The Green Room

Writer and author Bob Colacello was the editor of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine during the 1970s, a role that placed him at the very epicenter of that era's glitter, exuberance, and excess. Camera in hand, he accompanied the legendary pop artist through a dizzying social whirl around the world from the dark corners and disco lights of Studio 54 to the inner sanctums of the Reagan White House.     Now, as Netflix celebrates the life of his close friend, fashion icon Halston in a new series starring Ewan McGregor, Colacello joins Arsalan Mohammad in the Green Room to talk about what the series got right - and where it went wrong. We also discuss the background to Bob's epic biography of the Reagans based on his enduring friendship with Nancy, ponder the pair's legendary marriage and legacy and Bob recalls his runs-ins with a gauche real estate developer from Queens, with a taste for bling, who married an elegant socialite named Ivana.

In this week's edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator World edition Dominic Green meets human rights activist, campaigner for classical liberal values, research fellow, founder of the AHA foundation and prolific author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for a chat about her article in the new edition of The Spectator World edition. In it, she examines the perceived flaws in Western civilisation today, the toxic creep of those who push for a totalitarian ‘woke' agenda and reflects on how tertiary education in the US is in danger of smothering students with critical race theory.     ‘You have to drill down on what it is the woke want. They want to dictate what you eat and don't eat. They want to dictate who you fraternise with or what your children are learning at school. They're very totalitarian in their approach and they're punitive. I think it's a self-defeating cause and very soon they're going to be smashed up' A former politician in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now.  Don't forgot to subscribe to the The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week's edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green and co-host Arsalan Mohammad take a look back half a century to 1971, a year currently being explored in a magnificent eight-part documentary series on Apple+ TV. Packed with archival music, contemporary news reports, voices from the mainstream and underground, the series is highly recommended. However, Dom and Arsalan soon veer off into a debate on nostalgia, the whys and wherefores of the corporatisation of rock music, the astonishing impact of Black artists such as Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and James Brown versus the pomp-rock of bloated West Coast hippies like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Should the supergroup concept ever have been taken seriously? And then, there's the mind-boggling question - would you let David Crosby father YOUR child?

In this week's edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green meets DJ Taylor, who writes in the latest edition of Spectator World, about Hawkwind, unlikely champions of the British rock underground. Less a band, more a way of life, the fascinating story of Hawkwind veers from the radicalism of the late 1960s, through the rise and fall of countercultural forces in decades to follow, to the present day. It's a soap opera of Spinal Tap proportions, a very British tale of inspiration, madness, dreaminess and otherworldliness.    Dominic and DJ Taylor have collaborated on a special Hawkwind playlist over here at Spotify, so don't forget to check it out and let us know what you think! Meanwhile, do share the love in a suitably free love style, by sharing The Green Room with your social media channels for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living.  Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week's edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green and journalist Arsalan Mohammad celebrate Bob Dylan's 80th birthday by debating a good old-fashioned mixtape of tunes spanning the old master's 60-year career (with some background sound effects by Arsalan's dog). To listen to our selection, head over to our special Dylan Spotify playlist here and perhaps let us know what would make your top ten.    Don't forgot to subscribe to the The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

In this week's episode of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green meets the author Sohrab Ahmari for a chat about his new book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering The Wisdom Of Tradition In An Age Of Chaos. In it, Ahmari, a writer and New York Post op-ed editor, makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning, via 12 fundamental questions that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behaviour and, in so doing, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way. Don't forget to subscribe to The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

Dominic Green talks to Simon Nye, who adapted the memoir-novels of Gerald Durrell into the television series ‘The Durrells of Corfu'. 

We all know we're modern, but how many of us can say why? Dominic Green's guest on 'The Green Room' this week, Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a peerless explorer of what he calls the modern 'revolution in the human brain', and of the ghostly endurance of the old gods. His latest book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth in a kaleidoscopic series. Presented by Dominic Green.

Historian David Garrow on the de-classified FBI files on Martin Luther King. 

On this week's Green Room podcast, Art Tavana and Dominic Green discuss the making and unmaking of Laura Loomer, a 25 year old video journalist who made unsavory comments about Islam, and what her modern morality tale says about media, politics and the way we live. Tavana feels that Loomer's sanity and safety are in the balance, in part because she cannot escape her notoriety, but Loomer insists that she is going nowhere: 'I'm here forever. I'm here to stay.' Presented by Dominic Green.

Daniel Pipes, Dominic's guest in The Green Room this week, is an historian, the president of the Middle East Forum, and an analyst of Islam in Europe. They talk about how Europe got to where it is, what's going on now among the new nationalist parties in Europe, and what might happen next. Presented by Dominic Green.

In this fascinating podcast, Dominic Green talks to author and foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan. They look back at ‘The Coming Anarchy' after a quarter of a century, and trace the ambitions and disasters of the last three decades of American empire, from the early Nineties to the War on Terror and the retreat of the Obama and Trump years. If you listen carefully, you can hear the clink of coffee cups on saucer. If you listen even more carefully, you'll hear a reminder of Kipling's ‘Recessional', with its warning that all empires must dissolve: ‘Lest we forget.' Listen and learn.

Dominic talks to the team of crack art critics from The New Criterion: James Panero, Benjamin Riley and Andrew Shea in this review of the best art exhibitions of the year. In between high brow chats on Michelangelo and Sir Alfred Munnings, the panel brings the energy of the New Criterion Christmas party, raging next door, with them. Is Panero coughing because he has TB, or was it induced by the prospect of the Boston MFA's Toulouse-Lautrec show? Who was in and who was out in the major museums this year? And is Andy Shea really caught using his cellphone in the middle of a podcast?

As the old year dies, our thoughts turn to what happens next. What better time, then, to cast a seasonally morbid, deeply philosophical, and curiously uplifting pod about what happens in the Ancient Greek afterlife? The Getty Villa's new exhibition, Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife is all about this and Dominic Green talks to David Saunders, Associate Curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.

This week on the Green Room, Dominic talks the blues, the blacks and the whites with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticism of the policies of the Grammys' Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his father's juke joint. He was one of the last blues musicians to be ‘discovered' by anthropologists from the North. He has won two Grammy awards, in 2001 for the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which he starred as a blues singer who has sold his soul to the devil, and in 2002 in the category of Best Historical Album, for his tribute to Charley Patton, Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues. Yet he now finds his latest album, Hotel Voodoo, ineligible for Grammy nomination as a blues artist. So why won't the Blues Grammy recognise African American artists? Presented by Dominic Green.

Dominic Green talks to Pete Shelley about experimenting with punk, performing live, and the power of music.

Dominic Green talks to cinema historian Jay Glennie, author of a definitive account of the legendary and still alarming making of Performance, a legendary 1970 release starring Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and James Fox.

Is nationalism, in Emmanuel Macron's words, an ancient and modern cause of the ‘old demons' of history? Or, as Yoram Hazony argues in his latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is the nation state the best way to preserve law and liberty? Presented by Dominic Green.

In this episode, Dominic Green talks to Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. She is the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, a scathing and accurate critique of just about everything that's gone wrong with American higher education. When she was invited to speak at Claremont McKenna College in California, student groups organised on Facebook to “shut down” the “notorious white supremacist racist Heather Mac Donald.” When she got to campus, she was moved directly to what would otherwise be called a “safe space” for her own protection. With a police escort, and more than two hundred black-clad protestors banging on the windows, she had to livestream her speech from a vacant room.

Our guest this week is Matthew Hennessey. He's an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and also the author of Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from the Millennials (Encounter Books). It's a fascinating read: part-political obituary of a generation that, squeezed between two larger cohorts, the Boomers and the Millennials, may have missed its historical cue; part-rallying cry because, as Matthew explains in our midlife crisis of a conversation, it's not over yet. ‘It's zero hour. Don't just stand there. Bust a move.' Presented by Dominic Green.

In this week's Spectator USA Life 'n' Arts podcast, Dominic talks to David Pryce-Jones. Novelist, correspondent, historian, editor at National Review and, most recently, author of the autobiography and family history Fault Lines, Pryce-Jones has the longest association with the Spectator of any Life 'n' Arts podcaster yet. In 1963, Pryce-Jones began his literary journey to the status of national treasure on both sides of the Pond by becoming books' editor of our London mothership. ‘I think the common theme in everything that I've done, really, is: what makes people believe the extraordinary things they do believe?' Presented by Dominic Green.

Dominic Green talks to the poet Alicia Stallings

Grammy-winning Canadian musician Chilly Gonzales joins the latest episode of Life 'n' Arts with Dominic Green, the Life and Arts Editor of Spectator USA.

Dominic Green talks to Roger Scruton.

Dominic Green talks to Jamie Kirchick on what's gone wrong in the American university.

Dominic Green is joined by Nell Breyer, Executive Director of the Association of Marshall Scholars, to talk about the United States and Great Britain in the age of Donald Trump, and the Marshall Scholarships, an unsung element of the postwar architecture of Atlantic security. Presented by Dominic Green, Culture Editor of Spectator USA.

With novelist and essayist William Giraldi. Author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and The Hero's Body, a memoir of misspent youth as a bodybuilder, Giraldi is one of the few contemporary American critics worth reading. This month, he publishes his first collection of essays, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring (Norton). Presented by Dominic Green, Culture Editor of Spectator USA.