Author: podmeister

30. Hun’s eye view

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“The Huns are a blank canvas. That’s what makes them so interesting. We know only one word of Hunnic, the word strava, the Hunnic word for funeral. We have no Hunnic poetry, we have no Hunnic literature.” My guest on this edition of Podularity is Cambridge classicist, Christopher Kelly. His book on Attila the Hun and the part he played in the downfall of the Roman empire has just come out in paperback. In the interview, we talk about the difficulty of writing about someone whose civilization is only preserved in the annals of his enemies, in which the Huns were portrayed as “the scourge of God”. Kelly sets that against the opinion of one Roman commentator who came to know Attila and was impressed by the civilization of his court and the Hun leader’s command of Latin. And we tackle the key question – to what extent did the Huns bring about the fall of the Roman empire? The end result may not be a “Hun’s eye view” – that may well be impossible …

Introducing the Last Englishman

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Here is a short video I recorded with Roland Chambers about his new book, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome. You could view this as an appetizer for the longer audio interview with him, coming in my podcast for Faber in early September, in which he talks about Ransome’s life in Russia before Swallows and Amazons. In that podcast I’ll also be talking to John Carey about his new biography of William Golding.

29. A walk across the universe

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“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz several centuries ago. It’s one of the main questions animating Christopher Potter‘s first book, You Are Here. And given that there is something, how did it come into being? And how for that matter did we come into being, several billions of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher’s investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This “portable history of the universe” ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away – distances measured in billions of light years – to the infinitely small (which he calls “the realm of tininess”), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works.

28. The Life of a Roman Town

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How easy is it to get an insight into the life of the ancient Romans from a visit to the remains of Pompeii today? How much of what we see is even Roman, and how much is recent reconstruction? What did the Romans really think about sex? And what did they believe in a world on the cusp of embracing Christianity? And did they really eat dormice? Click on the link above to hear writer, broadcaster, blogger extraordinaire and Cambridge professor of Classics, Mary Beard tackle all these questions and more. You can also hear Mary talking about the Roman triumph in podcast 15: The Big Parade.

27. Alice on the Indus

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On Monday night Alice Albinia won the Dolman Travel Book Prize for her book, Empires of the Indus, in which she traces her remarkable journey from the river delta near Karachi to its source in Tibet. Just after the winner was announced, I spoke to Alice about her book. Click above to find out why the woman who donned a burqa to travel through Taliban country doesn’t think of herself as a particularly intrepid traveller…

Burma – Failed state: Le Monde diplomatique podcast

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Burma’s military regime, the State Peace and Development Council, has if anything become more repressive since the scenes of confrontation which the world witnessed on its television screens during the saffron revolution of 2007. In this month’s podcast, George Miller talks to journalist Rajeshree Sisodia about her article on contemporary Burma in the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique. They discuss the Orwellian climate of fear which prevails in the country and life in the refugee camps across the border in Thailand, home to thousands of Burmese who have fled their country. Rajeshree also talks about China’s growing investment in – and consequent influence over – Burma, and assesses the medium-term prospects for change. To listen to the podcast, click here [13:49]. Photo by Sam Hummel.

26. Who owns your body?

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“This is what I think is really surprising to most people: you don’t actually own your body, in the sense that tissue taken from it and used afterwards is yours to use as you see fit. “The law traditionally took the view that tissue, once it had left the body, was what was called ‘no one’s thing’. “And it took that view because traditionally the tissue wasn’t of any value. It is modern biotechnology that has given it this value.” This podcast is an extended version of an interview I did with Donna Dickenson for Blackwell Online about her book Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit. We talked about the global commodification of the human body, from the sale of eggs and the “grave-robbing” of bones to gene-patenting. Donna’s approach is not to sensationalize these issues, shocking though they often are, but to look at the big questions we as a society need to face in their ethical, legal and scientific context.

Ishiguro interview: part II

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Part two of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro is now available here. In it we talk about his Japanese roots; dealing with success at an early age; and the critical reaction to what he regards as his most ambitious, exploratory novel, The Unconsoled, which went from incomprehension or even hostility within the space of a few years to its selection as one of the finest post-war works of fiction. He also tells me about his theory that most novelists have produced their best work by the time they are in their forties. And at the end, he divulges what new project he is working on at the moment…

Revealing the Resistance

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Last week I interviewed Matthew Cobb about his new book, The Resistance: The French Fight against the Nazis, which surprisingly is the first popular book to examine the Resistance in a quarter of a century. Matthew, who lived for many years in Paris, told me before the interview that it was seeing images of Paris draped in swastikas in wartime which made him want to find out more about the French men and women who resisted the invaders. You can here my interview with him on the Blackwell Online site here. And you’ll find all my podcasts for Blackwell Online here.