http://podularity.com Authors and books. In a pod. Fri, 11 May 2012 12:03:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Podularity is a regular on-line books programme that features interviews with writers in a wide variety of genres. Join host, George Miller, in conversation with novelists, poets and authors of non-fiction. Think of it as an on-going literary festival on-line. George Miller no George Miller podulari@podularity.com podulari@podularity.com (George Miller) 2007-2010 The on-line books programme literature, books, writing, authors http://podularity.com/wp-content/images/podularity_logo.jpg http://podularity.com http://podularity.com/2012/05/09/merchants-of-culture-new-edition-for-a-changing-industry/ http://podularity.com/2012/05/09/merchants-of-culture-new-edition-for-a-changing-industry/#comments Wed, 09 May 2012 15:28:32 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=552 http://podularity.com/2012/05/09/merchants-of-culture-new-edition-for-a-changing-industry/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2012/03/27/consumption-and-its-consequences-rethinking-our-relationship-to-the-material-world/ http://podularity.com/2012/03/27/consumption-and-its-consequences-rethinking-our-relationship-to-the-material-world/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:36:56 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=517 http://podularity.com/2012/03/27/consumption-and-its-consequences-rethinking-our-relationship-to-the-material-world/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2012/03/15/wikileaks-significant-symptomatic-but-not-game-changing/ http://podularity.com/2012/03/15/wikileaks-significant-symptomatic-but-not-game-changing/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:51:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=492 http://podularity.com/2012/03/15/wikileaks-significant-symptomatic-but-not-game-changing/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2012/03/14/the-olympic-spirit-ancient-style/ http://podularity.com/2012/03/14/the-olympic-spirit-ancient-style/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:51:41 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=482 http://podularity.com/2012/03/14/the-olympic-spirit-ancient-style/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2012/03/05/robin-dunbar-on-the-science-of-love/ http://podularity.com/2012/03/05/robin-dunbar-on-the-science-of-love/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:53:14 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=475 http://podularity.com/2012/03/05/robin-dunbar-on-the-science-of-love/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2012/03/02/jon-agar-science-in-the-twentieth-century-and-beyond/ http://podularity.com/2012/03/02/jon-agar-science-in-the-twentieth-century-and-beyond/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:16:08 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=444 http://podularity.com/2012/03/02/jon-agar-science-in-the-twentieth-century-and-beyond/feed/ 2 http://podularity.com/2012/02/20/ash-amin-on-land-of-strangers/ http://podularity.com/2012/02/20/ash-amin-on-land-of-strangers/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:04:40 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/?p=382 http://podularity.com/2012/02/20/ash-amin-on-land-of-strangers/feed/ 1 "I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn't require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly i... "I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn't require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age." My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of togetherness, one in which a certain kind of “civility of indifference to difference” can be cultivated. And it looks at how this attitude might play out in reality at the level of the state but also in our habits of daily living, through which we might become unperturbed by the presence of the stranger in our midst - in other words, ways in which a different politics of the stranger may be forged. To listen to the complete interview, click here. To listen to extracts, choose from the links below: 1. In the introduction, Ash Amin talks of the "urgency of the political moment". I began by asking him about the timeliness of Land of Strangers. To listen, click here. 2. "Aversion" is frequently cited in the book as a pervasive attitude to strangers. I asked Ash Amin to expand on this here. 3. The metaphor of the drawbridge also occurs more than once; keeping out those that society deems undesirable. How does it operate? Click here. 4. Land of Strangers is a work of analysis but also a polemic. I asked why. Click here. 5. Is "stranger" a rather shifting term? Click here 6. Was it 9/11 which marked the radical shift from the multicultural politics of the 1990s to the new era in which we find ourselves? Click here. 7. If the prevailing humanist discourse is inadequate to create a new kind of politics of integration, as Land of Strangers argues, what other options are available? Click here. 8. Does "phenotypical racism" as described in the book offer a highly pessimistic analysis of the human condition? Click here. 9. Is a return to economic stability a necessary condition for the kind of politics of integration that Ash Amin wishes to see? Click here. 10. How big an obstacle is the lack of a compelling counter-narrative to the neo-liberal/catastrophist one? Click here.       George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/12/07/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-greece-in-chaos/ http://podularity.com/2011/12/07/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-greece-in-chaos/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:30:42 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/12/07/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-greece-in-chaos/ http://podularity.com/2011/12/07/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-greece-in-chaos/feed/ 0 Athens,austerity,finanacial crisis,Greece,Le Monde diplomatique In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I speak to Noëlle Burgi about the heavy toll that austerity measures are exacting in her homeland, Greece. - Noëlle, who is a researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Sciences Politique (... In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I speak to Noëlle Burgi about the heavy toll that austerity measures are exacting in her homeland, Greece. Noëlle, who is a researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Sciences Politique (CESSP), Sorbonne University, Paris, describes Athens and Thessaloniki as "dying cities", in which drug use, mental health problems, domestic violence and prostitution are all on the increase. Not least of the Greeks' problems is a feeling of powerlessness as their welfare state becomes hollowed out and their household incomes plummet. To listen to the interview, click here. And to read Noëlle Burgi's article, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/11/09/following-the-footsteps-of-the-psyche-an-interview-with-carol-gilligan/ http://podularity.com/2011/11/09/following-the-footsteps-of-the-psyche-an-interview-with-carol-gilligan/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:45:45 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/11/09/following-the-footsteps-of-the-psyche-an-interview-with-carol-gilligan/ http://podularity.com/2011/11/09/following-the-footsteps-of-the-psyche-an-interview-with-carol-gilligan/feed/ 0 In September I met up with Carol Gilligan at Polity's offices in Cambridge to record this two-part interview in which she talked about her childhood, writing her landmark study In a Different Voice (1982), her most recent book Joining the Resistance, In September I met up with Carol Gilligan at Polity's offices in Cambridge to record this two-part interview in which she talked about her childhood, writing her landmark study In a Different Voice (1982), her most recent book Joining the Resistance, and her thoughts on what has been achieved in the three decades since In a Different Voice appeared. She also talks about what remains to be done to achieve a post-patriarchal world in which individuals' voices are both heard and respected. "I am a woman who listens," Carol writes in her new book. That is certainly true. She is also a woman who speaks eloquently and passionately about the ideas that animate her, often linking them in to her own life experiences. To listen to part 1 of the interview, click here. And for part 2, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/10/17/joanna-nadin-queen-of-teen/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/17/joanna-nadin-queen-of-teen/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:14:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/10/17/joanna-nadin-queen-of-teen/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/17/joanna-nadin-queen-of-teen/feed/ 0 My daughters, Livi and Abby, interviewed Joanna Nadin (far right below, with fellow authors after the Queens of Teen event) before her talk at the Bath Children's Literature Festival last month. Click here to listen to the interview. [9:56] My daughters, Livi and Abby, interviewed Joanna Nadin (far right below, with fellow authors after the Queens of Teen event) before her talk at the Bath Children's Literature Festival last month. Click here to listen to the interview. [9:56] George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/10/12/tim-jeal-on-the-explorers-of-the-nile/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/12/tim-jeal-on-the-explorers-of-the-nile/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:29:40 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/10/12/tim-jeal-on-the-explorers-of-the-nile/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/12/tim-jeal-on-the-explorers-of-the-nile/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/10/06/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-the-deal-maker-not-world-shaker/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/06/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-the-deal-maker-not-world-shaker/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:57:45 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/10/06/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-the-deal-maker-not-world-shaker/ http://podularity.com/2011/10/06/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-the-deal-maker-not-world-shaker/feed/ 3 In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique I talk to Eric Alterman about his piece on Barack Obama in the October edition of the paper, entitled "The compromiser-in-chief". - Eric's piece begins with a reminder of the Mario Cuomo quote: "campai... In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique I talk to Eric Alterman about his piece on Barack Obama in the October edition of the paper, entitled "The compromiser-in-chief". Eric's piece begins with a reminder of the Mario Cuomo quote: "campaign in poetry but govern in prose" and goes on to look at the ways in which Obama's record is looking decidedly prosaic. "Deal-maker not world-shaker" is Alterman's verdict, and the terms of the deals being made in Washington are increasingly being set by the Republicans. I began by asking Eric about the disappointment felt by those who elected a president who promised "bold and swift" action. To listen to the podcast, click here. Complete archive of LMD podcasts here. Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute and the World Policy Institute. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/09/22/roger-luckhurst-on-dracula/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/22/roger-luckhurst-on-dracula/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:47:47 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/22/roger-luckhurst-on-dracula/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/22/roger-luckhurst-on-dracula/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/09/15/the-oxford-textbook-of-medicine/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/15/the-oxford-textbook-of-medicine/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:04:31 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/15/the-oxford-textbook-of-medicine/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/15/the-oxford-textbook-of-medicine/feed/ 0 Earlier this year, just before Oxford University Press's flagship medical title, the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, went online for the first time, I met all three editors of the book and interviewed them about it. Earlier this year, just before Oxford University Press's flagship medical title, the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, went online for the first time, I met all three editors of the book and interviewed them about it. The book attempts no less than a full digest of the current state of medical knowledge, and is therefore a huge - and hugely ambitious - undertaking. I was keen to find out more about the values which underpinned the book and also the practical side - how is it possible to stay on top of such a vast and ever-changing field, what does the future hold for the book now that it has gone online, and what are the pleasures of working on such a long-term project? Though the book is intended primarily for professionals, it also finds its way into other contexts; it's often cited in courts of law, for example. So I hope that this interview will be of interest to medics and non-medics alike. After all, it's far from unlikely that at some point in your life a medic will refer to this book with reference to your own health care... Key to speakers' initials: DAW - David A. Warrell, Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine and Honorary Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford TMC - Timothy M. Cox, Professor of Medicine, University of Cambridge; Honorary Consultant Physician, Addenbrooke's Hospital. Cambridge JDF - John D. Firth, Consultant Physician and Nephrologist, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge 1. First I asked about the origins of the book and the principles on which it was founded (DAW). Click here to listen to David Warrell's answer. 2. What is the audience for the book and how is that reflected in its content? (JDF, DAW) Click here 3. What sort of contributors have the editors recruited to the project? (JDF, TMC) Click here 4. What brief do the contributors get before they write their chapters? (JDF, DAW) Click here 5. What does the move online mean for the Oxford Textbook of Medicine and how will the book maintain its relevance? (JDF, DAW) Click here 6.  Do the editors need to be constantly aware of the need to balance the theory and practice of medicine in their presentation of it in the textbook? (JDF, DAW, TMC) Click here 7.  Medicine is practiced in very different economic, political and cultural contexts around the globe. How does the Textbook cope with that fact? (JDF, DAW) Click here 8. Does complementary medicine belong in a book on evidence-based medicine? (TMC) Click here 9. The chapter on psychiatry says explicitly that some readers may find it an unnecessary add-on. Clearly this is not a view shared by the book's editors. (TMC, DAW) Click here 10. I remarked that successive editions of the book must have reflected the changing role of the physician over the past decades... (TMC) Click here 11. ... and also of course changes in human behaviour. (TMC) Click here 12. I wondered whether in a sense the whole book was a reflection of the editors' view of what the ideal physician would be like. (JDF, DAW) Click here 13. How will updates happen now that the book is available online? (JDF) Click here 14. Is there a danger that, with all the advances in contemporary medicine, the Textbook may cease to be able to keep up with progress? (JDF, DAW) Click here 15. Finally I asked all three editors for their personal impressions of being an editor of this flagship publication. (TMC, JDF, DAW) Click here George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/09/11/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/11/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:25:27 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/11/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/11/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/09/10/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-becoming-dickens/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/10/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-becoming-dickens/#comments Sat, 10 Sep 2011 08:45:09 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/10/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-becoming-dickens/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/10/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-becoming-dickens/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/09/08/martin-kemp-christ-to-coke-how-image-becomes-icon/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/08/martin-kemp-christ-to-coke-how-image-becomes-icon/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:10:49 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/08/martin-kemp-christ-to-coke-how-image-becomes-icon/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/08/martin-kemp-christ-to-coke-how-image-becomes-icon/feed/ 0 Next month, renowned art historian Martin Kemp publishes Christ to Coke, a richly ilustrated exploration of how eleven images, from the face to Christ to the Coke bottle, have become icons. Along the way, he also investigates the stories of the cross, Next month, renowned art historian Martin Kemp publishes Christ to Coke, a richly ilustrated exploration of how eleven images, from the face to Christ to the Coke bottle, have become icons. Along the way, he also investigates the stories of the cross, the Mona Lisa, the double helix and Che Guevara, inter al. 1. When I interviewed Martin about the book, I began by asking him to define what he meant by an icon. [Click here to listen to extract.] 2. Next I asked him to sketch out the process by which an image turned into an icon. [Click here] 3. How, I wondered, did he select the eleven images that he features in the book? [Click here] 4. Why was Christ the first image he selected? Did that mean the ancient world didn't produce other icons with staying power? [Click here] 5. The image of Christ had to overcome obstacles in order to become an icon. Martin Kemp explains these here. [Click here] 6. In many instances, the icon draws some of its power from its backstory. How does this work? [Click here] 7. What part do chance and accidents play in an image becoming an icon? [Click here] 8. Martin Kemp reflects on the great emotional power invested in the Stars and Stripes as an icon. [Click here] 9. All the icons in the book share at least one common characteristic: their ability to retain power. [Click here] 10. In our image-saturated visual culture today, does Martin Kemp think it has become harder for an image to make the transition to icon? [Click here] 11. In terms of subject matter, this book marks something of a departure for Martin as a writer. He explains this here. [Click here] 12. From the world of modern science, Martin Kemp chose two icons:  the double helix and 'e = mc2'. Does the great complexity of science mean that it is much harder for it to generate icons? [Click here] George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/09/05/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-rise-of-europes-far-right/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/05/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-rise-of-europes-far-right/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 22:27:43 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/05/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-rise-of-europes-far-right/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/05/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-rise-of-europes-far-right/feed/ 0 “If they [far-right parties] can actually get their act together and leave specific ideological questions behind them, they can form a bloc in the European Union, get access to public money, and take advantage of a growing anti-elite and growing anti-E... “If they [far-right parties] can actually get their act together and leave specific ideological questions behind them, they can form a bloc in the European Union, get access to public money, and take advantage of a growing anti-elite and growing anti-European Union sentiment that's felt by vast sections of European populaces.” - K. Biswas In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to journalist and author K. Biswas about the fortunes of Europe's far-right populist parties, many of which have entered mainstream politics in ways unthinkable a decade ago. We discuss the role of the media and of leadership in their rise, and also how to interpret July's tragic events in Norway in the context of far-right politics. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/the-concise-oxford-english-dictionary-a-short-history/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/the-concise-oxford-english-dictionary-a-short-history/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:13:31 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/the-concise-oxford-english-dictionary-a-short-history/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/the-concise-oxford-english-dictionary-a-short-history/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/polity-podcasts-sylvia-walby-the-future-of-feminism/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/polity-podcasts-sylvia-walby-the-future-of-feminism/#comments Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:08:09 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/polity-podcasts-sylvia-walby-the-future-of-feminism/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/02/polity-podcasts-sylvia-walby-the-future-of-feminism/feed/ 1 equality,feminism,gender,globalization,human rights Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Gender Relations at Lancaster University. Her publications include Theorizing Patriarchy, Globalization and Inequalities, and Gender Transformations. - Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Gender Relations at Lancaster University. Her publications include Theorizing Patriarchy, Globalization and Inequalities, and Gender Transformations. I interviewed her recently about her latest book, The Future of Feminism, described by a reviewer as "[a] balanced and thoughtful assessment of the changes feminism has wrought and the challenges it faces". 1. I began by asking her if she could understand the forces and pressures that created the widespread assumption that we are living in a post-feminist age. [Click here] 2. In her book, Sylvia Walby discusses how feminism has changed form from its early days. I asked her to give me a tour d'horizon of those variant forms here. [Click here] 3. Sylvia Walby contends that the "depth" of a democracy is critical to determining how successfully a feminist agenda can be pursued within it. I asked her to expand on this notion here. [Click here] 4. Despite progress, violence against women remains a problem in many different contexts. Given the range of different interventions - global human rights, international co-ordination, local grassroots - I asked Sylvia Walby if it was possible to assess their relative effectiveness. [Click here] 5. If Sylvia Walby had been asked twenty years ago about where she thought the feminist agenda would be today, how accurate would her assessment have been? [Click here] 6. "Promising start, but major challenges ahead" is the heading of one of the final sections of the book. How optimistic is Sylvia Walby that those challenges can be met? [Click here] To listen to the complete interview, click here. To watch a short video about the book, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/09/01/polity-podcasts-john-urry-climate-change-and-society/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/01/polity-podcasts-john-urry-climate-change-and-society/#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:36:42 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/09/01/polity-podcasts-john-urry-climate-change-and-society/ http://podularity.com/2011/09/01/polity-podcasts-john-urry-climate-change-and-society/feed/ 0 climate change,neoliberalism,sociology John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His many publications include Sociology Beyond Society and After the Car. - I met him recently in Lancaster to talk to him about his latest book, Climate Change and Society, John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His many publications include Sociology Beyond Society and After the Car. I met him recently in Lancaster to talk to him about his latest book, Climate Change and Society, which explores the significance of human behaviour for understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and responding to those impacts. 1. I began by asking him about his central thesis, that sociology ought to replace economics as the main discourse for understanding anthropogenic climate change. [Click here] 2. Next I asked about whether understanding how complex systems functioned in the past and present can provide any guidance to the future. [Click here] "Sociology can bring out the enduring social and economic conflicts which inhibit change..." 3. John Urry reflects on how sociology can sharpen our understanding the vested interests of the "carbon military-industrial complex" and how those interests constrain responses to climate change. [Click here] 4. In Climate Change and Society, John Urry writes that we shall all have to become futurologists by necessity. I asked him about the difficulty of this, given that we are dealing with two highly complex systems: the climate and human societies. [Click here] "There is a very good reason why no future is good..." 5. John Urry on the "narrowed range of possibilities" that the twentieth century bequeathed the twenty-first. [Click here] To watch a short video about the book, click here. To listen to the complete interview, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/07/28/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-tale-of-a-spark-plug/ http://podularity.com/2011/07/28/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-tale-of-a-spark-plug/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 23:48:07 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/07/28/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-tale-of-a-spark-plug/ http://podularity.com/2011/07/28/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-the-tale-of-a-spark-plug/feed/ 0 In the August edition of Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to John R MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of books including The Selling of ‘Free Trade’: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy, In the August edition of Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to John R MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of books including The Selling of ‘Free Trade’: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy,about the impact Nafta has had on American jobs and communities since it came into effect in 1994. To date an estimated two and a half million US workers are unemployed as a result of it. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/07/10/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-when-international-law-is-found-wanting/ http://podularity.com/2011/07/10/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-when-international-law-is-found-wanting/#comments Sun, 10 Jul 2011 21:46:22 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/07/10/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-when-international-law-is-found-wanting/ http://podularity.com/2011/07/10/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-when-international-law-is-found-wanting/feed/ 0 "International law should certainly be an important strand in any debate about going to war, but it should not dominate and crowd out discussions about morality, about prudence, about efficacy, and most of all about consequences." - "International law should certainly be an important strand in any debate about going to war, but it should not dominate and crowd out discussions about morality, about prudence, about efficacy, and most of all about consequences." In the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique, New York-based civil rights lawyer Chase Madar writes about how far we have drifted from the post-war vision of international law as an instrument for regulating and upholding a peaceful world order. In his analysis, international law has in fact become what he calls "a supple instrument for war", as evinced most recently in the case of international intervention in Libya. In this interview for Le Monde diplomatique he explains his reasoning to George Miller. To listen, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/06/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-2011-a-year-of-awakening-for-the-uk/ http://podularity.com/2011/06/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-2011-a-year-of-awakening-for-the-uk/#comments Sat, 04 Jun 2011 17:43:45 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/06/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-2011-a-year-of-awakening-for-the-uk/ http://podularity.com/2011/06/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-2011-a-year-of-awakening-for-the-uk/feed/ 0 Le Monde diplomatique,protest,spending cuts,UK politics In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller interviews Tony Wood, deputy editor of the New Left Review, about the wave of protests sparked by the UK coalition government's planned £80bn public spending cuts. - As public anger grows, In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller interviews Tony Wood, deputy editor of the New Left Review, about the wave of protests sparked by the UK coalition government's planned £80bn public spending cuts. As public anger grows, are we on the brink of the biggest public engagement with politics since the miners' strike of the mid-1980s? To listen to the interview, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/05/17/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-end-of-the-line-for-assad/ http://podularity.com/2011/05/17/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-end-of-the-line-for-assad/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 15:39:06 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/05/17/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-end-of-the-line-for-assad/ http://podularity.com/2011/05/17/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-end-of-the-line-for-assad/feed/ 0 In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller speaks to journalist and Middle East specialist Patrick Seale about the current unrest in Syria and the chances of survival for the Assad dynasty, In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller speaks to journalist and Middle East specialist Patrick Seale about the current unrest in Syria and the chances of survival for the Assad dynasty, which has ruled the country for four decades. To listen to the interview, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/05/06/tales-from-facebook-iii/ http://podularity.com/2011/05/06/tales-from-facebook-iii/#comments Fri, 06 May 2011 13:19:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/05/06/tales-from-facebook-iii/ http://podularity.com/2011/05/06/tales-from-facebook-iii/feed/ 0 Facebook,social media Here's a transcript of a recent interview I did with Daniel Miller about his new book, Tales from Facebook, for Polity. (If you would prefer to listen to the interview, you will find it here.) George Miller: - Hello and welcome to this, Here's a transcript of a recent interview I did with Daniel Miller about his new book, Tales from Facebook, for Polity. (If you would prefer to listen to the interview, you will find it here.) George Miller: Hello and welcome to this, the fifth... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/04/19/what-is-the-oed-the-editor-explains/ http://podularity.com/2011/04/19/what-is-the-oed-the-editor-explains/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:46:52 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/04/19/what-is-the-oed-the-editor-explains/ http://podularity.com/2011/04/19/what-is-the-oed-the-editor-explains/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/04/17/kat-banyard-on-the-equality-illusion/ http://podularity.com/2011/04/17/kat-banyard-on-the-equality-illusion/#comments Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:25:21 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/04/17/kat-banyard-on-the-equality-illusion/ http://podularity.com/2011/04/17/kat-banyard-on-the-equality-illusion/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/03/17/tales-from-facebook-ii/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/17/tales-from-facebook-ii/#comments Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:06:46 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/03/17/tales-from-facebook-ii/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/17/tales-from-facebook-ii/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/03/16/tales-from-facebook/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/16/tales-from-facebook/#comments Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:16:47 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/03/16/tales-from-facebook/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/16/tales-from-facebook/feed/ 1 Daniel Miller is professor of material culture at University College London. His new book, Tales from Facebook (Polity, 2011) looks at the impacts of being a Facebook user on people's everyday  lives. - Drawing his examples from an in-depth study of F... Daniel Miller is professor of material culture at University College London. His new book, Tales from Facebook (Polity, 2011) looks at the impacts of being a Facebook user on people's everyday  lives. Drawing his examples from an in-depth study of Facebook users in Trinidad, the book is in part a sequence of detailed pen-portraits of a dozen individuals whose habits he examined. What emerges is a picture more fascinating and more complex than the easy media generalizations about Facebook's impact on society. To listen to my complete interview with Daniel Miller click here. To listen to shorter sections of the interview, click on the links which interest you below. 1. Why did you focus on Trinidadian Facebook users, rather than users in London, New York or Sydney? Click here. 2. You describe Facebook as being uncannily well-suited to Trinidadian culture. In what ways? Click here. 3. How did you go about researching something as personal as how people use Facebook? Click here. 4. What do you make of the charge that Facebook is just a waste of time? Click here. 5. Much of the book concerns Facebook's effect on relations between men and women. So is there an erotics of Facebook? Click here. 6. You suggest that Facebook may in fact be a conservative force. Can you explain what you mean by this? Click here. 7. Finally, do you have any predictions as to how Facebook will develop in the future? Click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/03/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-gilbert-achcar-on-the-muslim-brotherhood/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-gilbert-achcar-on-the-muslim-brotherhood/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:56:13 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/03/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-gilbert-achcar-on-the-muslim-brotherhood/ http://podularity.com/2011/03/04/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-gilbert-achcar-on-the-muslim-brotherhood/feed/ 0 In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to Gilbert Achcar of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London about his article in the latest issue of the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood and the role they might play i... In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to Gilbert Achcar of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London about his article in the latest issue of the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood and the role they might play in Egypt's "orderly transition" to a new order. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/01/18/discoveries-sarah-bakewell-on-irmgard-keun/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/18/discoveries-sarah-bakewell-on-irmgard-keun/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:40:04 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/18/discoveries-sarah-bakewell-on-irmgard-keun/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/18/discoveries-sarah-bakewell-on-irmgard-keun/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/01/17/46-elephants-on-the-edge/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/17/46-elephants-on-the-edge/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:43:42 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/17/46-elephants-on-the-edge/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/17/46-elephants-on-the-edge/feed/ 2   "Elephants are not treated much differently now than they were in the mid-eighteenth century: they are objects of awe and conservation, yet legally hunted, made captive, abused, and forced to labor for human gain.   "Elephants are not treated much differently now than they were in the mid-eighteenth century: they are objects of awe and conservation, yet legally hunted, made captive, abused, and forced to labor for human gain. What then has research and learning served?" In Elephants on the Edge, Gay Bradshaw makes an eloquent but always scientifically reasoned plea on behalf of the elephant, "for if we fail to act on what we know, we will lose them, and more". It's not just a call for better conservation measures and an end to the culling of an animal listed as "endangered" on the International Union of the Conservation of Nature Red List in 2008. It's an argument for expanding our notion of moral community to include animals, not least the sociable, communicative, intelligent elephant. "This book", one reviewer wrote, "opens the door into the soul of the elephant" and it is a remarkable world which we glimpse through that door. The book has also been highly praised by writers as diverse as Peter Singer, Desmond Tutu, J.M. Coetzee and Tim Flannery. Listen to the podcast by clicking on the link above and visit the website of the Kerulos Center in Oregon, which Gay directs, to learn about some of the inspiring projects they are running. IUCN Assessment, 2008 George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/01/12/whose-crisis-whose-future/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/12/whose-crisis-whose-future/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:01:37 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/12/whose-crisis-whose-future/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/12/whose-crisis-whose-future/feed/ 0 environment,financial crisis,poverty,social movements Susan George is an internationally renowned political scientist and author of over a dozen widely translated books. She was born in the Midwest during the Great Depression, but moved to France in the 1960s and subsequently took French citizenship. Susan George is an internationally renowned political scientist and author of over a dozen widely translated books. She was born in the Midwest during the Great Depression, but moved to France in the 1960s and subsequently took French citizenship. She still lives in Paris. Susan George achieved prominence in 1976 with her first ground-breaking book, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reason for World Hunger (available as a free download via this link). After hunger she went on to study debt and poverty, as reflected in books such as The Debt Boomerang and A Fate Worse than Debt. George is president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, an international network of scholar-activists committed to social change. Before we talked about her new book on our current predicament, Whose Crisis, Whose Future?, I asked her about the values she grew up with. Had the great collective effort made by the US in World War Two been particularly influential? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] Turning to her new book, I asked Susan to outline what her new book was about. Did the crisis of the title go beyond the current financial crisis? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] Besides diagnosing the problem, does the book also put forward solutions? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] The diagrams below depict, first, the status quo in Susan George's analysis, with finance at the centre of everything and the environment only a peripheral concern, and second, the state which Susan George advocates we must move to, and quickly. Collaboration in order to bring about change is a key element of Susan George's prescription. She discusses the need for concerted action here. Already in her first book Susan George was saying "Study the rich, not the poor" and she is saying it still. I asked her why that was so and why the message still needed repeating. [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] I asked Susan why she thought that people voted for - and believed in - governments that didn't have their best interests at heart. This took us to a discussion of her previous book, Hijacking America and the role of "money, management and media" in shaping our political culture and the shortcomings of the left. [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] The final question: does Susan George believe we can save the planet while neoliberal capitalism remains the dominant international system? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] If you would like to listen to the complete interview, you can click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2011/01/06/one-minute-word-histories-no3-twitterati/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/06/one-minute-word-histories-no3-twitterati/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:11:37 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/06/one-minute-word-histories-no3-twitterati/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/06/one-minute-word-histories-no3-twitterati/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/one-minute-word-histories-no2-twitterati/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/one-minute-word-histories-no2-twitterati/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:37:00 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/one-minute-word-histories-no2-twitterati/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/one-minute-word-histories-no2-twitterati/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/daljit-nagra-on-the-whoosh-of-poetry/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/daljit-nagra-on-the-whoosh-of-poetry/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:31:33 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/daljit-nagra-on-the-whoosh-of-poetry/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/05/daljit-nagra-on-the-whoosh-of-poetry/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/01/04/one-minute-word-histories-no1-avatar/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/04/one-minute-word-histories-no1-avatar/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:16:42 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/04/one-minute-word-histories-no1-avatar/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/04/one-minute-word-histories-no1-avatar/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2011/01/02/6-books-of-the-year-catherine-arnold/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/02/6-books-of-the-year-catherine-arnold/#comments Sun, 02 Jan 2011 11:55:04 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2011/01/02/6-books-of-the-year-catherine-arnold/ http://podularity.com/2011/01/02/6-books-of-the-year-catherine-arnold/feed/ 0 Our final guest who shares the highlights of her past twelve months of reading is historian Catherine Arnold. - I first interviewed Catherine about the second book in her London trilogy, which explores the darker aspects of the city's past, Our final guest who shares the highlights of her past twelve months of reading is historian Catherine Arnold. I first interviewed Catherine about the second book in her London trilogy, which explores the darker aspects of the city's past, Bedlam: London and its Mad. You can hear the interview here. (The first volume of the series, as yet unpodcasted, is Necropolis: London and its Dead.) More recently, we met to talk about her latest book, City of Sin: London and its Vices. You can listen to that here.  Here are Catherine's choices from her 2010 reading: Looking back at the books which I've enjoyed over the past year reveals that history, personal, national and social, has been much on my mind. I'm currently researching a book about London and crime, and to this end I've particularly enjoyed Newgate, London's Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday, and Tyburn, London's Fatal Tree (Alan Brooke and David Brandon), both from the History Press (Sutton). Gripping accounts of two of the darkest aspects of London life. As I have also become something of an expert on the sins of the flesh, I highly recommend Paul Willetts' Members Only (Profile Books), a highly entertaining account of the life and times of Paul Raymond. Raymond was Mr Soho, and his life story reflected the changing nature of London's naughtiest neighbourhood and its transformation from sleazy clubland to sanitized tourist trap. A mixture of the personal and political side of history is one of the most compelling aspects of Philippa Gregory's writing, and this year I've particularly enjoyed catching up on her work, particularly The Queen's Fool (about a young Jewish girl at the court of Mary Tudor) and The White Queen  (both Simon and Schuster) which sees Miss Gregory heading in a slightly different direction, towards the Plantagenets and their extended, squabbling families. Families, extended, eccentric and otherwise are the focus of two memoirs which have intrigued and entranced me. Families, extended, eccentric and otherwise are the focus of two memoirs which have intrigued and entranced me. Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, about growing up in a dotty vicarage on the Welsh Borders, has been re-issued this year with an introduction by her daughter. Another unusual family feature in Mirand Seymour's memoir, In My Father's House (Simon and Schuster) about Miranda's childhood in a rambling Nottinghamshire mansion with her charming but infuriating father, a motorcycle fanatic and late convert to homosexuality, and her tremendously loyal and long-suffering mother. Finally, for anyone looking for a diverting but thought-provoking read, I'd recommend This Charming Man by Maria Keyes which ventures boldy into some dark territory (domestic violence and alcoholism) whilst maintaining her distinctive warm, witty tones - she's the slightly dotty Irish best friend every girl needs. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/12/21/5-books-of-the-year-francis-spufford/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/21/5-books-of-the-year-francis-spufford/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:31:36 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/12/21/5-books-of-the-year-francis-spufford/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/21/5-books-of-the-year-francis-spufford/feed/ 0 Books of the Year 2010 Our guest selector of his Books of the Year today is Francis Spufford. Earlier this year Francis published the genre-defying Red Plenty. As the book's website says: "Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. Our guest selector of his Books of the Year today is Francis Spufford. Earlier this year Francis published the genre-defying Red Plenty. As the book's website says: "Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. It tells a true story, but it tells it as a story. Whatever you call it, it's about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it's about the last and cleverest version of the idea - central planning via cybernetics - and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed." You can  listen to my interview with Frances by clicking here. Here are his Books of the Year: I have been thinking a lot this year about the interesting edges and boundary zones of fiction, and one of the books that has intrigued me most has been Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream (Harper Voyager, £8.99). Depending how you think about it, this could be either a historical novel with science fiction threaded through it, or a science fiction novel that happens to be largely set in Renaissance Italy. But in fact it's a fusion of the two into something new and hard to categorise. It takes a meticulous, sympathetic recreation of Galileo's times, and then pulls back from it into a much larger chronological landscape, to produce a profound and hopeful meditation on science and human history. It contains, in twenty or so pages, a hypnotic fly-through of the course of all physics from Galileo to the present which would qualify as the single best piece of non-fiction science writing I've ever read - and then glides on imperturbably, just as beautifully, into a description of the imaginary physics of the future. Altogether, in fact, it's a kind of grand contradiction of the idea that genre writing, whichever genre you decide this is, must necessarily offer predictable or second-hand sensations. I also really enjoyed Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (Fourth Estate). I'm a confirmed Chabon fan, and when he turns from fiction to journalism, as here, he retains his magically vivid way with a sentence, and his warmth of tone. This is a collection about being a father; or more accurately, about the attempt to turn one's shambolic, not-wholly-reliable, self-indulgent male self into a load-bearing support for someone else's happiness, preferably without falling into the patriarchal stiffness and distance of previous ways of doing it. There's a great piece on how annoying it is to be overpraised for managing any childcare at all, when the only standard it makes any sense to measure yourself against is the expected, unpraised competence of women - but it's almost all good, and I laughed the laughter of recognition over and over. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/12/14/4-books-of-the-year-andrew-mcconnell-stott/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/14/4-books-of-the-year-andrew-mcconnell-stott/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:20:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/12/14/4-books-of-the-year-andrew-mcconnell-stott/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/14/4-books-of-the-year-andrew-mcconnell-stott/feed/ 0 Books of the Year 2010 Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London's Evening Standard as "an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture." The world, however, Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London's Evening Standard as "an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture." The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009). The latter was praised by Simon Callow in the Guardian as a "great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life".  Jenny Uglow in the Observer called it a "fast-paced, rumbustious biography" and said:  "A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, 'Joey the Clown', into the limelight again." You can hear my interview with Andrew by clicking here. Andrew is currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Here is his selection of books he has enjoyed this year: I don't tend to read that many books-of-the-moment, because I'm usually researching something that demands full monogamy on pain of wreaking horrible revenge in the form of shocking biographical errors. At the moment, I'm working on failed Romantic poets, so I've been catching up on all the bad literature written between the French Revolution and the accession of Queen Victoria. There's quite a lot.When I do get a day off, I'm inevitably catching up. This year, for example, was the first time I've managed to read anything by Jonathan Lethem, John Le Carre, or Nicole Krauss. I even read Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. Two particular favourites from the catch-up pile were Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Struggling With DH Lawrence, probably the greatest work ever about not getting work done; and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, a graphic novel about the Whitechapel murders that was one of the most bizarre and chilling volumes of any genre I've read for quite some time. Of recent publications, I was particularly taken with two works of non-fiction: David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon, which is the kind of book I aspire to write - a swashbuckling adventure, told with a novelist's attention to character and plot - and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, drawing on more than a decade of research and standing as a monument to what good non-fiction can achieve. Finally, I loved the stories in Mary Gaitskill's Don't Cry. I don't think there is another writer in America capable of writing the emotions with such razor-sharp precision as Gaitskill. The way external phenomena transmute into internal emotional states in her work feels exactly like feeling - at least to me. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/12/10/3-books-of-the-year-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/10/3-books-of-the-year-louise-foxcroft/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:39:50 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/12/10/3-books-of-the-year-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/10/3-books-of-the-year-louise-foxcroft/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/12/06/2-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-knowles/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/06/2-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-knowles/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:56:45 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/12/06/2-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-knowles/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/06/2-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-knowles/feed/ 0 Books of the Year 2010,ghost stories Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. - Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to make lexicographical sleuths of us all. You can hear my recent interview with Elizabeth by clicking here. And here are her Books of the Year: Since I was thirteen and first encountered M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I have had an affection for his particular subsection of the genre. The protagonist (generally learned) is drawn through his speciality into an exploration which is as tempting as it is unwise. The background (a country library or monastic church) is solidly evoked, but a crack through which terror can enter opens and widens as too many questions are asked, and warning voices are ignored. Throughout his canon of short stories, James again and again successfully achieves what he himself said were the two most valuable ingredients: "the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo". It was exciting to find this year two books which in many ways take and remake the elements which allowed James to chill the blood of his Edwardian readership. In Susan Hill's The Small Hand, the narrator, a dealer in antiquarian books, follows a frightening path which leads him from a derelict garden in Sussex to the library of a Trappist monastery in France - and finally, back to the garden again, and the tragic secret at its heart. The places he visits and the people he meets are delineated with all Susan Hill's precision, and the unobtrusively scholarly background (with its explanation of how an unknown First Folio might be discovered) underpins evocative descriptions of the French countryside. Like many of James's protagonists he is making a journey of personal discovery which will change for ever how he sees the world around him. M. R. James thought that "a short haze of distance" was desirable for a ghost story, and recommended "not long before the war" as what he called "a very proper opening". Michelle Paver's Dark Matter opens in 1947, but looks back ten years to a disastrous scientific expedition to the High Arctic. Once more, a terrifying aspect of the supernatural emerges through convincingly evoked realities: the Arctic landscape itself (often lyrically described; Michelle Paver knows and loves the region), and the disparate group who make up the expedition. The world of the 1930s is convincingly evoked, not least through the voice of Jack (the main narrator) who sees the expedition as the only chance he will ever have to achieve the career in science that lack of money has put beyond him. By contrast Michelle Paver has used, to great effect, the background history of a real (though less disastrous) Oxford University Arctic Expedition: I loved the details of their taking fine china and champagne for Christmas, as well as more essential supplies. Paver's ghost, like Hill's, is properly in the James tradition: deeply wronged and insatiably vengeful. Both protagonists (like the unlucky Mr Wraxall in James's Count Magnus) go on when it might have been wiser to turn back. And yet there may not have been a real choice: as the Abbot in Hill's story says, for him "Everything is the better when faced." There is always a point at which turning back is not a real option. We are a century on from the Edwardian world of M. R. James's first stories, and both Hill and Paver show us more of the emotional lives of their characters than James would ever have done. But for me both these twenty-first century stories of the supernatural embody the key qualities of a fine ghost story which I first met in the writings of M. R. James. I shall keep them on my shelves, and re-read them pleasurably. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/12/03/1-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/03/1-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-speller/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:58:50 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/12/03/1-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2010/12/03/1-books-of-the-year-elizabeth-speller/feed/ 0 Books of the Year,World War I Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. - Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, was published to great acclaim earlier this year. You can hear my interview with her about the book here. Her second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, will appear in May 2011. Here are her choices (you'll find an interview with one of her selected authors, Madeleine Bunting, here): My greatest pleasure this year came from reading Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Read selectively, randomly or straight through (I did all three, in order) it is a wonderfully intelligent and lively journey through the landscape of the imagination between the wars. Harris informs but also has huge fun with the creativity, fantasy and sometimes spectacular self-indulgence of the period. I'm delighted to see publishers producing such visually beautiful but serious books to compete with e-publishing. It was announced yesterday that Harris has just won the Guardian prize for a first book. My second choice is more sombre: Six Weeks: the Short but Gallant Life of a British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel. This intimate history is taken from the letters and diaries of very ordinary young men. These are, in the main, not poets, not heroes, just soldiers buying expensive uniforms, being brave, bored and scared, doing their duty and trying (and often failing) to survive. They are also very young: there is one poignant account of a dying subaltern asking his puzzled corporal to tell Uppingham (his school) that he did "all right". Lewis-Stempel proves there is still more to know about that most terrible and most studied of conflicts. Finally, Madeleine Bunting's The Plot: A Biography of My Father's English Acre maps a personal and national biography on to one tiny piece of land in Yorkshire. About spirit of place and passionate attachment to land- it is memoir, history, and exploration of identity in one. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/11/29/tolstoys-bedtime-story/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/29/tolstoys-bedtime-story/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:03:32 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/11/29/tolstoys-bedtime-story/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/29/tolstoys-bedtime-story/feed/ 0 Russian literature,storytelling,Tolstoy I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man's death a century ago on 20 November 1910. - The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man's death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in which Tolstoy as a boy listens to his grandmother's blind storyteller recount a bedtime story... Click here for the reading. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/11/19/45-bloody-borderlands/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/19/45-bloody-borderlands/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:18:56 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/11/19/45-bloody-borderlands/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/19/45-bloody-borderlands/feed/ 0 drugs,feminicidio,Mexico,organized crime Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. - It's a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years - "repelled and compelled", as he puts it in the interview. - Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. It's a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years - "repelled and compelled", as he puts it in the interview. "Charismatic,complex, irresistible" is how he describes it in his new book, Amexica, which he discusses with me in this podcast. The US-Mexican border is the busiest such crossing in the world - a million people use it every day. And some of them are engaged in the trafficking - of people, arms, drugs, and dirty money- which gives this land its often brutally violent character. In the interview we talk about that violence, where it comes from, the ways in which it mirrors developments in the global economy and - perhaps most worryingly - the fact that "children are growing up along the border with this as their world". George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/11/18/exploring-word-histories/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/18/exploring-word-histories/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:45:52 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/11/18/exploring-word-histories/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/18/exploring-word-histories/feed/ 0 English language,etymology,lexicography Elizabeth Knowles is a historical lexicographer, which means that she researches the histories of words - how did they come to mean what they mean today and what journeys have they taken to arrive at these meanings? - Elizabeth Knowles is a historical lexicographer, which means that she researches the histories of words - how did they come to mean what they mean today and what journeys have they taken to arrive at these meanings? Elizabeth firmly believes that "there is no such thing as a dull word" and to prove it has written How to Read a Word in which she reveals some techniques you can use in order to undertake fascinating journeys of your own in the history of our language. What follows are extracts from an interview in which she talks to George Miller about some of the words she discusses in the book - and we put her to the test by asking her without any forewarning how to go about researching two unusual terms. Just click on the links below to listen to the extracts. And if these whet your appetite, a longer interview about the book can be heard by clicking here. Kate Moss famously once said: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." Here Elizabeth talks about tracing the connotations of the word "skinny" and its journey from a largely negative to a sometimes positive term for "thin". Some dictionaries contain "ghost words". Click here to hear Elizabeth explain what this intriguing category of words is. How did the word "strategery" enter the lexicon, and what are its chances of surviving and becoming accepted as a "real" word? Elizabeth discusses this here. We now decided to put Elizabeth's strategies (or should that be "strategeries"?) for exploring words' histories to the test and asked her about two interesting terms which are not covered in the book. She had no preparation for these questions, so what would she make of the challenge of tackling first the term "best boy" as found on film credits? Click here to find out. Our final challenge was the unusual term "font wrangler" found in among the credits in a book on typography. Where does she suggest the word sleuth should start in trying to get to the origin of this term? Click here to listen to her answer. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/11/17/the-fine-art-of-political-phrase-making/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/17/the-fine-art-of-political-phrase-making/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:38:52 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/11/17/the-fine-art-of-political-phrase-making/ http://podularity.com/2010/11/17/the-fine-art-of-political-phrase-making/feed/ 0 humour,quotations Antony Jay's Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations - entitled Lend Me Your Ears - is now in its fourth edition. To mark its publication, I went to interview Antony - perhaps best known as the co-author of the "Yes, Antony Jay's Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations - entitled Lend Me Your Ears - is now in its fourth edition. To mark its publication, I went to interview Antony - perhaps best known as the co-author of the "Yes, Minister" series - at his home in Somerset. You can hear the whole interview by clicking here; or you can listen to highlights by clicking on the links below. My first question was: what makes a quotation a political quotation? Click here. Politics is a field more prone than most to misquotation. Antony Jay discusses a notorious quote attributed to James Callaghan, which he never in fact said. Click here to find out what it was. What are the challenges of pinning down who said what in the modern world of 24-hour news, blogs and soundbites? Click here. Was there such a thing as a Golden Age of political phrase-making? Click here to hear Antony Jay's view. Who are some of Tony's personal favourites among the many thousands of writers and politicians in the book? Click here to find out. Finally I asked Tony about the origins of the phrase "Yes, Minister". Click here to discover which politician first recorded it. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/09/23/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-henry-mayhew/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/23/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-henry-mayhew/#comments Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:33:43 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/09/23/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-henry-mayhew/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/23/robert-douglas-fairhurst-on-henry-mayhew/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/09/19/francis-spufford-on-red-plenty/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/19/francis-spufford-on-red-plenty/#comments Sun, 19 Sep 2010 10:22:15 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/09/19/francis-spufford-on-red-plenty/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/19/francis-spufford-on-red-plenty/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/09/08/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-vicken-cheterian/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/08/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-vicken-cheterian/#comments Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:51:16 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/09/08/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-vicken-cheterian/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/08/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-vicken-cheterian/feed/ 0 In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to Geneva-based journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about recent events in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. - We talk about inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek pe... In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to Geneva-based journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about recent events in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. We talk about inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek peoples, the stance of Kyrgyzstan's neighbours, Russia and Uzbekistan, and the role which Cheterian believes the West should play in helping bring this former beacon of reformism and pro-Western attitudes back from the brink of chaos. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here. The LMD podcast archive is accessible here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/09/05/alex-callinicos-on-bonfire-of-illusions/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/05/alex-callinicos-on-bonfire-of-illusions/#comments Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:38:30 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/09/05/alex-callinicos-on-bonfire-of-illusions/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/05/alex-callinicos-on-bonfire-of-illusions/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/09/03/hilary-mantel-interview-revisited/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/03/hilary-mantel-interview-revisited/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:05:29 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/09/03/hilary-mantel-interview-revisited/ http://podularity.com/2010/09/03/hilary-mantel-interview-revisited/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/08/18/summer-reading-choices-john-grindrod/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/18/summer-reading-choices-john-grindrod/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:42:03 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/18/summer-reading-choices-john-grindrod/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/18/summer-reading-choices-john-grindrod/feed/ 0 summer reading John Grindrod was born in 1970 in Croydon and still lives in South London. Last year he published Shouting at the Telly, a book in which a host of comedians, actors and writers wrestle with such weighty issues as:  Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal... John Grindrod was born in 1970 in Croydon and still lives in South London. Last year he published Shouting at the Telly, a book in which a host of comedians, actors and writers wrestle with such weighty issues as:  Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal pervert? What does Howards' Way tell us about the eighties? How do you win America's Next Top Model? Which programmes do you only watch when you're off sick?  I spoke to John about the book for the Blackwell Online podcast when it came out. You can listen to it here. Here are John's holiday reading choices: The most obviously summery book I've been reading has been Travis Elborough's hilarious and hugely informative Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, a cultural history of seaside resorts and our national obsession with piers, paddling and penny arcades. Travis grew up in Worthing and his disdain for the place colours the book, but this is as much a reconciliation with his own seaside demons as it is a gloriously eccentric travelogue around England's largely Georgian and Victorian pleasure palaces. It's like Coast, only with lots more laughs, no wildlife and the best footnotes you'll ever read. I've also been slowly working my way through David Kynaston's mighty Family Britain: 1951-57. I've read most of the post-war histories going, but I think this series might be my favourite. There's so much charm and personal detail in these books, with diaries and letters illuminating everyday human stories alongside the major events of the times. How he's managed to marshal such a range of material is a mystery: for me, only Juliet Gardiner comes close in terms of the detail of research and enthusiasm for the subject matter. There's so many gems on every page, one of my favourites being his inclusion of Kenneth Tynan's review of The Deep Blue Sea in 1952: ‘Kenneth More is our best answer to Marlon Brando so far'. I have to mention Stewart Lee's beguiling How I Escaped My Certain Fate: the Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian. It's not the sort of book you'd ever expect to read by a comic, one where they mercilessly dissect three of their most popular shows and reveal the inspiration behind jokes and the telling of them. But if you were to pick a comedian who was up to the task, it would be Lee, who is famous for deconstructing his act on stage as he goes along. It's a unique marvel, an intelligent, provocative insight into a perverse and often self-sabotaging mind. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/08/15/summer-reading-choices-maria-mccann/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/15/summer-reading-choices-maria-mccann/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:02:47 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/15/summer-reading-choices-maria-mccann/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/15/summer-reading-choices-maria-mccann/feed/ 0 summer reading Maria McCann's first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, Maria McCann's first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it "taut and compelling" and the Independent a "tour de force". It is set in the West Country during the Restoration, when a reckoning has to be made of acts committed during the turbulent time that preceded it and well-kept family secrets begin to unravel. The paperback of The Wilding is out next month. You can listen to my interview with Maria in which she talk about writing the book by clicking here. And here is her Summer Reading selection: At some point in the eighties, working as a library assistant in London, I came across Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and the surreal image of a glass building floating away downriver has haunted me ever since. In those days, surrounded by library stock and with no work to do in the evenings, I read novels more or less when they came out, but nowadays my reading is much more chaotic and I'm forever catching up, so I was very late in reading Jack Maggs and only this summer did I get round to reading Theft. In each case, I was kicking myself for having waited so long and not thrown aside everything else for the joy of reading Peter Carey. Theft is the story of Michael ('Butcher') Boone, a once-fashionable painter from Bacchus Marsh, Australia, and Hugh Boone, his damaged brother. One of the things I love most about Carey is his tender interest in misfits and self-destructive types, something in which he oddly resembles Thomas Hardy. The Boones are good examples of this interest, Hugh as an 'idiot savant' and Butcher as a frustrated yet cunning man caught between his upbringing and his aspirations (which are also his fears). The relationship between these physically strong, emotionally repressed men is essentially loving but fraught with tensions, wittily explored in their parallel narratives. Butcher has massive self-belief, an equally massive chip on the shoulder and a genius for antagonising anyone whose help he might need; Hugh's account, bizarre and childlike as it is, often reveals his brother's blind spots. Into this complex dynamic comes Marlene, beautiful and mysterious, with contacts in Japan and America that can revive Butcher's flagging artistic career. What follows is compelling: a love story, a novel of suspense, an exploration of identity and art and much more, with a complex plot which constantly wrongfoots the reader's expectations. Butcher's description of Marlene as 'a lovely series of revelations which I prayed would never end' can just as well be applied to Theft itself. To be honest, it may not be an ideal book for reading on the beach, but then I don't like beach holidays. If you think of the holiday as a time when you can indulge in some undisturbed reading, it's perfect. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/08/13/summer-reading-choices-marcus-chown/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/13/summer-reading-choices-marcus-chown/#comments Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:03:19 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/13/summer-reading-choices-marcus-chown/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/13/summer-reading-choices-marcus-chown/feed/ 0 summer reading Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal S... Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. I interviewed Marcus about We Need to Talk about Kelvin for the Faber podcast. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Here are his summer reading selections: It is probably odd to recommend a book so far only half-read but I knew from the opening page that Tash Aw's Map of the Invisible World was going to be special. The story of two orphaned brothers adopted by very different families, set amid the political turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia, its prose is rich and atmospheric. Reminds me of Graham Greene. Aw, a Malaysian writer based in London, deserves to be far better known than he is. I had never before read anything by Rose Tremain but, after putting down The Road Home, I wanted to read more. The novel charts the experiences, of Lev, an Eastern European migrant in Britain, recovering from the death of his wife. It has so many lovely touches, like the depiction of a deeply depressing old people's home transformed by the introduction of a little humanity and fun. This is a wise, humorous and ultimately uplifting novel. What can I say about The Other Hand by Chris Cleave? It is the most perfect book I have read for years and even bears comparison with To Kill a Mockingbird. Cleave's Incendiary, about the terrorist bombing of Arsenal football stadium, was excellent but The Other Hand is on another level altogether. A window on another world, where fear is the bedrock of life, it follows the fortunes of asylum seeker, Little Bee, inadvertently caught up in a war over oil in West Africa. One day on a remote beach in Nigeria, her life collides with Westerner Sarah in a truly traumatic way. The catastrophic and inevitable consequences echo down the pages of this book. This is a powerful, beautifully written novel, but it is also upsetting. It made me think: How can we treat asylum seekers this way? George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/08/10/summer-reading-choices-graham-farmelo/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/10/summer-reading-choices-graham-farmelo/#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:53:41 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/10/summer-reading-choices-graham-farmelo/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/10/summer-reading-choices-graham-farmelo/feed/ 0 summer reading Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Prize and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. You can listen to my interview with Graham about The Strangest Man by clicking here. And here are Graham's summer reading choices: Summer reading seems to be synonymous with light reading. Not for me. These relatively quiet months often present the best opportunities to read challenging, off-piste books that I tend to put on the shelf invisibly marked "when I have time".David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas has been there for too long. It took an appreciative review of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by the notoriously sniffy James Wood to nudge me into taking the plunge. I'm glad I did - though Cloud Atlas is not always easy to read, Mitchell's virtuosity makes it strangely compelling. I'm still waiting to be moved, though. Is it my imagination or are good scientific biographies becoming a bit thin on the ground? An exception is Oren Harman's hefty The Price of Altruism, a cross between a biography of the American population geneticist George Price and a history of the origins of altruism. Here is a biography with intellectual bite, worth multiply rereading. This is a good time to prepare for the Klondike of fundamental scientific insights soon to arrive, fingers crossed, courtesy of the Large Hadron Collider. Ian Sample's lively Massive is a first-rate curtain-raiser. This is a science book you can read on the beach, as refreshing as a giant choc-ice but conscience-free: it makes light of heavy stuff. An ideal summer read. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/08/04/summer-reading-choices-helena-markou/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/04/summer-reading-choices-helena-markou/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:38:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/04/summer-reading-choices-helena-markou/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/04/summer-reading-choices-helena-markou/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2010/08/01/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-chase-madar/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/01/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-chase-madar/#comments Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:57:23 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/08/01/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-chase-madar/ http://podularity.com/2010/08/01/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-chase-madar/feed/ 0 Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial next month on charges never before brought in the history of war - "murder in violation of the laws of war". Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial next month on charges never before brought in the history of war - "murder in violation of the laws of war". In this month's Le Monde diplomatique podcast I talk to New York civil rights lawyer Chase Madar about some of the troubling issues raised by the Khadr case. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/30/summer-reading-choices-daisy-hay/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/30/summer-reading-choices-daisy-hay/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:12:46 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/30/summer-reading-choices-daisy-hay/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/30/summer-reading-choices-daisy-hay/feed/ 0 Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford. - I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford. I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, which has recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. You can hear the interview by clicking here. Here are Daisy's summer reading suggestions: My summer holiday usually takes me to the same spot each year: the house in the South of France which has been in my family since before I was born. Each year I take with me a new novel, something meaty and absorbing, which is much more satisfying to read in long shady sessions on the terrace than in the snatched minutes available in the working week. Last year I packed A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and spent several glorious afternoons utterly engrossed in it. This year I took David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which I've brought home to finish. I'd be further through it were it not for the fact that one of the great delights of the house is its bookshelves, which are in every room and which sag under the weight of thirty years of accumulated family reading and the childhood collections of my younger aunts. The shelves contain a veritable feast of children's books, crime, classic and contemporary fiction and a good smattering of biography and history. So this year, as in previous years, I switched my brain off by re-reading L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott, and I also found a Molly Keane novel I'd never come across before, the brilliant Time After Time. I've come back determined to root out a copy of her Good Behaviour so that I can carry the delights of holiday reading forward into the rest of the summer. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/29/summer-reading-choices-philip-hoare/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/29/summer-reading-choices-philip-hoare/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:13:00 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/29/summer-reading-choices-philip-hoare/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/29/summer-reading-choices-philip-hoare/feed/ 0 Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. His books include Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001), which W.G. Sebald praised for its "unique sense of time and place, Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. His books include Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001), which W.G. Sebald praised for its "unique sense of time and place, and great depth of vision" and Leviathan or, The Whale which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. You can hear my interview with Philip in which we talk about whales, Melville and Moby-Dick by clicking here. Here are his summer reading recommendations: Having just returned from a book tour of New England - a place haunted by its past, and by its whales - I'm deep in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards' Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works, (Kent State University Press, $49). I picked up the book in the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, an island out of time where even billionaires' SUVs are subjected to 18th-century cobblestones in the street, and where, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association, I stayed in Thomas Macey's house, where Melville himself dined in 1852. (I was woken in the small hours by a loud and inexplicable thud in my bedroom; perhaps Herman was making known his opinion of my own recent publishings on his work.) Edwards is a writer steeped in the lore of the sea, and her book is a fascinating exposition of the way Melville played to Western fear of, and longing for, the Other, as represented by his titillating tales of anthropophagy in the South Seas. The subject rears its head in both Typee and Moby-Dick ­- indeed, the latter was based on the tale of the Nantucket whaleship, Essex, whose crew survived an attack by a whale, only to be forced to resort to cannibalism after they were shipwrecked. In fact, the day after he dined with Thomas Macey, Melville met the retired captain of the Essex, Pollard - a man who had eaten his own cousin, Owen Coffin - and pronounced him "the most impressive man... I have ever encountered". This ghoulish subject is further explored in Caleb Crain's intriguing essay, Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels, on his wonderfully named blog, "Steamboats Are Ruining Everything" (www.steamthing.com). But of course, the greatest cannibal was Melville himself, a man who shamelessly ate up his fellow writers' words and presented them as his own - via his exquisite and subversive art. On an equally subversive note, my beach reading this summer is positively filthy: John Waters' Role Models (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), to be published in the UK this September by Beautiful Books. Effortlessly and tastelessly switching from Manson murderers to Johnny Mathis, from Denton Welch to Comme des Garçons, it's a self-help manual for trainee perverts, and it proves, once again, that Mr Waters is one of America's greatest and dirtiest ironists. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/27/summer-reading-choices-lucy-worsley/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/27/summer-reading-choices-lucy-worsley/#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:35:28 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/27/summer-reading-choices-lucy-worsley/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/27/summer-reading-choices-lucy-worsley/feed/ 0 American literature By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. - By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History ... By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here. Here are her summer reading choices: I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar' book about boarding school life. I'm a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue. Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday companion. Luckily I can blame my new favourite author rather than myself. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/25/summer-reading-choices-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/25/summer-reading-choices-louise-foxcroft/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:19:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/25/summer-reading-choices-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/25/summer-reading-choices-louise-foxcroft/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/07/24/summer-reading-choices-jan-zalasiewicz/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/24/summer-reading-choices-jan-zalasiewicz/#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:24:43 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/24/summer-reading-choices-jan-zalasiewicz/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/24/summer-reading-choices-jan-zalasiewicz/feed/ 0 Today's holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. Today's holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. I'm hoping to interview him again this autumn when his new book, The Planet in a Pebble, appears. Here is his summer readiing recommendation: Holidays! It's off to the beach or café terrace or simply that rickety deckchair in the weed-strewn garden. Now - what to pack to read? Nothing too demanding or (the Gods forbid!) improving. An adventure that rattles along with zing and charm and fun and characters you can live with. But that's so hard to find... There are the staples, of course, that rarely disappoint: Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser and - a personal quirk, mostly from the charity bookshop, now - the early Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, admired for their style and craft by that other old dependable, P.G. Wodehouse. But more of that ilk? One tries so many books, hoping for a new star to come into one's personal firmament. But either it's too serious, or too dull, or too clunky or clichéd, or (these days) too gruesome, with authors outdoing each other in their serial killers' inventiveness at means to disembowel and flay. For me, thank you but no thank you. But here's one I lately found. The Janissary Tree, a first novel by Jason Goodwin, an engagingly Byzantine mix of history and harems, food, friendship, grue (just a soupçon, mind), politics and the mysterious requiting of love. It's all set within the comfortably familiar frame of a nineteenth-century whodunit and I found le tout ensemble a delight. There are sequels, too, so my spies tell me, so one can bring out the deckchair, put on the kettle and... enjoy! George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/23/summer-reading-choices-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/23/summer-reading-choices-elizabeth-speller/#comments Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:14:21 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/23/summer-reading-choices-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/23/summer-reading-choices-elizabeth-speller/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/07/22/summer-reading-choices-michael-bywater/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/22/summer-reading-choices-michael-bywater/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:12:11 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/22/summer-reading-choices-michael-bywater/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/22/summer-reading-choices-michael-bywater/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/07/21/summer-reading-choices-helen-rappaport/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/21/summer-reading-choices-helen-rappaport/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:31:09 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/21/summer-reading-choices-helen-rappaport/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/21/summer-reading-choices-helen-rappaport/feed/ 0 crime fiction,Scandinavia,summer reading This is the first in a short series of summer reading recommendations from some of the authors I have interviewed in recent months. New posts will appear as they arrive. - Our first guest is historian Helen Rappaport. This is the first in a short series of summer reading recommendations from some of the authors I have interviewed in recent months. New posts will appear as they arrive. Our first guest is historian Helen Rappaport. Helen studied Russian before becoming an actress, but in recent years she has developed a successful second career as an author, specializing in Russian history. You can hear my interview with her about book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile on the Blackwell website by clicking here. Here is her recommendation: As a historian in love with real people and real lives, and one who reads virtually no fiction - ever -  let alone contemporary fiction, I was totally gripped by the first two books of  Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy* like no other crime novels I have ever read. And for me that is saying something. Why did they have such an impact on me? Simple: it’s all down to the brilliant, quirky, compulsive and utterly believable central female character, Lisbeth Salander, the best feisty heroine created by a male writer ever, in my humble estimation. And, weirdly, I just love all the technobabble about computers and hacking and the internet, probably because I am a Luddite who finds even laptops hard to work on. I am saving book three, like a guilty box of the very best chocolates, for hunkering down in bed with in the autumn. * The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl  Who Played With Fire. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/08/israel-and-aid-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-july-2010/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/08/israel-and-aid-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-july-2010/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:27:59 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/08/israel-and-aid-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-july-2010/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/08/israel-and-aid-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-july-2010/feed/ 0 Gaza,Israel,Palestine In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled "NGOs are 'the enemy within'", which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations... In this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled "NGOs are 'the enemy within'", which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations and NGOs, particularly in the aftermath of their assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. Eyal Weizman is an architect, originally from Israel now based in London. He is director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before the interview, he explained to me that the Centre exists at the intersection of human rights, politics and the built environment. He has a particular interest in the way in which architecture is implicated in geopolitical conflicts "and how we can read the history of conflicts through the built environment". He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. Click here to play the podcast. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/07/01/antonio-forcellino-on-michelangelo/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/01/antonio-forcellino-on-michelangelo/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:08:48 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/07/01/antonio-forcellino-on-michelangelo/ http://podularity.com/2010/07/01/antonio-forcellino-on-michelangelo/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/06/10/city-pick-amsterdam/ http://podularity.com/2010/06/10/city-pick-amsterdam/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:04:06 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/06/10/city-pick-amsterdam/ http://podularity.com/2010/06/10/city-pick-amsterdam/feed/ 0 Amsterdam,Holland The latest volume in the city-pick series - on Amsterdam - has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book's editor, Heather Reyes. - This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which ... The latest volume in the city-pick series - on Amsterdam - has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book's editor, Heather Reyes. This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which I compiled on location in Amsterdam with Dutch poet and critic, Victor Schiferli, the co-editor of city-pick Amsterdam. Our main project was filming a number of interviews with Dutch writers, currently going up on Vimeo and YouTube, and in the interstices, we made the sound recordings that you can listen to below - a sort of audio introduction both to Amsterdam and Victor's book. Just click on the pictures below to hear the sound clips. 1. Spui Square and the Athenaeum Bookshop 2. De Zwart cafe and literary feuds 3. Dam Square 4. Amsterdam in wartime 5. The Vondelpark (and who was Vondel?) 6. In the Red Light District 7. Amsterdam on Two Wheels 8. Victor's Thoughts on Compiling the Book George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/06/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-james-k-galbraith/ http://podularity.com/2010/06/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-james-k-galbraith/#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:30:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/06/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-james-k-galbraith/ http://podularity.com/2010/06/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-james-k-galbraith/feed/ 0 This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month's Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the Univers... This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month's Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He's the author of six books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. "rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps" The interview accompanies and amplifies his article in the current issue of Le Monde diplo, which looks at what he calls "the Europeanization of Mediterranean debt" forced on the EU by speculators, and what he predicts will become a vicious circle of budget cutting, debt deflation and depression. He further predicts that old patterns of hardship migration will re-emerge: "rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps because they weren't willing to deal with them at home". To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/05/11/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-blame-the-grand-mufti/ http://podularity.com/2010/05/11/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-blame-the-grand-mufti/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 09:51:18 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/05/11/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-blame-the-grand-mufti/ http://podularity.com/2010/05/11/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-blame-the-grand-mufti/feed/ 0 Israel,Palestine,World War II After a gap of a couple of months, the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is back. This month I talk to Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese academic who is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS in London and author most recently of The... After a gap of a couple of months, the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is back. This month I talk to Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese academic who is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS in London and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, published this month. His subject in the article - and in this podcast - is Israel's propaganda war with the Palestinians and the Arab world in general, and the intensification it has undergone in recent years. In the interview we talk about the propaganda use to which the "abject" wartime behaviour of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has been put by Israel and how Holocaust denial in the Arab world differs from that in the West. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/05/05/latest-podularity-videos/ http://podularity.com/2010/05/05/latest-podularity-videos/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 14:06:35 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/05/05/latest-podularity-videos/ http://podularity.com/2010/05/05/latest-podularity-videos/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/04/24/in-search-of-happiness/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/24/in-search-of-happiness/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:32:54 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/04/24/in-search-of-happiness/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/24/in-search-of-happiness/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/04/11/44-dancing-on-the-heads-of-snakes/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/11/44-dancing-on-the-heads-of-snakes/#comments Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:55:30 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/04/11/44-dancing-on-the-heads-of-snakes/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/11/44-dancing-on-the-heads-of-snakes/feed/ 0 al-Qaeda,islam,Middle East "Dancing on the heads of snakes" is how President Ali Abdullah Salih of Yemen describes the near impossibility of governing his country. He should know; he's managed to cling on to power by keeping up the dance for the past three decades. - "Dancing on the heads of snakes" is how President Ali Abdullah Salih of Yemen describes the near impossibility of governing his country. He should know; he's managed to cling on to power by keeping up the dance for the past three decades. The challenge is certainly considerable: Yemen has been a united country for only 20 years and it's far from certain that it will remain one. Tribalism make governance a tricky business at the best of times as does poverty: around 40% of its rapidly growing population live on $2 a day. The country's oil and water supplies are both dwindling at an alarming rate. It's relations with its northern neighbour, Saudi Arabia, are strained. And since the failed suicide bomb attempt on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, Yemen is once again in the full glare of international attention as Al-Qaeda's home base on the Arabian peninsula. British journalist Victoria Clark, who was born in the city of Aden in the south of Yemen when it was still a British colony,  returned to the country in order to try to get to grips with Yemen's complexities. As she says in the introduction to her book, "Yemen manages to challenge and scramble the logical progressions and neat narratives that westerners prefer to deal in". Her book avoids those pitfalls, succeeding in doing justice to the country's troubled past in prose that has all the immediacy and pace of high-quality reportage. In our interview, she tells me about the challenges of enabling western readers to understand the situation in Yemen, and why it is so important that we should do so. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/michelangelo-a-tormented-life/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/michelangelo-a-tormented-life/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 10:15:40 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/michelangelo-a-tormented-life/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/michelangelo-a-tormented-life/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/the-return-of-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/the-return-of-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 10:08:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/the-return-of-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/ http://podularity.com/2010/04/06/the-return-of-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/03/27/in-praise-of-germany/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/27/in-praise-of-germany/#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:51:57 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/03/27/in-praise-of-germany/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/27/in-praise-of-germany/feed/ 0 In this week's podcast, I talk to Simon Winder about the challenges of making a book on German history entertaining. It's a challenge he rose to magnificently in his quirky new book, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern. - In this week's podcast, I talk to Simon Winder about the challenges of making a book on German history entertaining. It's a challenge he rose to magnificently in his quirky new book, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern. He takes the reader along the highways and down many of the byways of German history to reveal aspects of the country's past which are rarely encountered. It would be a flinty soul who read this book and didn't at least feel the first stirrings of a desire to holiday in Germany for the first time. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast and hear Simon's views on German cuisine and his tips for where to discover the delights of the "real" Germany. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/03/22/42-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/22/42-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:16:58 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/03/22/42-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/22/42-the-return-of-captain-john-emmett/feed/ 0 To record this week's podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd's hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. To record this week's podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd's hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. Although this book wasn't written there, its sequel, currently a work in progress, will be. You can see the hut - which is enough to arouse the envy of anyone with writerly ambitions - in the video we recorded, which will be on this site shortly. In the mean time, click on the link above to listen to our audio podcast in which we talk about making the transition from non-fiction to fiction, the challenges of setting a novel in the past, and the ways in which the reverberations of the First World War continued to be felt in the years that followed armistice. The novel has been getting terrific reviews: The Times, for example, said: "Speller’s writing is gorgeous, her research immaculate and very lightly worn. Sheer bliss." And the Independent said: "Covering death, poetry, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, it's set to be the new Birdsong - only better." Click on the book cover above to find out more about it. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/03/01/41-its-only-a-movie-and-a-book/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/01/41-its-only-a-movie-and-a-book/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:02:26 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/03/01/41-its-only-a-movie-and-a-book/ http://podularity.com/2010/03/01/41-its-only-a-movie-and-a-book/feed/ 0 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, 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 (sic) that morning. Later, he would delight his audience with nearly two hours of anecdotes from his career and opinions on the films he loves and loathes. But before he took to the stage, I talked to him about his career - what his earliest film memories are, why The Exorcist is his favourite film, and what overlooked gems he thinks we should all be seeking out. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/02/23/nicola-upson-interview/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/23/nicola-upson-interview/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:05:57 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/23/nicola-upson-interview/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/23/nicola-upson-interview/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/02/19/three-questions-for-simon-winder/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/19/three-questions-for-simon-winder/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:03:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/19/three-questions-for-simon-winder/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/19/three-questions-for-simon-winder/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2010/02/12/40-charles-dickens-a-writers-life/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/12/40-charles-dickens-a-writers-life/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:21:15 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/12/40-charles-dickens-a-writers-life/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/12/40-charles-dickens-a-writers-life/feed/ 0 Charles Dickens,Victorian literature 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, 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 navigable of modern biographies. Slater, the most distinguished of modern Dickens scholars, is a master of detail and a stickler for dates (there are a dozen or so on the first page) and the book gives a vivid sense of the day-to-day, week-by-week bustle and productivity of Dickens’s life, its polymorphous inventiveness, its relentless juggling." In this extended version of the interview, you can hear how Michael Slater first became interested in Dickens, what persuaded him to take on the monumental task, and which aspects of Dickens personality and writing have fascinated him most. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/02/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-barbara-ehrenreich/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-barbara-ehrenreich/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:23:38 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-barbara-ehrenreich/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/09/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-barbara-ehrenreich/feed/ 0 Le Monde diplomatique,US politics 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 las... 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 her thesis that the relentless promotion of positive thinking is undermining America and its effects are being felt all round the world. If you're unconvinced that positive thinking is creeping into more and more areas of life, here are some facts with which I began my article: "George W Bush was head football cheerleader in his senior year at prep school. The most popular course offered by Harvard University in 2006 was positive psychology. The total US market for “self-improvement products” in 2005 was estimated at $9.6bn. Last month, during the Haitian earthquake, the top international story on happynews.com – which publishes only good news – was “Prince William attracts crowd in New Zealand”. There are at least four different species of breast cancer awareness teddy bears. Sales of the self-help book The Secret (2006) (“the secret gives you anything you want: happiness, health and wealth”) by former Melbourne TV producer Rhonda Byrne exceed 7 million." Listen to the podcast by clicking here to make up your own mind whether there is something here to be worried about. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/02/05/books-of-the-decade-rebecca-carter/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/05/books-of-the-decade-rebecca-carter/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:02:55 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/05/books-of-the-decade-rebecca-carter/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/05/books-of-the-decade-rebecca-carter/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2010/02/04/books-of-the-decade-luke-brown/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/04/books-of-the-decade-luke-brown/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:25:19 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/02/04/books-of-the-decade-luke-brown/ http://podularity.com/2010/02/04/books-of-the-decade-luke-brown/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/01/14/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-and-smart-power/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/14/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-and-smart-power/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:04:20 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/14/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-and-smart-power/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/14/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-obama-and-smart-power/feed/ 0 Iran,Obama,US politics My guest in this first Le Monde diplomatique podcast of 2010 is Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. - In his article in the January edition of the paper, My guest in this first Le Monde diplomatique podcast of 2010 is Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. In his article in the January edition of the paper, "US turns persuader not policeman", Professor Klare asks whether disappointment with the first year of Obama's foreign policy is the right reaction, or whether we ought instead to see "smart power" as a pragmatic response to the US's diminished role as world superpower - "assertiveness in the face of decline". In the interview we talk about the challenge posed by Iran to US smart power and also its implications for the domestic political landscape in the US. To listen to the interview, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/39-on-monsters-an-unnatural-history-of-our-worst-fears/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/39-on-monsters-an-unnatural-history-of-our-worst-fears/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:48:22 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/39-on-monsters-an-unnatural-history-of-our-worst-fears/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/39-on-monsters-an-unnatural-history-of-our-worst-fears/feed/ 0 Christianity,Frankenstein,monsters 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 manifesta... 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 went on: "I have seldom read a book that so satisfyingly achieves such an ambitious goal." And indeed the book is much more than a mere freakish parade of monsters (though that is a part of its pleasure) - it is rather an investigation of the meaning of monsters. Why do all societies have their monsters? What do they help us cope with? How has the significance of monsters changed as societies have gone from polytheism to monotheism and on through the Enlightenment? And which of our current fears will our future monsters embody? Asma is clearly something of a polymath - not only did he produce many of the illustrations in the book himself, he also combines his academic career at Columbia College in Chicago, where he specializes in the philosophy and history of science, with playing music professionally (you can sample it here). And he has made his own entertainingly creepy trailer for On Monsters, which you can see here. Click on the link above to listen to the podcast, or subscribe to Podularity on iTunes using the link in the right hand column above - it's quick, free and easy. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/books-of-the-decade-michael-bywater/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/books-of-the-decade-michael-bywater/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:52:57 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/books-of-the-decade-michael-bywater/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/13/books-of-the-decade-michael-bywater/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/01/10/poland-a-country-in-the-moon/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/10/poland-a-country-in-the-moon/#comments Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:24:23 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/10/poland-a-country-in-the-moon/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/10/poland-a-country-in-the-moon/feed/ 1 Chopin,Poland,World War II 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 Briti... 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 capitalism. As a pianist, he was attracted by the music of Chopin, but confesses that he knew little about the country. He little suspected that he would fall in love with the country and end up making it his home. A Country in the Moon - the description is Edmund Burke's and dates from 1795, but might still stand for a country which is very little known and all too often reduced to cliché in the West - achieves something very rare for a travel book: it manages to be genuinely funny and entertaining, and also deeply thought-provoking about the many terrible chapters in Poland's history. The book has been widely praised; the Guardian called it "the best contemporary travel book on Poland, reminiscent in its finest moments of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s masterful Time of Gifts" and said "No thinking traveller interested in Poland should overlook this essential book". The Observer admired how it  "triumphantly balanc[ed] humour with scholarship", while the Spectator called it "well-researched and hugely entertaining...  a three-star feast". Click on the podcast player above to find out what Michael finds so attractive about Poland - and what it is like to tour the country in a venerable old Rolls-Royce. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/09/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kahn/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/09/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kahn/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:10:05 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/09/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kahn/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/09/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kahn/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/01/08/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kelly/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/08/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kelly/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:11:54 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/08/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kelly/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/08/books-of-the-decade-andrew-kelly/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2010/01/06/37-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/06/37-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:13:02 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/06/37-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/06/37-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall/feed/ 0 Henry VIII,Tudor history 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, 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 Mantel on her decision to write about Thomas Cromwell: "Very much I wanted to write about Cromwell. There isn't any other figure I would have picked; he was the main attraction because I was really interested in the path he took from very humble origins, to the Councils of State, to be the king's right-hand man, to be an earl. Other people rise from a humble background but they invariably come through the Church. "Cromwell didn't take that path. He very much created the conditions in which he could succeed, but by doing so [also created] a huge backwash of resentment and ill-will, which I suppose in his own mind must have seemed indefeasible at times. "He had the example before him of his patron and mentor, Cardinal Wolesey, and his fall from power. And so you might say that he must have known all along that he was bound not to succeed. And you know that saying, 'all political careers end in failure sooner or later'. But he obviously thought the game was worth the candle, and with the odds stacked against him, he persevered. "And if he had been able to do even a fraction of what he would have liked to do, the country would have been a very different place." To hear more about Thomas Cromwell and Hilary Mantel's extraordinarily accomplished novel about him, click on the podcast player at the top of this post. Or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes using the right-hand column above. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/05/three-questions-for-mary-beard/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/05/three-questions-for-mary-beard/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:47:14 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/05/three-questions-for-mary-beard/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/05/three-questions-for-mary-beard/feed/ 0 classics,Elgin marbles,Rome 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, 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 of short films. The format is as simple as the name suggests - three questions, no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. So click below to find out where Mary thinks the Elgin marbles belong, why she chose the Romans over the Greeks, and which book she thinks everyone should have to read before they leave school - it's not, it turns out, a Latin one... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/books-of-the-decade-roland-chambers/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/books-of-the-decade-roland-chambers/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:13:50 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/books-of-the-decade-roland-chambers/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/books-of-the-decade-roland-chambers/feed/ 0 Books of the Decade,Dominican Republic,food,Iran Roland Chambers studied film and literature in Poland and at New York University before returning to England in 1998. His first biography, The Last Englishman, won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature, Roland Chambers studied film and literature in Poland and at New York University before returning to England in 1998. His first biography, The Last Englishman, won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature, and draws on his experience both as a children's author and as a private investigator specializing in Russian politics and business. He currently divides his time between London and Connecticut. You can hear my audio interview with Roland by clicking here. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz A fat, fantasy and science fiction nerd spread-eagled between New Jersey, his grandma in the Dominican Republic, and the voodoo of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Messiah-cum-sacrificial cow, Oscar is devastating, as is his author, Junot Diaz: brilliance on every level. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi A so-called graphic novel (it’s an autobiography) which gives Iran since the Revolution through the childhood, adolescence and coming of age of Marji, author of perhaps the most influential comic since Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan Pollan shows how far we are from what we eat, how much of it either is or relies upon a single crop, how consuming that crop is like drinking petrol, and why American rednecks call their arseholes cornholes. The trick is understanding what’s for lunch. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/where-is-everybody/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/where-is-everybody/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:26:38 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/where-is-everybody/ http://podularity.com/2010/01/04/where-is-everybody/feed/ 0 cosmology,extraterrestrials 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), 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, Enrico Fermi, who developed the first nuclear reactor. Turning to his fellow scientists one day over lunch in 1950, he asked, "Where is everybody?" He wasn't referring to absent colleagues, but the apparent absence of signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Click on the video below to hear Marcus's take on whether we are alone... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/12/19/books-of-the-decade-roger-luckhurst/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/19/books-of-the-decade-roger-luckhurst/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:40:14 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/19/books-of-the-decade-roger-luckhurst/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/19/books-of-the-decade-roger-luckhurst/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/feeding-the-5000/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/feeding-the-5000/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:53:52 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/feeding-the-5000/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/feeding-the-5000/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/books-of-the-decade-peter-sillem/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/books-of-the-decade-peter-sillem/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:11:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/books-of-the-decade-peter-sillem/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/15/books-of-the-decade-peter-sillem/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/12/12/books-of-the-decade-keith-kahn-harris/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/12/books-of-the-decade-keith-kahn-harris/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:43:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/12/books-of-the-decade-keith-kahn-harris/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/12/books-of-the-decade-keith-kahn-harris/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/12/11/books-of-the-decade-mark-vernon/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/11/books-of-the-decade-mark-vernon/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:29:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/11/books-of-the-decade-mark-vernon/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/11/books-of-the-decade-mark-vernon/feed/ 0 ancient history,Athens,Books of the Decade,brain,crime fiction,Greece 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... 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 a range of business titles, including Management Today. He also broadcasts, notably on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. Mark's most recent book is Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' Guide to Modern Living. You can hear a podcast about that book by clicking here. His other publications include: Wellbeing, After Atheism, The Philosophy of Friendship, and Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life. On Religion, John Caputo (2001) This book appeared in 2001. Had those folk who waged battle in the God wars of the decade read it first, we might have had a more informed debate. Caputo aims to do a difficult thing: define religion. He does so with great verve, seeing that at heart, religion is a form of love – for good or ill. The Athenian Murders, José Carlos Somoza (2001) It is rare for a novel to combine the excitement of the thriller with the insight of great philosophy. Umberto Eco manages it, and Somoza does too, in a plot that starts with an apparently minor conundrum and ends up engaging nothing less than the secret of knowledge itself. Brilliant. The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head, Raymond Tallis (2008) I read this book whilst taking a long train trip, and it was so engaging that when I got off, I’d swear I saw the world in brighter colours. Tallis combines the science of the body with the philosophy of consciousness and, pulling no punches, produces a truly remarkable exploration of what goes on with our heads. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/12/09/books-of-the-decade-andy-beckett/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/09/books-of-the-decade-andy-beckett/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:18:52 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/09/books-of-the-decade-andy-beckett/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/09/books-of-the-decade-andy-beckett/feed/ 0 Books of the Decade,Chile,London,Pinochet Andy Beckett studied modern history at Oxford University and journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. For his first, widely praised book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History (2002), Andy Beckett studied modern history at Oxford University and journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. For his first, widely praised book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History (2002), he was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2009 he published a major new history of the political landscape of Britain in the 1970s: When the Lights Went Out. Reviewing the book, Hanif Kureishi praised Beckett for his "avid eye and novelistic flair for detail" and concluded "Beckett's excellent account of the 1970s is a necessity if we want to understand now as well as then". You can hear an interview with Andy Beckett in which he discusses the book here. Since 1993, he has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Independent on Sunday and the London Review of Books. For the last twelve years, he has been a feature writer at the Guardian. He lives in London. Click below to see which titles Andy has chosen as his Books of the Decade. Roberto Bolaño: Distant Star (2004) After writing a book partly about the infamous Chilean dictatorship, Pinochet in Piccadilly (Faber, 2002), I was easily drawn to Bolaño's novel about the hidden horrors of life under Pinochet. But Bolaño's eerie, sleepily-told story about a poet and conceptual artist who is also a fascist and a state-sponsored murderer has haunted me like few other books about Chile. And it's a useful reminder that creative people are not necessarily life's good guys. Iain Sinclair: London Orbital (2002) I've long enjoyed Sinclair's wiry, sharp-eyed writing about inner London, but this book about the city's usually neglected outermost spaces, the spacious suburbs and semi-countryside and the M25 that strangles and liberates them, gave him a completely fresh subject. I lived beside the M25 as it was being built, and I remember the bullying new drone when it opened. Sinclair gives you the texture of modern British life like few non-fiction authors or journalists. Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty (2004) Hollinghurst is such a lovely writer that often his novels don't need much of a plot. The precise, gliding sentences and luminous set-pieces are enough. Here, as in The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), he sets in motion a coming-of-age story which gives all his adjectives an extra emotional charge. The Line of Beauty is also a rare political and state-of-the-nation novel that actually works: by depicting a mood rather than clunkily recreating famous events. Just writing about this book makes me want to re-read it. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/12/04/books-of-the-decade-tony-bruce/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/04/books-of-the-decade-tony-bruce/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:25:20 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/04/books-of-the-decade-tony-bruce/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/04/books-of-the-decade-tony-bruce/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/12/03/books-of-the-decade-katy-derbyshire/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/03/books-of-the-decade-katy-derbyshire/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:20:04 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/03/books-of-the-decade-katy-derbyshire/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/03/books-of-the-decade-katy-derbyshire/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/12/02/books-of-the-decade-steve-lake/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/02/books-of-the-decade-steve-lake/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:03:44 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/02/books-of-the-decade-steve-lake/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/02/books-of-the-decade-steve-lake/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/three-questions-for-robert-rowland-smith/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/three-questions-for-robert-rowland-smith/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:34:29 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/three-questions-for-robert-rowland-smith/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/three-questions-for-robert-rowland-smith/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/books-of-the-decade-christopher-potter/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/books-of-the-decade-christopher-potter/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:21:48 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/books-of-the-decade-christopher-potter/ http://podularity.com/2009/12/01/books-of-the-decade-christopher-potter/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/27/books-of-the-decade-kirsten-ellis/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/27/books-of-the-decade-kirsten-ellis/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:35:01 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/27/books-of-the-decade-kirsten-ellis/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/27/books-of-the-decade-kirsten-ellis/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/25/books-of-the-decade-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/25/books-of-the-decade-louise-foxcroft/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:47:00 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/25/books-of-the-decade-louise-foxcroft/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/25/books-of-the-decade-louise-foxcroft/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/20/books-of-the-decade-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/20/books-of-the-decade-elizabeth-speller/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:09:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/20/books-of-the-decade-elizabeth-speller/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/20/books-of-the-decade-elizabeth-speller/feed/ 1 http://podularity.com/2009/11/12/did-the-vikings-wear-viking-helmets/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/12/did-the-vikings-wear-viking-helmets/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:43:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/12/did-the-vikings-wear-viking-helmets/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/12/did-the-vikings-wear-viking-helmets/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/10/the-wall-and-after/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/10/the-wall-and-after/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:55:05 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/10/the-wall-and-after/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/10/the-wall-and-after/feed/ 1 Berlin,Germany,World War II This week's podcast features an interview with Heather Reyes, co-founder of Oxygen Books, and co-editor of the latest addition to their City-Lit series, which appropriately enough in the week which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall com... This week's podcast features an interview with Heather Reyes, co-founder of Oxygen Books, and co-editor of the latest addition to their City-Lit series, which appropriately enough in the week which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, paints a portrait in words of Berlin. Although there are plenty of old favourites such as Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Döblin and Len Deighton, the emphasis of the book is on unexpected vantage points and new, less familiar voices. So there is no dutiful trot through the city's history "from earliest times to the present day", but instead themed sections which try to get under the skin of the city. Off the beaten track, some of the highlights of the book for me were: Rolf Schneider on the disappearing Berlin pub or Kneipe (it used to be said that every street crossing in Berlin had four corners and five corner pubs - but not any more); Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom's reflections on a city every inch of which is "steeped in history", from the opening of his novel All Souls' Day; Chloe Aridjis in Book of Clouds on the "ghost stations" on the underground - the deserted, embalmed stations which although on West Berlin lines, happened to lie beneath East Berlin's territory. There's also an excellent piece by Iain Bamforth about Berlin's sense of itself as expressed in its architecture (he coins the memorable phrase "hyperthyroid neoclassicism" for Hitler's default style). He mentions Stephen Spender's visit to Hitler's Chancellery in 1945 and writes: "Spender noted the reams of building manuals above the Führer's bed. Hitler didn't believe in much but he believed in architecture." And Berlin, it seems to me, is hard to better as an expression of what a city's people - or its leaders - believed throughout its history rendered in stone, glass, brick and steel. One of my own favourite books on the city (not included in the City-Lit anthology) is Brian Ladd's Ghosts of Berlin, which looks at how the city has come to terms with its past through the built environment. That may sound rather dry and specialist - it's not, since the past that Berlin has had to come to terms with has so often been so raw and painful. Finally, I wanted to mention Heather's co-editor on this volume, Katy Derbyshire. Katy has contributed many new translations to the book, which adds considerably to its appeal. You can find Katy's blog on German books (Love German Books) here. It's well worth checking out. To listen to the podcast, click on the link above, or go to Podularity's iTunes page using the link in the right-hand column. To see my photo essay on Berlin, click on the "more" link below. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/11/09/the-cat-and-the-cockroach/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/09/the-cat-and-the-cockroach/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:35:48 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/09/the-cat-and-the-cockroach/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/09/the-cat-and-the-cockroach/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/05/georgian-secrets/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/05/georgian-secrets/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:07:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/05/georgian-secrets/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/05/georgian-secrets/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/04/cookery-to-crow-about/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/04/cookery-to-crow-about/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:02:03 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/04/cookery-to-crow-about/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/04/cookery-to-crow-about/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/03/three-questions-for-julian-baggini/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/03/three-questions-for-julian-baggini/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:09:02 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/03/three-questions-for-julian-baggini/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/03/three-questions-for-julian-baggini/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/11/02/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-civilizations-from-different-galaxies/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/02/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-civilizations-from-different-galaxies/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:29:24 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/02/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-civilizations-from-different-galaxies/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/02/le-monde-diplomatique-podcast-civilizations-from-different-galaxies/feed/ 0 Afghanistan,al-Qaida,culture,islam,Taliban,war "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. "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 - a kind of Orientalism, the notion of a primordial and timeless enemy." My guest on this month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique is Dr Patrick Porter of the Defence Studies Department at King's College London. Patrick has recently published a book on military orientalism, and he pursues that theme in his article in this month's issue of LMD with particular reference to the Taliban. To view them as medieval or even extraterrestrials as many in the West have done is to see no further than their rhetoric and overlook the extent to which their culture is constantly changing and adapting to circumstances. To listen to the podcast, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/11/01/pick-of-the-podcasts/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/01/pick-of-the-podcasts/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:36:43 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/11/01/pick-of-the-podcasts/ http://podularity.com/2009/11/01/pick-of-the-podcasts/feed/ 0 Herta Müller,monsters,Romania 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, 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 to evaporate any time soon. Asma, a specialist in the philosophy and history of science, is amusing on the "class divisions" that exist in our perceptions of monsters, with vampires as a sort of aristocracy at the top and zombies as the lumpenproleteriat at the bottom of the heap. He also ventures some theories on why monsters have survived so well in the dark recesses of our collective imagination. Asma's book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, sounds well worth checking out. Michael Sims' review in the Post is here. Note that the book is available now in the US, but the UK publication date is January 2010. If you're curious about the 2009 Nobel laureate for literature, German-Romanian writer Herta Müller, who is far from a familiar name in the English-speaking literary world, I recommend this podcast from the New York Review of Books. In it, Hugh Eakin of the NYRB talks to Romanian writer, Norman Manea, about Müller's work and Romania's minority communities under Ceausescu and since.Here's a brief extract from their conversation: HE: One of Herta Müller’s big themes is the continuity of the security state in Romania. NM: She was extremely fierce in her criticism after 1989. This transition in Romania of civil society was and still is extremely ambiguous. Four million Communists became, the day after the dictator was killed, fierce anti-Communists. All of them claimed that they were victims – some of them really were. But a lot of people who worked in the former secret police became the nouveaux riches and now had another kind of power. And some of them are still in the shadows. And she spoke openly and insistently about this, which was not very easy to swallow, even for the post-Communist generation. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/31/35-a-dons-life/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/31/35-a-dons-life/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:40:20 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/31/35-a-dons-life/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/31/35-a-dons-life/feed/ 0 blogging,Cambridge,classics,higher education This week marks the second anniversary of Podularity, so I'm delighted to be welcoming back an old friend of the programme, Cambridge professor of classics, Mary Beard. - Mary appeared in programme 15 to talk about her book on the Roman triumph and mo... This week marks the second anniversary of Podularity, so I'm delighted to be welcoming back an old friend of the programme, Cambridge professor of classics, Mary Beard. Mary appeared in programme 15 to talk about her book on the Roman triumph and more recently in programme 28, to talk about Pompeii. This time, we're in conversation about the book of her blog, A Don's Life, which is out in paperback from Profile Books on 5 November. Although - as she explains in the interview - it can be a burden to be constantly described as "wickedly subversive", that's just what she often succeeds in being in her posts. Her subjects range from what Romans wore under their togas to whether Prince Harry should have gone to Afghanistan. To hear how Mary took to the blogosphere - and the blogosphere took to her - click on the link above. And if you listen to the end, you'll find out how high she rates the chances of her appearing on Twitter any time soon... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/23/34-after-weve-gone/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/23/34-after-weve-gone/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:41:27 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/23/34-after-weve-gone/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/23/34-after-weve-gone/feed/ 1 climate change,Earth,geology,paleontology What would a race of space-travelling aliens 100 million years in the future make of the Earth? "One can imagine that they'll be sufficiently scientifically curious to look on the world as extraordinary - because the Earth is extraordinary by compari... What would a race of space-travelling aliens 100 million years in the future make of the Earth? "One can imagine that they'll be sufficiently scientifically curious to look on the world as extraordinary - because the Earth is extraordinary by comparison with all the other planets. "And then to investigate its future present, as it were, and try to work out how this future present arose and how it survived for so long. And to do that they'll have to play the particular kind of history game that we call geology... they'll have to become fossil detectives..." My guest this week is Jan Zalasiewicz, who is a senior lecturer in the department of geology at the University of Leicester. The first ever edition of Podularity featured a geology title, Ted Nield's Supercontinent, so it's fitting that we return to that subject as the programme approaches its second birthday. In his new book, The Earth after Us, Jan decided to conduct a thought experiment on a grand scale - what would happen if you imagined applying the same techniques as we apply to the study of dinosaurs and other fossils to our own species in some far distant future epoch? What kind of fossils will humans leave behind? What will happen to cities, cars, and plastic cups? How thick a layer will the "human stratum" be? And will it be obvious that our species once dominated the planet? The answers are quite sobering... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/19/living-on-j-street/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/19/living-on-j-street/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:06:38 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/19/living-on-j-street/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/19/living-on-j-street/feed/ 0 Israel,Palestine,US politics This month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique features an interview with Eric Alterman, author of the bestselling What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News and most recently Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America. This month's podcast for Le Monde diplomatique features an interview with Eric Alterman, author of the bestselling What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News and most recently Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America. In the podcast I talk to Alterman about his article in this month's edition of LMD: "Support Israel through Criticism", which looks at the rise of J Street, an American Jewish lobby that supports a sane and reasonable peace with the Palestinians. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/16/33-through-the-georgian-keyhole/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/16/33-through-the-georgian-keyhole/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:31:04 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/16/33-through-the-georgian-keyhole/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/16/33-through-the-georgian-keyhole/feed/ 0 domestic life,Georgians,interior design,women's lives Amanda Vickery on the impression of Georgian life given by National Trust properties today: - "They're absolutely empty of life. They're neat and tidy and they don't smell and there's no noise of the household. Amanda Vickery on the impression of Georgian life given by National Trust properties today: "They're absolutely empty of life. They're neat and tidy and they don't smell and there's no noise of the household. All of those things are absolutely central to what it was like to live in even quite grand eighteenth-century houses. "Women's letters are full of complaints about how awful it is, how freezing, the stiff-backed ceremony, people coming in, a lack of privacy..." This week's podcast, sponsored by Blackwell Online, features an in-depth interview with Amanda Vickery, whose Behind Closed Doors has just been published by Yale University Press. In the interview we talk about what home meant to the Georgians, both physically and psychologically. Amanda is fascinating on what a detail of domestic interiors as apparently insignificant as wallpaper can tell you about the taste, status and outlook of a household. For those with money, it was a period which saw the dawning of the age of  the commercialization of home and simultaneously the feminization of it. While for those of lesser means, such as the Georgians' army of domestic servants, "home" could be a precarious affair - a temporary bed and a wooden box containing a few treasured possessions in your master's house. Amanda's book is richly illustrated in both senses - there are many pictures of domestic interiors and furnishings, but she also tells many stories of what home meant to individuals, which brings the history alive. "We see the Georgians at home as we have never seen them before in this ground-breaking book. Vickery can make a young wife’s arrangement of china into an event of thrilling social and psychological tension. Behind Closed Doors is both scholarly and terrifically good fun. Worth staying at home for." - Frances Wilson, Sunday Times, 11 October 2009 George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/12/32-what-made-greeks-laugh/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/12/32-what-made-greeks-laugh/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:56:51 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/12/32-what-made-greeks-laugh/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/12/32-what-made-greeks-laugh/feed/ 0 ancient Greece "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... "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 discussed by philosophers and others. "So I really wanted to use it as a prism through which to look at a wider range of Greek values and tensions with in the culture and ways in which Greeks think about many different aspects of life." My guest this week is Stephen Halliwell, Professor of Greek at St Andrews University and winner of this year's Criticos Prize for the best book published on the subject of Greece, ancient or modern. Stephen's book, Greek Laughter, is a vast compendium of information of what made the Greeks laugh and how laughter functioned in ancient Greek society. As the book makes abundantly clear, laughter was far from unproblematic -  to be laughed down in Greek society was a deeply shameful experience - and laughter was a frequent subject of reflection for philosophers and other ancient Greek thinkers. The book is also fascinating on the links between laughter and early Christianity (by and large, they weren't in favour of it...) Click on the link above to hear the podcast, or subscribe at iTunes (link in right-hand column above). George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/10/05/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge-ii/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/05/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge-ii/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:44:16 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/05/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge-ii/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/05/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge-ii/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/10/03/31-the-making-of-mr-grays-anatomy/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/03/31-the-making-of-mr-grays-anatomy/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:39:51 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/10/03/31-the-making-of-mr-grays-anatomy/ http://podularity.com/2009/10/03/31-the-making-of-mr-grays-anatomy/feed/ 0 anatomy,Gray's Anatomy "What's so wonderful about Carter's illustrations [for Gray's Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they're not shown as undignified, they're not shown in pain. In fact, "What's so wonderful about Carter's illustrations [for Gray's Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they're not shown as undignified, they're not shown in pain. In fact, many of the illustrations are quite noble... "It's the first real anatomy book for students to be published since the development of chloroform, anaesthesia in general, and I think these bodies are chloroformed bodies. They are not being treated as though they are social outcasts; they're being treated as human beings." My guest on this week's programme is medical historian, Ruth Richardson. Ruth has written a fascinating history of how the most famous medical textbook of all time came to be written - Gray's Anatomy, which is still going strong after more than 150 years and 40 editions. She shows that its success was down to not just Henry Gray, who wrote the text, but also to Henry Carter, who provided the illustrations. In the interview we talk about the very different fates of these two men and also about how medicine as a career was changing in the mid-nineteenth century. But, as you'll hear, much of Ruth's sympathies go to the workhouse poor, who in death provided the models for the illustrations in the book. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/09/30/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/30/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:46:06 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/09/30/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/30/vic-reeves-vast-book-of-world-knowledge/feed/ 0 To see the video using QuickTime, click here. - For RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, click here. To see the video using QuickTime, click here. For RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, click here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/09/24/margaret-atwood-interview/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/24/margaret-atwood-interview/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:11:12 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/09/24/margaret-atwood-interview/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/24/margaret-atwood-interview/feed/ 0 dystopias,Margaret Atwood,novelists "It's increasingly evident that narration is built in to the human floor-plan as it were. Little kids take to story-telling very, very early... The fact is that we will tell stories; it's part of being human. - "It's increasingly evident that narration is built in to the human floor-plan as it were. Little kids take to story-telling very, very early... The fact is that we will tell stories; it's part of being human. "What effects those stories may have are often quite unforeseen by the people telling them, but if they are listened to, if they have an audience, they are doing something... "This kind of novel is like a detour sign on a road: if you don't want to fall into the big hole that looms ahead, you should probably turn right here. Or left." (laughs) I interviewed Margaret Atwood about her new novel The Year of the Flood when she visited Bristol earlier this month as part of her international book tour, which has been dubbed the greenest book tour ever - Atwood travelled to the UK by ship rather than plane, forswore meat and insisted that all coffee served came from organic, Fairtrade, shade-grown plantations. Her event at the Bristol Festival of Ideas was unusual in other ways too - Atwood was joined on stage by a choir and group of actors to perform dramatized readings from the book and the specially composed hymns of the God's Gardeners sect. Click here to find out why writing dystopian fiction is still an optimistic act, why Montecristo cigars are so called, and why a book tour is like hang-gliding... [12 minutes] George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/09/08/old-dog-new-tricks/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/08/old-dog-new-tricks/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:44:23 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/09/08/old-dog-new-tricks/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/08/old-dog-new-tricks/feed/ 0 Philosopher Julian Baggini has taken to film-making to promote his latest book entitled Should You Judge This Book by its Cover? In the book, he subjects one hundred proverbs and other examples of homespun wisdom to philosophical scrutiny. Philosopher Julian Baggini has taken to film-making to promote his latest book entitled Should You Judge This Book by its Cover? In the book, he subjects one hundred proverbs and other examples of homespun wisdom to philosophical scrutiny. And in the film - well, click below and see for yourself. You can also listen to an audio interview about the book which I recorded with Julian last week for Blackwell Online by clicking here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/09/04/30-huns-eye-view/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/04/30-huns-eye-view/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:54:17 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/09/04/30-huns-eye-view/ http://podularity.com/2009/09/04/30-huns-eye-view/feed/ 0 barbarians,classics,Huns,Rome "The Huns are a blank canvas. That's what makes them so interesting. We know only one word of Hunnic, the word strava, the Hunnic word for funeral. We have no Hunnic poetry, we have no Hunnic literature." "The Huns are a blank canvas. That's what makes them so interesting. We know only one word of Hunnic, the word strava, the Hunnic word for funeral. We have no Hunnic poetry, we have no Hunnic literature." My guest on this edition of Podularity is Cambridge classicist, Christopher Kelly. His book on Attila the Hun and the part he played in the downfall of the Roman empire has just come out in paperback. In the interview, we talk about the difficulty of writing about someone whose civilization is only preserved in the annals of his enemies, in which the Huns were portrayed as "the scourge of God". Kelly sets that against the opinion of one Roman commentator who came to know Attila and was impressed by the civilization of his court and the Hun leader's command of Latin. And we tackle the key question - to what extent did the Huns bring about the fall of the Roman empire? The end result may not be a "Hun's eye view" - that may well be impossible to recapture - but it does at least demonstrate that Rome was not the only vantage point from which to view the world. As Kelly says in the interview, the Roman empire wrought far more destruction on the continent of Europe than the Huns ever did... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/08/28/introducing-the-last-englishman/ http://podularity.com/2009/08/28/introducing-the-last-englishman/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:22:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/08/28/introducing-the-last-englishman/ http://podularity.com/2009/08/28/introducing-the-last-englishman/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/08/16/29-a-walk-across-the-universe/ http://podularity.com/2009/08/16/29-a-walk-across-the-universe/#comments Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:39:50 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/08/16/29-a-walk-across-the-universe/ http://podularity.com/2009/08/16/29-a-walk-across-the-universe/feed/ 1 cosmology,God "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, "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 of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher's investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This "portable history of the universe" ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away - distances measured in billions of light years - to the infinitely small (which he calls "the realm of tininess"), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works. The book also has fascinating things to say about the origins of life, the scientific mindset and the way in which human consciousness is "woven into the fabric of the universe", as Freeman Dyson put it. (Potter cites Schrödinger's memorable observation that without any comprehending consciousness in the universe, the great performance plays to empty stalls.) In the interview he tells me how the impulse to write the book came out of a period of crisis in his own life.  That only makes the cogency and élan with which the book is written all the more remarkable. In addition to the main podcast, which you can hear by clicking the 'Play' icon at the top of this post, there are also a couple of audio extras: Christopher explains the title of the book here. And if you click here you can listen to him reading an extract from the book. I'll be posting a link to a video interview shortly. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/07/17/28-the-life-of-a-roman-town/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/17/28-the-life-of-a-roman-town/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:16:29 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/07/17/28-the-life-of-a-roman-town/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/17/28-the-life-of-a-roman-town/feed/ 0 dormice,food,Rome,sexuality 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? 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 the cusp of embracing Christianity? And did they really eat dormice? Click on the link above to hear writer, broadcaster, blogger extraordinaire and Cambridge professor of Classics, Mary Beard tackle all these questions and more. You can also hear Mary talking about the Roman triumph in podcast 15: The Big Parade. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/27-alice-on-the-indus/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/27-alice-on-the-indus/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:23:31 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/27-alice-on-the-indus/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/27-alice-on-the-indus/feed/ 1 Indus,Pakistan On Monday night Alice Albinia won the Dolman Travel Book Prize for her book, Empires of the Indus, in which she traces her remarkable journey from the river delta near Karachi to its source in Tibet. - Just after the winner was announced, On Monday night Alice Albinia won the Dolman Travel Book Prize for her book, Empires of the Indus, in which she traces her remarkable journey from the river delta near Karachi to its source in Tibet. Just after the winner was announced, I spoke to Alice about her book. Click above to find out why the woman who donned a burqa to travel through Taliban country doesn't think of herself as a particularly intrepid traveller... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/burma-failed-state-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/burma-failed-state-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:53:15 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/burma-failed-state-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/07/burma-failed-state-le-monde-diplomatique-podcast/feed/ 0 Burma,China,dictatorship,human rights,Le Monde diplomatique Burma's military regime, the State Peace and Development Council, has if anything become more repressive since the scenes of confrontation which the world witnessed on its television screens during the saffron revolution of 2007. - Burma's military regime, the State Peace and Development Council, has if anything become more repressive since the scenes of confrontation which the world witnessed on its television screens during the saffron revolution of 2007. In this month's podcast, George Miller talks to journalist Rajeshree Sisodia about her article on contemporary Burma in the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique. They discuss the Orwellian climate of fear which prevails in the country and life in the refugee camps across the border in Thailand, home to thousands of Burmese who have fled their country. Rajeshree also talks about China's growing investment in - and consequent influence over - Burma, and assesses the medium-term prospects for change. To listen to the podcast, click here [13:49]. Photo by Sam Hummel. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/07/03/26-who-owns-your-body/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/03/26-who-owns-your-body/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:19:53 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/07/03/26-who-owns-your-body/ http://podularity.com/2009/07/03/26-who-owns-your-body/feed/ 0 biotech,ethics,human body,law,medicine "This is what I think is really surprising to most people: you don't actually own your body, in the sense that tissue taken from it and used afterwards is yours to use as you see fit. - "The law traditionally took the view that tissue, "This is what I think is really surprising to most people: you don't actually own your body, in the sense that tissue taken from it and used afterwards is yours to use as you see fit. "The law traditionally took the view that tissue, once it had left the body, was what was called 'no one's thing'. "And it took that view because traditionally the tissue wasn't of any value. It is modern biotechnology that has given it this value." This podcast is an extended version of an interview I did with Donna Dickenson for Blackwell Online about her book Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit. We talked about the global commodification of the human body, from the sale of eggs and the "grave-robbing" of bones to gene-patenting. Donna's approach is not to sensationalize these issues, shocking though they often are, but to look at the big questions we as a society need to face in their ethical, legal and scientific context. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/leviathan-wins-samuel-johnson-prize/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/leviathan-wins-samuel-johnson-prize/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:36:15 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/leviathan-wins-samuel-johnson-prize/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/leviathan-wins-samuel-johnson-prize/feed/ 2 Philip Hoare's Leviathan was my favourite non-fiction title of last year, so I am delighted to hear that it has just won this year's Samuel Johnson prize. - You can hear the interview I did with Philip earlier this year here. Philip Hoare's Leviathan was my favourite non-fiction title of last year, so I am delighted to hear that it has just won this year's Samuel Johnson prize. You can hear the interview I did with Philip earlier this year here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/ishiguro-interview-part-ii/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/ishiguro-interview-part-ii/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:56:25 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/ishiguro-interview-part-ii/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/30/ishiguro-interview-part-ii/feed/ 0 Japan Part two of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro is now available here. - In it we talk about his Japanese roots; dealing with success at an early age; and the critical reaction to what he regards as his most ambitious, exploratory novel, The Unconsoled, Part two of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro is now available here. In it we talk about his Japanese roots; dealing with success at an early age; and the critical reaction to what he regards as his most ambitious, exploratory novel, The Unconsoled, which went from incomprehension or even hostility within the space of a few years to its selection as one of the finest post-war works of fiction. He also tells me about his theory that most novelists have produced their best work by the time they are in their forties. And at the end, he divulges what new project he is working on at the moment... George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/06/18/revealing-the-resistance/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/18/revealing-the-resistance/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:34:33 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/06/18/revealing-the-resistance/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/18/revealing-the-resistance/feed/ 0 France,Resistance,World War II Last week I interviewed Matthew Cobb about his new book, The Resistance: The French Fight against the Nazis, which surprisingly is the first popular book to examine the Resistance in a quarter of a century. - Matthew, who lived for many years in Paris, Last week I interviewed Matthew Cobb about his new book, The Resistance: The French Fight against the Nazis, which surprisingly is the first popular book to examine the Resistance in a quarter of a century. Matthew, who lived for many years in Paris, told me before the interview that it was seeing images of Paris draped in swastikas in wartime which made him want to find out more about the French men and women who resisted the invaders. You can here my interview with him on the Blackwell Online site here. And you'll find all my podcasts for Blackwell Online here. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/06/12/empires-of-the-sea/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/12/empires-of-the-sea/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:39:16 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/06/12/empires-of-the-sea/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/12/empires-of-the-sea/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/06/04/im-a-novelist-moonlighting-as-a-short-story-writer/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/04/im-a-novelist-moonlighting-as-a-short-story-writer/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:35:43 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/06/04/im-a-novelist-moonlighting-as-a-short-story-writer/ http://podularity.com/2009/06/04/im-a-novelist-moonlighting-as-a-short-story-writer/feed/ 0 Ishiguro,Japan,World War II Last month I recorded an extensive interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories. It also forms part of Faber's 80th birthday celebrations. - The first part of what we've decided to present as a two-pa... Last month I recorded an extensive interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories. It also forms part of Faber's 80th birthday celebrations. The first part of what we've decided to present as a two-part podcast is now available here on Faber's site and on iTunes. It focuses on the new book, Nocturnes, while the second part, which I've just finished editing, looks back at some of his earlier books including his first, A Pale View of Hills, now available in a new cover as part of the Faber Firsts series. Part II of the podcast will be available later this month. Meanwhile there are several interviews from this week to edit - with Sarah Hall, Giles Foden, and PD James. They'll all be available in the course of the next few weeks. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/05/23/when-the-lights-went-out/ http://podularity.com/2009/05/23/when-the-lights-went-out/#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 13:29:09 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/05/23/when-the-lights-went-out/ http://podularity.com/2009/05/23/when-the-lights-went-out/feed/ 0 Thatcher "Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the Seventies as an era has been simplified more than most." Andy Beckett - My interview with Guardian journalist Andy Beckett about When the Lights Went Out, his reassessment of the 1970s (were they really as ba... "Hindsight is a great simplifier, and the Seventies as an era has been simplified more than most." Andy Beckett My interview with Guardian journalist Andy Beckett about When the Lights Went Out, his reassessment of the 1970s (were they really as bad as we remember them?) has recently gone up on the Faber website. You can listen by clicking here. Andy interviewed many of the major political figures from the decade. There is, for example, an almost tragi-comic encounter with the very elderly Ted Heath. I asked him before the interview whether he'd tried to get an audience with Margaret Thatcher and he pointed out that his previous book had made that a bit of a long shot: George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/05/15/transmission-resumed/ http://podularity.com/2009/05/15/transmission-resumed/#comments Fri, 15 May 2009 13:58:49 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/05/15/transmission-resumed/ http://podularity.com/2009/05/15/transmission-resumed/feed/ 0 I realize that things have been a little quiet on the Podularity front lately, so I thought I'd reassure you I haven't hung up my microphone. In fact, I've been busy producing podcasts for a wide variety of people: My most recent podcast for Faber, I realize that things have been a little quiet on the Podularity front lately, so I thought I'd reassure you I haven't hung up my microphone. In fact, I've been busy producing podcasts for a wide variety of people: My most recent podcast for Faber, featuring exciting new Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah and award-winning journalist Oliver Balch on his South American odyssey, is here. Meanwhile, Mark Thompson's The White War has recently won the 2009 Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The prize is awarded for the best work of history published each year on events before 1945. The book is an account of the Italian Front, a major forgotten conflict of the First World War. You can hear me talk to Mark here. The series of fortnightly podcasts I am producing for Blackwells has already notched up nine editions. In the latest programme, you can hear one of Britain’s most eminent novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, talk about his first volume of short stories, Nocturnes, a bittersweet collection that owes its inspiration to Ishiguro’s fascination with music. In the same programme I also talk to Nick Davies, whose book Flat Earth News, last week won the first Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize sponsored by Blackwell. As it happens, I have also been making recordings for the Festival, which will be appearing on their site soon. All that said, I have been doing some interviews for Podularity: Mary Beard on Pompeii and Christopher Kelly on Atilla the Hun are both awaiting editing, and on Monday I shall be interviewing Michael Moran about Polish life and history. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/04/10/war-and-peace-in-the-caucasus/ http://podularity.com/2009/04/10/war-and-peace-in-the-caucasus/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:39:10 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/04/10/war-and-peace-in-the-caucasus/ http://podularity.com/2009/04/10/war-and-peace-in-the-caucasus/feed/ 0 Caucasus,Georgia,Russia,war Until recently, Georgia's wars were fought against separatist movements of ethnic minorities. In August 2008 it took on the Russian army in a five-day war which has left commentators unclear as to who was the aggressor and who the victim. Indeed, Until recently, Georgia's wars were fought against separatist movements of ethnic minorities. In August 2008 it took on the Russian army in a five-day war which has left commentators unclear as to who was the aggressor and who the victim. Indeed, perhaps those concepts are inadequate to capture the tangled nature of enmities and rivalries in the region. In this podcast which I've just produced for Le Monde diplomatique's April issue, I talk to journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about the nature of the five-day war and its consequences for the Caucasus and beyond. Click here to listen. Click here to see some very illuminating maps on the LMD site, which help explain the nature of the conflict. And click on the book cover (above) to find out more about Vicken's recent book on the subject. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/03/17/25-menopause-and-medicine/ http://podularity.com/2009/03/17/25-menopause-and-medicine/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:11:40 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/03/17/25-menopause-and-medicine/ http://podularity.com/2009/03/17/25-menopause-and-medicine/feed/ 1 menopause,sexuality,women's lives Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science - "There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon." Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science "There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon." As Louise Foxcroft's sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill's day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment. Earlier centuries had viewed the cessation of female fertility as also marking the end of a woman's meaningful existence, but the medical profession saw in what came to be called the menopause a business opportunity. If the menopause was pathologized - treated like a disease rather than a process - then medics were on hand to offer a cure, or at least a course of treatment. This was not, of course, the result of some deliberate policy so much as the outcome of the increasing professionalization of medicine, the growth of an affluent middle class, and an underlying misogyny that viewed women as natural invalids and their sexuality as something which required regulation. Drugs, surgery, and diagnoses of mental illness have all been thrown into the mix in the last two centuries and neither the medical profession nor male society in general emerge from this fascinating cultural history with much credit. Are there options today which avoid medicalization and what Germaine Greer has referred to as a time for "mourning"? Listen to the interview to hear Louise Foxcroft's views. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/03/02/24-lost-in-birmingham/ http://podularity.com/2009/03/02/24-lost-in-birmingham/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:10:32 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/03/02/24-lost-in-birmingham/ http://podularity.com/2009/03/02/24-lost-in-birmingham/feed/ 1 Birmingham,childhood Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost "As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. - "It was a child, Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost "As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. "It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag." When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O'Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost. The girl with the monkey is Kate Meaney, a bright, solitary child with a taste for mysteries and detection. She disappeared two decades ago but her image seems to appear on the monitor screens that security guard Kurt spends his nights watching in the Green Oaks shopping centre. Green Oaks itself is fictional, but draws both on Catherine's own previous experience working in a record store (which she deploys to wonderful comic effect in the book) and on her wider sense of what communities have lost as they have moved, often very rapidly, from an industrial to a post-industrial existence: the landscape is desolate, windswept and derelict, but dominated by a shiny shopping centre that seems to have descended from outer space. The shopping centre in What Was Lost is a sort of secular repository for people's dreams and fears and, as becomes clear as the book develops, for their deepest secrets, too. Click on the link above to listen to my interview with Catherine. You'll also be able to hear a hint about what her next book is about. To be sure not to miss the next episode of Podularity, go to iTunes and subscribe. It's entirely free and ensures that programmes update automatically to your computer. And check out Catherine's publisher, the excellent independent Tindall Street Press, based in Birmingham. And the Costa video is below: George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/02/17/le-monde-diplo-site-relaunched/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/17/le-monde-diplo-site-relaunched/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:55:46 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/02/17/le-monde-diplo-site-relaunched/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/17/le-monde-diplo-site-relaunched/feed/ 0 http://podularity.com/2009/02/13/23-exploring-the-haunted-city/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/13/23-exploring-the-haunted-city/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:07:04 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/02/13/23-exploring-the-haunted-city/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/13/23-exploring-the-haunted-city/feed/ 0 Austria,Germany,Nazism,World War II Neil Gregor: Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past "By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town." In this week's podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany's often difficult process of coming to ter... Neil Gregor: Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past "By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town." In this week's podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany's often difficult process of coming to terms with the second world war in the decades that followed its defeat. To bring sharper focus to his book, Neil decided to concentrate on how one city in particular - Nuremberg in Bavaria - reached its accommodation with the past. Neil's own father grew up in the city and one of Neil's earliest memories of learning about history was hearing his German godparents describe RAF bombing raids on Nuremberg. As the quote from our interview above makes clear, Nuremberg, site of the infamous rallies and power base of the arch-Nazi Julius Steicher, was no run-of-the-mill  town; but it faced many of the same challenges of mental and psychological reconstruction as other German cities in the post-war period, while having some acute problems of its own. In the interview I ask Neil about some of the stages in Germany's process of coming to terms with the past, such as the often half-hearted process of denazification that followed the war; the televised Eichmann trial in the 1960, which made the events of the Holocaust impossible to ignore any longer; and that decade's wave of student radicalism. At the end of the interview I ask Neil to contrast Germany's learning process with that of Austria and we discuss whether Germany provides an optimistic model of  how a country can over time face up to the legacy of its past. George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/02/12/consequences-of-gaza/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/12/consequences-of-gaza/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:30:14 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/02/12/consequences-of-gaza/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/12/consequences-of-gaza/feed/ 0 Gaza,Israel,Middle East In Le Monde diplomatique's February podcast, I talk to Middle East expert and deputy director of the French edition of the paper, Alain Gresh. - His article in this month's edition focuses on the consequences of the Israeli action against Hamas, In Le Monde diplomatique's February podcast, I talk to Middle East expert and deputy director of the French edition of the paper, Alain Gresh. His article in this month's edition focuses on the consequences of the Israeli action against Hamas, both for the participants and the wider region. In the podcast he talks about the reactions of nations such as Iran and Turkey to the conflict and considers why Israel's relations with the EU are more cordial than at any time since 1967. He also responds to my question about what we can tell about the Obama administration's approach to the Middle East. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. (Image © Joel Carillet) George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/02/07/22-from-barman-to-biographer/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/07/22-from-barman-to-biographer/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:34:55 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/02/07/22-from-barman-to-biographer/ http://podularity.com/2009/02/07/22-from-barman-to-biographer/feed/ 0 Scotland 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, 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 is also the author of Lanark, widely regarded as the finest Scottish novel of the past century, as well as a host of other books and creator of many art projects), reacted when the biography was first mooted: "Be my Boswell!" he shouted, dancing a jig around the room and raising a finger to the heavens. "Tell the world of my genius!” In the interview, Rodge reflects on the experience of being himself a character in this unconventional life, and is frank about such things as his own feelings for Gray ("I have great affection for him") and his uncertainty over what to make of Gray's artwork. You can read Gray's own reaction to Glass's biography here. And you can hear the great man himself in conversation with John Mullan about Lanark on this Guardian Books podcast recorded in London in 2007. Here are two audio extracts from Rodge's book: "A Canary in Disguise" "Mora" And here are links to the titles that Rodge especially recommends to the newcomer to Gray's work (click on the covers): George Miller no http://podularity.com/2009/01/31/de-profundis/ http://podularity.com/2009/01/31/de-profundis/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 22:13:01 +0000 podmeister http://podularity.com/2009/01/31/de-profundis/ http://podularity.com/2009/01/31/de-profundis/feed/ 0