All posts filed under: history and politics

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.

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.

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.

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.