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Podularity » Podcast Feed
by George Miller
Podularity is a regular on-line books programme that features interviews with writers in a wide variety of genres. Join host, George Miller, in conversation with novelists, poets and authors of non-fiction. Think of it as an on-going literary festival on-line.
Episodes
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46. Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
“Elephants are not treated much differently now than they were in the mid-eighteenth century: they are objects of awe and conservation, yet legally hunted, made captive, abused, and forced to labor for human gain. What then has research and learning served?” In Elephants on the Edge, Gay Bradshaw...
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45. Bloody borderlands
Amexica is the name journalist Ed Vulliamy has coined for the 2,000-mile-long borderland between the US and Mexico. It’s a land that has fascinated him for the past thirty years – “repelled and compelled”, as he puts it in the interview. “Charismatic,complex, irresistible” is how he describes it…
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44. Dancing on the heads of snakes
“Dancing on the heads of snakes” is how President Ali Abdullah Salih of Yemen describes the near impossibility of governing his country. He should know; he’s managed to cling on to power by keeping up the dance for the past three decades. The challenge is certainly considerable: Yemen has been a...
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43. In praise of Germany
In this week’s podcast, I talk to Simon Winder about the challenges of making a book on German history entertaining. It’s a challenge he rose to magnificently in his quirky new book, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern. He takes the reader along the highways and down many…
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42. The Return of Captain John Emmett
To record this week’s podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd’s hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. Although this book wasn’t written there, its sequel, currently a work in...
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41. It’s only a movie (and a book)
Last Monday I met film critic Mark Kermode at the Watershed in Bristol before his event there which formed part of his countrywide tour to present his new book, It’s Only a Movie. He was remarkably bright and engaged, considering he had been at the BAFTAs the night before and had already done 37...
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40. Charles Dickens – a writer’s life
We mark the birthday of Charles Dickens earlier this week with a special extended edition of my interview with his biographer Michael Slater from the end of last year, which originally appeared on Blackwell Online. John Bowen, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, said: “[it]...
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39. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears
I first became aware of Stephen Asma‘s book on the fine Washington Post Book World podcast (which sadly is no more). The Post also chose the book as one of its top non-fiction titles of the year for 2009, calling it “a safari through the many manifestations of our idea of the monstrous”. Their...
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38. Poland – a country in the moon
My guest on this week’s programme is Michael Moran, author of A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland. Michael first visited Poland in the early 1990s after the collapse of Communism as leader of an ill-assorted crew of British teachers charged with introducing the Poles…
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37. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
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...
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36. Berlin – city of “eternal becoming”
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…
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35. A Don’s Life
This week marks the second anniversary of Podularity, so I’m delighted to be welcoming back an old friend of the programme, Cambridge professor of classics, Mary Beard. Mary appeared in programme 15 to talk about her book on the Roman triumph and more recently in programme 28, to talk about...
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34. After we’ve gone
What would a race of space-travelling aliens 100 million years in the future make of the Earth? “One can imagine that they’ll be sufficiently scientifically curious to look on the world as extraordinary – because the Earth is extraordinary by comparison with all the other planets. “And then to...
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33. Through the Georgian keyhole
Amanda Vickery on the impression of Georgian life given by National Trust properties today: “They’re absolutely empty of life. They’re neat and tidy and they don’t smell and there’s no noise of the household. All of those things are absolutely central to what it was like to live in even quite…
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32. What made Greeks laugh?
“I’m trying to use laughter as a kind of prism, I suppose, through which to examine certain features of the broader culture… “Greeks talk a lot about laughter and so there are a lot of perceptions and representations of laughter in prose texts and poetic texts… It’s used all over the place, it’s...
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31. The Making of Mr Gray’s Anatomy
“What’s so wonderful about Carter’s illustrations [for Gray’s Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they’re not shown as undignified, they’re not shown in pain. In fact, many of the illustrations are quite noble… “It’s the first real anatomy book for...
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30. Hun’s eye view
“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…
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29. A walk across the universe
“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...
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28. The Life of a Roman Town
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…
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27. Alice on the Indus
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...
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26. Who owns your body?
“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…
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25. Menopause and medicine
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...
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24. Lost in Birmingham
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...
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23. Exploring the haunted city
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…
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22. From barman to biographer
Rodge Glass – Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography In this week’s podcast, Rodge Glass tells me how, after his first disastrous meeting with Alasdair Gray in a bar in Glasgow, he later went on to be the writer’s student, amanuensis and eventually biographer. Rodge recalls how Gray (a...
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21. In Pushkin’s library
“Pushkin died romantically, famously in a duel in 1837. He’s often thought of as the founding father of modern Russian literature, which makes him sound rather dusty and old-fashioned, but in fact he’s a great innovator and experimenter…” “His career is very important in the history of Russian...
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20. “Grub first, ethics later”
The first Podularity podcast of 2009 is an interview with polymath Raymond Tallis about his most recent book, Hunger, which appears in the Art of Living series from Acumen Publishing. The Times has described Tallis as “the Lennox Lewis of the intellectual world – a formidable heavyweight” and, as...
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19. Mark Vernon on: What is wellbeing?
Mark Vernon has just brought out a book on wellbeing in a new series of which he’s general editor. But this isn’t a run-of-the-mill self-help series. The series is called The Art of Living and it’s published by independent philosophy specialist, Acumen. Their stated aim is to “open up…
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18. Julian Baggini: Mistrust the lucky ducky
“In marketing and in politics people have got more sophisticated in their manipulation techniques, so more than ever we need to know what they are, so that we can spot the truth when we see it.” Julian Baggini is the first guest to pay a return visit to the Podularity studio. I last interviewed…
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17. “Unstitching the carefully tailored suit” – among the dead philosophers
“The book is written against the view that a philosopher’s biography is of no importance and that philosophy can be reduced to a series of systems of thought. It’s really an attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers. That was the way that philosophy was taught…
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16. “Our sweaty ape hands on the thermostat”
“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact some back-of-the-envelope calculations were made then which more or less stand the test of time a century later.” A few weeks back I met...
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15. The Big Parade with Mary Beard
“I’m interested in saying, look, how can you challenge the Asterix-and-the-Romans kind of image that we tend to have of Rome? We are determined to turn a blind eye to Roman subtlety, humour and sophistication because the Romans do a very good job for us of being bridge-builders and thugs. The...
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14. The Mighty Handful and more
“In Russian music you have a very different portrayal of Russia [from the one you find in literature], which has very strong rhythms, very festive images. It’s very bright, very colourful, very, very different from the melancholy Russian soul.” Writing of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar after...
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‘An extended passport application’ – the poetry of Michael Hofmann
“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German residue about things. It’s something I feel haunted by…” I’m delighted that the first poet to appear on Podularity is...
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12. A Chinese character
“I think the burning question is: we think of printing as having revolutionized intellectual life in Europe, how come it doesn’t appear to have revolutionized intellectual life in China? There’s no great fanfare when it arrives. It seems to creep in and people don’t talk about it much for quite a...
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11. ‘Gonged on Missy’
‘You always suppose you’re the heroine in the story of your life; the day you discover you’re the monster, it’s apt to come as a surprise’ Dol McQueen, ‘flash-girl’, 1862 Chris Hannan‘s dazzlingly accomplished first novel, Missy , is published today in the UK (in the US, it comes out in June from...
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10. Fleeing Hitler – the story of the Paris exodus
On 14 June 1940 German tanks swept into Paris. That the city would fall to the Nazis was by then a foregone conclusion; it had been declared an ‘open city’ the day before. In other words, it would put up no resistance against the invaders. The government had already packed up and left. By 14…
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9. Talking about animals
‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study…
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8. A Philosopher in Everytown
Philosophy can seem the most cerebral and abstract of disciplines. So what would happen if a philosopher stepped out of his study and ’embedded’ himself in an ordinary (but unfamiliar) community in his own country and tried to work out whether the English people have anything which could…
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7. Russian Childhood
This week’s Podularity podcast features an interview with Catriona Kelly, who has just published a monumental new history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia. The book, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991, draws not only on a vast amount of archival research but also on hundreds...
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6. Discovering Our Inner Ape
What aspects of our human character do we inherit from our fellow primates? Until recently, the answer would have been ‘all the bad bits’. Footage of chimpanzees killing their own kind influenced the view in the popular imagination that ‘killer’ and ‘ape’ were virtual synonyms. One of the leading...
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5. Sofka Zinovieff on the trail of the Red Princess
A few years ago Sofka Zinovieff became fascinated by the life of her grandmother and namesake, Sofka Dolgorouky, who was born into a noble family in imperial Russia exactly a century ago. Sofka had known her grandmother when she was already an old woman and, although she knew something of her...
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4. ‘Real stories of ordinary people…’ – Remembering Beslan
On the morning of 1 September 2004, children and teachers all over Russia were getting ready for the first day of the new school year. So begins Timothy Phillips’ account of the terrible siege of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Of course, we know now that that day three years ago which…
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3. One man and his dog
This week’s podcast features Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Tom has recently come to prominence as a novelist and his book, Remainder, has been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. But in Tintin and the Secret of Literature he shows he also possesses a sharp (and...
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2. Don’t Go Down to the (Vienna) Woods…
If mention of Vienna makes you think of Mozart, cream cakes and Gemütlichkeit, John Leake’s new book will make you think again. John Leake is a young Texan writer who found himself living in Vienna. The city captivated his imagination (his favourite film is The Third Man) and he soon began...
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1. Lost Continents, Deep Space… and Lasagne
“The four-dimensional complexities of our happy little planet – “earth’s immeasurable surprise” – are made elegantly accessible by Ted Nield in this truly exceptional book. At least until the next major discovery it deserves to become the standard work, ideal for students of the subject, and…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Podularity is a regular on-line books programme that features interviews with writers in a wide variety of genres. Join host, George Miller, in conversation with novelists, poets and authors of non-fiction. Think of it as an on-going literary festival on-line.
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George Miller
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Podularity is a regular on-line books programme that features interviews with writers in a wide variety of genres. Join host, George Miller, in conversation with novelists, poets and authors of non-fiction. Think of it as an on-going literary festival on-line.
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