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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.

The third podcast I’ve recorded for Le Monde diplomatique has just gone up on their site. In it I interview Johann Rossouw, editor of the publication’s Afrikaans edition, about the recent violent events in his country. He talks about what sparked those events, but looks behind the proximate causes to the deeper roots in the way in which South Africa emerged from its colonial and apartheid-governed past.

Listen to the podcast by clicking here.

The abstract-looking image that accompanies this post was taken in Durban’s Botanical Gardens by Robbie Ribeiro.

“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.
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 Mark Lynas: Six Degrees [24:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“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.

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I recently interviewed Stephen Armstrong for Faber about his new book, War plc. You can hear the interview by clicking here .

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. [Read more →]

In May I made a number of recordings for this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas, a series of very popular events which brought some high-powered thinkers to the city to stimulate discussion on subjects as diverse as the legacy of ‘68 to why the human brain is not quite ‘fit for purpose’.

I’m editing my interviews now for a series of podcasts sponsored by The Philosophers’ Magazine, which will be appearing over the next few months. The first one is downloadable now from iTunes here. [Read more →]

 

 Mary Beard: The Roman Triumph [33:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“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.

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“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. [Read more →]

“In politics there’s a constant endeavour to expose hypocrisy. Because people don’t like hypocrisy, it’s a very useful weapon to attack an opponent.
But the exposure of hypocrisy - the anti-hypocritical movement - doesn’t drive hypocrisy out of politics. It doesn’t even diminish the amount of hypocrisy that there is. If anything it just increases it.”

I was in Cambridge last week to interview David Runciman about his new book, Political Hypocrisy, for Princeton University Press. You can listen to the PUP podcast by clicking here (for iTunes) or here (for PUP site). [Read more →]

 

 Frolova-Walker: Russia Music and Nation [24:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“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’? [Read more →]