PODULARITY

My interview with Nicola Upson, recorded last autumn in Heffers in Cambridge, is currently on the Bookhugger home page. In it I talk to Nicola about her second Josephine Tey mystery, set in 1930s Cornwall. Click on the image below to listen.

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 Slater: Charles Dickens [36:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 […]

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Rebecca Carter is an editor of fiction and non-fiction at the Random House imprint Harvill Secker, a list that aims to continue the tradition, once announced in an advertisement for Secker, of publishing “international quality literature with a wayward streak”. She has a particular love of unusual narrative history, and novels that explore hidden corners […]

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Although we are now in a new decade, we haven’t yet reached Chinese new year. I am taking comfort from this fact, since  I am still putting up Books of the (past) Decade choices. And of course the books that were worth reading in 2009 are still worth reading in 2010.
Enough self-exculpation. I promise that […]

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 Stephen Asma: On Monsters [19:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 […]

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Michael Bywater is an author and broadcaster whose recent books include Lost Worlds (Granta, 2004), Big Babies (Granta, 2006), and - with Kathleen Burk - Is This Bottle Corked?: The Secret Life of Wine. He writes regularly for the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and numerous other publications. He is a regular broadcaster […]

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Andrew Kahn is University Lecturer in Russian at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford in Russian and Classics. His scholarly research draws on his wide-ranging interests in European literature, most especially Greek, Latin and French.
In addition to writing about Pushkin, whom […]

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Andrew Kelly is the Director of the Bristol Festival of Ideas and other projects. He is the author and editor of 12 books including Filming All Quiet on the Western Front, Cinema and the Great War, Queen Square: biography of a place, Brunel: in love with the impossible.
Of the many hundreds of books I […]

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 Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall [55:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 […]

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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 […]

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