Podularity Books Podcast

W H Auden wrote: when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, but what I see is a limestone landscape Fiona Sampson too hears the murmur of underground streams. She describes at the start of her recent book Limestone Country the shock, the epiphany, of realising that most of her favourite places were made from, and in and on, limestone: a cottage in West Oxfordshire; a hamlet in Périgord in southern France; the Karst region of western Slovenia; the city of Jerusalem. She writes: ‘Really living in these landscapes means paying radical attention to how they behave. It means knowing their wildlife as well as ways of farming, observing how water and vegetation respond to the mineral facts of rock and soil as much as how humans live in and with them.’ Responding ‘to the mineral facts’ – that might be a good way of thinking about her book. When I met Fiona earlier this year, I was keen to hear …

  This is a podcast I produced for Notting Hill Editions with Alison Leslie Gold, who is perhaps best known for her book Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Miep Gies, one of the people who protected the Frank family during the war. Before her collaboration on that book, Alison had experienced a lost decade, in which she descended into alcohol addiction. Writing the Anne Frank book represented a return to life, a rediscovery of interest in other people and their stories. Other stories were to follow. She became, as she puts it, ‘a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories’. But, as she writes in the Prologue to her new book, Found and Lost: She goes on: When I met Alison in London last autumn she began by telling me more about the book’s origins: Alison Leslie Gold The book started as a kind of treatise on close friends dying. It’s in five parts and it’s about six deaths; the first part was initially published by a small press connected to …

And here is the part of my interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in which I talk to him about his short story collection, Nocturnes. This was recorded first (hence it’s part 1) but six years on, my feeling is that Part 2 is in fact the best place to start as he sets his earlier books in context.

Half a dozen years ago, I was delighted to be asked by Faber & Faber to interview Kazuo Ishiguro for a special two-part podcast to mark the publication of his first collection of short stories, Nocturnes. In the first part, we focused on the new book, and in the second I asked him about his background, previous novels, and the effects of early success (and intriguingly, he makes what I think must have been one of his first public indication that he was working on an idea which would become the 2015 novel, The Buried Giant). To listen to the podcasts, click on the links below. To whet your appetite, here are a couple of extracts from our conversation. Kazuo Ishiguro Early on, when I was six or seven, I very much thought of Japan as my home and I very much thought we were about to return at any moment. And I was much more in touch with Japanese culture then. I was being sent comics and books so there was an attempt to …

I heard an interesting interview with Robert Ferguson on the New York Times Books podcast at the weekend in which he talked about his new book on Scandinavia (“an engaging, layered look into a culture,” New York Times). It reminded me that I did an interview with Robert a few years ago when his new history of the Vikings, The Hammer and the Cross, came out. I listened again to that interview this morning on the dog walk and thought I’d repost it here. In the interview, Robert told me: “One of the most important reasons for the outbreak of the age [of Viking raids and conquests] was acts of cultural self-defence. Almost – it is anachronistic – but almost terrorism. They couldn’t defeat the might of the [Christianizing] Frankish empire on the battlefield, so they resorted, as many a small culture will do when it’s under cultural threat, to terrorist-like activities, violent manifestations on frankly soft targets, monasteries and so on. “And of course there was money to be had and things to be …

I see that Philip Hoare is publishing the third volume of his trilogy about the sea next week. RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR comes nine years after his award-winning book on the culture and history of whales, Leviathan, so I though I would re-present the interview I did with Philip about that book back then in a coffee shop in Bath (to listen click on the player above or download here)… As the publisher’s blurb puts it: The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious. In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book …

What would it have been like to spend five days attending the ancient Greek Olympics in 388 BC? That’s what Neil Faulkner‘s book sets out to explore. You can listen to the interview, which I recorded with Neil in the spring of 2012, shortly before the London games, by clicking on the media players above or below. And there’s more information about the book on Yale University Press’s website here. In the interview, Neil tells me: ‘Ancient Greece is a highly divided and competitive world, and it’s a world that puts huge emphasis on sport, partly because all of Greece’s city states depend for their armed forces on a citizen militia made up of their adult male citizens. So there’s a sense in which Greek sport is war without the shooting. It’s preparation for war in a highly divided and competitive world.’ And we also produced a short video of Neil talking about the book: Neil Faulkner on his Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics from George Miller on Vimeo.  

With the same inevitability as the shifting tectonic plates perhaps, my podcast backlist seems to have drifted off iTunes and disappeared beneath the waves. So I am intending to use the opportunity, which did not initially come as welcome news, to gradually re-present all my interviews from the past ten years. They may not all arrive in chronological order, but this was definitely the first interview with which Podularity kicked off on Hallowe’en 2007. Here’s what I said about the podcast first time round: Ten billion years in the life of our planet. That’s the subject of this first Podularity podcast. And all in a little over 17 minutes … Alert readers may already object that it’s impossible to cover 10 billion years, as the Earth is only six billion years old. (If you are objecting that the Earth is a great deal younger than that, then this podcast is probably not going to appeal to you.) However, Ted Nield’s new book, Supercontinent, looks not only deep into the past by examining the geological record, …

“I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn’t require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age.” My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of …

In September I met up with Carol Gilligan at Polity‘s offices in Cambridge to record this two-part interview in which she talked about her childhood, writing her landmark study In a Different Voice (1982), her most recent book Joining the Resistance, and her thoughts on what has been achieved in the three decades since In a Different Voice appeared. She also talks about what remains to be done to achieve a post-patriarchal world in which individuals’ voices are both heard and respected. “I am a woman who listens,” Carol writes in her new book. That is certainly true. She is also a woman who speaks eloquently and passionately about the ideas that animate her, often linking them in to her own life experiences. To listen to part 1 of the interview, click here. And for part 2, click here.

My daughters, Livi and Abby, interviewed Joanna Nadin (far right below, with fellow authors after the Queens of Teen event) before her talk at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival last month. Click here to listen to the interview. [9:56]

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique I talk to Eric Alterman about his piece on Barack Obama in the October edition of the paper, entitled “The compromiser-in-chief”. Eric’s piece begins with a reminder of the Mario Cuomo quote: “campaign in poetry but govern in prose” and goes on to look at the ways in which Obama’s record is looking decidedly prosaic. “Deal-maker not world-shaker” is Alterman’s verdict, and the terms of the deals being made in Washington are increasingly being set by the Republicans. I began by asking Eric about the disappointment felt by those who elected a president who promised “bold and swift” action. To listen to the podcast, click here. Complete archive of LMD podcasts here. Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, the Nation Institute and the World Policy Institute.

Earlier this year, just before Oxford University Press’s flagship medical title, the Oxford Textbook of Medicine, went online for the first time, I met all three editors of the book and interviewed them about it. The book attempts no less than a full digest of the current state of medical knowledge, and is therefore a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking. I was keen to find out more about the values which underpinned the book and also the practical side – how is it possible to stay on top of such a vast and ever-changing field, what does the future hold for the book now that it has gone online, and what are the pleasures of working on such a long-term project? Though the book is intended primarily for professionals, it also finds its way into other contexts; it’s often cited in courts of law, for example. So I hope that this interview will be of interest to medics and non-medics alike. After all, it’s far from unlikely that at some point in your …

Next month, renowned art historian Martin Kemp publishes Christ to Coke, a richly ilustrated exploration of how eleven images, from the face to Christ to the Coke bottle, have become icons. Along the way, he also investigates the stories of the cross, the Mona Lisa, the double helix and Che Guevara, inter al. 1. When I interviewed Martin about the book, I began by asking him to define what he meant by an icon. [Click here to listen to extract.] 2. Next I asked him to sketch out the process by which an image turned into an icon. [Click here] 3. How, I wondered, did he select the eleven images that he features in the book? [Click here] 4. Why was Christ the first image he selected? Did that mean the ancient world didn’t produce other icons with staying power? [Click here] 5. The image of Christ had to overcome obstacles in order to become an icon. Martin Kemp explains these here. [Click here] 6. In many instances, the icon draws some of its power …

“If they [far-right parties] can actually get their act together and leave specific ideological questions behind them, they can form a bloc in the European Union, get access to public money, and take advantage of a growing anti-elite and growing anti-European Union sentiment that’s felt by vast sections of European populaces.” – K. Biswas In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to journalist and author K. Biswas about the fortunes of Europe’s far-right populist parties, many of which have entered mainstream politics in ways unthinkable a decade ago. We discuss the role of the media and of leadership in their rise, and also how to interpret July’s tragic events in Norway in the context of far-right politics. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Sylvia Walby is Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Gender Relations at Lancaster University. Her publications include Theorizing Patriarchy, Globalization and Inequalities, and Gender Transformations. I interviewed her recently about her latest book, The Future of Feminism, described by a reviewer as “[a] balanced and thoughtful assessment of the changes feminism has wrought and the challenges it faces”. 1. I began by asking her if she could understand the forces and pressures that created the widespread assumption that we are living in a post-feminist age. [Click here] 2. In her book, Sylvia Walby discusses how feminism has changed form from its early days. I asked her to give me a tour d’horizon of those variant forms here. [Click here] 3. Sylvia Walby contends that the “depth” of a democracy is critical to determining how successfully a feminist agenda can be pursued within it. I asked her to expand on this notion here. [Click here] 4. Despite progress, violence against women remains a problem in many different contexts. Given the range of different interventions – …

John Urry is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His many publications include Sociology Beyond Society and After the Car. I met him recently in Lancaster to talk to him about his latest book, Climate Change and Society, which explores the significance of human behaviour for understanding the causes and impacts of changing climates and responding to those impacts. 1. I began by asking him about his central thesis, that sociology ought to replace economics as the main discourse for understanding anthropogenic climate change. [Click here] 2. Next I asked about whether understanding how complex systems functioned in the past and present can provide any guidance to the future. [Click here] “Sociology can bring out the enduring social and economic conflicts which inhibit change…” 3. John Urry reflects on how sociology can sharpen our understanding the vested interests of the “carbon military-industrial complex” and how those interests constrain responses to climate change. [Click here] 4. In Climate Change and Society, John Urry writes that we shall all have to become futurologists by necessity. I …

In the August edition of Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to John R MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of books including The Selling of ‘Free Trade’: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy,about the impact Nafta has had on American jobs and communities since it came into effect in 1994. To date an estimated two and a half million US workers are unemployed as a result of it. To listen to the podcast, click here.

“International law should certainly be an important strand in any debate about going to war, but it should not dominate and crowd out discussions about morality, about prudence, about efficacy, and most of all about consequences.” In the July edition of Le Monde diplomatique, New York-based civil rights lawyer Chase Madar writes about how far we have drifted from the post-war vision of international law as an instrument for regulating and upholding a peaceful world order. In his analysis, international law has in fact become what he calls “a supple instrument for war”, as evinced most recently in the case of international intervention in Libya. In this interview for Le Monde diplomatique he explains his reasoning to George Miller. To listen, click here.

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller interviews Tony Wood, deputy editor of the New Left Review, about the wave of protests sparked by the UK coalition government’s planned £80bn public spending cuts. As public anger grows, are we on the brink of the biggest public engagement with politics since the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s? To listen to the interview, click here.

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller speaks to journalist and Middle East specialist Patrick Seale about the current unrest in Syria and the chances of survival for the Assad dynasty, which has ruled the country for four decades. To listen to the interview, click here.

Here’s a transcript of a recent interview I did with Daniel Miller about his new book, Tales from Facebook, for Polity. (If you would prefer to listen to the interview, you will find it here.) George Miller: Hello and welcome to this, the fifth in a series of podcasts from Polity. My name is George Miller and my guest on this programme is Daniel Miller, who is professor of material culture at University College, London. Danny is the author of several books on the Polity list, chief among which is perhaps Stuff, a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life. When we met recently it was to discuss Danny’s new book, Tales from Facebook, which looks at the consequences of being a Facebook user on people’s lives. How is it changing our behaviour and modes of interaction, especially between men and women? What is it doing to our sense of ourselves and …

Daniel Miller is professor of material culture at University College London. His new book, Tales from Facebook (Polity, 2011) looks at the impacts of being a Facebook user on people’s everyday  lives. Drawing his examples from an in-depth study of Facebook users in Trinidad, the book is in part a sequence of detailed pen-portraits of a dozen individuals whose habits he examined. What emerges is a picture more fascinating and more complex than the easy media generalizations about Facebook’s impact on society. To listen to my complete interview with Daniel Miller click here. To listen to shorter sections of the interview, click on the links which interest you below. 1. Why did you focus on Trinidadian Facebook users, rather than users in London, New York or Sydney? Click here. 2. You describe Facebook as being uncannily well-suited to Trinidadian culture. In what ways? Click here. 3. How did you go about researching something as personal as how people use Facebook? Click here. 4. What do you make of the charge that Facebook is just a …

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, George Miller talks to Gilbert Achcar of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London about his article in the latest issue of the paper on the Muslim Brotherhood and the role they might play in Egypt’s “orderly transition” to a new order. To listen to the podcast, click here.

“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 makes an eloquent but always scientifically reasoned plea on behalf of the elephant, “for if we fail to act on what we know, we will lose them, and more”. It’s not just a call for better conservation measures and an end to the culling of an animal listed as “endangered” on the International Union of the Conservation of Nature Red List in 2008. It’s an argument for expanding our notion of moral community to include animals, not least the sociable, communicative, intelligent elephant. “This book”, one reviewer wrote, “opens the door into the soul of the elephant” and it is a remarkable world which we glimpse through that door. The book has also been highly praised by writers as diverse as Peter Singer, Desmond Tutu, J.M. Coetzee …

Susan George is an internationally renowned political scientist and author of over a dozen widely translated books. She was born in the Midwest during the Great Depression, but moved to France in the 1960s and subsequently took French citizenship. She still lives in Paris. Susan George achieved prominence in 1976 with her first ground-breaking book, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reason for World Hunger (available as a free download via this link). After hunger she went on to study debt and poverty, as reflected in books such as The Debt Boomerang and A Fate Worse than Debt. George is president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, an international network of scholar-activists committed to social change. Before we talked about her new book on our current predicament, Whose Crisis, Whose Future?, I asked her about the values she grew up with. Had the great collective effort made by the US in World War Two been particularly influential? [To listen to this section of the interview, click here.] Turning to her new …

Our final guest who shares the highlights of her past twelve months of reading is historian Catherine Arnold. I first interviewed Catherine about the second book in her London trilogy, which explores the darker aspects of the city’s past, Bedlam: London and its Mad. You can hear the interview here. (The first volume of the series, as yet unpodcasted, is Necropolis: London and its Dead.) More recently, we met to talk about her latest book, City of Sin: London and its Vices. You can listen to that here.  Here are Catherine’s choices from her 2010 reading: Looking back at the books which I’ve enjoyed over the past year reveals that history, personal, national and social, has been much on my mind. I’m currently researching a book about London and crime, and to this end I’ve particularly enjoyed Newgate, London’s Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday, and Tyburn, London’s Fatal Tree (Alan Brooke and David Brandon), both from the History Press (Sutton). Gripping accounts of two of the darkest aspects of London life. As I have also …

Our guest selector of his Books of the Year today is Francis Spufford. Earlier this year Francis published the genre-defying Red Plenty. As the book’s website says: “Is it a novel? Is it non-fiction? It all depends on your definitions. It tells a true story, but it tells it as a story. Whatever you call it, it’s about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea – central planning via cybernetics – and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed.” You can  listen to my interview with Frances by clicking here. Here are his Books of the Year: I have been thinking a lot this year about the interesting edges and boundary zones of fiction, and one of the books that has intrigued me most has been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream (Harper Voyager, £8.99). Depending how you think about it, …

Andrew McConnell Stott is an award-winning writer and academic. For several years he was a stand-up comedian, described by London’s Evening Standard as “an absurdist comic with a satirical eye for popular culture.” The world, however, was unprepared for such hilarity and so he decided to give it up. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (Canongate, 2009). The latter was praised by Simon Callow in the Guardian as a “great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life”.  Jenny Uglow in the Observer called it a “fast-paced, rumbustious biography” and said:  “A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, ‘Joey the Clown’, into the limelight again.” You can hear my interview with Andrew by clicking here. Andrew is currently a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Here is his selection of books he has enjoyed this year: I don’t tend to read that many books-of-the-moment, because …

Our second guest to select her Books of the Year is Elizabeth Knowles. Elizabeth spent much of her career as a historical lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. She is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and, most recently, the author of How to Read a Word, a book that aims to make lexicographical sleuths of us all. You can hear my recent interview with Elizabeth by clicking here. And here are her Books of the Year: Since I was thirteen and first encountered M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, I have had an affection for his particular subsection of the genre. The protagonist (generally learned) is drawn through his speciality into an exploration which is as tempting as it is unwise. The background (a country library or monastic church) is solidly evoked, but a crack through which terror can enter opens and widens as too many questions are asked, and warning voices are ignored. Throughout his canon of short stories, James again and again successfully achieves what he himself …

Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, was published to great acclaim earlier this year. You can hear my interview with her about the book here. Her second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, will appear in May 2011. Here are her choices (you’ll find an interview with one of her selected authors, Madeleine Bunting, here): My greatest pleasure this year came from reading Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Read selectively, randomly or straight through (I did all three, in order) it is a wonderfully intelligent and lively journey through the landscape of the imagination between the wars. Harris informs but also has huge fun with the creativity, fantasy and sometimes spectacular self-indulgence of the period. I’m delighted to see publishers producing such visually beautiful but serious books to compete with e-publishing. It was announced …

I was in Oxford on Friday to interview Rosamund Bartlett about her recent Tolstoy biography, which coincides with the great man’s death a century ago on 20 November 1910. The interview will appear shortly on the Blackwell Online website, but in the meantime, here is Rosamund reading a short extract from the book itself, in which Tolstoy as a boy listens to his grandmother’s blind storyteller recount a bedtime story… Click here for the reading.

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 in his new book, Amexica, which he discusses with me in this podcast. The US-Mexican border is the busiest such crossing in the world – a million people use it every day. And some of them are engaged in the trafficking – of people, arms, drugs, and dirty money- which gives this land its often brutally violent character. In the interview we talk about that violence, where it comes from, the ways in which it mirrors developments in the global economy and – perhaps most worryingly – the fact that “children are growing up along the border with this as their world”.  

Elizabeth Knowles is a historical lexicographer, which means that she researches the histories of words – how did they come to mean what they mean today and what journeys have they taken to arrive at these meanings? Elizabeth firmly believes that “there is no such thing as a dull word” and to prove it has written How to Read a Word in which she reveals some techniques you can use in order to undertake fascinating journeys of your own in the history of our language. What follows are extracts from an interview in which she talks to George Miller about some of the words she discusses in the book – and we put her to the test by asking her without any forewarning how to go about researching two unusual terms. Just click on the links below to listen to the extracts. And if these whet your appetite, a longer interview about the book can be heard by clicking here. Kate Moss famously once said: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Here Elizabeth talks …

Antony Jay’s Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations – entitled Lend Me Your Ears – is now in its fourth edition. To mark its publication, I went to interview Antony – perhaps best known as the co-author of the “Yes, Minister” series – at his home in Somerset. You can hear the whole interview by clicking here; or you can listen to highlights by clicking on the links below. My first question was: what makes a quotation a political quotation? Click here. Politics is a field more prone than most to misquotation. Antony Jay discusses a notorious quote attributed to James Callaghan, which he never in fact said. Click here to find out what it was. What are the challenges of pinning down who said what in the modern world of 24-hour news, blogs and soundbites? Click here. Was there such a thing as a Golden Age of political phrase-making? Click here to hear Antony Jay’s view. Who are some of Tony’s personal favourites among the many thousands of writers and politicians in the book? Click …

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I talk to Geneva-based journalist and political analyst Vicken Cheterian about recent events in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan. We talk about inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbek peoples, the stance of Kyrgyzstan’s neighbours, Russia and Uzbekistan, and the role which Cheterian believes the West should play in helping bring this former beacon of reformism and pro-Western attitudes back from the brink of chaos. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here. The LMD podcast archive is accessible here.

John Grindrod was born in 1970 in Croydon and still lives in South London. Last year he published Shouting at the Telly, a book in which a host of comedians, actors and writers wrestle with such weighty issues as:  Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal pervert? What does Howards’ Way tell us about the eighties? How do you win America’s Next Top Model? Which programmes do you only watch when you’re off sick?  I spoke to John about the book for the Blackwell Online podcast when it came out. You can listen to it here. Here are John’s holiday reading choices: The most obviously summery book I’ve been reading has been Travis Elborough’s hilarious and hugely informative Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, a cultural history of seaside resorts and our national obsession with piers, paddling and penny arcades. Travis grew up in Worthing and his disdain for the place colours the book, but this is as much a reconciliation with his own seaside demons as it is a gloriously eccentric travelogue around England’s …

Maria McCann’s first novel, As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Civil War was published  in 2000 to great acclaim. Her second, The Wilding, appeared earlier this year and was also very warmly received; the Guardian, for example, called it “taut and compelling” and the Independent a “tour de force”. It is set in the West Country during the Restoration, when a reckoning has to be made of acts committed during the turbulent time that preceded it and well-kept family secrets begin to unravel. The paperback of The Wilding is out next month. You can listen to my interview with Maria in which she talk about writing the book by clicking here. And here is her Summer Reading selection: At some point in the eighties, working as a library assistant in London, I came across Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and the surreal image of a glass building floating away downriver has haunted me ever since. In those days, surrounded by library stock and with no work to do in the evenings, I read …

Marcus Chown is cosmology consultant of New Scientist. His books include Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, which has just been long-listed for the 2010 Royal Society Book Prize. I interviewed Marcus about We Need to Talk about Kelvin for the Faber podcast. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. Here are his summer reading selections: It is probably odd to recommend a book so far only half-read but I knew from the opening page that Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World was going to be special. The story of two orphaned brothers adopted by very different families, set amid the political turmoil of post-colonial Indonesia, its prose is rich and atmospheric. Reminds me of Graham Greene. Aw, a Malaysian writer based in London, deserves to be far better known than he is. I had never before read anything by Rose Tremain but, after putting down The Road Home, I wanted to read more. The novel charts the …

Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Prize and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. You can listen to my interview with Graham about The Strangest Man by clicking here. And here are Graham’s summer reading choices: Summer reading seems to be synonymous with light reading. Not for me. These relatively quiet months often present the best opportunities to read challenging, off-piste books that I tend to put on the shelf invisibly marked “when I have time”.David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been there for too long. It took an appreciative review of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by the notoriously sniffy James Wood to nudge me into taking the plunge. I’m glad I did – though Cloud Atlas is not always easy to read, Mitchell’s virtuosity makes …

Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial next month on charges never before brought in the history of war – “murder in violation of the laws of war”. In this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast I talk to New York civil rights lawyer Chase Madar about some of the troubling issues raised by the Khadr case. To listen to the podcast, click here.

Daisy Hay studied at Cambridge and currently holds the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I interviewed Daisy recently about her first book, Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, which has recently won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. You can hear the interview by clicking here. Here are Daisy’s summer reading suggestions: My summer holiday usually takes me to the same spot each year: the house in the South of France which has been in my family since before I was born. Each year I take with me a new novel, something meaty and absorbing, which is much more satisfying to read in long shady sessions on the terrace than in the snatched minutes available in the working week. Last year I packed A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and spent several glorious afternoons utterly engrossed in it. This year I took David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve brought home to finish. I’d be further through it were it not for the fact that one of …

Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. His books include Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001), which W.G. Sebald praised for its “unique sense of time and place, and great depth of vision” and Leviathan or, The Whale which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. You can hear my interview with Philip in which we talk about whales, Melville and Moby-Dick by clicking here. Here are his summer reading recommendations: Having just returned from a book tour of New England – a place haunted by its past, and by its whales – I’m deep in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards’ Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works, (Kent State University Press, $49). I picked up the book in the Whaling Museum in Nantucket, an island out of time where even billionaires’ SUVs are subjected to 18th-century cobblestones in the street, and where, courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association, I stayed in Thomas Macey’s house, where Melville himself dined in 1852. (I was woken …

By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al. By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here. Here are her summer reading choices: I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar’ book about boarding school life. I’m a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue. Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday …

Today’s holiday reading selector is Jan Zalasiewicz, who teaches geology at Leicester University. He was a guest on the very first Blackwell Online podcast, in which he told me about his book The World after Us. You can listen to the interview here. I’m hoping to interview him again this autumn when his new book, The Planet in a Pebble, appears. Here is his summer readiing recommendation: Holidays! It’s off to the beach or café terrace or simply that rickety deckchair in the weed-strewn garden. Now – what to pack to read? Nothing too demanding or (the Gods forbid!) improving. An adventure that rattles along with zing and charm and fun and characters you can live with. But that’s so hard to find… There are the staples, of course, that rarely disappoint: Terry Pratchett and George MacDonald Fraser and – a personal quirk, mostly from the charity bookshop, now – the early Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, admired for their style and craft by that other old dependable, P.G. Wodehouse. But more of that ilk? …

This is the first in a short series of summer reading recommendations from some of the authors I have interviewed in recent months. New posts will appear as they arrive. Our first guest is historian Helen Rappaport. Helen studied Russian before becoming an actress, but in recent years she has developed a successful second career as an author, specializing in Russian history. You can hear my interview with her about book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile on the Blackwell website by clicking here. Here is her recommendation: As a historian in love with real people and real lives, and one who reads virtually no fiction – ever –  let alone contemporary fiction, I was totally gripped by the first two books of  Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy* like no other crime novels I have ever read. And for me that is saying something. Why did they have such an impact on me? Simple: it’s all down to the brilliant, quirky, compulsive and utterly believable central female character, Lisbeth Salander, the best feisty heroine created by a male …

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled “NGOs are ‘the enemy within'”, which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations and NGOs, particularly in the aftermath of their assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. Eyal Weizman is an architect, originally from Israel now based in London. He is director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before the interview, he explained to me that the Centre exists at the intersection of human rights, politics and the built environment. He has a particular interest in the way in which architecture is implicated in geopolitical conflicts “and how we can read the history of conflicts through the built environment”. He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Click here to play the podcast.

The latest volume in the city-pick series – on Amsterdam – has just been published. When their Berlin book came out, Podularity carried an interview with the book’s editor, Heather Reyes. This time, we go one better and present an audio diary which I compiled on location in Amsterdam with Dutch poet and critic, Victor Schiferli, the co-editor of city-pick Amsterdam. Our main project was filming a number of interviews with Dutch writers, currently going up on Vimeo and YouTube, and in the interstices, we made the sound recordings that you can listen to below – a sort of audio introduction both to Amsterdam and Victor’s book. Just click on the pictures below to hear the sound clips. 1. Spui Square and the Athenaeum Bookshop 2. De Zwart cafe and literary feuds 3. Dam Square 4. Amsterdam in wartime 5. The Vondelpark (and who was Vondel?) 6. In the Red Light District 7. Amsterdam on Two Wheels 8. Victor’s Thoughts on Compiling the Book

This morning I spoke to leading US economist James K. Galbraith on the phone from Athens for this month’s Le Monde diplomatique podcast. James is professor of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He’s the author of six books, including The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps” The interview accompanies and amplifies his article in the current issue of Le Monde diplo, which looks at what he calls “the Europeanization of Mediterranean debt” forced on the EU by speculators, and what he predicts will become a vicious circle of budget cutting, debt deflation and depression. He further predicts that old patterns of hardship migration will re-emerge: “rich countries will have a lot of new poor people on their doorsteps because they weren’t willing to deal with them at home”. To listen to the podcast, click here.

After a gap of a couple of months, the Le Monde diplomatique podcast is back. This month I talk to Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese academic who is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS in London and author most recently of The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, published this month. His subject in the article – and in this podcast – is Israel’s propaganda war with the Palestinians and the Arab world in general, and the intensification it has undergone in recent years. In the interview we talk about the propaganda use to which the “abject” wartime behaviour of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has been put by Israel and how Holocaust denial in the Arab world differs from that in the West. To listen to the podcast, click here.

“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 united country for only 20 years and it’s far from certain that it will remain one. Tribalism make governance a tricky business at the best of times as does poverty: around 40% of its rapidly growing population live on $2 a day. The country’s oil and water supplies are both dwindling at an alarming rate. It’s relations with its northern neighbour, Saudi Arabia, are strained. And since the failed suicide bomb attempt on a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, Yemen is once again in the full glare of international attention as Al-Qaeda’s home base on the Arabian peninsula. British journalist Victoria Clark, who was born in the city of Aden in the south of Yemen when it was still a British …