Month: May 2009

When the lights went out

Published by podmeister

“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:

Transmission resumed

Published by podmeister

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 …