Year: 2007
4. ‘Real stories of ordinary people…’ – Remembering Beslan
On the morning of 1 September 2004, children and teachers all over Russia were getting ready for the first day of the new school year. So begins Timothy Phillips’ account of the terrible siege of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Of course, we know now that that day three years ago which began as a celebration was to turn into the worst terrorist atrocity in Russian history. But although we remember the harrowing scenes filmed by the terrorists in the school gymnasium on the camcorders which proud parents had brought to the parade, and the disastrous, chaotic end to the siege in which so many people died, many of us may have a sketchier understanding of what lay behind those events: Who were the hijackers? What motivated them? And what why did they come to Beslan? These are among the questions that Timothy Phillips tries to answer in his book on the siege. He travelled to Beslan a few months after the siege and spoke to those involved. In the interview, I ask …
3. One man and his dog
This week’s podcast features Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Tom has recently come to prominence as a novelist and his book, Remainder, has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. But in Tintin and the Secret of Literature he shows he also possesses a sharp (and playful) critical mind into the bargain. Tom’s starting point is to ask whether the hugely successful Tintin cartoons are also great literature, and in attempting to answer that question he gets to the heart of what literature actually is. Along the way he also examines a few skeletons in Hergé’s closet. But the book is above all an immensely entertaining exploration of the Tintin books, which will make you want to read them all again. “With a code-breaking ingenuity worthy of the boy reporter himself, McCarthy reveals Hergé’s crisp, graphic style to be a complex circuitry of forgery and artifice, corporeal obsession and psycho-sexual intrigue; sparking leads and crackling connections that wire the Belgian cartoonist’s work deep into the matrix of 20th-century art …
2. Don’t Go Down to the (Vienna) Woods…
1. Lost Continents, Deep Space… and Lasagne
“The four-dimensional complexities of our happy little planet – “earth’s immeasurable surprise” – are made elegantly accessible by Ted Nield in this truly exceptional book. At least until the next major discovery it deserves to become the standard work, ideal for students of the subject, and hugely enjoyable to those for whom the world remains an unfathomable enigma.” Simon Winchester Ten billion years in the life of our planet. That’s the subject of this first Podularity podcast. And all in a little over 17 minutes… Alert readers may already object that it’s impossible to cover 10 billion years, as the Earth is only six billion years old. (If you are objecting that the Earth is a great deal younger than that, then this podcast is probably not going to appeal to you.) However,Ted Nield’s new book, Supercontinent, looks not only deep into the past by examining the geological record, but also peers into the planet’s far-distant future. The book tells the story of the planet by tracing what Nield calls ‘the grandest cycle in all …