts; it’s often cited in courts of law, for example. So I hope that this interview will be of interest to medics and non-medics alike. After all, it’s far from unlikely that at some point in your …
Next month, renowned art historian Martin Kemp publishes Christ to Coke, a richly ilustrated exploration of how eleven images, from the face to Christ to the Coke bottle, have become icons. Along the way, he also investigates the stories of the cross, the Mona Lisa, the double helix and Che Guevara, inter al. 1. When I interviewed Martin about the book, I began by asking him to define what he meant by an icon. [Click here to listen to extract.] 2. Next I asked him to sketch out the process by which an image turned into an icon. [Click here] 3. How, I wondered, did he select the eleven images that he features in the book? [Click here] 4. Why was Christ the first image he selected? Did that mean the ancient world didn’t produce other icons with staying power? [Click here] 5. The image of Christ had to overcome obstacles in order to become an icon. Martin Kemp explains these here. [Click here] 6. In many instances, the icon draws some of its power …
“If they [far-right parties] can actually get their act together and leave specific ideological questions behind them, they can form a bloc in the European Union, get access to public money, and take advantage of a growing anti-elite and growing anti-European Union sentiment that’s felt by vast sections of European populaces.” – K. Biswas In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to journalist and author K. Biswas about the fortunes of Europe’s far-right populist parties, many of which have entered mainstream politics in ways unthinkable a decade ago. We discuss the role of the media and of leadership in their rise, and also how to interpret July’s tragic events in Norway in the context of far-right politics. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Gender Relations at Lancaster University. Her publications include Theorizing Patriarchy, Globalization and Inequalities, and Gender Transformations. I interviewed her recently about her latest book, The Future of Feminism, described by a reviewer as “[a] balanced and thoughtful assessment of the changes feminism has wrought and the challenges it faces”. 1. I began by asking her if she could understand the forces and pressures that created the widespread assumption that we are living in a post-feminist age. [Click here] 2. In her book, Sylvia Walby discusses how feminism has changed form from its early days. I asked her to give me a tour d’horizon of those variant forms here. [Click here] 3. Sylvia Walby contends that the “depth” of a democracy is critical to determining how successfully a feminist agenda can be pursued within it. I asked her to expand on this notion here. [Click here] 4. Despite progress, violence against women remains a problem in many different contexts. Given the range of different interventions – …
John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His many publications include Sociology Beyond Society and After the Car. I met him recently in Lancaster to talk to him about his latest book, Climate Change and Society, which explores the significance of human behaviour for understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and responding to those impacts. 1. I began by asking him about his central thesis, that sociology ought to replace economics as the main discourse for understanding anthropogenic climate change. [Click here] 2. Next I asked about whether understanding how complex systems functioned in the past and present can provide any guidance to the future. [Click here] “Sociology can bring out the enduring social and economic conflicts which inhibit change…” 3. John Urry reflects on how sociology can sharpen our understanding the vested interests of the “carbon military-industrial complex” and how those interests constrain responses to climate change. [Click here] 4. In Climate Change and Society, John Urry writes that we shall all have to become futurologists by necessity. I …
In the August edition of Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to John R MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of books including The Selling of ‘Free Trade’: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy,about the impact Nafta has had on American jobs and communities since it came into effect in 1994. To date an estimated two and a half million US workers are unemployed as a result of it. To listen to the podcast, click here.
“International law should certainly be an important strand in any debate about going to war, but it should not dominate and crowd out discussions about morality, about prudence, about efficacy, and most of all about consequences.” In the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique, New York-based civil rights lawyer Chase Madar writes about how far we have drifted from the post-war vision of international law as an instrument for regulating and upholding a peaceful world order. In his analysis, international law has in fact become what he calls “a supple instrument for war”, as evinced most recently in the case of international intervention in Libya. In this interview for Le Monde diplomatique he explains his reasoning to George Miller. To listen, click here.
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller interviews Tony Wood, deputy editor of the New Left Review, about the wave of protests sparked by the UK coalition government’s planned £80bn public spending cuts. As public anger grows, are we on the brink of the biggest public engagement with politics since the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s? To listen to the interview, click here.
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller speaks to journalist and Middle East specialist Patrick Seale about the current unrest in Syria and the chances of survival for the Assad dynasty, which has ruled the country for four decades. To listen to the interview, click here.
Here’s a transcript of a recent interview I did with Daniel Miller about his new book, Tales from Facebook, for Polity. (If you would prefer to listen to the interview, you will find it here.) George Miller: Hello and welcome to this, the fifth in a series of podcasts from Polity. My name is George Miller and my guest on this programme is Daniel Miller, who is professor of material culture at University College, London. Danny is the author of several books on the Polity list, chief among which is perhaps Stuff, a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life. When we met recently it was to discuss Danny’s new book, Tales from Facebook, which looks at the consequences of being a Facebook user on people’s lives. How is it changing our behaviour and modes of interaction, especially between men and women? What is it doing to our sense of ourselves and …
Daniel Miller is professor of material culture at University College London. His new book, Tales from Facebook (Polity, 2011) looks at the impacts of being a Facebook user on people’s everyday lives. Drawing his examples from an in-depth study of Facebook users in Trinidad, the book is in part a sequence of detailed pen-portraits of a dozen individuals whose habits he examined. What emerges is a picture more fascinating and more complex than the easy media generalizations about Facebook’s impact on society. To listen to my complete interview with Daniel Miller click here. To listen to shorter sections of the interview, click on the links which interest you below. 1. Why did you focus on Trinidadian Facebook users, rather than users in London, New York or Sydney? Click here. 2. You describe Facebook as being uncannily well-suited to Trinidadian culture. In what ways? Click here. 3. How did you go about researching something as personal as how people use Facebook? Click here. 4. What do you make of the charge that Facebook is just a …
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to Gilbert Achcar of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London about his article in the latest issue of the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood and the role they might play in Egypt’s “orderly transition” to a new order. To listen to the podcast, click here.
“Elephants are not treated much differently now than they were in the mid-eighteenth century: they are objects of awe and conservation, yet legally hunted, made captive, abused, and forced to labor for human gain. What then has research and learning served?” In Elephants on the Edge, Gay Bradshaw makes an eloquent but always scientifically reasoned plea on behalf of the elephant, “for if we fail to act on what we know, we will lose them, and more”. It’s not just a call for better conservation measures and an end to the culling of an animal listed as “endangered” on the International Union of the Conservation of Nature Red List in 2008. It’s an argument for expanding our notion of moral community to include animals, not least the sociable, communicative, intelligent elephant. “This book”, one reviewer wrote, “opens the door into the soul of the elephant” and it is a remarkable world which we glimpse through that door. The book has also been highly praised by writers as diverse as Peter Singer, Desmond Tutu, J.M. Coetzee …
Susan George is an internationally renowned political scientist and author of over a dozen widely translated books. She was born in the Midwest during the Great Depression, but moved to France in the 1960s and subsequently took French citizenship. She still lives in Paris. Susan George achieved prominence in 1976 with her first ground-breaking book, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reason for World Hunger (available as a free download via this link). After hunger she went on to study debt and poverty, as reflected in books such as The Debt Boomerang and A Fate Worse than Debt. George is president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, an international network of scholar-activists committed to social change. Before we talked about her new book on our current predicament, Whose Crisis, Whose Future?, I asked her about the values she grew up with. Had the great collective effort made by the US in World War Two been particularly influential? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] Turning to her new …
Our final guest who shares the highlights of her past twelve months of reading is historian Catherine Arnold. I first interviewed Catherine about the second book in her London trilogy, which explores the darker aspects of the city’s past, Bedlam: London and its Mad. You can hear the interview here. (The first volume of the series, as yet unpodcasted, is Necropolis: London and its Dead.) More recently, we met to talk about her latest book, City of Sin: London and its Vices. You can listen to that here. Here are Catherine’s choices from her 2010 reading: Looking back at the books which I’ve enjoyed over the past year reveals that history, personal, national and social, has been much on my mind. I’m currently researching a book about London and crime, and to this end I’ve particularly enjoyed Newgate, London’s Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday, and Tyburn, London’s Fatal Tree (Alan Brooke and David Brandon), both from the History Press (Sutton). Gripping accounts of two of the darkest aspects of London life. As I have also …
Our guest selector of his Books of the Year today is Francis Spufford. Earlier this year Francis published the genre-defying Red Plenty. As the book’s website says: “Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. It tells a true story, but it tells it as a story. Whatever you call it, it’s about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea – central planning via cybernetics – and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed.” You can listen to my interview with Frances by clicking here. Here are his Books of the Year: I have been thinking a lot this year about the interesting edges and boundary zones of fiction, and one of the books that has intrigued me most has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream (Harper Voyager, £8.99). Depending how you think about it, …
Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London’s Evening Standard as “an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture.” The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009). The latter was praised by Simon Callow in the Guardian as a “great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life”. Jenny Uglow in the Observer called it a “fast-paced, rumbustious biography” and said: “A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, ‘Joey the Clown’, into the limelight again.” You can hear my interview with Andrew by clicking here. Andrew is currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Here is his selection of books he has enjoyed this year: I don’t tend to read that many books-of-the-moment, because …
Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to make lexicographical sleuths of us all. You can hear my recent interview with Elizabeth by clicking here. And here are her Books of the Year: Since I was thirteen and first encountered M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I have had an affection for his particular subsection of the genre. The protagonist (generally learned) is drawn through his speciality into an exploration which is as tempting as it is unwise. The background (a country library or monastic church) is solidly evoked, but a crack through which terror can enter opens and widens as too many questions are asked, and warning voices are ignored. Throughout his canon of short stories, James again and again successfully achieves what he himself …
Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, was published to great acclaim earlier this year. You can hear my interview with her about the book here. Her second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, will appear in May 2011. Here are her choices (you’ll find an interview with one of her selected authors, Madeleine Bunting, here): My greatest pleasure this year came from reading Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Read selectively, randomly or straight through (I did all three, in order) it is a wonderfully intelligent and lively journey through the landscape of the imagination between the wars. Harris informs but also has huge fun with the creativity, fantasy and sometimes spectacular self-indulgence of the period. I’m delighted to see publishers producing such visually beautiful but serious books to compete with e-publishing. It was announced …
I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man’s death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in which Tolstoy as a boy listens to his grandmother’s blind storyteller recount a bedtime story… Click here for the reading.
Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. It’s a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years – “repelled and compelled”, as he puts it in the interview. “Charismatic,complex, irresistible” is how he describes it in his new book, Amexica, which he discusses with me in this podcast. The US-Mexican border is the busiest such crossing in the world – a million people use it every day. And some of them are engaged in the trafficking – of people, arms, drugs, and dirty money- which gives this land its often brutally violent character. In the interview we talk about that violence, where it comes from, the ways in which it mirrors developments in the global economy and – perhaps most worryingly – the fact that “children are growing up along the border with this as their world”.
Elizabeth Knowles is a historical lexicographer, which means that she researches the histories of words – how did they come to mean what they mean today and what journeys have they taken to arrive at these meanings? Elizabeth firmly believes that “there is no such thing as a dull word” and to prove it has written How to Read a Word in which she reveals some techniques you can use in order to undertake fascinating journeys of your own in the history of our language. What follows are extracts from an interview in which she talks to George Miller about some of the words she discusses in the book – and we put her to the test by asking her without any forewarning how to go about researching two unusual terms. Just click on the links below to listen to the extracts. And if these whet your appetite, a longer interview about the book can be heard by clicking here. Kate Moss famously once said: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Here Elizabeth talks …
Antony Jay’s Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations – entitled Lend Me Your Ears – is now in its fourth edition. To mark its publication, I went to interview Antony – perhaps best known as the co-author of the “Yes, Minister” series – at his home in Somerset. You can hear the whole interview by clicking here; or you can listen to highlights by clicking on the links below. My first question was: what makes a quotation a political quotation? Click here. Politics is a field more prone than most to misquotation. Antony Jay discusses a notorious quote attributed to James Callaghan, which he never in fact said. Click here to find out what it was. What are the challenges of pinning down who said what in the modern world of 24-hour news, blogs and soundbites? Click here. Was there such a thing as a Golden Age of political phrase-making? Click here to hear Antony Jay’s view. Who are some of Tony’s personal favourites among the many thousands of writers and politicians in the book? Click …
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to Geneva-based journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about recent events in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. We talk about inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek peoples, the stance of Kyrgyzstan’s neighbours, Russia and Uzbekistan, and the role which Cheterian believes the West should play in helping bring this former beacon of reformism and pro-Western attitudes back from the brink of chaos. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here. The LMD podcast archive is accessible here.
John Grindrod was born in 1970 in Croydon and still lives in South London. Last year he published Shouting at the Telly, a book in which a host of comedians, actors and writers wrestle with such weighty issues as: Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal pervert? What does Howards’ Way tell us about the eighties? How do you win America’s Next Top Model? Which programmes do you only watch when you’re off sick? I spoke to John about the book for the Blackwell Online podcast when it came out. You can listen to it here. Here are John’s holiday reading choices: The most obviously summery book I’ve been reading has been Travis Elborough’s hilarious and hugely informative Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, a cultural history of seaside resorts and our national obsession with piers, paddling and penny arcades. Travis grew up in Worthing and his disdain for the place colours the book, but this is as much a reconciliation with his own seaside demons as it is a gloriously eccentric travelogue around England’s …
Maria McCann’s first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it “taut and compelling” and the Independent a “tour de force”. It is set in the West Country during the Restoration, when a reckoning has to be made of acts committed during the turbulent time that preceded it and well-kept family secrets begin to unravel. The paperback of The Wilding is out next month. You can listen to my interview with Maria in which she talk about writing the book by clicking here. And here is her Summer Reading selection: At some point in the eighties, working as a library assistant in London, I came across Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and the surreal image of a glass building floating away downriver has haunted me ever since. In those days, surrounded by library stock and with no work to do in the evenings, I read …
Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. I interviewed Marcus about We Need to Talk about Kelvin for the Faber podcast. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Here are his summer reading selections: It is probably odd to recommend a book so far only half-read but I knew from the opening page that Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World was going to be special. The story of two orphaned brothers adopted by very different families, set amid the political turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia, its prose is rich and atmospheric. Reminds me of Graham Greene. Aw, a Malaysian writer based in London, deserves to be far better known than he is. I had never before read anything by Rose Tremain but, after putting down The Road Home, I wanted to read more. The novel charts the …
Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Prize and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. You can listen to my interview with Graham about The Strangest Man by clicking here. And here are Graham’s summer reading choices: Summer reading seems to be synonymous with light reading. Not for me. These relatively quiet months often present the best opportunities to read challenging, off-piste books that I tend to put on the shelf invisibly marked “when I have time”.David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been there for too long. It took an appreciative review of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by the notoriously sniffy James Wood to nudge me into taking the plunge. I’m glad I did – though Cloud Atlas is not always easy to read, Mitchell’s virtuosity makes …
Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial next month on charges never before brought in the history of war – “murder in violation of the laws of war”. In this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast I talk to New York civil rights lawyer Chase Madar about some of the troubling issues raised by the Khadr case. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, which has recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. You can hear the interview by clicking here. Here are Daisy’s summer reading suggestions: My summer holiday usually takes me to the same spot each year: the house in the South of France which has been in my family since before I was born. Each year I take with me a new novel, something meaty and absorbing, which is much more satisfying to read in long shady sessions on the terrace than in the snatched minutes available in the working week. Last year I packed A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and spent several glorious afternoons utterly engrossed in it. This year I took David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve brought home to finish. I’d be further through it were it not for the fact that one of …
Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. His books include Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001), which W.G. Sebald praised for its “unique sense of time and place, and great depth of vision” and Leviathan or, The Whale which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. You can hear my interview with Philip in which we talk about whales, Melville and Moby-Dick by clicking here. Here are his summer reading recommendations: Having just returned from a book tour of New England – a place haunted by its past, and by its whales – I’m deep in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’ Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works, (Kent State University Press, $49). I picked up the book in the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, an island out of time where even billionaires’ SUVs are subjected to 18th-century cobblestones in the street, and where, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association, I stayed in Thomas Macey’s house, where Melville himself dined in 1852. (I was woken …
By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here. Here are her summer reading choices: I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar’ book about boarding school life. I’m a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue. Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday …
Today’s holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. I’m hoping to interview him again this autumn when his new book, The Planet in a Pebble, appears. Here is his summer readiing recommendation: Holidays! It’s off to the beach or café terrace or simply that rickety deckchair in the weed-strewn garden. Now – what to pack to read? Nothing too demanding or (the Gods forbid!) improving. An adventure that rattles along with zing and charm and fun and characters you can live with. But that’s so hard to find… There are the staples, of course, that rarely disappoint: Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser and – a personal quirk, mostly from the charity bookshop, now – the early Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, admired for their style and craft by that other old dependable, P.G. Wodehouse. But more of that ilk? …
This is the first in a short series of summer reading recommendations from some of the authors I have interviewed in recent months. New posts will appear as they arrive. Our first guest is historian Helen Rappaport. Helen studied Russian before becoming an actress, but in recent years she has developed a successful second career as an author, specializing in Russian history. You can hear my interview with her about book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile on the Blackwell website by clicking here. Here is her recommendation: As a historian in love with real people and real lives, and one who reads virtually no fiction – ever – let alone contemporary fiction, I was totally gripped by the first two books of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy* like no other crime novels I have ever read. And for me that is saying something. Why did they have such an impact on me? Simple: it’s all down to the brilliant, quirky, compulsive and utterly believable central female character, Lisbeth Salander, the best feisty heroine created by a male …
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled “NGOs are ‘the enemy within'”, which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations and NGOs, particularly in the aftermath of their assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. Eyal Weizman is an architect, originally from Israel now based in London. He is director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before the interview, he explained to me that the Centre exists at the intersection of human rights, politics and the built environment. He has a particular interest in the way in which architecture is implicated in geopolitical conflicts “and how we can read the history of conflicts through the built environment”. He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Click here to play the podcast.
The latest volume in the city-pick series – on Amsterdam – has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book’s editor, Heather Reyes. This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which I compiled on location in Amsterdam with Dutch poet and critic, Victor Schiferli, the co-editor of city-pick Amsterdam. Our main project was filming a number of interviews with Dutch writers, currently going up on Vimeo and YouTube, and in the interstices, we made the sound recordings that you can listen to below – a sort of audio introduction both to Amsterdam and Victor’s book. Just click on the pictures below to hear the sound clips. 1. Spui Square and the Athenaeum Bookshop 2. De Zwart cafe and literary feuds 3. Dam Square 4. Amsterdam in wartime 5. The Vondelpark (and who was Vondel?) 6. In the Red Light District 7. Amsterdam on Two Wheels 8. Victor’s Thoughts on Compiling the Book
This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He’s the author of six books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps” The interview accompanies and amplifies his article in the current issue of Le Monde diplo, which looks at what he calls “the Europeanization of Mediterranean debt” forced on the EU by speculators, and what he predicts will become a vicious circle of budget cutting, debt deflation and depression. He further predicts that old patterns of hardship migration will re-emerge: “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps because they weren’t willing to deal with them at home”. To listen to the podcast, click here.
After a gap of a couple of months, the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is back. This month I talk to Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese academic who is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS in London and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, published this month. His subject in the article – and in this podcast – is Israel’s propaganda war with the Palestinians and the Arab world in general, and the intensification it has undergone in recent years. In the interview we talk about the propaganda use to which the “abject” wartime behaviour of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has been put by Israel and how Holocaust denial in the Arab world differs from that in the West. To listen to the podcast, click here.
“Dancing on the heads of snakes” is how President Ali Abdullah Salih of Yemen describes the near impossibility of governing his country. He should know; he’s managed to cling on to power by keeping up the dance for the past three decades. The challenge is certainly considerable: Yemen has been a united country for only 20 years and it’s far from certain that it will remain one. Tribalism make governance a tricky business at the best of times as does poverty: around 40% of its rapidly growing population live on $2 a day. The country’s oil and water supplies are both dwindling at an alarming rate. It’s relations with its northern neighbour, Saudi Arabia, are strained. And since the failed suicide bomb attempt on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, Yemen is once again in the full glare of international attention as Al-Qaeda’s home base on the Arabian peninsula. British journalist Victoria Clark, who was born in the city of Aden in the south of Yemen when it was still a British …
In this week’s podcast, I talk to Simon Winder about the challenges of making a book on German history entertaining. It’s a challenge he rose to magnificently in his quirky new book, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern. He takes the reader along the highways and down many of the byways of German history to reveal aspects of the country’s past which are rarely encountered. It would be a flinty soul who read this book and didn’t at least feel the first stirrings of a desire to holiday in Germany for the first time. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast and hear Simon’s views on German cuisine and his tips for where to discover the delights of the “real” Germany.
To record this week’s podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd’s hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. Although this book wasn’t written there, its sequel, currently a work in progress, will be. You can see the hut – which is enough to arouse the envy of anyone with writerly ambitions – in the video we recorded, which will be on this site shortly. In the mean time, click on the link above to listen to our audio podcast in which we talk about making the transition from non-fiction to fiction, the challenges of setting a novel in the past, and the ways in which the reverberations of the First World War continued to be felt in the years that followed armistice. The novel has been getting terrific reviews: The Times, for example, said: “Speller’s writing is gorgeous, her research immaculate and very lightly worn. Sheer bliss.” And the Independent said: “Covering death, poetry, a …
Last Monday I met film critic Mark Kermode at the Watershed in Bristol before his event there which formed part of his countrywide tour to present his new book, It’s Only a Movie. He was remarkably bright and engaged, considering he had been at the BAFTAs the night before and had already done 37 interviews (sic) that morning. Later, he would delight his audience with nearly two hours of anecdotes from his career and opinions on the films he loves and loathes. But before he took to the stage, I talked to him about his career – what his earliest film memories are, why The Exorcist is his favourite film, and what overlooked gems he thinks we should all be seeking out.
We mark the birthday of Charles Dickens earlier this week with a special extended edition of my interview with his biographer Michael Slater from the end of last year, which originally appeared on Blackwell Online. John Bowen, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, said: “[it] immediately takes its place as the most authoritative, fair-minded and navigable of modern biographies. Slater, the most distinguished of modern Dickens scholars, is a master of detail and a stickler for dates (there are a dozen or so on the first page) and the book gives a vivid sense of the day-to-day, week-by-week bustle and productivity of Dickens’s life, its polymorphous inventiveness, its relentless juggling.” In this extended version of the interview, you can hear how Michael Slater first became interested in Dickens, what persuaded him to take on the monumental task, and which aspects of Dickens personality and writing have fascinated him most. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast.
In this month’s edition of Le Monde diplomatique I have a piece about US journalist and campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich and her latest book, called Smile or Die in the UK and Brightsided in the US. I interviewed Barbara on a snowy evening in Bristol last month before she appeared at the Festival of Ideas to explore her thesis that the relentless promotion of positive thinking is undermining America and its effects are being felt all round the world. If you’re unconvinced that positive thinking is creeping into more and more areas of life, here are some facts with which I began my article: “George W Bush was head football cheerleader in his senior year at prep school. The most popular course offered by Harvard University in 2006 was positive psychology. The total US market for “self-improvement products” in 2005 was estimated at $9.6bn. Last month, during the Haitian earthquake, the top international story on happynews.com – which publishes only good news – was “Prince William attracts crowd in New Zealand”. There are at least four …
My guest in this first Le Monde diplomatique podcast of 2010 is Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. In his article in the January edition of the paper, “US turns persuader not policeman”, Professor Klare asks whether disappointment with the first year of Obama’s foreign policy is the right reaction, or whether we ought instead to see “smart power” as a pragmatic response to the US’s diminished role as world superpower – “assertiveness in the face of decline”. In the interview we talk about the challenge posed by Iran to US smart power and also its implications for the domestic political landscape in the US. To listen to the interview, click here.
I first became aware of Stephen Asma‘s book on the fine Washington Post Book World podcast (which sadly is no more). The Post also chose the book as one of its top non-fiction titles of the year for 2009, calling it “a safari through the many manifestations of our idea of the monstrous”. Their reviewer went on: “I have seldom read a book that so satisfyingly achieves such an ambitious goal.” And indeed the book is much more than a mere freakish parade of monsters (though that is a part of its pleasure) – it is rather an investigation of the meaning of monsters. Why do all societies have their monsters? What do they help us cope with? How has the significance of monsters changed as societies have gone from polytheism to monotheism and on through the Enlightenment? And which of our current fears will our future monsters embody? Asma is clearly something of a polymath – not only did he produce many of the illustrations in the book himself, he also combines his academic …
My guest on this week’s programme is Michael Moran, author of A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland. Michael first visited Poland in the early 1990s after the collapse of Communism as leader of an ill-assorted crew of British teachers charged with introducing the Poles to the delights of market capitalism. As a pianist, he was attracted by the music of Chopin, but confesses that he knew little about the country. He little suspected that he would fall in love with the country and end up making it his home. A Country in the Moon – the description is Edmund Burke’s and dates from 1795, but might still stand for a country which is very little known and all too often reduced to cliché in the West – achieves something very rare for a travel book: it manages to be genuinely funny and entertaining, and also deeply thought-provoking about the many terrible chapters in Poland’s history. The book has been widely praised; the Guardian called it “the best contemporary …
I’m delighted to say that the first Podularity podcast of 2010 is devoted to an in-depth interview with 2009 Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel in which she talks about her remarkable novel, Wolf Hall. As far as I can tell, this is the most extensive interview about the book available anywhere on the web. Here’s Hilary Mantel on her decision to write about Thomas Cromwell: “Very much I wanted to write about Cromwell. There isn’t any other figure I would have picked; he was the main attraction because I was really interested in the path he took from very humble origins, to the Councils of State, to be the king’s right-hand man, to be an earl. Other people rise from a humble background but they invariably come through the Church. “Cromwell didn’t take that path. He very much created the conditions in which he could succeed, but by doing so [also created] a huge backwash of resentment and ill-will, which I suppose in his own mind must have seemed indefeasible at times. “He had the …
Mary Beard is no stranger to Podularity. In fact, she may have appeared on it more times than any other author. This however is her Podularity video debut. Last autumn, after recording an audio interview with Mary about her book-of-the-blog, It’s a Don’s Life, I asked her to take part in my “Three Questions for” series of short films. The format is as simple as the name suggests – three questions, no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. So click below to find out where Mary thinks the Elgin marbles belong, why she chose the Romans over the Greeks, and which book she thinks everyone should have to read before they leave school – it’s not, it turns out, a Latin one…
Roland Chambers studied film and literature in Poland and at New York University before returning to England in 1998. His first biography, The Last Englishman, won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature, and draws on his experience both as a children’s author and as a private investigator specializing in Russian politics and business. He currently divides his time between London and Connecticut. You can hear my audio interview with Roland by clicking here. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz A fat, fantasy and science fiction nerd spread-eagled between New Jersey, his grandma in the Dominican Republic, and the voodoo of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Messiah-cum-sacrificial cow, Oscar is devastating, as is his author, Junot Diaz: brilliance on every level. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi A so-called graphic novel (it’s an autobiography) which gives Iran since the Revolution through the childhood, adolescence and coming of age of Marji, author of perhaps the most influential comic since Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan Pollan shows how far we are from what we …
Here’s an intriguing question to start the new year with. Last autumn I interviewed Marcus Chown about his latest popular science title, We Need to Talk about Kelvin. At the end of the interview (which you can find here), we made this short video in which Marcus tackled a question famously posed by the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, who developed the first nuclear reactor. Turning to his fellow scientists one day over lunch in 1950, he asked, “Where is everybody?” He wasn’t referring to absent colleagues, but the apparent absence of signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Click on the video below to hear Marcus’s take on whether we are alone…
Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. His academic interests led him from physics to philosophy via theology (he began his professional life as a priest in the Church of England). He went freelance ten years ago and now writes regularly for the Guardian, The Philosophers’ Magazine, TLS, Financial Times and New Statesman, alongside a range of business titles, including Management Today. He also broadcasts, notably on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Mark’s most recent book is Plato’s Podcasts: The Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living. You can hear a podcast about that book by clicking here. His other publications include: Wellbeing, After Atheism, The Philosophy of Friendship, and Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life. On Religion, John Caputo (2001) This book appeared in 2001. Had those folk who waged battle in the God wars of the decade read it first, we might have had a more informed debate. Caputo aims to do a difficult thing: define religion. He does so with great verve, seeing that at heart, religion is a form of …
This week’s podcast features an interview with Heather Reyes, co-founder of Oxygen Books, and co-editor of the latest addition to their City-Lit series, which appropriately enough in the week which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, paints a portrait in words of Berlin. Although there are plenty of old favourites such as Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Döblin and Len Deighton, the emphasis of the book is on unexpected vantage points and new, less familiar voices. So there is no dutiful trot through the city’s history “from earliest times to the present day”, but instead themed sections which try to get under the skin of the city. Off the beaten track, some of the highlights of the book for me were: Rolf Schneider on the disappearing Berlin pub or Kneipe (it used to be said that every street crossing in Berlin had four corners and five corner pubs – but not any more); Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom‘s reflections on a city every inch of which is “steeped in history”, from the opening of …
“After Iraq the ideas of the Bush administration – for example, the idea that you can remake the world in America’s image, that we can alter the condition of the whole Islamic world in order to protect ourselves – had become deeply unfashionable. “But I think there is a danger of embracing the opposite idea – a kind of Orientalism, the notion of a primordial and timeless enemy.” My guest on this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique is Dr Patrick Porter of the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. Patrick has recently published a book on military orientalism, and he pursues that theme in his article in this month’s issue of LMD with particular reference to the Taliban. To view them as medieval or even extraterrestrials as many in the West have done is to see no further than their rhetoric and overlook the extent to which their culture is constantly changing and adapting to circumstances. To listen to the podcast, click here.
This is the first of a new series which will feature a regular round-up of podcasts on other sites which I have recently enjoyed. Hallowe’en may be over, but as Stephen Asma tells Ron Charles on the Washington Post Book World podcast, humanity’s fear of monsters – and our fascination with them – is not likely to evaporate any time soon. Asma, a specialist in the philosophy and history of science, is amusing on the “class divisions” that exist in our perceptions of monsters, with vampires as a sort of aristocracy at the top and zombies as the lumpenproleteriat at the bottom of the heap. He also ventures some theories on why monsters have survived so well in the dark recesses of our collective imagination. Asma’s book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, sounds well worth checking out. Michael Sims’ review in the Post is here. Note that the book is available now in the US, but the UK publication date is January 2010. If you’re curious about the 2009 Nobel laureate …
This week marks the second anniversary of Podularity, so I’m delighted to be welcoming back an old friend of the programme, Cambridge professor of classics, Mary Beard. Mary appeared in programme 15 to talk about her book on the Roman triumph and more recently in programme 28, to talk about Pompeii. This time, we’re in conversation about the book of her blog, A Don’s Life, which is out in paperback from Profile Books on 5 November. Although – as she explains in the interview – it can be a burden to be constantly described as “wickedly subversive”, that’s just what she often succeeds in being in her posts. Her subjects range from what Romans wore under their togas to whether Prince Harry should have gone to Afghanistan. To hear how Mary took to the blogosphere – and the blogosphere took to her – click on the link above. And if you listen to the end, you’ll find out how high she rates the chances of her appearing on Twitter any time soon…
What would a race of space-travelling aliens 100 million years in the future make of the Earth? “One can imagine that they’ll be sufficiently scientifically curious to look on the world as extraordinary – because the Earth is extraordinary by comparison with all the other planets. “And then to investigate its future present, as it were, and try to work out how this future present arose and how it survived for so long. And to do that they’ll have to play the particular kind of history game that we call geology… they’ll have to become fossil detectives…” My guest this week is Jan Zalasiewicz, who is a senior lecturer in the department of geology at the University of Leicester. The first ever edition of Podularity featured a geology title, Ted Nield‘s Supercontinent, so it’s fitting that we return to that subject as the programme approaches its second birthday. In his new book, The Earth after Us, Jan decided to conduct a thought experiment on a grand scale – what would happen if you imagined applying …
This month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique features an interview with Eric Alterman, author of the bestselling What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News and most recently Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America. In the podcast I talk to Alterman about his article in this month’s edition of LMD: “Support Israel through Criticism”, which looks at the rise of J Street, an American Jewish lobby that supports a sane and reasonable peace with the Palestinians. Listen to the podcast by clicking here.
Amanda Vickery on the impression of Georgian life given by National Trust properties today: “They’re absolutely empty of life. They’re neat and tidy and they don’t smell and there’s no noise of the household. All of those things are absolutely central to what it was like to live in even quite grand eighteenth-century houses. “Women’s letters are full of complaints about how awful it is, how freezing, the stiff-backed ceremony, people coming in, a lack of privacy…” This week’s podcast, sponsored by Blackwell Online, features an in-depth interview with Amanda Vickery, whose Behind Closed Doors has just been published by Yale University Press. In the interview we talk about what home meant to the Georgians, both physically and psychologically. Amanda is fascinating on what a detail of domestic interiors as apparently insignificant as wallpaper can tell you about the taste, status and outlook of a household. For those with money, it was a period which saw the dawning of the age of the commercialization of home and simultaneously the feminization of it. While for those …
“I’m trying to use laughter as a kind of prism, I suppose, through which to examine certain features of the broader culture… “Greeks talk a lot about laughter and so there are a lot of perceptions and representations of laughter in prose texts and poetic texts… It’s used all over the place, it’s referred to, it’s discussed by philosophers and others. “So I really wanted to use it as a prism through which to look at a wider range of Greek values and tensions with in the culture and ways in which Greeks think about many different aspects of life.” My guest this week is Stephen Halliwell, Professor of Greek at St Andrews University and winner of this year’s Criticos Prize for the best book published on the subject of Greece, ancient or modern. Stephen’s book, Greek Laughter, is a vast compendium of information of what made the Greeks laugh and how laughter functioned in ancient Greek society. As the book makes abundantly clear, laughter was far from unproblematic – to be laughed down in …
“What’s so wonderful about Carter’s illustrations [for Gray’s Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they’re not shown as undignified, they’re not shown in pain. In fact, many of the illustrations are quite noble… “It’s the first real anatomy book for students to be published since the development of chloroform, anaesthesia in general, and I think these bodies are chloroformed bodies. They are not being treated as though they are social outcasts; they’re being treated as human beings.” My guest on this week’s programme is medical historian, Ruth Richardson. Ruth has written a fascinating history of how the most famous medical textbook of all time came to be written – Gray’s Anatomy, which is still going strong after more than 150 years and 40 editions. She shows that its success was down to not just Henry Gray, who wrote the text, but also to Henry Carter, who provided the illustrations. In the interview we talk about the very different fates of these two men and also …
To see the video using QuickTime, click here. For RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, click here.
“It’s increasingly evident that narration is built in to the human floor-plan as it were. Little kids take to story-telling very, very early… The fact is that we will tell stories; it’s part of being human. “What effects those stories may have are often quite unforeseen by the people telling them, but if they are listened to, if they have an audience, they are doing something… “This kind of novel is like a detour sign on a road: if you don’t want to fall into the big hole that looms ahead, you should probably turn right here. Or left.” (laughs) I interviewed Margaret Atwood about her new novel The Year of the Flood when she visited Bristol earlier this month as part of her international book tour, which has been dubbed the greenest book tour ever – Atwood travelled to the UK by ship rather than plane, forswore meat and insisted that all coffee served came from organic, Fairtrade, shade-grown plantations. Her event at the Bristol Festival of Ideas was unusual in other ways too …
Philosopher Julian Baggini has taken to film-making to promote his latest book entitled Should You Judge This Book by its Cover? In the book, he subjects one hundred proverbs and other examples of homespun wisdom to philosophical scrutiny. And in the film – well, click below and see for yourself. You can also listen to an audio interview about the book which I recorded with Julian last week for Blackwell Online by clicking here.
“The Huns are a blank canvas. That’s what makes them so interesting. We know only one word of Hunnic, the word strava, the Hunnic word for funeral. We have no Hunnic poetry, we have no Hunnic literature.” My guest on this edition of Podularity is Cambridge classicist, Christopher Kelly. His book on Attila the Hun and the part he played in the downfall of the Roman empire has just come out in paperback. In the interview, we talk about the difficulty of writing about someone whose civilization is only preserved in the annals of his enemies, in which the Huns were portrayed as “the scourge of God”. Kelly sets that against the opinion of one Roman commentator who came to know Attila and was impressed by the civilization of his court and the Hun leader’s command of Latin. And we tackle the key question – to what extent did the Huns bring about the fall of the Roman empire? The end result may not be a “Hun’s eye view” – that may well be impossible …
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz several centuries ago. It’s one of the main questions animating Christopher Potter‘s first book, You Are Here. And given that there is something, how did it come into being? And how for that matter did we come into being, several billions of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher’s investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This “portable history of the universe” ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away – distances measured in billions of light years – to the infinitely small (which he calls “the realm of tininess”), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works. The book also has fascinating things to say about the origins of life, the scientific mindset and the way in which human consciousness is “woven into the fabric of the universe”, as Freeman Dyson put it. (Potter cites Schrödinger’s memorable observation that without any …
How easy is it to get an insight into the life of the ancient Romans from a visit to the remains of Pompeii today? How much of what we see is even Roman, and how much is recent reconstruction? What did the Romans really think about sex? And what did they believe in a world on the cusp of embracing Christianity? And did they really eat dormice? Click on the link above to hear writer, broadcaster, blogger extraordinaire and Cambridge professor of Classics, Mary Beard tackle all these questions and more. You can also hear Mary talking about the Roman triumph in podcast 15: The Big Parade.
On Monday night Alice Albinia won the Dolman Travel Book Prize for her book, Empires of the Indus, in which she traces her remarkable journey from the river delta near Karachi to its source in Tibet. Just after the winner was announced, I spoke to Alice about her book. Click above to find out why the woman who donned a burqa to travel through Taliban country doesn’t think of herself as a particularly intrepid traveller…
Burma’s military regime, the State Peace and Development Council, has if anything become more repressive since the scenes of confrontation which the world witnessed on its television screens during the saffron revolution of 2007. In this month’s podcast, George Miller talks to journalist Rajeshree Sisodia about her article on contemporary Burma in the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique. They discuss the Orwellian climate of fear which prevails in the country and life in the refugee camps across the border in Thailand, home to thousands of Burmese who have fled their country. Rajeshree also talks about China’s growing investment in – and consequent influence over – Burma, and assesses the medium-term prospects for change. To listen to the podcast, click here [13:49]. Photo by Sam Hummel.
“This is what I think is really surprising to most people: you don’t actually own your body, in the sense that tissue taken from it and used afterwards is yours to use as you see fit. “The law traditionally took the view that tissue, once it had left the body, was what was called ‘no one’s thing’. “And it took that view because traditionally the tissue wasn’t of any value. It is modern biotechnology that has given it this value.” This podcast is an extended version of an interview I did with Donna Dickenson for Blackwell Online about her book Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit. We talked about the global commodification of the human body, from the sale of eggs and the “grave-robbing” of bones to gene-patenting. Donna’s approach is not to sensationalize these issues, shocking though they often are, but to look at the big questions we as a society need to face in their ethical, legal and scientific context.
Philip Hoare’s Leviathan was my favourite non-fiction title of last year, so I am delighted to hear that it has just won this year’s Samuel Johnson prize. You can hear the interview I did with Philip earlier this year here.
Part two of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro is now available here. In it we talk about his Japanese roots; dealing with success at an early age; and the critical reaction to what he regards as his most ambitious, exploratory novel, The Unconsoled, which went from incomprehension or even hostility within the space of a few years to its selection as one of the finest post-war works of fiction. He also tells me about his theory that most novelists have produced their best work by the time they are in their forties. And at the end, he divulges what new project he is working on at the moment…
Last week I interviewed Matthew Cobb about his new book, The Resistance: The French Fight against the Nazis, which surprisingly is the first popular book to examine the Resistance in a quarter of a century. Matthew, who lived for many years in Paris, told me before the interview that it was seeing images of Paris draped in swastikas in wartime which made him want to find out more about the French men and women who resisted the invaders. You can here my interview with him on the Blackwell Online site here. And you’ll find all my podcasts for Blackwell Online here.
Last month I recorded an extensive interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories. It also forms part of Faber’s 80th birthday celebrations. The first part of what we’ve decided to present as a two-part podcast is now available here on Faber’s site and on iTunes. It focuses on the new book, Nocturnes, while the second part, which I’ve just finished editing, looks back at some of his earlier books including his first, A Pale View of Hills, now available in a new cover as part of the Faber Firsts series. Part II of the podcast will be available later this month. Meanwhile there are several interviews from this week to edit – with Sarah Hall, Giles Foden, and PD James. They’ll all be available in the course of the next few weeks.
“Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the Seventies as an era has been simplified more than most.” Andy Beckett My interview with Guardian journalist Andy Beckett about When the Lights Went Out, his reassessment of the 1970s (were they really as bad as we remember them?) has recently gone up on the Faber website. You can listen by clicking here. Andy interviewed many of the major political figures from the decade. There is, for example, an almost tragi-comic encounter with the very elderly Ted Heath. I asked him before the interview whether he’d tried to get an audience with Margaret Thatcher and he pointed out that his previous book had made that a bit of a long shot:
I realize that things have been a little quiet on the Podularity front lately, so I thought I’d reassure you I haven’t hung up my microphone. In fact, I’ve been busy producing podcasts for a wide variety of people: My most recent podcast for Faber, featuring exciting new Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah and award-winning journalist Oliver Balch on his South American odyssey, is here. Meanwhile, Mark Thompson’s The White War has recently won the 2009 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The prize is awarded for the best work of history published each year on events before 1945. The book is an account of the Italian Front, a major forgotten conflict of the First World War. You can hear me talk to Mark here. The series of fortnightly podcasts I am producing for Blackwells has already notched up nine editions. In the latest programme, you can hear one of Britain’s most eminent novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, talk about his first volume of short stories, Nocturnes, a bittersweet collection that owes its inspiration to Ishiguro’s fascination with music. In the same …
Until recently, Georgia’s wars were fought against separatist movements of ethnic minorities. In August 2008 it took on the Russian army in a five-day war which has left commentators unclear as to who was the aggressor and who the victim. Indeed, perhaps those concepts are inadequate to capture the tangled nature of enmities and rivalries in the region. In this podcast which I’ve just produced for Le Monde diplomatique‘s April issue, I talk to journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about the nature of the five-day war and its consequences for the Caucasus and beyond. Click here to listen. Click here to see some very illuminating maps on the LMD site, which help explain the nature of the conflict. And click on the book cover (above) to find out more about Vicken’s recent book on the subject.
Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment. Earlier centuries had viewed the cessation of female fertility as also marking the end of a woman’s meaningful existence, but the medical profession saw in what came to be called the menopause a business opportunity. If the menopause was pathologized – treated like a disease rather than a process – then medics were on hand to offer a cure, or at least a course of treatment. This was not, of course, the result of some deliberate policy so much as the outcome of the increasing professionalization of medicine, the growth of an affluent middle class, and an underlying misogyny …
Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost. The girl with the monkey is Kate Meaney, a bright, solitary child with a taste for mysteries and detection. She disappeared two decades ago but her image seems to appear on the monitor screens that security guard Kurt spends his nights watching in the Green Oaks shopping centre. Green Oaks itself is fictional, but draws both on Catherine’s own previous experience working in a record store (which she deploys to wonderful comic effect in the book) and …
Neil Gregor: Haunted City – Nuremberg and the Nazi Past “By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town.” In this week’s podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany’s often difficult process of coming to terms with the second world war in the decades that followed its defeat. To bring sharper focus to his book, Neil decided to concentrate on how one city in particular – Nuremberg in Bavaria – reached its accommodation with the past. Neil’s own father grew up in the city and one of Neil’s earliest memories of learning about history was hearing his German godparents describe RAF bombing raids on Nuremberg. As the quote from our interview above makes clear, Nuremberg, site of the infamous rallies and power base of the arch-Nazi Julius Steicher, was no run-of-the-mill town; but it faced many of the same challenges of mental and psychological reconstruction as other German cities in the post-war period, while having some acute problems of its own. In the interview I …
In Le Monde diplomatique‘s February podcast, I talk to Middle East expert and deputy director of the French edition of the paper, Alain Gresh. His article in this month’s edition focuses on the consequences of the Israeli action against Hamas, both for the participants and the wider region. In the podcast he talks about the reactions of nations such as Iran and Turkey to the conflict and considers why Israel’s relations with the EU are more cordial than at any time since 1967. He also responds to my question about what we can tell about the Obama administration’s approach to the Middle East. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. (Image © Joel Carillet)
Rodge Glass – Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography In this week’s podcast, Rodge Glass tells me how, after his first disastrous meeting with Alasdair Gray in a bar in Glasgow, he later went on to be the writer’s student, amanuensis and eventually biographer. Rodge recalls how Gray (a self-described “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”, who is also the author of Lanark, widely regarded as the finest Scottish novel of the past century, as well as a host of other books and creator of many art projects), reacted when the biography was first mooted: “Be my Boswell!” he shouted, dancing a jig around the room and raising a finger to the heavens. “Tell the world of my genius!” In the interview, Rodge reflects on the experience of being himself a character in this unconventional life, and is frank about such things as his own feelings for Gray (“I have great affection for him”) and his uncertainty over what to make of Gray’s artwork. You can read Gray’s own reaction to Glass’s biography here. And …
“Pushkin died romantically, famously in a duel in 1837. He’s often thought of as the founding father of modern Russian literature, which makes him sound rather dusty and old-fashioned, but in fact he’s a great innovator and experimenter…” “His career is very important in the history of Russian letters because he is perhaps the first writer who tries to make his career as a professional man of letters… Unfortunately for him he was an inveterate gambler who dug himself into a financial hole.” My guest on Podularity this week is Andrew Kahn of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. I met him last autumn to talk about Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. For his latest book, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, Andrew set himself the task of reading as much of Pushkin’s library of some 4,000 volumes as possible, the better to trace the development of his ideas and influences, and in particular how they found expression in his lyric poetry. In the interview, we also talk about Pushkin’s amatory career and capacity for self-mythologizing. If the interview whets …
The first Podularity podcast of 2009 is an interview with polymath Raymond Tallis about his most recent book, Hunger, which appears in the Art of Living series from Acumen Publishing. The Times has described Tallis as “the Lennox Lewis of the intellectual world – a formidable heavyweight” and, as you might expect from such a wide-ranging thinker, his essay on hunger goes beyond the satisfaction of our physiological desires to look at a whole range of human appetites and desires. But the title of this post (a quote from Brecht) is a reminder, as Tallis shows, that the ways in which the affluent world satisfies its “higher-order” appetites has real consequences for the parts of the world where not having enough to eat is an everyday reality. To hear my conversation with Raymond Tallis click on the player above. I also recommend Sharman Apt Russell’s book on hunger (also called simply Hunger), which looks at the effects of hunger on the human body (and mind) and also tackles the profound way in which hunger affects …
Here’s a link to the Faber podcast I did just before Christmas with Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater about their book, Is this Bottle Corked?, in which they explore the “secret life of wine”. Listen to it and not only will you discover how to tell with confidence when a bottle is corked, you’ll also discover why elephants may be capable of making booze but are unlikely ever to aspire to the status of a grand cru. In fact, the stories Kathy and Michael come up with are so entertaining, they could be just what you need to help you through January, even if you’ve forsworn drink…
When Cathy Cassidy was in Bath for the Children’s Literature Festival in September, my daughters Livi and Abby, along with their friend Ellie, were lucky enough to get the chance to interview her. In the interview, Cathy talks about how she started out as a writer, how she creates her characters and gives some hints about her next books. She also has tips for aspiring young writers. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. [20:36]
The latest podcast I’ve produced for Faber has just gone up on their site. In it I talk to novelists Paul Auster and Nadeem Aslam about the books they published this autumn. You can find the podcast here. In Auster’s book, Man in the Dark, an ageing literary critic, August Brill, spends a night imagining a dystopian future in which America is embroiled in a civil war as a way of distracting him from the ghosts that trouble his sleep, not least of which is the death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend in Iraq. And Aslam’s Wasted Vigil brings an American CIA man, a Russian woman seeking her soldier brother, and a young Muslim fundamentalist to the home of an English doctor in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. This conjunction of characters enables Aslam to tell the story of Afghanistan’s recent past in a way that is by turns richly poetic and shockingly violent. There’s a longer version of the Auster interview here. And the full version of the Aslam interview is here.
Congratulations to Aravind Adiga for his Booker win last night for his debut novel, The White Tiger. For those of you who missed it, you can find my interview with Aravind from earlier this year here. And if you want to sample his novel, you can hear him reading from it here and here.
Mark Vernon has just brought out a book on wellbeing in a new series of which he’s general editor. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill self-help series. The series is called The Art of Living and it’s published by independent philosophy specialist, Acumen. Their stated aim is to “open up philosophy’s riches to a wider public once again”. Consequently, authors have been asked to tackle the big question “How should we live?” in relation to a diverse selection of topics, including hunger, illness, work and sex. (You can hear my interview with Raymond Tallis on Hunger in a couple of weeks.) So the books have practical ambitions, but they’re rooted in an understanding of philosophical tradition (though this isn’t limited to the western canon). In the interview I was keen to get Mark to tease apart wellbeing and happiness. Happiness has been the subject of many books recently, whereas we tend to think of wellbeing as more of a Sunday supplement concept that embraces getting a good night’s sleep and drinking less caffeine. So what exactly …
“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.” Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed him back in March in programme 8, A Philosopher in Everytown, when he talked to me about the folk philosophy of the English. Julian’s been publishing very actively lately and when I spoke to him last week we talked about two new books which he has brought out this year. In a future programme, you can hear my interview about Complaint, in which he puts the case for “the noble art of complaining”. This week, though, the focus of our discussion is bad arguments. Listen to the interview and find out why logic is like a sausage machine… You may also hear a rainstorm going on in the background at the start of the interview…
My latest podcast for Faber & Faber is now available on their site and on iTunes. In it I talk to American novelist Andrew Sean Greer about his latest book, The Story of a Marriage. It’s a beautifully realized depiction of what happens to the relationship between two people when a third appears on the scene – but in almost every way unexpected. “We think we know the ones we love,” the book begins, but it turns out that our knowledge is often imperfect. The book is full of surprises without straining credibility and it’s also a marvellous depiction of the fog-bound suburbs of San Francisco during the Korean War, when people were dealing with a new war while still living in the shadow of the previous one. In the interview, Andrew also tells me how he became a dog owner…
“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought. It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught until the eighteenth century. So in a way it’s a revival of a rather ancient idea of philosophy being taught through exemplary biography or the idea of philosophy as a way of life.” In this week’s podcast I talk to Simon Critchley about his recently published Book of Dead Philosophers. The book might at first seem like one of those forgettable book of quirky lists and miscellaneous bizzareries, but in fact it’s much more than that. As Jonathan Derbyshire put it in his Guardian review: “These descriptions aren’t just intended to be diverting, however (though they are certainly that); Critchley says that they are also meant to challenge a conception of philosophy which holds that it is a form of abstract, conceptual inquiry that …
Over the last few months I’ve been producing a new podcast for Faber and Faber, which you can find on their recently relaunched website here. In the first four podcasts, which are now available on iTunes, I talk to – among others – Hanif Kureishi, Peter Carey, Sebastian Barry (pictured left) and Junot Díaz. The podcast will be a regular monthly feature of the Faber site and there will be “specials” every so often too. I’m hoping to interview Paul Auster about his latest novel, Man in the Dark, in the autumn, for example.
“I see this in a sense as a cautionary tale. What my narrator is is a white tiger – he’s unusual for his time. Very few servants in India actually kill their masters and take their money…” Aravind Adiga’s debut novel was recently selected for the Booker long-list, so I thought I’d make available this interview which I did with him earlier this year in London. Click here to listen to the interview. If you click on the picture below, you can hear Aravind reading from the book. There’s another reading available here. You can find more information about the book on Atlantic Books’ website.
“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact some back-of-the-envelope calculations were made then which more or less stand the test of time a century later.” A few weeks back I met Mark Lynas in Oxford to talk about his book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, shortly before the book won this year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize. The book looks degree by degree at the consequences for the Earth, its biodiversity and its inhabitants, as average global temperatures continue to rise throughout this century. The book is alarming without being alarmist, sobering without being defeatist. As the Royal Society recognized, the book represents a magnificent achievement on Mark’s part, who sifted through a huge amount of scientific data in order to construct such readable and readily comprehensible scenarios. Average rises in global temperature of up to two degrees have serious consequences; above that, the consequences range from the dramatic …
I recently interviewed Stephen Armstrong for Faber about his new book, War plc. The book takes the reader into the world of the private security companies, which have mushroomed in the last few years to the extent that the military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq would be impossible without them. The development is not accidental. To get a sense of the ideological drive that lies behind the emergence of these private companies on the battlefield, here is an extract from an extraordinary speech (quoted in Stephen’s book) which US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the day before 9/11: “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating 5 year plans. From a single capital it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defence of the United States and …
“I’m interested in saying, look, how can you challenge the Asterix-and-the-Romans kind of image that we tend to have of Rome? We are determined to turn a blind eye to Roman subtlety, humour and sophistication because the Romans do a very good job for us of being bridge-builders and thugs. The Greeks are sophisticated guys who go round thinking about the meaning of life, and the Romans conquer people. And those kinds of symbols of difference are terribly convenient for modern culture to use, as you can see if you look at how Rome appears in movies.” I’ve recently been in Cambridge to talk to Professor Mary Beard about her radical re-evaluation of one of ancient Rome’s quintessential rituals – the triumph. There are few images more evocative of ancient Rome than the triumph. It’s one of the favourite set-pieces of countless “sword-and-sandal” epics. To be awarded a triumph was the greatest accolade for a victorious Roman general. He would be drawn through the city’s streets, dressed as a god and surrounded by his raucous …
“It’s a very surreal place… children have grown up with bomb scrap around them. So when they see bomb scrap, they don’t perceive any danger. It’s all around you.The houses are made of bombs. It’s piled up by the side of the roads. It’s part of the fabric of life.” I’ve just completed a first podcast for the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, the monthly French paper which now exists in many foreign-language editions and publishes in-depth reports on the political, social and cultural situation around the world. My guest in this first LMD podcast is Angela Robson, who used to work with Amnesty International, and is now a writer and journalist who broadcasts frequently on the BBC. Angela recently visited Laos, the small land-locked country in S.E. Asia, ahead of the Dublin conference to discuss an international cluster-bomb ban. Though few people in the west know much about Laos, it is the country which has suffered the heaviest bombing of any nation on Earth. More than Japan and Germany in the Second World …
“In Russian music you have a very different portrayal of Russia [from the one you find in literature], which has very strong rhythms, very festive images. It’s very bright, very colourful, very, very different from the melancholy Russian soul.” Writing of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar after its premiere in 1836, one Russian critic boldly predicted that ‘Europe will be amazed’. Surely Europeans would now want to ‘take advantage of the new ideas developed by our maestro’? Yet this opera, which is regarded as the very foundation of Russian music in its home country, is little known abroad, its composer (the ‘great father of Russian music’) merely another name in the long list of half-neglected nineteenth-century Russian composers. Marina Frolova-Walker, a Russian-born musicologist now based in Cambridge, set out to do something much more ambitious than explain the neglect of certain Russian composers. She wanted to examine the whole notion of ‘Russianness’ in Russian music, a story which starts with Glinka. What did Russianness consist of? How did it come about? What changing …
“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German residue about things. It’s something I feel haunted by…” I’m delighted that the first poet to appear on Podularity is Michael Hofmann. I’ve known Michael for several years and greatly admire his work as a translator, but his poetry has been a comparatively recent – and very pleasurable – discovery for me. George Szirtes, reviewing Michael’s Selected Poems in the Guardian recently, said of his work: In the programme we talk about Michael’s relationship with the German and English languages and how he moves between the two; his relationship with his late father, the German novelist, Gert Hofmann, which forms the explicit or implicit subject matter of much of his poetry: ‘these two men meet up to divide the world between them and this is how it goes: my father gets prose in German and I get poetry in English, and we each go away …
“I think the burning question is: we think of printing as having revolutionized intellectual life in Europe, how come it doesn’t appear to have revolutionized intellectual life in China? There’s no great fanfare when it arrives. It seems to creep in and people don’t talk about it much for quite a long time. That was the problem I was trying to address overall.” This week I’ve been at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to see Professor of East Asian History, Tim Barrett. It was the title of Tim’s recent book – The Woman Who Discovered Printing – which made me keen to meet him. After all, most of us have grown up with the idea that printing was invented in medieval Germany by Gutenberg. In fact, Tim’s book shows that printing was already well-established in China many centuries before Gutenberg, and that Europeans had probably seen eastern wood-block type at a period when they were too far behind China technologically speaking to make use of it. Perhaps our difficulty in the …
‘You always suppose you’re the heroine in the story of your life; the day you discover you’re the monster, it’s apt to come as a surprise’ Dol McQueen, ‘flash-girl’, 1862 Chris Hannan‘s dazzlingly accomplished first novel, Missy , is published today in the UK (in the US, it comes out in June from FSG). I met Chris last week at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh to talk about making the transition from writing plays to writing novels, how he created the voice of a young American prostitute in a silver-rush boom-town, and how aspects of his own life fed into what seems at first the least autobiographical of first novels. The ‘missy’ of the title by the way is not a character in the book, but the liquid opium to which its narrator, Dol McQueen, is addicted. Dol McQueen is one of the “flash-girls” who forsake the fleshpots of San Francisco to ply their trade in Nevada’s Virginia City, where men are rumored to be newly rich and ripe for plucking. …
That’s how the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel reckons he should entitle his life story. Adiga’s narrator, Balram Halwai, believes he is half-baked because, like so many in India, he’s been unable to finish his schooling, and so his head is an ‘odd museum’ of half-cooked ideas. This is the head the reader is given a guided tour of over the course of 300 often bitingly satirical pages. Adam Lively in The Times called the book ‘extraordinary and brilliant’ and another critic said it was ‘the perfect antidote to lyrical India’. Balram is not the sort of character who is normally given centre stage in Indian novels. He comes from a low caste in an almost feudal village and seems destined for a life as a downtrodden servant, abused by his affluent, rapidly (and often comically) westernizing masters. Yet over the course of several nights, Balram relates the steps he took to escape the ‘rooster coop’ of Indian society and turn himself into a ‘self-made entrepreneur’. He offers the wisdom he has gained (‘free …
On 14 June 1940 German tanks swept into Paris. That the city would fall to the Nazis was by then a foregone conclusion; it had been declared an ‘open city’ the day before. In other words, it would put up no resistance against the invaders. The government had already packed up and left. By 14 June, four-fifths of Parisians had also fled the city, leaving it looking as though it had been stricken by some medieval disaster such as a great plague. Little more than a week later Hitler would make a propaganda visit to Paris and have his picture taken beneath the Eiffel Tower. Yet, despite the magnitude of the exodus in which literally millions of people took to the roads in any form of transport they could find, including push-carts and bicycles, it has been little written about by professional historians, as though it has been crowded out by the attention given to the Vichy regime, the resistance, and the occupation. Hanna Diamond‘s new book, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (OUP) sets out to …
‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the human and the animal worlds as reflected in art and science. It is one of those books which make you look at the world in a different way after you close it. It is full of examples of how throughout history we have drawn (often unflattering) comparisons between humans and animals, and it makes you realize that anthropomorphized animals are still all around us – in adverts, political cartoons, children’s literature – and the language of animal comparisons still infuses our everyday speech (from politicians crying ‘crocodile tears’, to a child’s taunt of ‘scaredy cat’ to the media branding a thug an ‘animal’ or a ‘beast’). When we reach for animal comparisons, we seem to be asking what it …
Philosophy can seem the most cerebral and abstract of disciplines. So what would happen if a philosopher stepped out of his study and ’embedded’ himself in an ordinary (but unfamiliar) community in his own country and tried to work out whether the English people have anything which could reasonably be called a philosophy? That’s exactly the challenge that Julian Baggini set himself in 2005, when he left his comfort zone in Bristol and moved to Rotherham, which, it turns out, is as typical as you can hope to find of how the English live now. We met this month to coincide with the paperback publication of his account of his sojourn, Everytown, and I asked him how his assumptions about what he would find had matched up to reality. Here’s the list he made as he travelled north: ‘On the train, I jotted down a list of values and characteristics I expected to find, making no attempt to mask my prejudices. I thought there would be toleration for difference, but no real love for it, …
This week’s Podularity podcast features an interview with Catriona Kelly, who has just published a monumental new history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia. The book, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991, draws not only on a vast amount of archival research but also on hundreds of interviews with Russians of all ages in which they discuss their memories of childhood, both happy and unhappy. What quickly becomes clear is that the familiar western impression of identically dressed children paying homage to ‘Beloved Stalin’ is a crude caricature of a much richer, more complex reality. The book reveals what childhood was really like for millions of Soviet children, shedding light on everything from the swaddling of peasant children to life in orphanages or children’s games and toys. As Catriona explains in our interview, she wanted to convey ‘what Russian schools looked like, what school food was like, what people’s relations to their parents were like in single-room communal apartments – essentially to show how the “children’s world” was not just a cliché, but also the …
What aspects of our human character do we inherit from our fellow primates? Until recently, the answer would have been ‘all the bad bits’. Footage of chimpanzees killing their own kind influenced the view in the popular imagination that ‘killer’ and ‘ape’ were virtual synonyms. One of the leading scientists who has done much to change that view in recent years is the guest on this latest Podularity podcast, Frans de Waal. Frans is a Dutch-born primatologist, who has been based at Emory University in the US since 1981. His study of reconciliation behaviour in chimps has overturned many preconceptions about what constitutes their ‘nature’ and founded the field of animal conflict resolution research. Frans also has a great interest in international politics, so it seemed natural to him to compare our human interactions with those of our chimpanzee cousins. Of what prompted his latest book he writes: within biology, the tone of the debate about human nature has changed drastically over the last few years, from the right of the strongest to the evolution …
A few years ago Sofka Zinovieff became fascinated by the life of her grandmother and namesake, Sofka Dolgorouky, who was born into a noble family in imperial Russia exactly a century ago. Sofka had known her grandmother when she was already an old woman and, although she knew something of her colourful life, she was to make many discoveries as she researched her book. Her quest was to take her back to her grandmother’s childhood home in St Petersburg and their country estate in the Crimea. It would also lead her to a prison camp in eastern France and the archives of MI5… You can see some of the great reviews the book has had by clicking here.
On the morning of 1 September 2004, children and teachers all over Russia were getting ready for the first day of the new school year. So begins Timothy Phillips’ account of the terrible siege of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Of course, we know now that that day three years ago which began as a celebration was to turn into the worst terrorist atrocity in Russian history. But although we remember the harrowing scenes filmed by the terrorists in the school gymnasium on the camcorders which proud parents had brought to the parade, and the disastrous, chaotic end to the siege in which so many people died, many of us may have a sketchier understanding of what lay behind those events: Who were the hijackers? What motivated them? And what why did they come to Beslan? These are among the questions that Timothy Phillips tries to answer in his book on the siege. He travelled to Beslan a few months after the siege and spoke to those involved. In the interview, I ask …
This week’s podcast features Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Tom has recently come to prominence as a novelist and his book, Remainder, has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. But in Tintin and the Secret of Literature he shows he also possesses a sharp (and playful) critical mind into the bargain. Tom’s starting point is to ask whether the hugely successful Tintin cartoons are also great literature, and in attempting to answer that question he gets to the heart of what literature actually is. Along the way he also examines a few skeletons in Hergé’s closet. But the book is above all an immensely entertaining exploration of the Tintin books, which will make you want to read them all again. “With a code-breaking ingenuity worthy of the boy reporter himself, McCarthy reveals Hergé’s crisp, graphic style to be a complex circuitry of forgery and artifice, corporeal obsession and psycho-sexual intrigue; sparking leads and crackling connections that wire the Belgian cartoonist’s work deep into the matrix of 20th-century art …
If mention of Vienna makes you think of Mozart, cream cakes and Gemütlichkeit, John Leake’s new book will make you think again. John Leake is a young Texan writer who found himself living in Vienna. The city captivated his imagination (his favourite film is The Third Man) and he soon began searching around for a Viennese subject for his first book. That was when he stumbled upon the grisly case of Jack Unterweger… John’s debut is a tale of murder and mayhem so bizarre that in a novel it would be dismissed as too far-fetched to be believable. In fact, it is all true. The book tells the story of Jack Unterweger, son of an Austrian prostitute and an anonymous GI. Jack grew up to be a small-time hoodlum, pimp, and thief, and was sentenced to life imprisonment for a brutal murder in 1974. So far, so predictable. But after Jack began to writing children’s stories and had them broadcast on Austrian National Radio, the country’s intelligentsia sat up and took notice: here was living …
“The four-dimensional complexities of our happy little planet – “earth’s immeasurable surprise” – are made elegantly accessible by Ted Nield in this truly exceptional book. At least until the next major discovery it deserves to become the standard work, ideal for students of the subject, and hugely enjoyable to those for whom the world remains an unfathomable enigma.” Simon Winchester Ten billion years in the life of our planet. That’s the subject of this first Podularity podcast. And all in a little over 17 minutes… Alert readers may already object that it’s impossible to cover 10 billion years, as the Earth is only six billion years old. (If you are objecting that the Earth is a great deal younger than that, then this podcast is probably not going to appeal to you.) However,Ted Nield’s new book, Supercontinent, looks not only deep into the past by examining the geological record, but also peers into the planet’s far-distant future. The book tells the story of the planet by tracing what Nield calls ‘the grandest cycle in all …