Podularity has been off air for the last month while I’ve been finishing a book (and so busy, in fact, that Podularity’s first birthday went unrecorded). But as of 4.15pm yesterday the book has gone, so normal service will shortly be resumed.

Coming up before the end of the year are podcasts on Russia’s national poet, Pushkin, an interview with Raymond Tallis on hunger and my long-promised interview with Julian Baggini on the nature of complaint in contemporary life, to name but three. Looking further ahead, the plan for 2009 is to make Podularity podcasts a regular fortnightly event, with much more content on the site.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to a podcast (scroll down the page on their site to find it) which I made recently for Yale University Press featuring Philip Pullman, Bettany Hughes and Leonie Gombrich. Philip and Bettany, I’m very pleased to say, have agreed to be future guests on the programme. This recent podcast is about Ernst Gombrich’s Little History of the World, a book the great art historian wrote for children when he was in his mid-twenties in 1935, and which went on to be an international bestseller. But it had to wait seven decades before it appeared in English. You can find out more about this remarkable book in the podcast.