Author: podmeister

Empires of the Sea

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With Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley, Podularity.com enters the video age! I spent a very pleasant afternoon with Roger Crowley this week at his home in Gloucestershire interviewing him about his book on sixteenth-century superpower confrontation, Empires of the Sea. After the audio interview was complete we went into his garden and recorded this short video. Podularity’s heart will remain with audio, but the odd talking head (so to speak) is going to start appearing from time to time, too.

“I’m a novelist moonlighting as a short story writer”

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Last month I recorded an extensive interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories. It also forms part of Faber’s 80th birthday celebrations. The first part of what we’ve decided to present as a two-part podcast is now available here on Faber’s site and on iTunes. It focuses on the new book, Nocturnes, while the second part, which I’ve just finished editing, looks back at some of his earlier books including his first, A Pale View of Hills, now available in a new cover as part of the Faber Firsts series. Part II of the podcast will be available later this month. Meanwhile there are several interviews from this week to edit – with Sarah Hall, Giles Foden, and PD James. They’ll all be available in the course of the next few weeks.

When the lights went out

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“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

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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 …

War and Peace in the Caucasus

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Until recently, Georgia’s wars were fought against separatist movements of ethnic minorities. In August 2008 it took on the Russian army in a five-day war which has left commentators unclear as to who was the aggressor and who the victim. Indeed, perhaps those concepts are inadequate to capture the tangled nature of enmities and rivalries in the region. In this podcast which I’ve just produced for Le Monde diplomatique‘s April issue, I talk to journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about the nature of the five-day war and its consequences for the Caucasus and beyond. Click here to listen. Click here to see some very illuminating maps on the LMD site, which help explain the nature of the conflict. And click on the book cover (above) to find out more about Vicken’s recent book on the subject.

25. Menopause and medicine

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Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment.

24. Lost in Birmingham

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Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost.

Le Monde diplo site relaunched

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The English-language edition of Le Monde diplomatique, for which I produce a monthly current affairs podcast featuring an in-depth interview with one of that month’s contributors, has just relaunched its website, and very smart it is too! I’m delighted to say that there is a podcast page, where all the podcasts are archived (click on the screen grab below to visit the page). And it’s always interesting to see how designers respond to the challenge of coming up with a logo that says “podcast”…

23. Exploring the haunted city

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Neil Gregor: Haunted City – Nuremberg and the Nazi Past “By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town.” In this week’s podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany’s often difficult process of coming to terms with the second world war in the decades that followed its defeat. To bring sharper focus to his book, Neil decided to concentrate on how one city in particular – Nuremberg in Bavaria – reached its accommodation with the past. Neil’s own father grew up in the city and one of Neil’s earliest memories of learning about history was hearing his German godparents describe RAF bombing raids on Nuremberg.