All posts filed under: history and politics

37. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

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I’m delighted to say that the first Podularity podcast of 2010 is devoted to an in-depth interview with 2009 Booker prize winner, Hilary Mantel in which she talks about her remarkable novel, Wolf Hall. As far as I can tell, this is the most extensive interview about the book available anywhere on the web. Here’s Hilary Mantel on her decision to write about Thomas Cromwell: “Very much I wanted to write about Cromwell. There isn’t any other figure I would have picked; he was the main attraction because I was really interested in the path he took from very humble origins, to the Councils of State, to be the king’s right-hand man, to be an earl. Other people rise from a humble background but they invariably come through the Church. “Cromwell didn’t take that path. He very much created the conditions in which he could succeed, but by doing so [also created] a huge backwash of resentment and ill-will, which I suppose in his own mind must have seemed indefeasible at times. “He had the …

Three questions for… Mary Beard

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Mary Beard is no stranger to Podularity. In fact, she may have appeared on it more times than any other author. This however is her Podularity video debut. Last autumn, after recording an audio interview with Mary about her book-of-the-blog, It’s a Don’s Life, I asked her to take part in my “Three Questions for” series of short films. The format is as simple as the name suggests – three questions, no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. So click below to find out where Mary thinks the Elgin marbles belong, why she chose the Romans over the Greeks, and which book she thinks everyone should have to read before they leave school – it’s not, it turns out, a Latin one…

Books of the Decade – Keith Kahn-Harris

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Keith Kahn-Harris works as a sociologist, researcher, writer and music critic. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society at Birkbeck College, an associate lecturer for the Open University and the convenor of New Jewish Thought. He has written on a variety of topics, including Judaism, music scenes, heavy metal, transgression, Israel, communities, dialogue, religion, ethnicity, political discourse, and denial. You can find his contributions to the Guardian’s Comment is Free here. Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (2003) Okay, this was first published in 1972, but the English translation appeared in 2003. If she is heard of at all, the Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson is known in the English-speaking world for the Moomin books. The Summer Book shows her to have been (she died in 2001) an author of mature works of extraordinary subtlety and power. The Summer Book recounts the conversations and “adventures” of an old women and her six-year-old granddaughter spending the summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. It is a …

Books of the Decade – Andy Beckett

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Andy Beckett studied modern history at Oxford University and journalism at the University of California in Berkeley. For his first, widely praised book, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002), he was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2009 he published a major new history of the political landscape of Britain in the 1970s: When the Lights Went Out. Reviewing the book, Hanif Kureishi praised Beckett for his “avid eye and novelistic flair for detail” and concluded “Beckett’s excellent account of the 1970s is a necessity if we want to understand now as well as then”. You can hear an interview with Andy Beckett in which he discusses the book here. Since 1993, he has written for the New York Times, the Economist, the Independent on Sunday and the London Review of Books. For the last twelve years, he has been a feature writer at the Guardian. He lives in London. Click below to see which titles Andy has chosen as his Books of the Decade.

Books of the Decade – Louise Foxcroft

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Louise Foxcroft is a historian of medicine and the author of The Making of Addiction: Opiate Use and Abuse in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2007) and Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009). Mary Crockett in the Scotsman called Hot Flushes a “gripping study of western attitudes to women of a certain age and older”. She went on: “The good news, sisters – and brothers, if you’re still reading – is that Foxcroft’s study, complete with extensive endnotes and an entertainingly compiled index, arrives at a constructive conclusion. The thrust of her message is: it’s time we changed our way of thinking on ageing. For starters, it’s a natural process, not a disease. Second, women aren’t in it alone, not everything being rosy in the male mid-life department.” Louise appeared in programme 25, “Menopause and Medicine”, on Podularity to talk about the book. You’ll find that podcast here. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (Jonathan Cape, 2001) Had I read this book when I was thirty I would have felt threatened and …

Books of the Decade – Elizabeth Speller

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Whoosh! There goes the first decade of the no-longer-quite-so-new millennium.  To mark the decade’s end, we’re launching a new series in which writers, editors and publishers are given the agonizing challenge of choosing just three favourite books from the more than two million published in English in the past ten years. Over the next few weeks you’ll be able to read the choices of a host of guest reviewers and, we hope, make some interesting new discoveries. And of course we’d be delighted to hear about your favourite books of the decade too. You can use the comment form on this site or else send me an email at george[at]podularity.com. I’m delighted that the first guest to make her selection is Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has already won acclaim for her poetry – her poem “Finistère” was short-listed for the 2009 Forward Prize – and for her family memoir (2006), Sunlight on the Garden. Of this book a TLS reviewer said: “There are echoes … of Sylvia Plath’s ability to combine beauty with irony, and suffering …

Did the Vikings wear Viking helmets?

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Robert Ferguson visited London from his home in Oslo earlier this week and I interviewed him at his publisher’s offices for the Blackwells podcast which will go out tomorrow. Robert has just published a major new history of the Viking age called The Hammer and the Cross, in which he says he wants to “restore the violence of the Viking age”, but also to explain the context in which that violence took place – namely the enforced Christianization of the northern peoples by Charlemagne. Is it, Robert wonders in the Blackwells interview, out of place to compare the dynamic driving those Viking raids to modern acts of terrorism? I also made this short film with him in which I confess the questions were a bit more straightforward: so did the Vikings wear horned helmets? Click below to find out [3:37].

36. Berlin – city of “eternal becoming”

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This week’s podcast features an interview with Heather Reyes, co-founder of Oxygen Books, and co-editor of the latest addition to their City-Lit series, which appropriately enough in the week which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, paints a portrait in words of Berlin. Although there are plenty of old favourites such as Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Döblin and Len Deighton, the emphasis of the book is on unexpected vantage points and new, less familiar voices. So there is no dutiful trot through the city’s history “from earliest times to the present day”, but instead themed sections which try to get under the skin of the city. Off the beaten track, some of the highlights of the book for me were: Rolf Schneider on the disappearing Berlin pub or Kneipe (it used to be said that every street crossing in Berlin had four corners and five corner pubs – but not any more); Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom‘s reflections on a city every inch of which is “steeped in history”, from the opening of …