Podcasts about British Library

Andy Cumpstey welcomes Joseph Alderman, a clinical lecturer in anaesthesia at the University of Birmingham, to discuss the hurdles AI faces in the healthcare sector. Dr. Alderman, who has a background in cell biology and immunometabolism, shares his insights into why AI technologies often fail to reach patients. He identifies three primary challenges: misalignment between AI development and healthcare needs, inadequate resourcing, and premature solution-oriented thinking. The conversation also touches on the importance of involving patients and clinicians in the AI development process and an exciting new initiative by Dr. Alderman's team to create a health chatbot user guide. The episode concludes with a look into regulatory challenges and the need for better patient empowerment and risk management in AI-driven healthcare. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Welcome, my love buckets!Step into the real world of medieval beauty- a place where "glowing skin" meant experimenting with ingredients that ranged from clever to catastrophic.In this episode, I peel back the rituals, recipes, and dangerously creative practices that shaped the medieval ideal face, and the women who kept that knowledge alive. Some of what you'll hear will shock you, some will weirdly make sense, and some might feel unsettlingly familiar.If you think modern beauty culture is intense... wait until you hear where we came from. By the end, you might start questioning how different we really are today.Are. You. Ready?****************Featured AD:If you love wandering into the stranger corners of history with me, you'll want to hear the trailer for my new narrative show, Murder Through Time: A Whodunit Across the Centuries. Each episode drops you into a different era as you unravel a real case shaped by the customs, dangers, and secrets of its time. You're not just listening, you're the detective. You'll hear the teaser in today's episode, and you can listen to the first episode right now wherever you get your podcasts.****************Sources & Further Reading:Monica H. Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine (University of Pennsylvania Press).S. Pisanti et al., “The Medieval Skincare Routine According to the Formulations of Magistra Trotula,” UNESCO Chair Salerno / University of Salerno.Walters Art Museum Journal, “Becoming a Blond in Late Fifteenth-Century Venice.”The Recipes Project (academic collective): articles on Vergel de Señores and Moorish women's cosmetic expertise.The British Library, digitized medieval medical and cosmetic manuscripts.Diana Luft, Medieval Welsh Medical Texts: The Recipes (University of Wales Press) — ingredient lists including goat urine.Pliny the Elder, Natural History (Loeb Classical Library edition) — ancient uses of urine, skin treatments, and cleansing agents.Becky Little, “The Strange and Dangerous History of Toxic Makeup,” National Geographic.Science Museum Group, “Dangerous Beauty: Hazardous Chemicals in Historic Cosmetics.”****************Leave Us a 5* Rating, it helps the show!Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beauty-unlocked-the-podcast/id1522636282Spotify Podcast:https://open.spotify.com/show/37MLxC8eRob1D0ZcgcCorA****************Follow Us on TikTok & Subscribe to our YouTube Channel!YouTube:@beautyunlockedspodcasthourTikTok:tiktok.com/@beautyunlockedthepod****************Intro/Outro Music:“Fame Inc” by Savvier — https://icons8.com/music

Optometry historians observe 23rd February, 1305 as the day eyeglasses were perhaps first discussed in public, when friar Giordano de Rivalto stood at the pulpit and declared that he had personally met the man who invented spectacles... Except, frustratingly, he forgot to mention the bloke's name. One popular contender for the title is Salvino D'Armati, a Florentine said to have created the first glasses in 1284. The only problem? His story turned out to be a hoax—his supposed 1317 epitaph even used the word "inventor," which didn't exist yet. But the connection to the church is legit, as the earliest wearers of glasses were usually monks, because they were the nation's biggest bookworms. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly romp through a brief history of optometry, learning how ear hooks first came to the fore; explaining how Seneca used early lenses to assist his reading; and revealing Benjamin Franklin's surprising role in the world of bifocals… Further Reading: • ‘Through the looking glass' (British Library, 2019): https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/02/medieval-spectacles.html • ‘The history of spectacles' (College of Optometrists): https://www.college-optometrists.org/the-british-optical-association-museum/the-history-of-spectacles • ‘Why so many people need glasses now' (Vox, 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAkFtka3UFw Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Michelle Chew is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and editor for the British Journal of Anaesthesia. Hear her sharing her Perioperative Profile on TopMedTalk with Andy Cumpstey. After initial anaesthesia training in Denmark, she moved to Lund University, Sweden, combining clinical work and research, later establishing her own experimental haemodynamics group studying septic and haemorrhagic shock and myocardial changes. She balances academic and family life by prioritizing rather than seeking "life balance," noting challenges for women in academia despite Scandinavian support. She explains journal editing—from rapid assessment, literature checks, peer review coordination, to feedback synthesis—and entered the field via the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, later serving at BJA and other journals. She also describes developing clinical guidelines, emphasizing expert panels, systematic reviews, consensus, and local adaptation, with involvement in Scandinavian and European anesthesia societies. Throughout, she highlights lessons from mentors and family, especially her grandmother, stresses taking opportunities and putting in the work, and emphasizes that science and clinical medicine ultimately serve patients. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Lieutenant Ward Harrison is sent to find out what is delaying the meteorological monitoring of a planned colonial base on the planet Mars. Vintage sci-fi horror from “Amazing Stories” magazine.This original recording is an audio presentation by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted Horror. “MONSOONS OF DEATH” attributed to Gerald Vance, 1942.

ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2025, the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), and Desiree Chappell hosts Professor Michael Scott from the University of Rochester and Dr Wael Saasouh, director of research for NorthStar Anesthesia. The discussion centers on the evolution of patient-centered monitoring, the importance of continuous hemodynamic monitoring, and the broader implications of hemodynamic instability. The guests delve into their recent consensus paper with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation and highlight the need for more comprehensive monitoring technologies that are accessible and cost-effective. The conversation also explores international collaborations, differences in practice settings (academic vs. private), and the future of enhanced recovery and post-operative care. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Desiree Chappell, Kate Leslie, and Mike Grocott welcome Harriet W. Hopf, a physician-scientist and professor of anesthesiology and adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Utah, UK. Dr Hopf is known for her leadership in academic governance, medical education, and healthcare research. She shares insights on her distinguished career focusing on surgical site infections and faculty development. We discuss pivotal research on the importance of oxygen in wound healing, mechanisms behind surgical site infections, and the significance of maintaining normothermia during surgery. The conversation also touches on the impact of thermoregulation, volume status, and the use of oxygen in improving patient outcomes. Dr. Hopf emphasizes the necessity of hand hygiene and proper surgical practices to mitigate infections. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

This week we're featuring a lost sound of the countryside – the curious melodies of clattering mills. These were wind-powered devices on tall poles that made a racket to scare birds from the crops – especially starlings plundering cherry crops. Thanks to Sonke Prigge for collecting these incredible sounds, which will be  included in the British Library's Very Rare and Lost Sounds collection. This is special strand within the Library's national sound archive dedicated to preserving audio that's at risk of disappearing or already forgotten.BBC Countryfile Magazine's Sound Escapes are a weekly audio postcard from the countryside to help you relax and transport you somewhere beautiful, wherever you happen to be. Recorded by Sonke Prigge and introduced by Hannah Tribe. Email the Plodcast team – and send your sound recordings of the countryside – to: theplodcast@countryfile.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This piece takes us to The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) annual meeting in San Antonio, ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2025 where Andy Cumpstey is joined by co-host Desiree Chappell and guest Dr Joyce A. Wahr — Professor Emeritus of Anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota Medical School (Minneapolis, USA) and former Executive Medical Director of Perioperative Services at M Health Fairview and Vice-Chair for Quality & Safety. Joyce shares her journey from surgery residency to becoming a cardiac and thoracic anesthesiologist, and her involvement in patient safety. She discusses her Severinghaus Lecture titled 'It's Not Your Fault: The Cognitive Basis of Error,' discussing how subconscious processes generate errors beyond our control, and how we can implement barriers to prevent these errors from harming patients. The conversation delves into the cognitive mechanisms behind errors, the importance of system-level protections, and the role of technology in enhancing patient safety. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Andy Cumpstey discusses the significance of perioperative screening in improving patient outcomes with three experts from the field: Helen Andersen from University Hospitals Plymouth, Ruth de La Casas from Norfolk Norwich University Hospitals, and Neelaksi Desai from the Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Glasgow. They delve into the challenges and advancements in preoperative screening methods, with a particular focus on digital approaches and interdisciplinary cooperation. Key themes include optimizing patient care through early assessments, leveraging digital tools for efficient triage, and overcoming obstacles such as funding and system fragmentation. The discussion also highlights the importance of collaboration between primary and secondary care and the potential of digital solutions to streamline the screening process. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love, the role of ideas in Stoppard's writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She's written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome.Hermione Lee: Thank you very much.Oliver: We're mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard's work?Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one.And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing, who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian.Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don't think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him.And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman, you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we're meant to be agreeing with.Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia, who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view.Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard's other work.Lee: It's long. Yes. I don't find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you're never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who's going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think.But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I'm so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that's a matter of opinion.Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that's un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer?Lee: I think it's a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it's both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia, and have you think about both at once.But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn't what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play.Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else?Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him.But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland, and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play.“I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone.Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I've always disliked the idea that it's a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described.Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can't get away from it.Oliver: Surface level.Lee: Beckett's there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard's favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It's two journalists on a story that doesn't add up, which is very clever and funny.”Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That's profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too.Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard?Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: “It's wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we're going out the way we came in.” So I think that's right at the heart of Stoppard's work, and it's right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it's mine or someone else's. If you can't know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up.You can't do it through impressions. You've got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I'm not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I've done that.It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me.I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that's obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I'm sure there were things he didn't tell me, but that's fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can't talk to a thousand people, or I'd have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who've worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said.Repetition's very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that's right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he'd lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel.And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director's permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber's wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner's production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast.And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz, which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can't get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one's very eyes, and that for a biographer, it's a pretty amazing privilege.Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think?Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn't enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It's physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing.Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't understand this.” You'd often get, “I don't really understand.”And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you've got to make it work.” I'm putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let's put another sentence or something like that.”Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that's available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean?Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes.Oliver: No, sure. Very important.Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties, he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it's the play in which you've got Joyce and you've got Tristan Tzara and you've got the Lenins, and they're all these real people and he makes him talk.But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you'll find.Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward?Lee: Oh, I think there's a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing, he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren't based on something else. They weren't based on Hamlet. They weren't based on The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models.Oliver: You don't think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it's all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce?The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you'll be damn lucky.” It's like a model for him, a loose model.Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays.Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean?Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian.My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language.Oliver: Because it's a funny word. It's hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it's an untypical Stoppard.Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let's get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here's a play like Arcadia, all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia, where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the '20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust.And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you've had these jumps through time.And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I'm sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn't seen Leopoldstadt. Because when it happens on the stage, it's an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people.Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors?Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because we shouldn't deviate, but there's always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people.But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that's why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn't always charming. Patrick Marber, who's a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt, is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I've heard that from other directors too—Jack O'Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love.If Stoppard felt it wasn't right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn't a sort of oleaginous character at all. It's not smooth, it's not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn't want to do was write a hagiography. You don't want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard.And I don't know the theater world; it's not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I'm sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who'd come up against the steeliness that there is in him.I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun. And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him.Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film.Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don't know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun, it's a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant.I know people like Brazil, the Terry Gilliam sort of surrealist way. And there's some interesting early work. Most of his film work was not one script; it was little bits that he helped with. So there's famously the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he did most of the dialogue for Harrison Ford.But there are others like the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, where I think there's one line, anonymously Stoppardian in there. One of the things about the obituaries that slightly narked me was that there, I felt there was a bit too much about the films. Truly, I don't think the film work was—he wanted it to be right and he wanted to get it right—but it wasn't as close to his heart as the theater work. And indeed the work for radio, which I thought was generally underwritten about when he died. There was some terrific work there.Oliver: Yes. And there aren't that many canonical writers who've been great on the radio.Lee: Absolutely. He did everything. He did film, he did radio. He wrote some opera librettos. He really did everything. And on top of that, there was the great work for the public good, which I think is a very important part of his legacy, his history.Oliver: How much crossover influence is there between the different bits of his career? Does the screenwriting influence the theater writing and the radio and so on? Or is he just compartmentalized and able to do a lot of different things?Lee: That's such an interesting question. I don't think I've thought about it enough. I think there are very cinematic aspects to some of the plays, like Night and Day, for instance, the play about journalism. That could easily have been a film.And perhaps Hapgood as well, although it could be a kind of John le Carré type film thriller, though it's such a set of complicated interlocking boxes that I don't know that it would work as a film. It's not one of my favorite players, I must say. I struggle a little bit with Hapgood. But, yes, I'm sure that they fed into each other. Because he was so busy, he was often doing several things at once. So he was keeping things in boxes and opening the lid of that box. But mentally things must have overlapped, I'm sure.Oliver: He once joked that rather than having read Wittgenstein from cover to cover, he had only read the covers. How true is that? Because I know some people who would say he's very clever in everything, but he's not as clever as he looks. It's obviously not true that he only read the covers.Lee: I think there was a phase, wasn't there, after the early plays when people felt that he was—it's that English phrase, isn't it—too clever by half. Which you would never hear anyone in France saying of someone that they were too clever by half. So he was this kind of jazzy intellectual who put all his ideas out there, and he was this sort of self-educated savant who hadn't been to Oxford.There was quite a lot of that about in the earlier years, I think. And a sense that he was getting away with it, to which I would countermand with the story of the writing of The Invention of Love. So what attracted him to the figure of Housman initially was not the painful, suppressed homosexual love story, but the fact that here was this person who was divided into a very pernickety, savagely critical classical editor of Latin and a romantic lyric poet. In order to work out how to turn this into a play, he probably spent about six years taking Latin lessons, reading everything he could read on the history of classical literature. Obviously reading about Housman, engaging in conversation with classical scholars about Housman's, finer points of editorial precision about certain phrases. And what he used from that was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg was real.He really did that work and he often used to say that it was his favorite play because he'd so much enjoyed the work that went into it. I think he took what he needed from someone like Wittgenstein. I know you don't like The Coast of Utopia very much, but if you read his background to Coast of Utopia, what went into it, and if you compare what's in the plays, those three plays, with what's in the writing about those revolutionaries, he read everything. He may have magpied it, but he's certainly knows what he's talking about. So I defend him a bit against that, I think.Oliver: Good, good. Did you see the recent production at the Hamstead Theatre of The Invention of Love?Lee: I did, yes.Oliver: What did you think?Lee: I liked it. I thought it was rather beautifully done. I liked those boats rowing around that clicked together. I thought Simon Russell Beale was extremely good, particularly very moving. And very good in Housman's vindictiveness as a critic. He is not a nice person in that sense. And his scornfulness about the women students in his class, that kind of thing. And so there was a wonderful vitriol and scorn in Russell Beale's performance.I think when you see it now, some of the Oxford context is a little bit clunky, those scenes with Jowett and Pater and so on, it's like a bit of a caricature of the context of cultural life at the time, intellectual life at the time. But I think that the trope of the old and the young Housman meeting each other and talking to each other, which I still think is very moving. I thought it worked tremendously well.Oliver: What are Tom Stoppard's poems like?Lee: You see them in Indian Ink where he invents a poet, Flora Crewe, who is a poet who was died young, turn of the century, bold feminist associated with Bloomsbury and gets picked up much later as a kind of Sylvia Plath-type, HD type heroine. And when you look at Stoppard's manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Austin, in Texas, there is more ink spent on writing and rewriting those poems of Flora Crewe than anything else I saw in the manuscript. He wrote them and rewrote them.Early on he wrote some Elliot—they're very like Elliot—little poems for himself. I think there are probably quite a lot of love poems out there, which I never saw because they belong to the people for whom he wrote them. So I wouldn't know about those.Oliver: How consistently did Stoppard hold to a kind of liberal individualism in his politics?Lee: He was accused of being very right wing in the 1980s really, 1970s, 1980s, when the preponderant tendency for British drama was radicalism, Royal Court, left wing, all of that. And Stoppard seemed an outlier then, because he approved of Thatcher. He was a friend of Thatcher. He didn't like the print union. It was particularly about newspapers because he'd been a newspaper man in his youth. That was his alternative university education, working in Bristol on the newspapers. He had a romance heroic feeling about the value of the journalist to uphold democracy, and he hated the pressure of the print unions to what he thought at the time was stifling that.He changed his mind. I think a lot about that. He had been very idealistic and in love with English liberal values. And I think towards the end of his life he felt that those were being eroded. He voted lots of different ways. He voted conservative, voted green. He voted lib dem. I don't if he ever voted Labour.Oliver: But even though his personal politics shifted and the way he voted shifted, there is something quite continuous from the early plays through to Rock ‘n' Roll. Is there a sort of basic foundation that doesn't change, even though the response to events and the idea about the times changes?Lee: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it can be summed up in what Henry says in The Real Thing about politics, which is a version of what's often said in his plays, which is public postures have the configuration of private derangement. So that there's a deep suspicion of political rhetoric, especially when it tends towards the final solution type, the utopian type, the sense that individual lives can be sacrificed in the interest of an ultimate rationalized greater good.And then, he's worked in the '70s for the victims of Soviet communism. His work alongside in support of Havel and Charter 77. And he wrote on those themes such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul. Those are absolutely at the heart of what he felt. And they come back again when he's very modest about this and kept it quiet. But he did an enormous amount of work for the Belarus exile, Belarus Free Theater collective, people in support of those trying to work against the regime in Belarus.And then the profound, heartfelt, intense feeling of horror about what happened to people in Leopoldstadt. That's all part of the same thing. I think he's a believer in individual freedom and in democracy and has a suspicion of political rhetoric.Oliver: How much were some of his great parts written for specific actors? Because I sometimes have a feeling when I watch one of his plays now, if I'd been here when Felicity Kendal was doing this, I would be getting the whole thing, but I'm getting most of it.Lee: I'm sure that's right. And he built up a team around him: Peter Wood, the director and John Wood who's such an extraordinary Henry Carr in in in Travesties. And Michael Hordern as George the philosopher in Jumpers. And he wrote a lot for Kendal, in the process of becoming life companions.But he'd obviously been writing and thinking of her very much, for instance, in Arcadia. And also I think very much, it's very touching now to see the production of Indian Ink that's running at Hampstead Theatre in which Felicity Kendal is playing the older woman, the surviving older sister of the poet Flora Crewe, where of course the part of Flora Crewe was written for her. And there's something very touching about seeing that now. And, in fact, the first night of that production was the day of Stoppard's funeral. And Kendal couldn't be at the funeral, of course, because she was in the first night of his play. That's a very touching thing.Oliver: Why did he think the revivals came too soon?Lee: I don't really know the answer to that. I think he thought a play had to hook up a lot of oxygen and attract a lot of attention. If you were lucky while it was on, people would remember the casting and the direction of that version of it, and it would have a kind of memory. You had to be there.But people who were there would remember it and talk about it. And if you had another production very soon after that, then maybe it would diminish or take away that effect. I think he had a sort of loyalty to first productions often. What do you think about that? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that.Oliver: I don't know. To me it seems to conflict a bit with his idea that it's a living thing and he's always rewriting it in the rehearsal room. But I think probably what you say is right, and he will have got it right in a certain way through all that rehearsing. You then need to wait for a new generation of people to make it fresh again, if you like.Lee: Or not a generation even, but give it five years.Oliver: Everyone new and this theater's working differently now. We can rework it in our own way. Can we have a few questions about your broader career before we finish?Lee: Depends what they are.Oliver: Your former colleague John Carey died at a similar time to Stoppard. What do you think was his best work?Lee: John Carey's best work? Oh. I thought the biography of Golding was pretty good. And I thought he wrote a very good book on Thackery. And I thought his work on Milton was good. I wasn't so keen on The Intellectuals and the Masses. He and I used to have vociferous arguments about that because he had cast Virginia Woolf with all the modernist fascists, as it were. He'd put her in a pile with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and so on. And actually, Virginia Woolf was a socialist feminist. And this didn't seem to have struck him because he was so keen to expose her frightful snobbery, which is what people in England reading Woolf, especially middle class blokes, were horrified by.And she is a snob, there's no doubt about it. But she knew that and she lacerated herself for it too. And I think he ignored all the other aspects of her. So I was angry about that. But he was the kind of person you could have a really good argument with. That was one of the really great things about John.Oliver: He seems to be someone else who was amenable and charming, but also very steely.Lee: Yes, I think he probably was I think he probably was. You can see that in his memoir, I think.Oliver: What was Carmen Callil like?Lee: Oh. She was a very important person in my life. It was she who got me involved in writing pieces for Virago. And it was she who asked me to write the life of Virginia Woolf for Chatto. And she was an enormous, inspiring encourager as she was to very many people. And I loved her.But I was also, as many people were, quite daunted by her. She was temperamental, she was angry. She was passionate. She was often quite difficult. Not a word I like to use about women because there's that trope of difficult women, but she could be. And she lost her temper in a very un-English way, which was quite a sight to behold. But I think of her as one of the most creative and influential publishers of the 20th century.Oliver: Will there be a biography of her?Lee: I don't know. Yes, it's a really interesting question, and I've been asking her executors whether they have any thoughts about that. Somebody said to me, oh, who wants a biography of a publisher? But, actually, publishers are really important people often, so I hope there would be. Yes. And it would need to be someone who understood the politics of feminism and who understood about coming from Australia and who understood about the Catholic background and who understood about her passion for France. And there are a whole lot of aspects to that life. It's a rich and complex life. Yes, I hope there will be someday.Oliver: Her papers are sitting there in the British Library.Lee: They are. And in fact—you kindly mentioned this to start with—I've just finished a biography of the art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, who won the Booker prize in 1984 for a novel called Hotel du Lac.And Carmen and Anita were great buddies, surprisingly actually, because they were very different kinds of characters. And the year before she died, Carmen, who knew I was working on Anita, showed me all her diary entries and all the letters she'd kept from Anita. And that's the kind of generous person that she was.That material is now sitting in the British Library, along with huge reams of correspondence between Carmen and many other people. And it's an exciting archive.Oliver: She seems to have had a capacity to be friends with almost anyone.Lee: Yes, I think there were people she would not have wanted to be friends with. She was very disapproving of a lot of political figures and particularly right-wing figures, and there were people she would've simply spat at if she was in the room with them. But, yes, she an enormous range of friends, and she was, as I said, she was fantastically encouraging to younger women writers.And, also, another aspect of Carmen's life, which I greatly admired and was fascinated by: In Virago she would often be resuscitating the careers of elderly women writers who had been forgotten or neglected, including Antonia White and including Rosamund Lehmann. And part of Carmen's job at Virago, as she felt, was not just to republish these people, some of whom hadn't had a book published for decades, but also to look after them. And they were all quite elderly and often quite eccentric and often quite needy. And Carmen would be there, bringing them out and looking after them and going around to see them. And really marvelous, I think.Oliver: Yes, it is. Tell me about Brian Moore.Lee: Breean, as he called himself.Oliver: Oh, I'm sorry.Lee: No, it's all right. I think Brian became a friend because in the 1980s I had a book program on Channel 4, which was called Book Four. It had a very small audience, but had a wonderful time over several years interviewing lots and lots of writers who had new books out. We didn't have a budget; it was a table and two chairs and not the kind of book program you see on the television anymore. And I got to know Brian through that and through reviewing him a bit and doing interviews with him, and my husband and I would go out and visit him and his wife Jean.And I loved the work. I thought the work was such a brilliant mixture of popular cultural forms, like the thriller and historical novel and so on. And fascinating ideas about authority and religion and how to be free, how to break free of the bonds of what he'd grown up with in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, the bombs of religious autocracy, as it were. And very surreal in some ways as well. And he was also a very charming, funny, gregarious person who could be quite wicked about other writers.And, he was a wonderfully wicked and funny companion. What breaks my heart about Brian Moore is that while he was alive, he was writing a novel maybe every other year or every three years, and people would review them and they were talked about, and I don't think they were on academic syllabuses but they were really popular. And when he died and there were no more books, it just went. You can think of other writers like that who were tremendously well known in their time. And then when there weren't any more books, just went away. You ask people, now you go out and ask people, say, “What about The Temptation of Eileen Hughes or The Doctor's Wife or Black Robe? And they'll go, “Sorry?”Oliver: If anyone listening to this wants to try one of his novels, where do you say they should start?Lee: I think I would start with The Doctor's Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. And then if one liked those, one would get a taste for him. But there's plenty to choose from.Oliver: What about Catholics?Lee: Yes. Catholics is a wonderful book. Yes. Wonderful book. Bit like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, I think.Oliver: How important is religion to Penelope Fitzgerald's work?Lee: She would say that she felt guilty about not having put her religious beliefs more explicitly into her fiction. I'm very glad that she didn't because I think it is deeply important and she believes in miracles and saints and angels and manifestations and providence, but she doesn't spell it out.And so when at the end of The Gate of Angels, for instance, there is a kind of miracle on the last page but it's much better not to have it spelt out as a miracle, in my view. And in The Blue Flower, which is not my favorite of her books, but it's the book of the greatest genius possibly. And I think she was a genius. There is a deep interest in Novalis's romantic philosophical ideas about a spiritual life, beyond the physical life, no more doctrinally than that. And she, of course, believes in that. I think she believed, in an almost Platonic way, that this life was a kind of cave of shadows and that there was something beyond that. And there are some very mysterious moments in her books, which, if they had been explained as religious experiences, I think would've been much less forceful and much less intense.Oliver: What is your favorite of her books?Lee: Oh, The Beginning of Spring. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow just before the revolution. And its concerns an Englishman who runs a print and publishing works. And it's based quite a lot on some factual narratives about people in Moscow at the time. And it's about the feeling of that place and that time, but it's also about being in love with two people at the same time.And, yes, and it's about cultural clashes and cultural misunderstanding, and it is an astonishingly evocative book. And when asked about this book, interviewers would say to Penelope, oh, she must have lived in Moscow for ages to know so much about it. And sometimes she would say, “Yes, I lived there for years.” And sometimes she would say, “No, I've never been there in my life.” And the fact was she'd had a week's book tour in Moscow with her daughter. And that was the only time she ever went to Russia, but she read. So it was a wonderful example of how she would be so wicked; she would lie.Oliver: Yes.Lee: Because she couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.Oliver: But wasn't she poking fun at their silly questions?Lee: Yes. It's not such a silly question. I would've asked her that question. It is an astonishing evocation of a place.Oliver: No, I would've asked it too, but I do feel like she had this sense of it's silly to be asked questions at all. It's silly to be interviewed.Lee: I interviewed her about three times—and it was fascinating. And she would deflect. She would deflect, deflect. When you asked her about her own work, she would deflect onto someone else's work or she would tell you a story. But she also got quite irritable.So for instance, there's a poltergeist in a novel called The Bookshop. And the poltergeist is a very frightening apparition and very strong chapter in the book. And I said to her in interview, “Look, lots of people think this is just superstition. There aren't poltergeists.” And she looked at me very crossly and said they just haven't been there. They don't know what they're talking about. Absolutely factual and matter of fact about the reality of a poltergeist.Oliver: What makes Virginia Woolf's literary criticism so good?Lee: Oh, I think it's a kind of empathy actually. That she has an extraordinary ability to try and inhabit the person that she's writing about. So she doesn't write from the point of view of, as it were, a dry, historical appreciation.She's got the facts and she's read the books, but she's trying to intimately evoke what it felt like to be that writer. I don't mean by dressing it up with personal anecdotes, but just she has an extraordinary way of describing what that person's writing is like, often in images by using images and metaphors, which makes you feel you are inside the story somehow.And she loves anecdotes. She's very good at telling anecdotes, I think. And also she's not soft, but she's not harshly judgmental. I think she will try and get the juice out of anything she's writing about. Most of these literary criticism pieces were written for money and against the clock and whilst doing other things.So if you read her on Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry James, there's a wonderful sense of, you feel your knowledge has been expanded. Knowledge in the sense of knowing the person; I don't mean in the sense of hard facts.Oliver: Sure. You've finished your Anita Brookner biography and that's coming this year.Lee: September the 10th this year, here and in the States.Oliver: What will you do next?Lee: Yes. That's a very good question, though a little soon, I feel.Oliver: Is there someone whose life you always wanted to write, but didn't?Lee: No. No, there isn't. Not at the moment. Who knows?Oliver: You are open to it. You are open.Lee: Who knows what will come up.Oliver: Yes. Hermione Lee, this was a real pleasure. Thank you very much.Lee: Thank you very much. It was a treat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

With a cast of over 800, and a budget equivalent to £3 million, James Shirley's extravagant masque ‘The Triumph of Peace' was performed on 3rd February, 1634. Unusually, it was such a popular show that, despite the enormous cost of staging it, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria requested that it be repeated. Though replete with all the arse-kissing allegorical tableaux that typified these celebrations of the monarchy - and requisite set designs by Inigo Jones - this spectacular was also markedly different from its predecessors in that it was especially designed to appease Henrietta, who had been slurred by polemicist William Prynne.    In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly come to terms with the ‘17th century immersive theatre' experience; explain why legendary playwright Ben Jonson WASN'T involved in this one; and reveal how a masque was once responsible for the destruction of Shakespeare's Globe…  Further Reading: • ‘Masque and music at the Stuart court' (Royal Museums Greenwich): https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/masque-music-stuart-court • ‘Inigo Jones designs for masque costumes' (The British Library): https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/inigo-jones-designs-for-masque-costumes •  ‘The History of the British Masque' (Heidi Kobara, 2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G22UED2yJ_Q Love the show? Support us!  Join 

How can indie authors raise their game through academic-style rigour? How might AI tools fit into a thoughtful research process without replacing the joy of discovery? Melissa Addey explores the intersection of scholarly discipline, creative writing, and the practical realities of building an author career. In the intro, mystery and thriller tropes [Wish I'd Known Then]; The differences between trad and indie in 2026 [Productive Indie Fiction Writer]; Five phases of an author business [Becca Syme]; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Making the leap from a corporate career to full-time writing with a young family Why Melissa pursued a PhD in creative writing and how it fuelled her author business What indie authors can learn from academic rigour when researching historical fiction The problems with academic publishing—pricing, accessibility, and creative restrictions Organising research notes, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and knowing when to stop researching Using AI tools effectively as part of the research process without losing your unique voice You can find Melissa at MelissaAddey.com. Transcript of the interview with Melissa Addey JOANNA: Melissa Addey is an award-winning historical fiction author with a PhD in creative writing from the University of Surrey. She was the Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the British Library, and now works as campaigns lead for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Welcome back to the show, Melissa. MELISSA: Hello. Thank you for having me. JOANNA: It's great to have you back. You were on almost a decade ago, in December 2016, talking about merchandising for authors. That is really a long time ago. So tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and self-publishing. MELISSA: I had a regular job in business and I was writing on the side. I did a couple of writing courses, and then I started trying to get published, and that took seven years of jumping through hoops. There didn't seem to be much progress. At some point, I very nearly had a small publisher, but we clashed over the cover because there was a really quite hideous suggestion that was not going to work. I think by that point I was really tired of jumping through hoops, really trying to play the game traditional publishing-wise. I just went, you know what? I've had enough now. I've done everything that was asked of me and it's still not working. I'll just go my own way. I think at the time that would've been 2015-ish. Suddenly, self-publishing was around more. I could see people and hear people talking about it, and I thought, okay, let's read everything there is to know about this. I had a little baby at the time and I would literally print off stuff during the day to read—probably loads of your stuff—and read it at two o'clock in the morning breastfeeding babies. Then I'd go, okay, I think I understand that bit now, I'll understand the next bit, and so on. So I got into self-publishing and I really, really enjoyed it. I've been doing it ever since. I'm now up to 20 books in the last 10 or 11 years. As you say, I did the creative writing PhD along the way, working with ALLi and doing workshops for others—mixing and matching lots of different things. I really enjoy it. JOANNA: You mentioned you had a job before in business. Are you full-time in all these roles that you're doing now, or do you still have that job? MELISSA: No, I'm full-time now. I only do writing-related things. I left that in 2015, so I took a jump. I was on maternity leave and I started applying for jobs to go back to, and I suddenly felt like, oh, I really don't want to. I want to do the writing. I thought, I've got about one year's worth of savings. I could try and do the jump. I remember saying to my husband, “Do you think it would be possible if I tried to do the jump? Would that be okay?” There was this very long pause while he thought about it. But the longer the pause went on, the more I was thinking, ooh, he didn't say no, that is out of the question, financially we can't do that. I thought, ooh, it's going to work. So I did the jump. JOANNA: That's great. I did something similar and took a massive pay cut and downsized and everything back in the day. Having a supportive partner is so important. The other thing I did—and I wonder if you did too—I said to Jonathan, my husband, if within a year this is not going in a positive direction, then I'll get another job. How long did you think you would leave it before you just gave up? And how did that go? Because that beginning is so difficult, especially with a new baby. MELISSA: I thought, well, I'm at home anyway, so I do have more time than if I was in a full-time job. The baby sleeps sometimes—if you're lucky—so there are little gaps where you could really get into it. I had a year of savings/maternity pay going on, so I thought I've got a year. And the funny thing that happened was within a few months, I went back to my husband and I was like, I don't understand. I said, all these doors are opening—they weren't massive, but they were doors opening. I said, but I've wanted to be a writer for a long time and none of these doors have opened before. He said, “Well, it's because you really committed. It's because you jumped. And when you jump, sometimes the universe is on board and goes, yes, all right then, and opens some doors for you.” It really felt like that. Even little things—like Writing Magazine gave me a little slot to do an online writer-in-residence thing. Just little doors opened that felt like you were getting a nod, like, yes, come on then, try. Then the PhD was part of that. I applied to do that and it came with a studentship, which meant I had three years of funding coming in. That was one of the biggest creative gifts that's ever been given to me—three years of knowing you've got enough money coming in that you can just try and make it work. By the time that finished, the royalties had taken over from the studentship. That was such a gift. JOANNA: A couple of things there. I've got to ask about that funding. You're saying it was a gift, but that money didn't just magically appear. You worked really hard to get that funding, I presume. MELISSA: I did, yes. You do have to do the work for it, just to be clear. My sister had done a PhD in an entirely different subject. She said, “You should do a PhD in creative writing.” I said, “That'd be ridiculous. Nobody is going to fund that. Who's going to fund that?” She said, “Oh, they might. Try.” So I tried, and the deadline was something stupid like two weeks away. I tried and I got shortlisted, but I didn't get it. I thought, ah, but I got shortlisted with only two weeks to try. I'll try again next year then. So then I tried again the next year and that's when I got it. It does take work. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to make your case. But it's a very joyful thing if you get one. JOANNA: So let's go to the bigger question: why do a PhD in creative writing? Let's be clear to everyone—you don't need even a bachelor's degree to be a successful author. Stephen King is a great example of someone who isn't particularly educated in terms of degrees. He talks about writing his first book while working at a laundry. You can be very successful with no formal education. So why did you want to do a PhD? What drew you to academic research? MELISSA: Absolutely. I would briefly say, I often meet people who feel they must do a qualification before they're allowed to write. I say, do it if you'd like to, but you don't have to. You could just practise the writing. I fully agree with that. It was a combination of things. I do actually like studying. I do actually enjoy the research—that's why I do historical research. I like that kind of work. So that's one element. Another element was the funding. I thought, if I get that funding, I've got three years to build up a back catalogue of books, to build up the writing. It will give me more time. So that was a very practical financial issue. Also, children. My children were very little. I had a three-year-old and a baby, and everybody went, “Are you insane? Doing a PhD with a three-year-old and a baby?” But the thing about three-year-olds and babies is they're quite intellectually boring. Emotionally, very engaging—on a number of levels, good, bad, whatever—but they're not very intellectually stimulating. You're at home all day with two small children who think that hide and seek is the highlight of intellectual difficulty because they've hidden behind the curtains and they're shuffling and giggling. I felt I needed something else. I needed something for me that would be interesting. I've always enjoyed passing on knowledge. I've always enjoyed teaching people, workshops, in whatever field I was in. I thought, if I want to do that for writing at some point, it will sound more important if I've done a PhD. Not that you need that to explain how to do writing to someone if you do a lot of writing. But there were all these different elements that came together. JOANNA: So to summarise: you enjoy the research, it's an intellectual challenge, you've got the funding, and there is something around authority. In terms of a PhD—and just for listeners, I'm doing a master's at the moment in death, religion, and culture. MELISSA: Your topic sounds fascinating. JOANNA: It is interesting because, same as you, I enjoy research. Both of us love research as part of our fiction process and our nonfiction. I'm also enjoying the intellectual challenge, and I've also considered this idea of authority in an age of AI when it is increasingly easy to generate books—let's just say it, it's easy to generate books. So I was like, well, how do I look at this in a more authoritative way? I wanted to talk to you because even just a few months back into it—and I haven't done an academic qualification for like two decades—it struck me that the academic rigour is so different. What lessons can indie authors learn from this kind of academic rigour? What do you think of in terms of the rigour and what can we learn? MELISSA: I think there are a number of things. First of all, really making sure that you are going to the quality sources for things—the original sources, the high-quality versions of things. Not secondhand, but going back to those primary sources. Not “somebody said that somebody said something.” Well, let's go back to the original. Have a look at that, because you get a lot from that. I think you immerse yourself more deeply. Someone can tell you, “This is how they spoke in the 1800s.” If you go and read something that was written in the 1800s, you get a better sense of that than just reading a dictionary of slang that's been collated for you by somebody else. So I think that immerses you more deeply. Really sticking with that till you've found interesting things that spark creativity in you. I've seen people say, “I used to do all the historical research. Nowadays I just fact-check. I write what I want to write and I fact-check.” I think, well, that's okay, but you won't find the weird little things. I tend to call it “the footnotes of history.” You won't find the weird little things that really make something come alive, that really make a time and a place come alive. I've got a scene in one of my Regency romances—which actually I think are less full of historical emphasis than some of my other work—where a man gives a woman a gift. It's supposed to be a romantic gift and maybe slightly sensual. He could have given her a fan and I could have fact-checked and gone, “Are there fans? Yes, there are fans. Do they have pretty romantic poems on them? Yes, they do. Okay, that'll do.” Actually, if you go round and do more research than that, you discover they had things like ribbons that held up your stockings, on which they wrote quite smutty things in embroidery. That's a much more sexy and interesting gift to give in that scene. But you don't find that unless you go doing a bit of research. If I just fact-check, I'm not going to find that because it would never have occurred to me to fact-check it in the first place. JOANNA: I totally agree with you. One of the wonderful things about research—and I also like going to places—is you might be somewhere and see something that gives you an idea you never, ever would have found in a book or any other way. I used to call it “the serendipity of the stacks” in the physical library. You go looking for a particular book and then you're in that part of the shelf and you find several other books that you never would have looked for. I think it's encouraging people, as you're saying, but I also think you have to love it. MELISSA: Yes. I think some people find it a bit of a grind, or they're frightened by it and they think, “Have I done enough?” JOANNA: Mm-hmm. MELISSA: I get asked that a lot when I talk about writing historical fiction. People go, “But when do I stop? How do I know it's enough? How do I know there wasn't another book that would have been the book? Everyone will go, ‘Oh, how did you not read such-and-such?'” I always say there are two ways of finding out when you can stop. One is when you get to the bibliographies, you look through and you go, “Yep, read that, read that, read that. Nah, I know that one's not really what I wanted.” You're familiar with those bibliographies in a way that at the beginning you're not. At the beginning, every single bibliography, you haven't read any of it. So that's quite a good way of knowing when to stop. The other way is: can you write ordinary, everyday life? I don't start writing a book till I can write everyday life in that historical era without notes. I will obviously have notes if I'm doing a wedding or a funeral or a really specific battle or something. Everyday life, I need to be able to just write that out of my own head. You need to be confident enough to do that. JOANNA: One of the other problems I've heard from academics—people who've really come out of academia and want to write something more pop, even if it's pop nonfiction or fiction—they're also really struggling. It is a different game, isn't it? For people who might be immersed in academia, how can they release themselves into doing something like self-publishing? Because there's still a lot of stigma within academia. MELISSA: You're going to get me on the academic publishing rant now. I think academic publishing is horrendous. Academics are very badly treated. I know quite a lot of academics and they have to do all the work. Nobody's helping them with indexing or anything like that. The publisher will say things like, “Well, could you just cut 10,000 words out of that?” Just because of size. Out of somebody's argument that they're making over a whole work. No consideration for that. The royalties are basically zilch. I've seen people's royalty statements come in, and the way they price the books is insane. They'll price a book at 70 pounds. I actually want that book for my research and I'm hesitating because I can't be buying all of them at that price. That's ridiculous. I've got people who are friends or family who bring out a book, and I'm like, well, I would gladly buy your book and read it. It's priced crazy. It's priced only for institutions. I think actually, if academia was written a little more clearly and open to the lay person—which if you are good at your work, you should be able to do—and priced a bit more in line with other books, that would maybe open up people to reading more academia. You wouldn't have to make it “pop” as you say. I quite like pop nonfiction. But I don't think there would have to be such a gulf between those two. I think you could make academic work more readable generally. I read someone's thesis recently and they'd made a point at the beginning of saying—I can't remember who it was—that so-and-so academic's point of view was that it should be readable and they should be writing accordingly. I thought, wow, I really admired her for doing that. Next time I'm doing something like that, I should be putting that at the front as well. But the fact that she had to explain that at the beginning… It wasn't like words of one syllable throughout the whole thing. I thought it was a very quality piece of writing, but it was perfectly readable to someone who didn't know about the topic. JOANNA: I might have to get that name from you because I've got an essay on the Philosophy of Death. And as you can imagine, there's a heck of a lot of big words. MELISSA: I know. I've done a PhD, but I still used to tense up a little bit thinking they're going to pounce on me. They're going to say that I didn't talk academic enough, I didn't sound fancy enough. That's not what it should be about, really. In a way, you are locking people out of knowledge, and given that most academics are paid for by public funds, that knowledge really ought to be a little more publicly accessible. JOANNA: I agree on the book price. I'm also buying books for my course that aren't in the library. Some of them might be 70 pounds for the ebook, let alone the print book. What that means is that I end up looking for secondhand books, when of course the money doesn't go to the author or the publisher. The other thing that happens is it encourages piracy. There are people who openly talk about using pirate sites for academic works because it's just too expensive. If I'm buying 20 books for my home library, I can't be spending that kind of money. Why is it so bad? Why is it not being reinvented, especially as we have done with indie authors for the wider genres? Has this at all moved into academia? MELISSA: I think within academia there's a fear because there's the peer reviews and it must be proven to be absolutely correct and agreed upon by everybody. I get that. You don't want some complete rubbish in there. I do think there's space to come up with a different system where you could say, “So-and-so is professor of whatever at such-and-such a university. I imagine what they have to say might be interesting and well-researched.” You could have some sort of kite mark. You could have something that then allows for self-publishing to take over a bit. I do just think their system is really, really poor. They get really reined in on what they're allowed to write about. Alison Baverstock, who is a professor now at Kingston University and does stuff about publishing and master's programmes, started writing about self-publishing because she thought it was really interesting. This was way back. JOANNA: I remember. I did one of those surveys. MELISSA: She got told in no uncertain terms, “Do not write about this. You will ruin your career.” She stuck with it. She was right to stick with it. But she was told by senior academics, “Do not write about self-publishing. You're just embarrassing yourself. It's just vanity press.” They weren't even being allowed to write about really quite interesting phenomena that were happening. Just from a historical point of view, that was a really interesting rise of self-publishing, and she was being told not to write about it. JOANNA: It's funny, that delay as well. I'm looking to maybe do my thesis on how AI is impacting death and the death industry. And yet it's such a fast-moving thing. MELISSA: Yes. JOANNA: Sometimes it can take a year, two years or more to get a paper through the process. MELISSA: Oh, yes. It moves really, really fast. Like you say, by the time it comes out, people are going, “Huh? That's really old.” And you'll be going, “No, it's literally two years.” But yes, very, very slow. JOANNA: Let's come back to how we can help other people who might not want to be doing academic-level stuff. One of the things I've found is organising notes, sources, references. How do you manage that? Any tips for people? They might not need to do footnotes for their historical novel, but they might want to organise their research. What are your thoughts? MELISSA: I used to do great big enormous box files and print vast quantities of stuff. Each box file would be labelled according to servant life, or food, or seasons, or whatever. I've tried various different things. I'm moving more and more now towards a combination of books on the shelf, which I do like, and papers and other materials that are stored on my computer. They'll be classified according to different parts of daily life, essentially. Because when you write historical fiction, you have to basically build the whole world again for that era. You have to have everything that happens in daily life, everything that happens on special events, all of those things. So I'll have it organised by those sorts of topics. I'll read it and go through it until I'm comfortable with daily life. Then special things—I'll have special notes on that that can talk me through how you run a funeral or a wedding or whatever, because that's quite complicated to just remember in your head. MELISSA: I always do historical notes at the end. They really matter to me. When I read historical fiction, I really like to read that from the author. I'll say, “Right, these things are true”—especially things that I think people will go, “She made that up. That is not true.” I'll go, “No, no, these are true.” These other things I've fudged a little, or I've moved the timeline a bit to make the story work better. I try to be fairly clear about what I did to make it into a story, but also what is accurate, because I want people to get excited about that timeline. Occasionally if there's been a book that was really important, I'll mention it in there because I don't want to have a proper bibliography, but I do want to highlight certain books. If you got excited by this novel, you could go off and read that book and it would take you into the nonfiction side of it. JOANNA: I'm similar with my author's notes. I've just done the author's note for Bones of the Deep, which has some merfolk in it, and I've got a book on Merpeople. It's awesome. It's just a brilliant book. I'm like, this has to go in. You could question whether that is really nonfiction or something else. But I think that's really important. Just to be more practical: when you're actually writing, what tools do you use? I use Scrivener and I keep all my research there. I'm using EndNote for academic stuff. MELISSA: I've always just stuck to Word. I did get Scrivener and played with it for a while, but I felt like I've already got a way of doing it, so I'll just carry on with that. So I mostly just do Word. I have a lot of notes, so I'll have notepads that have got my notes on specific things, and they'll have page numbers that go back to specific books in case I need to go and double-check that again. You mentioned citations, and that's fascinating to me. Do you know the story about Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner? It won the Pulitzer. It's a novel, but he used 10% of that novel—and it's a fairly slim novel—10% of it is actually letters written by somebody else, written by a woman before his time. He includes those and works with them in the story. He mentioned her very briefly, like, “Oh, and thanks to the relatives of so-and-so.” Very brief. He got accused of plagiarism for using that much of it by another part of her family who hadn't agreed to it. I've always thought it's because he didn't give enough credence to her. He didn't give her enough importance. If he'd said, “This was the woman who wrote this stuff. It's fascinating. I loved it. I wanted to creatively respond and engage with it”—I think that wouldn't have happened at all. That's why I think it's quite important when there are really big, important elements that you're using to acknowledge those. JOANNA: That's part of the academic rigour too— You can barely have a few of your own thoughts without referring to somebody else's work and crediting them. What's so interesting to me in the research process is, okay, I think this, but in order to say it, I'm going to have to go find someone else who thought this first and wrote a paper on it. MELISSA: I think you would love a PhD. When you've done a master's, go and do a PhD as well. Because it was the first time in academia that I genuinely felt I was allowed my own thoughts and to invent stuff of my own. I could go, “Oh no, I've invented this theory and it's this.” I didn't have to constantly go, “As somebody else said, as somebody else said.” I was like, no, no. This is me. I said this thing. I wasn't allowed to in my master's, and I found it annoying. I remember thinking, but I'm trying to have original thoughts here. I'm trying to bring something new to it. In a PhD, you're allowed to do that because you're supposed to be contributing to knowledge. You're supposed to be bringing a new thing into the world. That was a glorious thing to finally be allowed to do. JOANNA: I must say I couldn't help myself with that. I've definitely put my own opinion. But a part of why I mention it is the academic rigour—it's actually quite good practice to see who else has had these thoughts before. Speed is one of the biggest issues in the indie author community. Some of the stuff you were talking about—finding original sources, going to primary sources, the top-quality stuff, finding the weird little things—all of that takes more time than, for example, just running a deep research report on Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT. You can do both. You can use that as a starting point, which I definitely do. But then the point is to go back and read the original stuff. On this timeframe— Why do you think research is worth doing? It's important for academic reasons, but personal growth as well. MELISSA: Yes, I think there's a joy to be had in the research. When I go and stand in a location, by that point I'm not measuring things and taking photos—I've done all of that online. I'm literally standing there feeling what it is to be there. What does it smell like? What does it feel like? Does it feel very enclosed or very open? Is it a peaceful place or a horrible place? That sensory research becomes very important. All of the book research before that should lead you into the sensory research, which is then also a joy to do. There's great pleasure in it. As you say, it slows things down. What I tend to say to people if they want to speed things up again is: write in a series. Because once you've done all of that research and you just write one book and then walk away, that's a lot. That really slows you down. If you then go, “Okay, well now I'm going to write four books, five books, six books, still in that place and time”—obviously each book will need a little more research, but it won't need that level of starting-from-scratch research. That can help in terms of speeding it back up again. Recently I wrote some Regency romances to see what that was like. I'd done all my basic research, and then I thought, right, now I want to write a historical novel which could have been Victorian or could have been Regency. It had an openness to it. I thought, well, I've just done all the research for Regency, so I'll stick with that era. Why go and do a whole other piece of research when I've only written three books in it so far? I'll just take that era and work with that. So there are places to make up the time again a bit. But I do think there's a joy in it as well. JOANNA: I just want to come back to the plagiarism thing. I discovered that you can plagiarise yourself in academia, which is quite interesting. For example, my books How to Write a Novel and How to Write Nonfiction—they're aimed at different audiences. They have lots of chapters that are different, but there's a chapter on dictation. I thought, why would I need to write the same chapter again? I'm just going to put the same chapter in. It's the same process. Then I only recently learned that you can plagiarise yourself. I did not credit myself for that original chapter. MELISSA: How dare you not credit yourself! JOANNA: But can you talk a bit about that? Where are the lines here? I'm never going to credit myself. I think that's frankly ridiculous. MELISSA: No, that's silly. I mean, it depends what you're doing. In your case, that completely makes sense. It would be really peculiar of you to sit down and write a whole new chapter desperately trying not to copy what you'd said in a chapter about exactly the same topic. That doesn't make any sense. JOANNA: I guess more in the wider sense. Earlier you mentioned you keep notes and you put page numbers by them. I think the point is with research, a lot of people worry about accidental plagiarism. You write a load of notes on a book and then it just goes into your brain. Perhaps you didn't quote people properly. It's definitely more of an issue in nonfiction. You have to keep really careful notes. Sometimes I'm copying out a quote and I'll just naturally maybe rewrite that quote because the way they've put it didn't make sense, or I use a contraction or something. It's just the care in note-taking and then citing people. MELISSA: Yes. When I talk to people about nonfiction, I always say, you're basically joining a conversation. I mean, you are in fiction as well, but not as obviously. I say, well, why don't you read the conversation first? Find out what the conversation is in your area at the moment, and then what is it that you're bringing that's different? The most likely reason for you to end up writing something similar to someone else is that you haven't understood what the conversation was, and you need to be bringing your own thing to it. Then even if you're talking about the same topic, you might talk about it in a different way, and that takes you away from plagiarism because you're bringing your own view to it and your own direction to it. JOANNA: It's an interesting one. I think it's just the care. Taking more care is what I would like people to do. So let's talk about AI because AI tools can be incredible. I do deep research reports with Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT as a sort of “give me an overview and tell me some good places to start.” The university I'm with has a very hard line, which is: AI can be used as part of a research process, but not for writing. What are your thoughts on AI usage and tools? How can people balance that? MELISSA: Well, I'm very much a newbie compared to you. I follow you—the only person that describes how to use it with any sense at all, step by step. I'm very new to it, but I'm going to go back to the olden days. Sometimes I say to people, when I'm talking about how I do historical research, I start with Wikipedia. They look horrified. I'm like, no. That's where you have to get the overview from. I want an overview of how you dress in ancient Rome. I need a quick snapshot of that. Then I can go off and figure out the details of that more accurately and with more detail. I think AI is probably extremely good for that—getting the big picture of something and going, okay, this is what the field's looking like at the moment. These are the areas I'm going to need to burrow down into. It's doing that work for you quickly so that you're then in a position to pick up from that point. It gets you off to a quicker start and perhaps points you in the direction of the right people to start with. I'm trying to write a PhD proposal at the moment because I'm an idiot and want to do a second one. With that, I really did think, actually, AI should write this. Because the original concept is mine. I know nothing about it—why would I know anything about it? I haven't started researching it. This is where AI should go, “Well, in this field, there are these people. They've done these things.” Then you could quickly check that nobody's covered your thing. It would actually speed up all of that bit, which I think would be perfectly reasonable because you don't know anything about it yet. You're not an expert. You have the original idea, and then after that, then you should go off and do your own research and the in-depth quality of it. I think for a lot of things that waste authors' time—if you're applying for a grant or a writer-in-residence or things like that—it's a lot of time wasting filling in long, boring forms. “Could you make an artist statement and a something and a blah?” You're like, yes, yes, I could spend all day at my desk doing that. There's a moment where you start thinking, could you not just allow the AI to do this or much of it? JOANNA: Yes. Or at least, in that case, I'd say one of the very useful things is doing deep searches. As you were mentioning earlier about getting the funding—if I was to consider a PhD, which the thought has crossed my mind—I would use AI tools to do searches for potential sources of funding and that kind of research. In fact, I found this course at Winchester because I asked ChatGPT. It knows a lot about me because I chat with it all the time. I was talking about hitting 50 and these are the things I'm really interested in and what courses might interest me. Then it found it for me. That was quite amazing in itself. I'd encourage people to consider using it for part of the research process. But then all the papers it cites or whatever—then you have to go download those, go read them, do that work yourself. MELISSA: Yes, because that's when you bring your viewpoint to something. You and I could read the exact same paper and choose very different parts of it to write about and think about, because we're coming at it from different points of view and different journeys that we're trying to explore. That's where you need the individual to come in. It wouldn't be good enough to just have a generic overview from AI that we both try and slot into our work, because we would want something different from it. JOANNA: I kind of laugh when people say, “Oh, I can tell when it's AI.” I'm like, you might be able to tell when it's AI writing if nobody has taken that personal spin, but that's not the way we use it. If you're using it that way, that's not how those of us who are independent thinkers are using it. We're strong enough in our thoughts that we're using it as a tool. You're a confident person—intellectually and creatively confident—but I feel like some people maybe don't have that. Some people are not strong enough to resist what an AI might suggest. Any thoughts on that? MELISSA: Yes. When I first tried using AI with very little guidance from anyone, it just felt easy but very wooden and not very related to me. Then I've done webinars with you, and that was really useful—to watch somebody actually live doing the batting back and forth. That became a lot more interesting because I really like bouncing ideas and messing around with things and brainstorming, essentially, but with somebody else involved that's batting stuff back to you. “What does that look like?” “No, I didn't mean that at all.” “How about what does this look like?” “Oh no, no, not like that.” “Oh yes, a bit like that, but a bit more like whatever.” I remember doing that and talking to someone about it, going, “Oh, that's really quite an interesting use of it.” And they said, “Why don't you use a person?” I said, “Well, because who am I going to call at 8:30 in the morning on a Thursday and go, ‘Look, I want to spend two hours batting back and forth ideas, but I don't want you to talk about your stuff at all. Just my stuff. And you have to only think about my stuff for two hours. And you have to be very well versed in my stuff as well. Could you just do that?'” Who's going to do that for you? JOANNA: I totally agree with you. Before Christmas, I was doing a paper. It was an art history thing. We had to pick a piece of art or writing and talk about Christian ideas of hell and how it emerged. I was writing this essay and going back and forth with Claude at the time. My husband came in and saw the fresco I was writing about. He said, “No one's going to talk to you about this. Nobody.” MELISSA: Yes, exactly. JOANNA: Nobody cares. MELISSA: Exactly. Nobody cares as much as you. And they're not prepared to do that at 8:30 on a Thursday morning. They've got other stuff to do. JOANNA: It's great to hear because I feel like we're now at the point where these tools are genuinely super useful for independent work. I hope that more people might try that. JOANNA: Okay, we're almost out of time. Where can people find you and your books online? Also, tell us a bit about the types of books you have. MELISSA: I mostly write historical fiction. As I say, I've wandered my way through history—I'm a travelling minstrel. I've done ancient Rome, medieval Morocco, 18th century China, and I'm into Regency England now. So that's a bit closer to home for once. I'm at MelissaAddey.com and you can go and have a bit of a browse and download a free novel if you want. Try me out. JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Melissa. MELISSA: That was great. Thank you. It was fun. The post Research Like An Academic, Write Like an Indie With Melissa Addey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In today's TopMedTalk Andy Cumpstey interviews James Bowness, consultant anaesthetist, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and an Honorary Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at University College London (UCL), at Anaesthesia Research 2025 in Birmingham. They discuss the definition and scope of AI, its applications in healthcare, and its potential to improve medical practices. The conversation emphasizes the importance of clinicians' involvement in the development and implementation of AI technologies. It also highlights ongoing efforts to identify and address key clinical problems through multidisciplinary collaboration, aiming to advance AI's role in anaesthesia, preoperative medicine, and acute pain management. The conversation underscores the need for a strategic, coordinated approach to integrate AI into healthcare effectively. -- Join us at Evidence Based Perioperative Medicine (EBPOM) World Congress 2026 in London. Be part of a global conversation as clinicians from around the world gather between 7-9th July at the British Library in London. Three days of evidence-based perioperative medicine, global insights, and expert debate—featuring speakers including Michael Marmot and Ken Rockwood. Register here - https://ebpom.org/product/ebpom-world-congress-2026/

Send us a textWhat does it mean to keep making, caring and staying human when everything feels like it's falling apart?In this final episode of the Girls Twiddling Knobs podcast, Isobel Anderson speaks directly and unfiltered to you, the listeners, with honesty, clarity and care.This is not a neat goodbye or a highlight reel. It is a reckoning. A permission slip. And a series of parting truths offered to women in music, male allies, music organisations and colleagues in higher education.Isobel reflects on the wider context we are living in: dark times, eroding systems, the devaluing of art and the quiet shame so many creatives carry around money, security and survival. She argues for doing less but doing it with integrity. For making more than we consume. For listening more than we shout. And for staying close to creativity not because it will save the world, but because it keeps us human.You'll hear candid advice about:The real trade-offs between making art and making a livingWhy streaming is a dead end for most musiciansWhen to treat music like a business and when not toInvesting in skills, backing yourself and stopping the wait for permissionLetting other people own their shitWhy organisations must take digital communication seriously if they want real impactThe role men must play as active, imperfect alliesThe heartbreak and hope of higher education, and when it might be time to build something elseThe episode closes with gratitude, acknowledgements and a reflection on legacy. Girls Twiddling Knobs may be ending, but listening, making, creating and caring do not.Stay bold. Stay unapologetic. Don't wait for permission. Stay human.---------------------------------------------------Girls Twiddling Knobs has ended, but you can stay connected to Isobel's artistic work here. Girls Twiddling Knobs was hosted by Isobel Anderson and produced by Isobel Anderson and Jade Bailey from Nov 2020-Jan 2026 and will remain live on all major podcast platforms throughout 2026. We are grateful to the British Library who have archived the podcast in their Sound and Vision Collection. Learn more about the Girls Twiddling Knobs legacy here.Watch this episode on YouTubeExplore more episodes here.Listen on Spotify.

Elephants have played a surprisingly important role on the battlefield, even before the birth of Christ; notably in 5th Century BCE India, and during the Punic Wars in Africa.  But on 23rd January, 971, the Southern Han division of the Chinese military retired their famous elephant corps forever - after facing a massive aerial assault from crossbowmen from the Song Dynasty, who had defeated them in battle. War elephants were not just formidable attackers, but also served as platforms for archers, vantage points, and even provided cover for advancing troops. Despite their effectiveness, the inherent volatility of the animals - susceptible to spooking and turning on their own side -  led to their eventual decline. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly discover how some elephants continued to serve in the military, even after the development of gunpowder; consider the awesome psychological impact of being attacked by a troupe of elephants; and reveal how the Romans learned to defend themselves from elephants - with the aid of some squealing pigs… Content Warning: animal cruelty. #China #Animals #War #Medieval #BC Further Reading: • ‘Elephants, kingship and warfare in Southeast Asia' (British Library, 2017): https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/05/elephants-kingship-and-warfare-in-southeast-asia.html • ‘In Ancient Rome flaming war pigs were used to counter elephants' (The Vintage News, 2016: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/15/ancient-rome-flaming-war-pigs-used-counter-elephants/ ‘War Elephants' (Royal Armouries, 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI3-f8ebLlk This episode first aired in 2024 FRIDAY - MEGAPHONE COPYWe'll be back on Monday - unless you join CLUB RETROSPECTORS, where we give you ad-free listening AND a full-length Sunday episode every week!Plus, weekly bonus content, unlock over 70 bonus bits, and support our independent podcast.Join now via Apple Podcasts or Patreon. Thanks!The Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill.Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Edit Producer: Ollie PeartCopyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2026 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hannah Murray will start by looking at the bestseller lists on Amazon.co.uk and The Sunday Times, the oldest and most influential book sales chart in the UK, and seeing what new entries there are.R.L. Maizes's debut novel 'Other People's Pets' won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of 2020. Her new book 'A Complete Fiction' examines the very serious questions of who has the right to tell a story, and has cancel-culture gone too far in our social media drenched world? Marya Burgess's BBC career spanned almost 40 years, reporting for Woman's Hour, and finally curating The Listening Project in partnership with the British Library. Over the years Marya has attempted to tell her mother's remarkable story, but it was only after moving to rural Scotland that 'Finding Ida' began to take shape. It's a moving family saga about a Polish family caught between shifting frontlines of WWIIMaggie Ritchie is a journalist living in Scotland. Her novel 'Looking for Evelyn' was shortlisted for the Wilber Smith Adventure Writing Prize for Best Published Novel 2018. Her debut novel 'Paris Kiss' won the Curtis Brown Prize in 2015. 'White Raven' is inspired by the role Scottish women played in the Cold War during the 1950s - especially the story of real-life Glasgow girl and wartime codebreaker Moira Beaty....Hayley Graham is a psychotherapist who works with children, adolescents and adults. She herself is a late-diagnosed Autistic. She is also the founder of a thriving children's mental health charity. Her second novel 'Other Wise Hearts' is a hidden tale of strength and the magic of embracing who you truly are. It's a series of gripping and heartfelt stories that debunk common myths about autism, while exploring the rich, complex and often misunderstood realities of autistic lives - especially women and girls. Anna Nolan is a humorist with a penchant for irreverent satire and parody. Her novel 'Fun, Frolics and Fandangos with Satire' looks at modern bureaucracy, office culture and digital obsession. Elle Marr is the No.1 Amazon Charts bestselling author of various novels including Your Dark Secrets. Her latest 'The Lie She Wears' turns the tables on the classic male series killer narrative. This psychological thriller, set in the art world, is filled with shocking family secrets and twists at every turn. Urmilla Seshagiri is professor of English at the University of Tennessee. Her latest book that she has edited is 'The Life of Violet; Three Early Stories, by Virginia Woolf' In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five year old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess names Violet. Urmilla discovered these stories in 2022...

Watch the Q&A session here:  https://youtu.be/3B58-fA2b-4"Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings." — KandinskyHow do we ‘see' music, or ‘hear' images? From Newton's colour scales assigning tones to the rainbow, artists and composers have long explored the deep connections between sound and vision.Kandinsky's Compositions and Improvisations; Klee's polyphonic paintings, and Scriabin's synaesthetic craft all reveal the scintillating interplay of visual and sonic art. This lecture traces their co-evolution and shared language, from spectral composers to technological translations of light into rhythm and melody, uncovering the hidden spectrum where music and colour intertwine.This lecture was recorded by Milton Mermikides on the 14th of January 2026 at LSO St Luke's, LondonMilton Mermikides is a composer, guitarist, technologist, academic and educator in a wide range of musical styles and has collaborated with artists and scientists as diverse as Evelyn Glennie, Tim Minchin, Pat Martino, Peter Zinovieff, John Williams and Brian Eno. Son of a CERN nuclear physicist, he was raised with an enthusiasm for both the arts and sciences, an eclecticism which has been maintained throughout his teaching, research and creative career. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics (BSc), Berklee College of Music (BMus) and the University of Surrey (PhD). He has lectured, exhibited and given keynote presentations at organisations like the Royal Academy of Music, TEDx, Royal Musical Association, British Library, Smithsonian Institute and The Science Museum and his work has been featured extensively in the press. His music, research and graphic art are published and featured by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and more, and he has won awards, scholarships and commendations for writing, teaching, research and his charity work.      Milton is Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, Professor of Guitar at the Royal College of Music, Deputy Director of the International Guitar Research Centre, an Ableton Certified Trainer, and lives in London with his wife, the guitarist Bridget Mermikides and their daughter Chloe. He is also a Vice-Chair of Governors at Addison Primary School, a state school which foregrounds music education, offering free instrumental lessons for all on Pupil Premium. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/music-light-colourGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukX: https://x.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollegeSupport Us: Support the show

Curiosities and Lesser-Known FactsValentine's Day encompasses a range of unusual and historically significant stories that extend beyond conventional symbols such as flowers and chocolates. These lesser-known facts underscore the holiday's complex and multifaceted nature. For instance, the oldest extant Valentine's love note is a poem composed in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, addressed to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt. This correspondence, now preserved in the British Library, illustrates the enduring human desire for connection on this day. In the Victorian era, the tradition of the Vinegar Valentine emerged, representing a satirical, often harsh variant of the holiday. These inexpensive cards, featuring crude illustrations and caustic humor, were sent anonymously to criticize individuals such as employers, neighbors, or unwelcome admirers. Rather than promoting affection, these cards facilitated social commentary and personal grievances, highlighting the holiday's longstanding complexity.Flavors + Knowledge Podcast Produced by SimVal Media Group, USAMore Podcast Subscribe Free to the Flavors + Knowledge Newsletter

Send us a textI thought I would try something a little different for the podcast during 2026. Each month (in conjunction with the usual podcast content) I shall broadcast a podcast giving selected stories from SPR's journal as they have been bound together (two years at a time) in the British Library. I am starting with the journals from 1913/14 and will continue in chronological order. I have started with World War 1 being the start of the modern world.I can spare the time to make an SPR podcast each month as they are easy to research.I record the podcast in one take with no editing. This is not a professional podcast, I make nothing from the podcast, it is a pastime in which I enjoy the research but not presenting the podcast

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is watching Arctic Void (2022; dir. Darren R. Mann); drinking almond nog + Bright Lights, Big Bourbon.Damien is watching Good Boy (2025; dir. Ben Leonberg); drinking a Bhakta 1928.Ryan is watching Shrinking (Apple TV original series); drinking a Gingerbread fartini (vanilla vodka, Frangelico, Bailey's, gingerbread syrup).If you liked this week's story, watch Head Count (2018; dir. Elle Callahan)Up next: Damn the fates, it's Season 9! Special music licensed for non-commercial use through Creative Commons:Intro/Outro: This is Christmas by Scott HolmesSummary Poem: Christmas Meditation by Dee Yan-KeyLike, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

In this special episode recorded at our A Photographic Life Live 2025 event at Oxford Brookes University Grant speaks with photographic historian Dr Michael Pritchard concerning the importance of creating an organised archive, making money from an archive and how to leave your archive for those who will inherit it. Dr Michael Pritchard Dr Michael Pritchard has a practical knowledge of studio and location photography, darkroom processing and printing, and digital photography.  He joined Christie's, the fine art auction house, as a photography specialist in 1986 and grew auctions of cameras and photographic equipment and associated material, setting many world auction records. He was also an auctioneer, and became a Christie's Director and International Business Director for collectibles across the company. In 2007 he became a consultant for Christie's working on a new cataloguing and property control system. He also undertook a PhD in history of photography between 2007 and 2010. His thesis examined photographic manufacturing and retailing from 1839-1914.  He has taught history of photography at MA level at De Montfort University and catalogued and organised the Kodak Historical Collection at the British Library for public access. Pritchard was recruited to the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 2011 as Chief Executive, becoming Director of Programmes from 2018-2023. During his tenure he brought a renewed public profile for the RPS  and oversaw an expansion in its public activities, not least growing its membership to the largest in its history. In 2024 he established his own consultancy. He continues to support the RPS. Pritchard continues to actively research the history of photography and regularly delivers conference papers and publishes across the field. He edits the British Photographic History blog and The PhotoHistorian. His knowledge is regularly sought and he shares his expertise and knowledge of photography and its history with other academics and institutions, students, collectors and the general public.  He gives regular talks and has broadcast on a wide range of photographic subjects. His most recent book is A History of Photography in 50 Cameras (Bloomsbury).  https://mpritchard.squarespace.com Dr.Grant Scott After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work zas a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby's, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style (Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers (Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018. Scott's next book is Inside Vogue House: One building, seven magazines, sixty years of stories, Orphans Publishing, is on sale February 2024. © Grant Scott 2025

The Gaming Hut wonders what would happen in an F20 world where the smoke from burned magic scrolls produced a potent intoxication? Thanks to the Secret Maps exhibition at the British Library, the Travel Advisory veers into the Cartography Hut. Which means we must be back from London, occasioning our annual UK edition of Ken's […]

The British Library is one of the UK's greatest cultural institutions. However, behind the scenes, the staff who make it function are working longer hours for less pay, in worsening conditions. Now, with help from the PCS union, they've decided to fight back.But what does this means more broadly in terms of who is able to access and benefit from our cultural institutions? The Standard's Culture Writer Claudia Cockerell is here with the findings of her special report on the subject - alongside footage of the strikers in action, from London tour guide Jenny Draper. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christmas at Colonel and Lady Garrison's house is all warmth, laughter, and parlour games, until the evening's “entertainment” arrives: a small, shabby medium with disconcertingly sharp eyes. The guests settle round the table for an amusing bit of spiritualism. As the lights dim and the control takes over, the party games curdle into something closer to an inquest, and the most unwelcome of visitors finds its way back. First published in The Sphere on 20 November 1935, “The Man Who Came Back” was collected in The Floating Café and Other Stories (Jarrolds, 1936). It has since reappeared in several modern anthologies of seasonal supernatural tales, including the British Library's Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights (2021). Margery Harriet Lawrence (1889–1969) was an English writer who moved with ease between ghost stories, occult fiction, romance, and crime, and whose work was widely read in the inter-war decades. She is now best remembered for her Club of the Round Table tales and for Dr Miles Pennoyer, her “psychic doctor” occult detective, whose cases draw heavily on the spiritualist beliefs she embraced in later life. Buy My Christmas Ghost Stories Paperback as a Gift for Someone!? https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=MxXXCglWV2Uu4L9ArK8eIz8rexI8huhrBketkRcyMfh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is bingeing all 14 seasons of King of the Hill; drinking Burnside Bourbon.Damien is reading Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman; drinking a legit painkiller with Pussers Rum (orange, pineapple, cream of coconut, nutmeg).Ryan is reading  Ghostland by Edward Parnell; drinking a Lagavulin 16.If you liked this week's story, read Gothic by Philip Fracassi.Up next: Damn the fates, it's Season 9! And a merry little bonus episode interlude...Special thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

When he wrote Messiah (in 24 days), Handel was past his prime and nearly broke. One night in Dublin changed all that. (Part two of “Making Messiah.”) SOURCES:Charles King, political scientist at Georgetown University.Chris Scobie, curator of music, manuscripts, and archives at the British Library.Ellen Harris, musicologist and professor emeritus at MIT.Mark Risinger, teacher at St. Bernard's School.Philip Rushforth, organist and master of the choristers at the Chester Cathedral.Proinnsías Ó Duinn, conductor and music director of Our Lady's Choral Society. RESOURCES:Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah, by Charles King (2024)."Arnaud du Sarrat and the international music trade in Halle and Leipzig c.1700," by Tomasz Górny (Early Music, 2023).George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, by Ellen Harris (2014).Handel (Composers Across Cultures), by Donald Burrows (2012)."Georg Händel (1622–97): The Barber-Surgeon Father of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)," by Aileen Adams and B. Hofestädt (Journal Of Medical Biography, 2005).Handel's Messiah: A Celebration: A Richly Illustrated History of the Music and Its Eighteenth-Century Background, by Richard Luckett (1995).Handel's Messiah The Advent Calendar, podcast series. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A woman played a female role on the London stage for the very first time on December 8th, 1660, as Desdemona in a revival of Shakepeare's Othello. The actress was probably Margaret Hughes - though nobody bothered to record this at the time, so we can't be sure. After the 1660 restoration of King Charles II, theatres opened their doors for the first time after 16 years of Puritan suppression. Charles, who had been exiled in France, admired continental theatre, where women had already been performing for over a century, and so England's actresses were finally permitted to follow suit. Arion, Rebecca and Olly uncover the stories of those pioneering performers who combatted sexism and sexual harassment to have their time in the limelight; consider the fate of the ‘pretty boys in petticoats' once real women were allowed on stage; and, once again, marvel at Samuel Pepys's inability to keep his sexual urges out of his diaries… Further Reading: • 'Who was the first Shakespearean actress?' (British Library, 2016): https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/05/who-was-the-first-shakespearean-actress.html • 'The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660-1700 - By Elizabeth Howe' (Cambridge University Press, 1992): https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_First_English_Actresses/gPC5RvL7O_8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=elizabeth+howe+women+on+stage&printsec=frontcover • ‘April de Angelis Interview | The first women on stage' (Whats On Stage, 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvaJIzHj6zY Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir; drinking Freeland Spirits Bourbon.Damien is watching Freaky Tales (2024; dir. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck); drinking a Hibiki Japanese Harmony.Ryan is reading  A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck; drinking a Highland Park 12.If you liked this week's story, watch Black Box (2020; dir. Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour).Up next: "The Stalls of the Barchester Cathedral" by the inimitable M. R. JamesSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah by Stephen King; drinking Free Spirits 'The Spirit of Bourbon'.Damien is reading Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte; drinking a Boulevardier (Larceny bourbon, Campari, sweet vermouth).Ryan is reading  Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse and Bad Manners, edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey; drinking a Glenlivet 14.If you liked this week's story, read the interconnected short stories of the Dandridge Cycle by Caitlin R Kiernan.Up next: "The Face of the Monk" by Robert HichensSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

The 2025 RDI address will be delivered by incoming Master Johanna Gibbons RDI, founding partner of J&L Gibbons and founding director of Landscape Learn.Johanna is a Landscape Architect, Founding Partner of J&L Gibbons established in 1986 and Founding Director of social enterprise Landscape Learn. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art and is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and the RSA, and a Research Partner of Urban Mind with Kings College London with an international profile as design panellist, juror and speaker.Jo was awarded Royal Designer for Industry in 2019 for her ‘pioneering and influential work combining design with activism, education and professional practice'. She is respected for routinely and seamlessly incorporating ecology, organismal biology, urban planning, conservation, community organising, the arts, and pedagogy, being driven by a keen awareness of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social need.Her many award-winning, collaborative and innovative designs span over four decades of practice, mostly within the cultural and public realm sector. They range from urban regeneration, heritage and estate planning to artist collaboration and the landscapes of cathedrals and museums, including the Natural History Museum London, Inger Munch Pier Oslo, Horniman Museum and Gardens, St Albans Cathedral and The British Library.Prior to the Address, 5 new Royal Designers for Industry (RDI) and 2 new Honorary Royal Designers for Industry will be welcomed to the Faculty.The title ‘Royal Designer for Industry' is awarded annually by the RSA to designers of all disciplines who have achieved sustained design excellence, work of aesthetic value and significant benefit to society.The RDI is the highest accolade for designers in the UK. Only 200 designers can hold the title. Non-UK designers may become honorary Royal Designers.The ‘Royal Designers' are responsible for designing the world around us, enriching our cultural heritage, driving innovation, inspiring creativity in others and improving our quality of life.Speakers:Johanna Gibbons RDI, founding partner of J&L Gibbons and founding director of Landscape LearnCharlie Paton RDI, founder and director of Seawater Greenhouse Ltd and RDI MasterChair:Sir Loyd Grossman CBE, chair of trustees, RSADonate to the RSA: https://thersa.co/3ZyPOEaBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/ueembFollow RSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thersaorg/Like RSA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theRSAorg/Listen to RSA Events podcasts: https://bit.ly/35EyQYUJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is watching They Cloned Tyrone (2023; dir Juel Taylor); drinking a Ghia Ginger Spritz.Damien is watching Strange Darling (2024; dir. J.T. Mollner); drinking a Glenmorangie 12.Ryan is play Blue Prince (VG; 2025) ; drinking a Glenlivet Caribbean Cask.If you liked this week's story, watch Presence (2024; dir. Steven Soderbergh)Up next: "The Duchess at Prayer" by Edith WhartonSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

In this episode Adrienne asks Paul probing questions about crime fiction, why is it so popular and what keeps us coming back for more?Theses are the books and authors we mention https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/bookylicious-series-5-episode-3?&new-list-page=trueYou can find the Shedunnit podcast is here https://www.shedunnitshow.com/And details of next year's Agatha Christie Exhibition at the British Library are here https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/agathachristie

Tony Watkins interviews Dr Dirk Jongkind, Vice Principal (Academic) about his new book, ‘Growing in Understanding: Devotions for Christian Academics' (published by Apollos in 2025).GROWING IN UNDERSTANDING: DEVOTIONS FOR CHRISTIAN ACADEMICS is available directly from IVP or from your normal bookseller.Dirk Jongkind is probably best known as editor of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. However, before he ended up in the academy, Dirk worked in the horticultural sector (together with his wife Marion), growing tropical cut-flowers (Heliconia) in greenhouses in his native country, the Netherlands. He enjoyed this hands-on setting, yet decided to follow his life's fascination with the history and text of the Bible. He completed a M.A. in Old Testament at Tyndale Theological Seminary (1999, Badhoevedorp, nr. Amsterdam), and moved to the United Kingdom for an M.Phil. in New Testament at Cambridge University, where he also completed a PhD in 2005. At this time he was employed for a brief project at the British Library as part of the preparation of the Codex Sinaiticus Digitisation project.At Tyndale House, Dirk does research in the transmission of the text of the New Testament which has resulted in the Tyndale House Edition of the Greek New Testament (2017). He also maintains an interest in lexical and grammatical studies. He is an Associate Editor of the Tyndale Bulletin. Working at Tyndale House gives unique opportunities to contribute to the practice and vision of theological education.He has taught in a wide variety of settings ranging from big conference rooms and university halls to the back rooms of small rural chapels and local village pubs. Dirk is a Fellow of St Edmund's College and a Member of the Faculty of Divinity.Apart from explaining the Bible and the many ways in which one passage resonates with others, he also enjoys speaking about how Christians can be good scholars and pursue knowledge and truth without compromising their commitment to faith.Support the showEdited by Tyndale House Music – Acoustic Happy Background used with a standard license from Adobe Stock.Follow us on: X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletchere; drinking a Blind Tiger's Bees Knees.Damien is reading The Haar by David Sodergren; drinking a Larceny bourbon whiskey.Ryan is watching "Adolescence" (Netflix); drinking and Old Forester 86.If you liked this week's story, watch Black Swan (2010; dir. Darren Aronofsky)Up next: "An Evicted Spirit" by Marguerite MeringtonSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

Do animals make music? Are the languages of whales and birds truly songs? To answer this, we must first understand what we mean by music as human animals—and how it might emerge across the animal kingdom. From Messiaen's transcriptions of bird calls to the rhythmic gaits of horses echoing in the blues, we'll hear how animal behaviours form an unwitting orchestra and explore whether music is uniquely human or a shared language with our animal cousins.This lecture was recorded by Milton Mermikides on the 29th of October 2025 at LSO St Luke's, LondonMilton Mermikides is a composer, guitarist, technologist, academic and educator in a wide range of musical styles and has collaborated with artists and scientists as diverse as Evelyn Glennie, Tim Minchin, Pat Martino, Peter Zinovieff, John Williams and Brian Eno. Son of a CERN nuclear physicist, he was raised with an enthusiasm for both the arts and sciences, an eclecticism which has been maintained throughout his teaching, research and creative career. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics (BSc), Berklee College of Music (BMus) and the University of Surrey (PhD). He has lectured, exhibited and given keynote presentations at organisations like the Royal Academy of Music, TEDx, Royal Musical Association, British Library, Smithsonian Institute and The Science Museum and his work has been featured extensively in the press. His music, research and graphic art are published and featured by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony and more, and he has won awards, scholarships and commendations for writing, teaching, research and his charity work.      Milton is Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, Professor of Guitar at the Royal College of Music, Deputy Director of the International Guitar Research Centre, an Ableton Certified Trainer, and lives in London with his wife, the guitarist Bridget Mermikides and their daughter Chloe. He is also a Vice-Chair of Governors at Addison Primary School, a state school which foregrounds music education, offering free instrumental lessons for all on Pupil Premium. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/music-animalsGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukX: https://x.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollegeSupport Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-todaySupport the show

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane; drinking a canned Spiritless Old Fashioned.Damien is reading Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones; drinking a Redbreast 15 Single Pot Still Irish Whiskey.Ryan is reading Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian; drinking the Lagavuhlin 16 yr old.If you liked this week's story, watch The Forest (2016; dir. Jason Zada)Up next: "A Story Told In Church" by Ada BuissonSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

When a US Navy exploratory ship finds a tramp steamer that went missing some years before, the mystery surrounding its disappearance becomes closer to being solved when a passenger's journal is uncovered. But what really happened aboard the Wellington and what became of its crew?This original recording is an audio presentation by Jasper L'Estrange for EnCrypted Horror. “SARGASSO” by Ward Muir, 1908.

In this week's episode of the Security Squawk Podcast, Bryan Hornung, Randy Bryan, and Reginald Andre break down three major cybersecurity incidents that show how no industry is immune — from universities and government contractors to the British Library itself. We dig into a 1.2 million-record donor data breach, a ransomware-driven shutdown, and the growing supply-chain risk for MSPs and IT providers. Tune in for sharp analysis, real-world lessons, and actionable advice to protect your business from being the next victim. Cybersecurity podcast, data breach, ransomware, MSP, vendor risk, university breach, British Library, Conduent, IT security trends ️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! https://streamyard.com/pal/d/65161790...

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo; drinking Heck's Gentle Persuasion Golden NA.Damien is watching Daddy's Head (2024; dir. Benjamin Barfoot); drinking a Flying Naked (bourbon, Bénédictine, Aperol, lemon juice).Ryan is reading Aurora Rising by Alastair Reynolds; drinking Highland Park 12 yr 'Viking Honour'.If you liked this week's story, read "Procession of the Black Sloth" by Laird BarronUp next: "The Sexton's Adventuret" by Sheridan Le FanuSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is watching Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023; dir. Stephen Cognetti); drinking Sloop Brewing Oktoberfest.Damien is watching Bring Her Back (2025; dir. Phillipou Brothers); drinking a Painkiller with Pussers Rum (orange, pineapple, cream of coconut, nutmeg).Ryan is reading "Lot No. 249" by Arthur Conan Doyle; drinking the Bowmore 15.If you liked this week's story, read Night Film by Marisha Pessl.Special thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is watching Taskmaster (2015 - current TV series); drinking St Agrestis Phony Mezcal Negroni.Damien is watching Demoni/Demons (1985; dir. Lamberto Bava, produced and co-written by Dario Argento); drinking Corsair Triple Smoke.Ryan is reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson; drinking a perfect Manhattan.If you liked this week's story, read The Traveller by R.H. BensonUp next: "The Cathedral Crypt" by John WyndhamSpecial thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, tells the story of the discovery of a treasure-trove at the heart of University College London. In a long-forgotten room James found thousands of maps and atlases. This abandoned archive reveals how maps have traced the contours of the world, inspiring some of the greatest scientific discoveries, as well as leading to terrible atrocities and power grabs. But maps have not always been used to navigate or reveal the world, according to a new exhibition at the British Library on Secret Maps (from 24 October 2025 to 18 January 2026). Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and author of Four Points of the Compass, explains how mysterious maps throughout history have been used to hide, shape and control knowledge. The biographer Jenny Uglow celebrates a different kind of mapping in her new book, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer. In 1781 the country curate Gilbert White charted the world around him – from close observation of the weather, to the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming harvest – revealing a natural map of his Hampshire village.Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is watching Red Rooms (2024; dir Pascal Plante); drinking The Best Day Brewing's NA Kolsch.Damien is watching The Coffee Table (2022; dir. Caye Casas); drinking Nelson's Green Brier Tennessee Whiskey.Ryan is reading The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy; drinking Glenlivet Double Oaked.If you liked this week's story, watch Mandy (2018; dir. Panos Cosmatos)Up next: "In The Confessional" by Amelia B Edwards.Special thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

When Oscar Wilde was jailed for, "gross indecency," a 19th century euphemism for gay sex, his library card was revoked. 130 years later, the British Library has re-issued it to his grandson.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

US President Donald Trump has confirmed that he authorized the CIA to conduct secret operations in Venezuela, adding that the White House is weighing the possibility of a land attack on the country. Also, staff members at a prestigious opera house in Venice, Italy, are going on strike to protest the incoming conductor, saying she lacks the experience needed for the role. And, Doctors Without Borders shutters its emergency care center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, amid a surge in violence. Plus, 130 years later, The British Library reinstates playwright and author Oscar Wilde's library card.Listen to today's Music Heard on Air. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Comprehensive coverage of the day's news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. World Food Day 2007 bronze Pope says international community must not turn away from hunger, as UN observes World Food Day; California launches landmark plan to sell insulin pens for $11, Governor Newsom says “Best in the nation, nothing comes close”; Trump prepares to use IRS to go after left-leaning groups, Wall Street Journal says targets include major Democratic donors; Trump considering revamp of US refugee system to favor white South Africans, English speakers, and Europeans opposed to migration; Crowd-sourced “Defending Our Neighbors” fund aims to raise $30 million to provide free legal representation for immigrants; British Library reissues Oscar Wilde's library card, 130 years after it was revoked when Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality The post UN observes World Food Day; California to sell insulin pens for $11 beginning January 1 – October 16, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

Bar Talk (our recommendations):Jessica is reading The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard; drinking Labatt's NA.Damien is reading Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell; drinking Hibiki Japanese Harmony.Ryan is reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir; drinking the Lagavulin 16yr.If you liked this week's story, watch Oddity (2024; dir. Damian McCarthy)Up next: "The Parson's Oath" by Mrs. Henry Wood.Special thank you to Dr Blake Brandes for our Whiskey and the Weird music! Like, rate, and follow! Check us out @whiskeyandtheweird on Instagram, Threads & Facebook, and at whiskeyandtheweird.com

Melissa Febos is the author of The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, available from Knopf. Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Abandon Me, Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and, most recently, The Dry Season. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, The British Library, The Black Mountain Institute, MacDowell, the Bogliasco Foundation, The American Library in Paris, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Sun, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Best American Travel and Food Writing, and New York Review of Books. Febos is a Roy J. Carver Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program. She lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly. *** ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Otherppl with Brad Listi⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, etc. Get ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How to Write a Novel,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ the debut audio course from DeepDive. 50+ hours of never-before-heard insight, inspiration, and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors. Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brad's email newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠proud affiliate partner of Bookshop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Literature's most famous castaway, Robinson Crusoe, was washed up on a desert island - where he would remain for 28 years - on 30th September, 1659. By selecting this date, author Daniel Defoe ensured that his fictional protagonist's fate pre-dated the real-life estrangement of Royal Navy man Alexander Selkirk, who was stranded some 46 years later: 14 years prior to Defoe writing his novel. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how his story pioneered not only the English novel, but also the movie trailer; ask whether Crusoe's narrative voice sounds like an authentic young man of the period, or betrays the fact that Defoe was nearly sixty when he created him; and dig around in the writer's early career (including, but not limited to, creating perfume from civets)... Further Reading: • Daniel Defoe profile (The British Library): https://www.bl.uk/people/daniel-defoe • ‘Debunking the Myth of the ‘Real' Robinson Crusoe' (National Geographic, 2016): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/robinson-crusoe-alexander-selkirk-history • The Shipwreck scene from ‘Robinson Crusoe' (1927): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCaYAD1ZGuM This episode first aired in 2021Love the show? Support us!  Join