PODULARITY

Simon Winder has just published a personal and highly entertaining history of Germany and the Germans. In his preface to Germania, he writes:
“[this] is an attempt to tell the story of the Germans starting from their notional origins in the sort of forests enjoyed by gnomes and heroes and ending at the time of […]

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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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Here’s an intriguing question to start the new year with.
Last autumn I interviewed Marcus Chown about his latest popular science title, We Need to Talk about Kelvin. At the end of the interview (which you can find here), we made this short video in which Marcus tackled a question famously posed by the Italian physicist, […]

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On Wednesday 16th December 2009, Trafalgar Square will host a free feast of biblical proportions: a modern day Feeding the 5000. In this short film, Tristram Stuart, author of Waste, explains the problem – and outlines some solutions.

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This is the second in an occasional series in which I ask an interviewee three questions - no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either.
This time my guest is writer, Robert Rowland Smith, who has just published a book entitled Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life. I rather like the exclamation mark and […]

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Robert Ferguson visited London from his home in Oslo earlier this week and I interviewed him at his publisher’s offices for the Blackwells podcast which will go out tomorrow.
Robert has just published a major new history of the Viking age called The Hammer and the Cross, in which he says he wants to “restore the […]

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Click on the video below to hear Dan Cruickshank talking about his latest book, The Secrets of Georgian London. As Frances Wilson succinctly put it in her Times review:
“Eighteenth-century London contained more prostitutes than anywhere else in Europe. In this fascinating account of sex and the Georgian city, Dan Cruickshank suggests that one woman in […]

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Here’s the first of the videos I’ve made with Faber archivist, Robert Brown. In it, he introduces us to a wartime cookery book, Meat Dishes without Coupons, which contains recipes only fit for the strongest of modern stomachs.
You may sense a bad pun lurking in the title above. Click on the video below to discover […]

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This is the first in a new series of films in which (you may have guessed this from the title) I ask an author three questions on camera. No tricks or traps, but no forewarning either.
My first guest is philosopher Julian Baggini, who has appeared on Podularity before.
Click below to see how he responded to […]

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Atlantic Books have just published Vic Reeves’ Vast Book of World Knowledge, and last Tuesday I visited him at home in Kent to make this short film. I put up a rough cut last week; now here is the final version:

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