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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 […]

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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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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 […]

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“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 - […]

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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 […]

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 Halliwell: Greek Laughter [27:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“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 […]

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 Christopher Potter: You Are Here [20:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“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 […]

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 Mary Beard: Pompeii [31:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 […]

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 Mark Vernon: Wellbeing [14:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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 […]

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