I met François Lelord in London recently to discuss his international bestseller – just released in English – Hector and the Search for Happiness (Gallic Books). François is a psychiatrist by training, so it’s no coincidence that the hero in his first venture into fiction is a Candide-like young practitioner of that profession who becomes dissatisfied with his life and goes off round the world in search of the meaning of happiness…
Simon Winder has just published a personal and highly entertaining history of Germany and the Germans. In his preface to Germania, he writes: “[this] is an attempt to tell the story of the Germans starting from their notional origins in the sort of forests enjoyed by gnomes and heroes and ending at the time of Hitler’s seizure of power.” He admits up-front that Germany is “a sort of Dead Zone” for English-speaking visitors today, unless they happen to have a professional reason for being there. But Simon’s spirited and idiosyncratic exploration of the highways and many of the byways of German history may well be able to change that. It’s certainly a long time since a book on German history made me laugh aloud in public as this one did. An audio interview is coming soon. In the mean time, as an appetiser, here is Simon’s contribution to our “Three Questions for…” series.
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…
Here’s an intriguing question to start the new year with. Last autumn I interviewed Marcus Chown about his latest popular science title, We Need to Talk about Kelvin. At the end of the interview (which you can find here), we made this short video in which Marcus tackled a question famously posed by the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, who developed the first nuclear reactor. Turning to his fellow scientists one day over lunch in 1950, he asked, “Where is everybody?” He wasn’t referring to absent colleagues, but the apparent absence of signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Click on the video below to hear Marcus’s take on whether we are alone…
On Wednesday 16th December 2009, Trafalgar Square will host a free feast of biblical proportions: a modern day Feeding the 5000. In this short film, Tristram Stuart, author of Waste, explains the problem – and outlines some solutions.
This is the second in an occasional series in which I ask an interviewee three questions – no tricks or traps, but no forewarning either. This time my guest is writer, Robert Rowland Smith, who has just published a book entitled Breakfast with Socrates: The Philosophy of Everyday Life. I rather like the exclamation mark and semi-colon behind Robert’s shoulder, unintentional though they were! Click on the book cover above to find out more about Robert’s book. A podcast interview – in which I get to ask Robert more than three questions – is coming soon.
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].
Click on the video below to hear Dan Cruickshank talking about his latest book, The Secrets of Georgian London. As Frances Wilson succinctly put it in her Times review: “Eighteenth-century London contained more prostitutes than anywhere else in Europe. In this fascinating account of sex and the Georgian city, Dan Cruickshank suggests that one woman in five was involved in some way with the sex industry.” There are many other jaw-dropping secrets of the Georgian underworld uncovered in this highly readable, but clearly meticulously researched book. Yet what stops it becoming a catalogue of humanity’s seemingly endless appetite for exploitation of its own kind is Cruickshank’s unmistakable sympathy for the women who became ensnared in the sex trade. For a lucky few, it could be a passport to a life of luxury, but for the vast majority the trajectory was the downwards one described in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress.
