All posts filed under: podcasts

9. Talking about animals

Published by podmeister

‘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 …

8. A Philosopher in Everytown

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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, …

7. Russian Childhood

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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 …

4. ‘Real stories of ordinary people…’ – Remembering Beslan

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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 …

3. One man and his dog

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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 …

2. Don’t Go Down to the (Vienna) Woods…

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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 …

1. Lost Continents, Deep Space… and Lasagne

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“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 …