As this series, Talking about Photographs, continues, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that fathers will feature prominently as a subject – fathers gone and fathers barely known in particular. Here, Sabrina Hazelwood reflects on a picture of her father with some navy friends taken in Cuba in the 1960s.
Our second interviewee, Nigel Wellings, chooses a picture of himself from the late seventies, taken just after his return from his first trip to India.
The idea is very simple. I ask an interviewee to talk about a photograph with special significance for them. The video lasts less than two minutes. And at the end you get to see the photo. Talking about Photographs: 1. Philippa Vick from George Miller on Vimeo.
My guest in the latest edition of the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In his recently published book, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Spring, he looks at the Arab Spring’s underlying causes, the deep roots of the social and economic problems, which elections and changes of leadership have done little to address. The book argues for seeing what is going on in the Arab world as a long-term revolutionary process rather than a sequence of rapid transformative events – an analysis which certainly seems to be borne out by recent events in Egypt. I spoke to Gilbert about Egypt’s most recent crisis midway through the 48-hour ultimatum which Egypt’s military gave President Mohammed Morsi. To listen to the podcast, click here.
I recently interviewed Serbian-born, London-based writer, poet, and academic Vesna Goldsworthy, whose books include a collection of poetry, The Angel of Salonika, and a memoir entitled Chernobyl Strawberries, which one reviewer described as “suffused with a longing complicated and deepened by the eradication of the Yugoslav state”. I met Vesna to discuss Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, another book which contemplates the identity of South Eastern Europe, in this case the construction of the Balkans in the British literary imaginary – “a gently ridiculous proxy” as Vesna calls it (typified by the fictional kingdom of Ruritania) for the real Balkans; a repository for the qualities of a region which by turn attracted, fascinated and repelled the British; a place that could be turned into farce and pastiche, or depicted as a place of potential menace, where European identify dissolved into something irredeemably alien and eastern. To listen to the podcast [22:45], click here. To find out more about the book, visit Vesna’s publisher’s site here.
The asteroid belt is not the way it’s portrayed in Star Wars… It’s not this busy violent place with things colliding all the time… The meteorite that landed on Chebarkul a few days ago made me think that it was a good time to delve into the archive for the podcast I recorded with my old friend Ted Nield about his book Incoming!, which seeks to persuade us to stop worrying and learn to love the meteorite (which may be less easy if you live in the Urals). When we met to record this podcast at the Geological Society in London a couple of years ago, we began by talking about the region in the solar system between Mars and Jupiter, known as the asteroid belt, an “orphanage for homeless bits of potential planets”, which is home to meteorites… and yes, we do come round to talking about whether or not a meteorite impact was to blame for the demise of the dinosaurs… You can listen to the podcast by clicking here.
Yes, the title of this post is admittedly a little misleading – the popes in the podcast (popecast?) are not necessarily the favourites of my guest, Eamon Duffy, but those who he thinks have had the greatest impact on history – The Ten Popes who Shook the World. Eamon’s popes range from Saint Peter to John Paul II, and along the way take in reforming popes and reactionaries, and sometimes complex men who combined both instincts, faced with the challenges of establishing and shaping the church. With over 260 candidates to choose from, I bean by asking Eamon how hard it had been to come up with a list of just ten pontiffs. To listen to the podcast, click here. Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity, Cambridge University, and fellow and former president of Magdalene College. He is the author of many prizewinning books, among them Fires of Faith, Marking the Hours, and Saints and Sinners, all available from Yale University Press.
With horse meat cropping up all over the place in food in the UK at the moment, I went back to the interview I recorded in 2008 for Princeton University Press with Bee Wilson about her book Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Ersatz Coffee. As the book makes clear, (justifiable) concern about what’s in our food is nothing new: complaints about adulterated bread date back at least as far as the Middle Ages, and the Victorians had to contend with fake tea, ersatz coffee and cheese coloured with red lead. In this interview, Bee says: Adulteration is a universal in history – it’s always been with us and it’s always going to be with us in some form or another. But it only seems to have become endemic in modern industrialized cities coupled with a particular kind of state. You would have editorials written in the Times between about the 1820s and the 1860s quite regularly saying things like, if a gentleman wants to sell chicory and call it coffee, that’s his business, no one …
Louise Foxcroft on Calories and Corsets from George Miller on Vimeo.
