Year: 2018

Fiona Sampson on Limestone Country

Published by podmeister

W H Auden wrote: when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, but what I see is a limestone landscape Fiona Sampson too hears the murmur of underground streams. She describes at the start of her recent book Limestone Country the shock, the epiphany, of realising that most of her favourite places were made from, and in and on, limestone: a cottage in West Oxfordshire; a hamlet in Périgord in southern France; the Karst region of western Slovenia; the city of Jerusalem. She writes: ‘Really living in these landscapes means paying radical attention to how they behave. It means knowing their wildlife as well as ways of farming, observing how water and vegetation respond to the mineral facts of rock and soil as much as how humans live in and with them.’ Responding ‘to the mineral facts’ – that might be a good way of thinking about her book. When I met Fiona earlier this year, I was keen to hear …

Stephen Moss on Mrs Moreau’s Warbler

Published by podmeister

> A couple of months ago I drove half an hour south-west from home to visit Stephen Moss in Somerset and talk to him about his new book, Mrs Moreau’s Warbler: How Birds Got Their Names. The interview is part of a new series of podcasts for Faber called Book to Book, in which guests discuss not only their own book but also another title that has been influential to them, perhaps directly, perhaps obliquely. Stephen kicked off the series by choosing a multi-volume partwork from the 1970s, The World of Birds,  thereby setting me the interesting challenge: to seek out all 108 parts on eBay, which might be a long-term project as some of them seem hard to come by, or talking to him about it making use of what I could glean about WoB from the Internet. I chose the latter course, and was pleased to discover that The World of Birds was not edited by some faceless team that evaporated without trace, but by a very influential figure in the world of …

Alison Leslie Gold, ‘salvager of other people’s stories’

Published by podmeister

  This is a podcast I produced for Notting Hill Editions with Alison Leslie Gold, who is perhaps best known for her book Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Miep Gies, one of the people who protected the Frank family during the war. Before her collaboration on that book, Alison had experienced a lost decade, in which she descended into alcohol addiction. Writing the Anne Frank book represented a return to life, a rediscovery of interest in other people and their stories. Other stories were to follow. She became, as she puts it, ‘a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories’. But, as she writes in the Prologue to her new book, Found and Lost: She goes on: When I met Alison in London last autumn she began by telling me more about the book’s origins: