PODULARITY

Our next guest recommender of Summer Reading is Michael Bywater, author (of Lost Worlds and Big Babies, inter al.), broadcaster, and - as you will see when you read on - now writing for the stage…
This summer I’m too too utterly utterly up to my ears in queers, dears. Specifically the (slightly illusory) late […]

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

Continuing our series in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of the past ten years, today’s guest is Kirsten Ellis.
Kirsten is the author of Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope (Harper Collins). She is currently writing an historical novel and completing her MPhil/PhD in Creative Writing and teaching […]

[Read more →]

Here is a short video I recorded with Roland Chambers about his new book, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome.
You could view this as an appetizer for the longer audio interview with him, coming in my podcast for Faber in early September, in which he talks about Ransome’s life in Russia […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]