Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial next month on charges never before brought in the history of war – “murder in violation of the laws of war”. In this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast I talk to New York civil rights lawyer Chase Madar about some of the troubling issues raised by the Khadr case. To listen to the podcast, click here.
Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, which has recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. You can hear the interview by clicking here. Here are Daisy’s summer reading suggestions: My summer holiday usually takes me to the same spot each year: the house in the South of France which has been in my family since before I was born. Each year I take with me a new novel, something meaty and absorbing, which is much more satisfying to read in long shady sessions on the terrace than in the snatched minutes available in the working week. Last year I packed A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and spent several glorious afternoons utterly engrossed in it. This year I took David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve brought home to finish. I’d be further through it were it not for the fact that one of …
Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. His books include Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001), which W.G. Sebald praised for its “unique sense of time and place, and great depth of vision” and Leviathan or, The Whale which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. You can hear my interview with Philip in which we talk about whales, Melville and Moby-Dick by clicking here. Here are his summer reading recommendations: Having just returned from a book tour of New England – a place haunted by its past, and by its whales – I’m deep in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’ Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works, (Kent State University Press, $49). I picked up the book in the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, an island out of time where even billionaires’ SUVs are subjected to 18th-century cobblestones in the street, and where, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association, I stayed in Thomas Macey’s house, where Melville himself dined in 1852. (I was woken …
By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here. Here are her summer reading choices: I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar’ book about boarding school life. I’m a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue. Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday …
Louise Foxcroft is the author of Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause, which won the Longman History Today prize for Book of the Year 2009.You can listen to my interview with Louise about this book by clicking here. Here are her holiday reading recommendations: In the early summer, ready to get away from the drizzle, I reread Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt and The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay. The English have always been very good at producing caustic aunts who can’t stay put but who can tolerate the young and irritate the rest of the family with their fantasies, politics, and unsuitable lovers. There was a distinct glut of them after the first world war and it was obviously difficult to know what to do with them. On the whole, the aunts seem to have made life up as they went along, so the first idea you have to expunge from your mind is that aunts are in any way dull or cosy. Graham Greene’s aunt appears late …
Today’s holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. I’m hoping to interview him again this autumn when his new book, The Planet in a Pebble, appears. Here is his summer readiing recommendation: Holidays! It’s off to the beach or café terrace or simply that rickety deckchair in the weed-strewn garden. Now – what to pack to read? Nothing too demanding or (the Gods forbid!) improving. An adventure that rattles along with zing and charm and fun and characters you can live with. But that’s so hard to find… There are the staples, of course, that rarely disappoint: Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser and – a personal quirk, mostly from the charity bookshop, now – the early Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, admired for their style and craft by that other old dependable, P.G. Wodehouse. But more of that ilk? …
Today’s guest selector of summer reading is Elizabeth Speller, author most recently of a highly praised debut novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett. She is also the author of several works of non-fiction – including a memoir, Sunlight on the Garden – and a prize-winning poet. Here are her choices: Dragging a hefty suitcase of books to Greece to provide a whole summer’s reading tends to sharpen opinions about the contents; there is, literally, a heavy freight of expectation and hope. This year three or four big disappointments have been balanced by three surprises. Only as I write do I realize that these are linked by a theme of war. This is perhaps not surprising as my own novels concern war, but my three choices are so different from each other that this almost irrelevant except that war changes everything and these are all novels of individuals whose certainties have been swept away. Richard Bausch’s Peace is a short novel set in a hard WWII Italian winter and focusing on one small, weary platoon …
Our next guest recommender of Summer Reading is Michael Bywater, author (of Lost Worlds and Big Babies, inter al.), broadcaster, and – as you will see when you read on – now writing for the stage… This summer I’m too too utterly utterly up to my ears in queers, dears. Specifically the (slightly illusory) late nineteenth century London homosexual world and the point at which it collides, in a flurry of ortolans’ tongues and lilies, with the largely abortive English Aesthetes. This is no indulgence – actually at times it’s hard going – but work: I’m writing (it may sound improbable) a musical about Oscar Wilde with (equally improbably) those two giants of American popular music, the songwriting duo Leiber and Stoller. The work itself is a treat, but Oscar himself poses three problems: his literary work was something (in England at least) of a dead end; most of the legends about him are untrue; and the world is well-supplied with Oscar mavens who’ll be on the edge of their seats, not with delight, but …
This is the first in a short series of summer reading recommendations from some of the authors I have interviewed in recent months. New posts will appear as they arrive. Our first guest is historian Helen Rappaport. Helen studied Russian before becoming an actress, but in recent years she has developed a successful second career as an author, specializing in Russian history. You can hear my interview with her about book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile on the Blackwell website by clicking here. Here is her recommendation: As a historian in love with real people and real lives, and one who reads virtually no fiction – ever – let alone contemporary fiction, I was totally gripped by the first two books of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy* like no other crime novels I have ever read. And for me that is saying something. Why did they have such an impact on me? Simple: it’s all down to the brilliant, quirky, compulsive and utterly believable central female character, Lisbeth Salander, the best feisty heroine created by a male …
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled “NGOs are ‘the enemy within’”, which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations and NGOs, particularly in the aftermath of their assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. Eyal Weizman is an architect, originally from Israel now based in London. He is director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before the interview, he explained to me that the Centre exists at the intersection of human rights, politics and the built environment. He has a particular interest in the way in which architecture is implicated in geopolitical conflicts “and how we can read the history of conflicts through the built environment”. He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Click here to play the podcast.
