Podcasts about englishness

With the fever now airborne within the Kingdom, Luke and Jim jumped on YouTube for another Lions Watch livestream ahead of the World Cup starting NEXT WEEK. YOU WHAT?!On today's agenda: should England say they're expecting to win it all? Are we actually a bit short on the right-hand side? And what in-flight meal is going to stoke the fires of Englishness within the squad: pie 'n' mash or fish and chips?Got the fever? Well, you're in luck - grab your Ramble World Cup watch party tickets hereFind us on Bluesky, X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: show@footballramble.com.Sign up to the Football Ramble Patreon for ad-free shows for just $5 per month: https://www.patreon.com/footballramble.***Please take the time to rate us on your podcast app. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** The Football Ramble, the original and best football podcast. Brand new podcasts every single weekday throughout the Premier League season and every day throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup.No cliches. No ex-pros like Peter Crouch or The Rest is Football. Just the funniest football conversation out there. Your guardian for the season, daily not weekly. Stick to the Ramble, totally. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of OffScript, Josephine Burton is joined by historian, journalist, and writer Paula Akpan. A specialist in Black British history and queer identity, Paula brings a vital perspective to our exploration of Albion.Drawing on her acclaimed book, When We Ruled: The Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors, Paula discusses the power of restoring overlooked narratives to the centre of our global and national stories. Together, they examine how history shapes the idea of who gets to be seen as "English" and the intersections of race, memory, and belonging.From pre-colonial African leadership to contemporary British activism, this conversation explores whether Englishness can ever be fully inclusive and how learning untold histories can reshape our understanding of identity today.Our Public House is currently touring England. Find out more at https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-houseThis episode is part of Dash Arts' Albion series - an ongoing exploration of what it means to be English today.Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second of our bonus episodes, Mark talks with historian and author Ollie Randall about his book Writers in Whites: How a group of literary cricketers changed English culture (London: Fairfield Books, 2026) which is released today. Bonus episodes are released early to patrons. If you want to hear these episodes when they are first available, sign up at https://www.patreon.com/doingsofdoyle as a free or paid member. Ollie Randall Ollie Randall is a writer, historian and cartoonist. He completed his doctoral thesis, 'Cricket, Literary Culture and Englishness' in January 2026, which has become the basis for his book Writers in Whites (2026). Ollie has written articles for a variety of publications, including The Sherlock Holmes Journal, and most frequently the Times Literary Supplement. He has worked as the historical researcher for a former leader of the House of Lords, and as a tour manager on cultural tours. His second book, Lord's and Maharajas – about the political intrigue and imperial crisis that shaped the origins of Indian international cricket – is due out in Autumn 2026. Next time on Doings of Doyle… For our 75th regular episode, we cover one of Conan Doyle's most important early stories, ‘J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' (1884). You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/wiki/J._Habakuk_Jephson%27s_Statement  Acknowledgements  Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal. Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com. Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.

For today's episode we have something very special for you - a collaboration between Three Ravens and The History of England Podcast about 15 English Objects.Since St George's Day 2026 A Very English Chat has been encouraging respectful conversations to overcome growing hatred and division around our national identity.The brief is simple: what five objects - anecdotes, artefacts, emotional connections, films, food, landmarks, language, literature, music, nature, places, or people would you include within your own ‘Story of England'?Guests including Billy Bragg and Caroline Lucas have offered their selections of five English objects, and, from a Three Ravens perspective, when our friend and own of our major inspirations David Crowther of the History of England suggested we collaborate to offer our own two pence, we leapt at the opportunity!A Very English Chat is working to tackle England's fraying social fabric and growing polarisation by offering simple responses to potentially difficult and divisive questions about ‘What it means to be English in 2026.'The campaign asks people to identify five objects that signify what Englishness means to them today, using this idea as a starting point to make it easier to have respectful conversations around the subject.As such, we - Eleanor, David and Martin - each came ready to discuss, in less than 45 minutes, our own five favourite examples of 'English Things' - all without comparing notes.Before long, as you will hear, common themes start to emerge about sweetness, curiosity, enterprise, rebellion, and endurance.But of the 15 objects we've chosen, which is the best?And, are we as a trio all destined to get diabetes?!?We really hope you enjoy the episode, and will speak to you again on Monday with a new episode of the Three Ravens Bestiary all about the history and folklore of Imps!Learn more about and listen to The History of England.Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...Bonus Episodes are released on Thursdays plus Local Legends episodes on Saturdays - interviews with acclaimed authors, folklorists, podcasters and historians with unique perspectives on that week's county.With a range of exclusive content on Patreon, too, including audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?REGISTER FOR THE TALES OF SOUTHERN ENGLAND TOURVisit our website Join our Patreon Social media channels and sponsors Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Sixty Years of Hurt with David Baddiel' explores the meaning of England and Englishness through the history of the England Men's Football team. This is a social and cultural history as much as a sporting one, examining the story England tells about itself and how it's changed, via the medium of the international game.“Football is singularly the most important cultural institution in the country for defining Englishness” says Historian David Goldblatt, as the series begins looking at the most famous moment in English football – the world cup win in 1966. Comedian, writer and football fan, David Baddiel, sees how the victory adorned swinging London, and yet the characters in the team spoke to a very different kind of England. David also travels back to the very origins of the game in England (discovering that Henry VIII had a pair of football boots), checks in with Elis James for a view from Wales, and muses on the meaning of national anthems. The series delves deep into how national myths are both forged and reflected in the fate of eleven young men with three lions on their shirts. It takes in the view from England's sporting rivals, from Wales to Argentina, and asks what light the success of England's Woman casts on the story of England's Men.Across the series, David Baddiel will be joined by contributors including Stephen Fry, Alex James, Maisie Adam, Elis James, Barney Ronay, Roy Williams, Des Lynam, Stuart Pearce, Jean Williams, David Goldblatt, Pippa Grange, Jonathan Wilson, David Seaman, Omid Djalili and many more.Sixty Years of Hurt with David Baddiel is produced by BBC Studios Audio for BBC Radio 4, in collaboration with Left Bank Pictures who are producing the upcoming drama Dear England for BBC iPlayer and BBC One.The producers are Rich Power and David Baddiel.

'Sixty Years of Hurt with David Baddiel' explores the meaning of England and Englishness through the history of the England Men's Football team. This is a social and cultural history as much as a sporting one, examining the story England tells about itself and how it's changed, via the medium of the international game.The series delves deep into how national myths are both forged and reflected in the fate of eleven young men with three lions on their shirts. It takes in the view from England's sporting rivals, from Wales to Argentina, and asks what light the success of England's Woman casts on the story of England's Men.Across the series, comedian, writer and football fan David Baddiel will be joined by contributors including Stephen Fry, Alex James, Maisie Adam, Elis James, Barney Ronay, Roy Williams, Des Lynam, Stuart Pearce, Jean Williams, David Goldblatt, Pippa Grange, Jonathan Wilson, David Seaman, Omid Djalili and many more.The England football team always, somehow, represents a nation. Its dramas are our dramas, its divisions are our divisions, its story is our story. A story about race and history, talent and rivalry, class and courage, violence and beauty. But what exactly is that narrative, who gets to write it and, once the final whistle is blown, what does it all mean?Sixty Years of Hurt with David Baddiel is produced by BBC Studios Audio for BBC Radio 4, in collaboration with Left Bank Pictures who are producing the upcoming drama Dear England for BBC iPlayer and BBC One.

Josephine Burton takes us inside the rehearsal room of Our Public House, Dash Arts' new touring theatre production and the culmination of our series of work on Albion.We join the company during their rehearsals at Toynbee Studios while some of the country heads to the polls in local elections. Assistant Director Scott Hurran shares insights into the collective creation of characters and how communities across the country have shaped the play's development.Set in a pub, Our Public House is a play about Englishness: who we are, what we've lost, and what we might still become.Our Public House tours England from May 2026. Get your tickets and find out more on the Dash Arts website: https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-houseOur intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf MajidiYou also hear a preview of Rent Controls Now and All The Same by Jonathan Walton, arranged by Yaniv Fridel.Thanks to the cast and crew for welcoming us in with our microphones. Mary - Gabriella LeonSanjana - Bharti PatelAnika - Chaya GuptaScott - Fergus O'DonnellJo - Lauren MoakesTom - Kit EsuruosoCompany Stage Manager - Cora Frank Deputy Stage Manager - Alice KellyWritten by Barney Norris Created and Directed by Josephine Burton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us Fan MailHappy Beltane to those that celebrate, here's an extra episode to welcome those longer days that are on the way. It's an extended interview with author and broadcaster Zakia Sewell about the journeys and discoveries that make up Finding Albion, her search for another Britain. Born out of her 2020 radio 4 series (My Albion) - it is a rejection of a narrow and exclusionary vision of Englishness in favour of a unifying sense of national identity. Centred around the wheel of the year and a pursuit that took Zakia the length and breadth of  our island Finding Albion is as much an exploration of our shared colonial past as it is the weird and wonderful folk customs and traditions that continue to bind our communities together. What emerges is a (much needed) hopeful vision of our future and the offer to pursue a deeper sense of who we are.'Hopeful and Inspiring' - Caroline Lucas'Finding Albion offers up much-needed alternative national identities and stories for us to keep close and cherish. A timely book' - Jeremy Deller. Huge thanks to Huw Marc Bennett and the mighty Albert's Favourites for the use of Huw's music. Music used: Carol Haf (Summer Carol) Gwenith Gwyn (White Wheat) Taken from Huw's latest album 'Heol Las,' get your copy direct from Huw's band camp page. If you fancy getting a copy of the Finding Albion why not help the wonderful  Gloucester Road Books (Bristol) celebrate their fifth birthday by ordering it from their website. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the pod and share with those you love. x@fieldzine www.fieldzine.comwww.patreon.com/fieldzine

CO is back, with a dream guest for Dan and Kasia: Professor Patrick Wright, author of On Living in an Old Country and The Village That Died for England, joins us for an urgent and vital conversation about Englishness, heritage, national decline, landscapes, Brexit and Reform, historical memory, and social and cultural disintegration. This is a conversation about "the direly persistent English question" - one which will not go away. "I don't even have a history O'level - history came to me, rather than me coming to it,” Patrick tell us, taking us on a fascinating journey beginning in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher appealed loudly to “tradition”, while ripping up norms that would ensure many things would never be the same. We discuss why politics often amounts to, in Patrick's words, “conjuring with the bones of the dead”, and why the telling of our history is so often framed in terms of crisis: as Heritage in Danger. How does the landscape shape our idea of the nation, and vice versa? We chew over some great symbolic moments - “radioactive anecdotes” like the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree, the Crooked House pub fire, Foot and Mouth, Dutch Elm disease (“the whole landscape was like a cemetery”), and the elevating of HMS Mary Rose from the sea bed after 450 years. ~~~ Read Patrick's brilliant books: On Living in an Old Country (1985)  The Village that Died for England (1995) The Sea View Has Me Again (2021) ~~~ Do please consider supporting our Patreon!  You'll also get a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps, and it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects  

What does Englishness sound like?In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by musician, songwriter, and activist Billy Bragg for an electric conversation about England - its flags, its contradictions, and its capacity for protest.Billy and Josephine dig into what it means to love a country and argue with it at the same time. They explore the politics of the English flag, the radical traditions buried in folk music, and whether a song can actually change the world. Billy even sings.The conversation spills into Our Public House, Dash Arts' new touring theatre production, a state-of-the-nation play set in a pub, born out of four years of travelling England and listening to over 700 people talk about the country they want to live in. It's the kind of England Billy Bragg has been singing about for decades, and it turns out he has a lot to say about it.Because if anyone has spent a lifetime making the case for a different kind of Englishness, one rooted in solidarity, humour, and dissent, it's Billy Bragg.Our Public House is touring England, opening at Leeds Playhouse from May 15th before touring to Prescot, Coventry, Sheffield, Cornwall and London. Find out more at https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-houseThis episode is part of Dash Arts' Albion series - an ongoing exploration of what it means to be English today.Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf MajidiBilly Bragg photo by Murdo MacLeod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What makes someone English - and who gets to decide?In this episode of Off Script, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, raised in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and educated in the UK, whose internationalism has always been at the heart of her practice.Shobana and Josephine explore what Englishness and Britishness actually mean, and why the tension between them matters. Shobana reflects on how English literature and a culture of open debate shaped her own values, even as she felt, in many ways, an outsider looking in.At the centre of the conversation is Shobana's production We Caliban, which draws on Shakespeare's The Tempest to interrogate the encounter between non-European cultures and the colonising gaze of Prospero. It's a work about empire, migration, and the questions that remain stubbornly unresolved. The Tempest is also the source material for Dash Arts' forthcoming production, Our Public House. Together, Josephine and Shobana make the case for why the arts, more than politics or policy, can hold the complexity that simple definitions of belonging refuse to.You can now buy tickets for our new touring theatre production, Our Public House. Find out more on the Dash Arts website : https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode with Professor Mark Connelly we explore the profound connection between landscape, memory, and national identity during the Great War, focusing on the significance of chalk landscapes in Britain and their influence on cultural memory and battlefield symbolism.We dive into how the beautiful, chalky terrains of England shaped the identity of soldiers during the Great War. Many of them carried an intimate knowledge of these landscapes, a connection forged through literature and culture. When they found themselves on the battlefields of France, the familiar terrain sparked powerful memories and emotions, making the destruction all the more poignant.This narrative goes beyond military history; it's about identity, memory, and how we connect with the land we call home. The chalk downlands were not just a backdrop but a symbol of what they were fighting for, and losing.And we ask, what does this mean for how we remember the war today?Professor Mark Connelly's Tours: Mark Connelly - Connelly ContoursThe book mentioned was 'England in France' by Charles Vince, illustrations by Sydney R. Jones (London 1919)Main Image: A Grave and a Mine Crater at La Boisselle, August 1917 by William Orpen (IWMART2378) Sign up for the free podcast newsletter here: Old Front Line Bulletin.You can order Old Front Line Merch via The Old Front Line Shop.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us Fan MailSupport the show

What does Englishness mean to you?In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by journalist, writer, and Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times, Hardeep Matharu, for a wide-ranging conversation about the complex and overlooked stories shaping contemporary England. Drawing on her work leading an independent, reader-funded news outlet committed to investigative journalism and democratic accountability, Hardeep brings a sharp perspective on the narratives that dominate public life — and those that are too often ignored.This podcast series sits within Dash Arts' ongoing exploration of landscape and language, Albion, from reimagining Middlemarch in 1980s Coventry to running speech-making workshops with over 700 people across the UK. Throughout these projects, we've been listening closely to how people express identity, voice, and place.In 2026 Albion will culminate with our new touring theatre production, Our Public House. Get your tickets and to find out more on the Dash Arts website : https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura's Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there's a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie's 1926 disappearance.Laura, welcome.LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I'm such a fan of your Substack, as you know.OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that's what we like.Christie's Favorite WritersOLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don't you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—OLIVER: We've lost it? We don't have the typescript?THOMPSON: I've never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don't know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don't have to.OLIVER: Yes. There's Shakespeare in every book?THOMPSON: No, but it's there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.OLIVER: Yeah.THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there's a lot of Bible in her books, as I'm sure you've noticed.OLIVER: Yes. Yes.THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.Christie and ShakespeareOLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?OLIVER: Well, let's not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.THOMPSON: That's so interesting.OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don't like and I do—THOMPSON: Go on.OLIVER: It's called Murder Most Foul, isn't it?THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And there's something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can't walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting.OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She's not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.OLIVER: Much more rational.THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she's not mad, Margaret, is she? But she's upset.OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—OLIVER: Waspish.THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that's obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they're structured. That's not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that's obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.She's very—I hope I'm right in saying this—she's very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn't regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What's wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I'll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that's sort of the last thing they are. And they're very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they're full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.Christie on Shakespeare?OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn't. Why?THOMPSON: No. I don't think she ever liked being told what to do.OLIVER: [laughs]THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren't they?OLIVER: Yes, yes. I've only read what's in your book, but yes, I didn't warm to him.THOMPSON: I'm glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they're just thoughts for you.” I don't think she would've felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.OLIVER: Save it for the novels.THOMPSON: Yes, she's a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would've preferred to do that and use it to her ends.And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you've killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.I mean, Miss Marple was. She's quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”OLIVER: It's one of her most striking lines.THOMPSON: It is, isn't it?OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she's very modern, she's very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.Dickens and Christie's FamilyOLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It's obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I'm going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It's the first time there's a police detective in a major English novel.THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don't actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don't know. She had a lot of go in her.And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would've made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you're that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I've never quite got the habit.OLIVER: But if she's born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she's got a somewhat direct—THOMPSON: Yes, she was.OLIVER: You know, it's sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes. Isn't that extraordinary?OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It's crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It's like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.OLIVER: But worse, yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would've been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I'd never, ever thought of that before. Isn't that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I'm leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it's awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.I don't mean to make extravagant claims, but there's a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won't let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.Art and MusicOLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It's very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it's still there.And they used to do this thing—I think it's a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would've dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.THOMPSON: And there's a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn't strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would've been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant's Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it's all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don't, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.Christie's UniquenessOLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn't, to me, feel—she's obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn't feel the same as them somehow.THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: What is that?THOMPSON: Do you think it's her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn't write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that's in that book. It's a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There's a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she's also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.I don't think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she'd dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn't bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they're a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.She doesn't do that with Poirot. He's just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it's that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don't quite do. And at the same time, she's redefining it from within.OLIVER: There's something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don't know, two or three novels, that's gone, and he's Poirot as we know him, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes, yes.OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.Christie and the TheaterTHOMPSON: Yes. She's sort of conceptual and the others aren't quite, I think. She doesn't do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn't—it's not Cluedo, is it? It's not, there's six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it's: it's nobody, or it's everybody, or it's the policeman, or it's a child, or there's something bigger and bolder going on.And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she's incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl's a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there's 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It's all in there.OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan't reveal, but—THOMPSON: That's Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she's given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can't resist—OLIVER: Yes, but that's what I'm saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: No, no. We're crossed wires.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That's a reenactment.OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—OLIVER: I've seen it once. I've seen it—you know, I don't know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it's you.” It's very dramatic moments. You don't like it?THOMPSON: No, I think you're right. I wouldn't mind seeing it done really, really well. There's something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It's in Ordeal by Innocence. It's in Mrs. McGinty. That's, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it's not abandonment, but I think—OLIVER: Well, yes.THOMPSON: — it's not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we've said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I've always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.The TV AdaptationsOLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don't.THOMPSON: Yes, that's true.OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that's really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn't really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don't know. I don't know because I think they're mostly not very good. I don't know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that's deliberate, that they're less—if they drove you back to the books, you'd probably get quite a pleasant surprise.OLIVER: It's hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I'd finished reading her.THOMPSON: What did you think?OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what's she called?THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Hickson. I think she's just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It's all so cleanly done.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that's very good. It's very funny, you know, he gets it.THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn't he? It had gone very, very—OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn't watch them all, no, no.THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.OLIVER: Yes, you did.THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don't think I've ever got—OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they'd hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don't think I've ever got to the end of one of those.But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they're really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren't for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn't happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.Resurgence and PopularityOLIVER: No, they don't have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That's why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don't think—she's always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn't she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she's terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.I'm not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade's called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she's survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she's not real, she's true. I think she's incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there's a femme fatale who's murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can't resist men. She's prey; she's not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They're not predators. They're very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you're very—there's so much easy wisdom in there somehow.And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it's very, “I am wise and you're going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It's all very, “I'm very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything's so easy with Agatha. It's so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there's so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don't think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.Self-AdaptationsOLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?THOMPSON: Yes. That's such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That's not what my audiences are going to want from me. They're just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They're not distilled at all; they're quite the opposite.I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn't have to constantly—they're unresolved; they ask questions that don't have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I'm sure, but I think she would've thought people aren't coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.OLIVER: Hmm.THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn't take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I've just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn't emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.And I think it's extraordinary to me how—it's so difficult for us today, isn't it? We're so at the mercy of “That won't sell, don't do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she's doing, an instinctive sort of—there's a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she's doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don't know that she would be, really. What do you think?OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.THOMPSON: You might know he'd say it right.OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there's a—I think there must have been something about—I think it's in Poirot's Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would've thought the old man had so much blood in him?”And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there's quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she's good enough to run on instinct at times.THOMPSON: That's right. That's it. Exactly. That's absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it's terribly timely—whether it's better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that's when she quotes from the Book of Saul.And it's just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she's really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she'll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It's the whole—it's not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she's got this gift of knowing what flowers we're going to need.I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don't want be like one of those people who's writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It's not—I do think that's a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she's an interplay. And that's why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there's nothing more interesting. There's nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.And she does that—that's at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she's so all the things we've been talking about. She's so distilled, she's so simple, she's so smooth, she's so instinctive. And she's doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—Quick Opinions on ChristieOLIVER: Should we have—THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?THOMPSON: Please.OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—THOMPSON: Oh, god.OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]OLIVER: Hallowe'en Party.THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?OLIVER: I think it's a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.THOMPSON: I can't keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it's better to have experienced it. It's quite a mournful novel.OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Oh, sorry.THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don't you think? Such a clever character.OLIVER: Why didn't she do more of him?THOMPSON: Yes, that would've been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell'arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who's also a moral force, isn't he really? Or—yes, I wish she'd done more. They're marvelous.OLIVER: Towards Zero.THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don't you think?OLIVER: One of the best.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.OLIVER: It's very distinct in her. I haven't read all of her novels, but it's very distinct.THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She's very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there's a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it's so—it just drives along that book, doesn't it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.OLIVER: Death on the Nile.THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it's one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.And I feel that a little bit in that book. There's a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.THOMPSON: It's a great film, yes. Wonderful film.Other Mystery WritersOLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.THOMPSON: You've got me. I haven't read him. Should I?OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.THOMPSON: Can't get into her.OLIVER: No.THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.THOMPSON: No, somebody told—OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that's great.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn't—I read it in a book that she really hadn't liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I'm going to read one, try that, yes?OLIVER: Yes, that's a great book. Margery Allingham.THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I'm in a bit of a fog, but she's quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?OLIVER: She's good at the fog. She's good at that sort of whirligig sense that there's a lot going on—THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.OLIVER: —and you've got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.THOMPSON: You've got me again, Henry.OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You'll like this.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you'll like that a lot.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.THOMPSON: Didn't get on with him.OLIVER: Why not?THOMPSON: Don't know. Don't know. It sounds like I don't read the men, doesn't it? Which is not the truth at all.OLIVER: I think that's fair enough, isn't it?THOMPSON: Well, I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don't know. Why didn't I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don't know. I just didn't get on with it.OLIVER: Too glib?THOMPSON: Possibly.OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn't quite get hold of it in some way. I don't know.OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he's got a bit of a “he's a very clever boy” about him.THOMPSON: Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that.OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.THOMPSON: I haven't read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn't it? I'm starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that's what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don't know why I haven't read him.Christie and NostalgiaOLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?THOMPSON: No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would've written At Bertram's Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that's such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”I've written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she's—well, she's an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they're much more underlined about it. Again, I'm intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?OLIVER: I think there's definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that's disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.THOMPSON: That's true. That's absolutely true. That's The Mirror Crack'd. And it's—OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry's house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn't think hard enough before I answered your question.OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can't sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it's just useful material for her, you know?THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it's a bit sub–Brave New World, but it's very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who's completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it's so true. There's quite a lot of that going on.She's very clear-eyed. So if she—I'm a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can't help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack'd. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—OLIVER: And the adaptations don't help with that.THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it's that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there's no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that's nostalgic in a way.Christie's PoshnessOLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?THOMPSON: Good question. I've been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn't—and that there wasn't much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn't matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it's lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there's a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.It's amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that's how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.Inspirations for Miss MarpleOLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—OLIVER: Drawn from life?THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We're occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn't suitable or whatever, but she's almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She's an observer. She's not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she's the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that's in At Bertram's Hotel. She was—there's a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she'd seen her up in Harrogate, she would've known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she's a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I'm reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it's really astounding to me how there's a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who's kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there's not—it's not only nonjudgmental; there's literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It's really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that's maybe not recognized about her that much.Nursery RhymesOLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?THOMPSON: Yes, that's interesting. They're part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There's books where she—I don't think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that's right? Or do you think it's something more than that?OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it's part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I've—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that's the heart of her. And I also feel it's the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.Wartime ProductivityOLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And as you say, they're some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there's a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn't completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that's like, “You think I'm chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there's something about being in that adorable little flat—they're so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it's absolutely insane how productive she is.And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she's got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there's a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]The Mary Westmacott NovelsOLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I've never read them, but you seem very—THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?OLIVER: You're very up on them. You like them?THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they're very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it's just so dull.THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.OLIVER: I couldn't read it. I couldn't read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn't really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn't.THOMPSON: Well, I think that's probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you've ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I'm going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.Poirot vs. MarpleOLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?THOMPSON: Yes, I've wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don't really think she did. It's just something people say, isn't it?OLIVER: Well, it's a common thing about artists. They're supposed to hate their most successful work, but—THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it's certainly—OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn't he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn't it?THOMPSON: And very kind to her.OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn't do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that's it?THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he's a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.And he is—I don't mean to denigrate David Suchet because he's a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they've got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can't analyze, really. I don't—well, I can't. And that's how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.And she's incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there's no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—OLIVER: [laughs] That's great.THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that's right about Poirot? Do you think there's something more . . .Reader Preferences and SalesOLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader's prejudice involved.THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he's a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he's always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple's just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don't know.THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don't know that she would've been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I'm overdoing her—OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn't she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn't—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it's terrible.But I don't know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they're just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn't write anything at all because I think she thought, “What's the point?” But then, that wasn't her way. But I don't know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.Rereading ChristieOLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: Really?THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don't—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who's my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there's bits of—there is this kind of—there's bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.But there's something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I've said it on Substack—that they're fairy tales for adults. There's something about that. There's an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I'm not going to say she's quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there's something in it because the resolution is so—because it's character based, and at her best, she's character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There's something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I'm experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn't matter if you know who did it. There's so much pleasure in them.Thompson's CareerOLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I'm still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn't very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she's a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.But it's a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I've written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that's okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don't you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don't you think? Did you not find that with your book?OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don't think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it's sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that's fine.THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you've—well, you're in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.And it was about—I can't bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That's a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn't do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.Secretly Reading ChristieOLIVER: And you've said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.OLIVER: That can't be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it's intense.THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I've tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we've been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I've ever read—the best thing I've ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.OLIVER: Oh, thank you.THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it's been a good thing.OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?THOMPSON: It's only a short book—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn't—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.But mainly it's such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can't write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I'm intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.Henry on Agatha ChristieOLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura's always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I'm going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I've lost the taste, in a way.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don't know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I've always thought she's really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I've read this one. I know. Yes. It's the same as the other one, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it's not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don't think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she's great, but it's enough. [laughs]THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she'd written as many books as Agatha, you can't imagine it would've sustained the level of quality.THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn't have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.She has style—I don't know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there's something so fathomless about her, and that's what continues to compel me. But I think it's very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you've let me sort of—OLIVER: Well, it's not that I'm not an admirer. It's just that I don't—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don't know, somehow I've reached a point where it's—I sort of get it, but it's just not that funny anymore. I don't know, just need some time away.THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I'm a bit—she's part of my life now. It's like if somebody said, “You can't read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can't listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it'd be like a kind of death. She's part of my life the same way they're part of my life. She's now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you'll be reassured to know. [laughter]OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.THOMPSON: Oh, I've really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it's been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.OLIVER: Oh, it's been delightful.THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.OLIVER: Thank you. 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

Audiobook. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Chapters 1-4. In God's Secretaries, Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the era of the King James Bible and its translation, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building but a book. A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities.  This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.   This excerpt serves as an introduction to this fine book and audiobook. Purchase the entire book at Amazon or your favorite book seller   NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “This elegant account of the creation of what four centuries of history has confirmed is the finest English-language work of all time, is entirely true to its subject: Adam Nicolson's lapidary prose is masterly, his measured account both as readable as the curious demand and as dignified as the story deserves.”  — Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa    

A milky tea, a jam sponge and this week's news served on a tin tray with a steam train painted on it points our very English conversation towards the following … … what connects the Monkees and a British Prime Minister? … when are you too old for Indie? … A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi? A Bar on The Piccolo Marina? Noel Coward or Neil Tennant? … the Move, the Streets, the Kinks, ELO, Ian Dury, Anthony Newley, the Jam, Herman's Hermits, Cat Stevens, Arctic Monkeys and other acts with a sense of Englishness … Girl in the Thunderbolt Suit: when Marc Bolan went science fiction … how London Zoo could have put the tin lid on the Beatles … the daft story of Randy Scouse Git … how Michael Caine cooked up the name Harry Palmer ... the most English pronunciation of a songword ever … Black Crowes, Byrds and the allure of misspelling … Roxy, 10cc, the Hollies, Manfred Mann, Human League and other original line-ups we want to reform … plus Angine de Poitrine, Kaleidoscope rebooted by Jimmy Page and birthday guest Jonny Wren.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A milky tea, a jam sponge and this week's news served on a tin tray with a steam train painted on it points our very English conversation towards the following … … what connects the Monkees and a British Prime Minister? … when are you too old for Indie? … A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi? A Bar on The Piccolo Marina? Noel Coward or Neil Tennant? … the Move, the Streets, the Kinks, ELO, Ian Dury, Anthony Newley, the Jam, Herman's Hermits, Cat Stevens, Arctic Monkeys and other acts with a sense of Englishness … Girl in the Thunderbolt Suit: when Marc Bolan went science fiction … how London Zoo could have put the tin lid on the Beatles … the daft story of Randy Scouse Git … how Michael Caine cooked up the name Harry Palmer ... the most English pronunciation of a songword ever … Black Crowes, Byrds and the allure of misspelling … Roxy, 10cc, the Hollies, Manfred Mann, Human League and other original line-ups we want to reform … plus Angine de Poitrine, Kaleidoscope rebooted by Jimmy Page and birthday guest Jonny Wren.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A milky tea, a jam sponge and this week's news served on a tin tray with a steam train painted on it points our very English conversation towards the following … … what connects the Monkees and a British Prime Minister? … when are you too old for Indie? … A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi? A Bar on The Piccolo Marina? Noel Coward or Neil Tennant? … the Move, the Streets, the Kinks, ELO, Ian Dury, Anthony Newley, the Jam, Herman's Hermits, Cat Stevens, Arctic Monkeys and other acts with a sense of Englishness … Girl in the Thunderbolt Suit: when Marc Bolan went science fiction … how London Zoo could have put the tin lid on the Beatles … the daft story of Randy Scouse Git … how Michael Caine cooked up the name Harry Palmer ... the most English pronunciation of a songword ever … Black Crowes, Byrds and the allure of misspelling … Roxy, 10cc, the Hollies, Manfred Mann, Human League and other original line-ups we want to reform … plus Angine de Poitrine, Kaleidoscope rebooted by Jimmy Page and birthday guest Jonny Wren.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton takes us inside the rehearsal room and into the pub, as she introduces the people and ideas behind Our Public House, Dash Arts' new touring theatre production and the culmination of the Albion series.Josephine reflects on three years of speech-making workshops with over 700 people across the country, from community centres, schools, working men's groups to HMP Styal, and what she has learned about who we are, and who we could be. She talks about how those voices have shaped the play, and how 150 of the people who inspired it will step onto the stage alongside the professional cast.She's joined by several guests including BSL Consultant Charly Arrowsmith, who talks about the work happening behind the scenes to build a production that speaks, in every sense, to everyone; by actor Lauren Moakes, who reflects on what it meant to meet inmates at HMP Styal and how that encounter will ground her performance; and by playwright Barney Norris, who takes us into the heart of a play about a community that has lost faith in politics and what happens when it finds its voice again.Set in a struggling pub on election night, Our Public House is a play about Englishness: who we are, what we've lost, and what we might still become. It sits at the very heart of Albion.Join us as we ask: what kind of future can we imagine together?Our Public House tours England in 2026. Get your tickets and find out more on the Dash Arts website: https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-houseOur intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf MajidiYou also hear a preview of Community by Jonathan Walton, arranged by Yaniv Fridel Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roifield and David talk about 5stories of England as part of the Very English Chat project, to tell stories of England in 50 objects.‘A very English chat' works is a wonderful project to escape division and polarisation, and the arid quarrels about flags - to build and celebrate a sense of Englishness, as part of a build up to England's national day, St George's Day on 23rd April. We are all invited to share our own 5 objects to be included in a virtual ‘pocket museum' telling ‘The story of England 2026 in 50 objects. To take part in a conversation between parishioners of the History of England, add your comment below, or go to the History of England Facebook Group.To share your 5 objects for submission to the Pocket Museum of Englishness, please go to the A Very English Chat site.I'd love to hear from you - and have fun celebrating a shared, positive and inclusive vision of Englishness means to us. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zakia Sewell is a broadcaster, DJ and writer, and the author of a remarkable new book, Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. In this conversation we talk about national identity, immigration, paganism, Notting Hill Carnival, radical histories, British humour, and what happens when love of place is ceded entirely to the right. - Deep Reading Lists are available at phoebe.substack.com @phoebelovatt @deepread.phoebelovatt @zzzakia

In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by Jeremy Deller for a wide-ranging conversation about how art uncovers the contradictions, radical traditions, and hidden stories that shape contemporary England.Jeremy and Josephine reflect on why Englishness remains so slippery to define; how popular culture, folk traditions, and street art reveal who we really are.Dash Arts has been digging into landscape and language — from reimagining George Eliot's Middlemarch in 1980s Coventry, to running speech-making workshops with more than 600 people across the country. We've been listening to who we are — and who we could be.Join us as we ask: what does Englishness mean to you?In 2026 Albion will culminate with our new touring theatre production, Our Public House. Get your tickets and to find out more on the Dash Arts website : https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-houseOur intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf MajidiThis podcast is marked explicit for language only. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes … … Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue! … the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema ... is pop music becoming inbred? … when Neil Sedaka made records with 10cc (and Abba) … Happy? Get Lucky? Crazy In Love? What was the last hit single the whole world seemed to be singing? … Noddy Holder, Kim Wilde, Robert Wyatt, Gary Numan: what makes you a National Treasure? … rock and roll puns and double-entendres … “drawn from the national conversation”: the divine Englishness of the Pet Shop Boys … the Gilded Palace of Sin, In The Court of the Crimson King and other records we bought because of the title … and acts wiped out by the Beatles “like corn before the sickle”.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes … … Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue! … the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema ... is pop music becoming inbred? … when Neil Sedaka made records with 10cc (and Abba) … Happy? Get Lucky? Crazy In Love? What was the last hit single the whole world seemed to be singing? … Noddy Holder, Kim Wilde, Robert Wyatt, Gary Numan: what makes you a National Treasure? … rock and roll puns and double-entendres … “drawn from the national conversation”: the divine Englishness of the Pet Shop Boys … the Gilded Palace of Sin, In The Court of the Crimson King and other records we bought because of the title … and acts wiped out by the Beatles “like corn before the sickle”.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spinning sides at the conversational disco to see what fills the dancefloor, which this week includes … … Jerry Garcia had seven fingers! Brian Jones had seven children! Morrissey worked for the Inland Revenue! … the most terrifying villain in the history of cinema ... is pop music becoming inbred? … when Neil Sedaka made records with 10cc (and Abba) … Happy? Get Lucky? Crazy In Love? What was the last hit single the whole world seemed to be singing? … Noddy Holder, Kim Wilde, Robert Wyatt, Gary Numan: what makes you a National Treasure? … rock and roll puns and double-entendres … “drawn from the national conversation”: the divine Englishness of the Pet Shop Boys … the Gilded Palace of Sin, In The Court of the Crimson King and other records we bought because of the title … and acts wiped out by the Beatles “like corn before the sickle”.Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Albion - our exploration of what it means to be English, and what we mean by England.In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by Caroline Lucas for a thoughtful and urgent conversation about Englishness - beyond flags and nostalgia.Drawing on her book Another England, Caroline shares her thoughts on how land, belonging and identity shape our politics and our culture; how England's stories have been constructed and contested; and why reclaiming a generous, complex vision of England matters now.Since 2022, Dash Arts has been digging into landscape and language - from reimagining Middlemarch by George Eliot in 1980s Coventry, to running speech-making workshops with more than 600 people across the country. We've been listening to who we are — and who we could be.Join us as we ask: what does Englishness mean to you?Albion will culminate in 2026 with our new touring theatre production, Our Public House. Get your tickets and to find out more on the Dash Arts website : https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Constable's painting The Cornfield celebrates its bicentenary in 2026. How has it aged? This is a landscape that has acquired iconic status – a marker of national identity -- as a representation of typically English countryside. How has that Englishness been constituted in the painting? And how does The Cornfield (a view of a partly working landscape) speak to current ideas about relationships and tensions between the natural world and the human presence, especially in our age of environmental anxieties?This lecture was recorded by Malcolm Andrews on 20th January 2026 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.Malcolm Andrews is Professor (Emeritus) of Victorian and Visual Studies, University of Kent. He was the Editor of The Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, and a past President of the Dickens Society of America.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/constable-200Gresham 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's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukTwitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeSupport the show

Today I'm talking to Carl Benjamin about what people are calling “the right's civil war” — and why the story most of us are being told might be missing the point. SPONSORS: Earn up to 4 per cent on gold, paid in gold: https://www.monetary-metals.com/heretics/  Use my code Andrew25 on MyHeritage: https://bit.ly/AndrewGoldDNA  Grab your free seat to the 2-Day AI Mastermind: https://link.outskill.com/GOLDNOV4  Start fresh at tryfum.com/products/zero-crisp-mint . Over 500,000 people have already made the switch — no nicotine, no vapor, no batteries. Just flavor, fidget, and a fresh start. Get up to 45% off Ekster with my code ANDREWGOLDHERETICS: https://partner.ekster.com/andrewgoldheretics  Plaud links! Official Website: Uk: https://bit.ly/3K7jDGm US: https://bit.ly/4a0tUie  Amazon: https://amzn.to/4hQVyAm Get an automatic 20% discount at checkout until December 1st. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://mintmobile.com/heretics  A lot of this conversation is about labels, loyalty tests, and what happens when movements turn inward: who gets cast out, who gets listened to, and how ordinary people end up pushed into tribes they don't fully recognise. I'm not here to do propaganda for anyone - I'm here to understand what's actually going on. We cover: - What “civil war on the right” even means (and what it doesn't) - Why factions form, escalate, and start purging allies - How online incentives warp political identity and belonging - The difference between “protecting a culture” and playing tribal status games - What Carl thinks people get wrong about this moment - If you disagree with either of us, I still want you here - but argue the point, not the person. #carlbenjamin #culturewar #politics  Join the 30k heretics on my mailing list: https://andrewgoldheretics.com  Check out my new documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@andrewgoldinvestigates  Andrew on X: https://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok   Insta: https://www.instagram.com/andrewgold_ok Heretics YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@andrewgoldheretics Chapters: 0:00 Carl Benjamin Highlights 4:00 What “woke right” is (and why it's used as gatekeeping) 8:00 Group claims: Israel as the analogy + demographic security 12:00 Representation, leadership, and why “who governs” matters 16:00 Civic vs ethnic Englishness (and why this gets slippery) 20:00 Grievances beyond immigration: economy, state intrusion, taxes 24:00 Tradition vs bureaucracy: jury trials, “24-hour courts” talk 28:00 Scapegoating minorities vs blaming English political elites 32:00 Categories vs “bundles of relations” (community as the unit) 36:00 When relations break down: resentment, “colonies,” dual loyalties 40:00 What counts as “authoritarian”? Quotas vs visa reversal 44:00 The “Boris wave” argument + welfare resentment example 48:00 “How do you get people to assimilate?” (and is it too late?) 52:00 Greta Thunberg comparison: activism that demands, not solves 56:00 “Should England be governed by English people?” (definition fight) 1:00:00 Foreign-born MPs + why rules might change 1:04:00 Recognition politics: what woke left/right each “gets right” 1:08:00 Victimhood lens + stereotypes / everyday risk judgments 1:12:00 Flags, pride, assimilation vs multiculturalism 1:16:00 “Love other cultures — just not here” + preserving civic life 1:20:00 What would it take to reverse course? Parliament + repeal logic 1:22:48 A Heretic Carl Admires Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is Englishness? Why did Suella Braverman clash with Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss over immigration? And would she really join Reform UK? In this explosive episode of Heretics, Andrew Gold sits down with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman to discuss British identity, immigration, nationalism, and the deep state within the Conservative Party. SPONSORS: Get up to 45% off Ekster with my code ANDREWGOLDHERETICS: https://partner.ekster.com/andrewgoldheretics  Go to https://TryFum.com/HERETICS  and use code HERETICS to get your free FÜM Topper when you order your Journey Pack today!  Use Code ANDREW FOR 25% OFF Plaud Note: https://bit.ly/4nJWt7j  Plaud Note Pro: https://bit.ly/423JiWv  Grab your free seat to the 2-Day AI Mastermind: https://link.outskill.com/ANDREWS2  Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://mintmobile.com/heretics  Start your MyHeritage journey now with a 14-day free trial using my link: https://bit.ly/AndrewGoldMyHeritage Suella opens up about her time in Number 10, the ‘Stop the Boats' crisis, and what really happened behind closed doors with Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. She reveals why she believes immigration is out of control, what went wrong with the Rwanda plan, and whether Britain can ever regain control of its borders. We also dive deep into what it means to be English, British or Asian-British in modern Britain — from the St. George's flag controversy to national pride, religion, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Suella explains why she believes strong countries need strong identities, and how ‘human rights' laws have been exploited to block deportations. Finally, Andrew challenges Suella on issues like burqas, cousin marriage, and nationalism, before asking the question everyone wants to know — would she join Nigel Farage and Reform UK? #SuellaBraverman #HereticsPodcast #BritishPolitics  Join the 30k heretics on my mailing list: https://andrewgoldheretics.com  Check out my new documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@andrewgoldinvestigates  Andrew on X: https://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok   Insta: https://www.instagram.com/andrewgold_ok Heretics YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@andrewgoldheretics Chapters: 0:00 Suella Braverman Highlights 1:35 Why Suella Braverman is Normal 4:05 What is Englishness? 6:35 Nationality vs Ethnicity 9:35 Nationalism Debate 12:05 We Must Copy Israel's Nationalism 13:35 St. George's Flag Controversy 15:35 Why We Brought In So Many Immigrants 17:35 What Suella Said To Rishi and Liz 21:35 The Deep State & Stopping the Boats 25:05 Can We Ever Trust The Tories Again? 26:50 How Has Islam Changed Your Life 28:35 What's Suella's Ancestry? 31:35 Andrew's Dog Test 33:35 Burqas and 1st Cousin Marriage 36:35 We Have Too Many People 39:35 Would Suella Join Reform? 41:35 Can the Tories Win? 43:35 Harry Kane Analogy With Reform 47:35 What Actually Is The ECHR? 50:35 Why Rwanda Failed 53:35 Can We Get Out Of The ECHR? 56:35 How ‘Human Rights' Are Exploited 59:35 Where Kemi & Tories Stand 1:00:35 The Origin of Suella's Name 1:03:35 Keir Starmer's ‘Management Speak' 1:05:35 Why Suella Lost Her Job 1:07:35 The Jews Love Suella 1:10:35 A Heretic Suella Admires Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At a time of renewed interest in the spiritual, what could challenge the uninspiring notion of ‘cultural Christianity'? One answer is by embracing the esoteric. William Blake, the painter and poet, has become a model for a new kind of rebellious spirituality. Though he spent his life in poverty and obscurity, Blake's radical vision of the divine is now a cornerstone of modern mysticism. Psychotherapist and podcaster Mark Vernon, author of ‘Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination', and religion researcher, Esmé Partridge, talk in a masterclass, hosted by Unherd in London, on the meaning and mythos of Blake.0:00 What world Blake was responding to2:15 What did Blake mean by Newton's sleep?5:28 How did Blake see the natural world?8:30 Why did Blake react against the Christianity of his day?11:50 Understanding “The Garden of Love”13:50 Understanding “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”16:50 Blake against the ills of today: sentimentality and unforgivingness18:40 The road of excess and erotic desire21:47 Navigating the contrary tensions of life25:15 Blake's mythological figures29:30 What about Los and Jerusalem?32:30 What about Blake's view of politics and revolution?36:50 How do you cleanse the doors of perception?40:20 So in what way was Blake Christian?43:46 How did William and Catherine support themselves?46:52 How do we distinguish between imagination and fantasy?49:51 How can Blake be helpful to modern psychology?52:30 How can Blake help us reach for the eternal?56:10 How can Blake bring meaning to life?57:30 What would Blake make of Nietzsche?1:00:00 What would Blake make of Spinoza?1:01:30 Can we diagnose Blake and his visions?1:03:20 What about Blake and cultural Christianity today?1:05:30 What did Blake make about violence?1:07:43 Can you say more about Catherine Blake?1:09:30 Blake's wit about his visions1:10:54 Can you comment on Blake and Englishness?

'What's wrong with Englishness?'Watch as Nigel Farage bites back at former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon in an intense clash over the use of the St George's flag. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From working with rappers in Beiruti basements to gathering musicians from all the conservatoires of ex-Soviet Republics in the mountains of Georgia and wild late nights in a tent with the Dash Arts Dacha, this episode celebrates the music and sounds woven through the last 20 years of Dash Arts.Josephine Burton acts as a guide across Dash Arts' many musical projects, sharing stories and music from Dash's multi-year seasons of artistic work. We hear about Dash's journeys in the Arabic world, former Soviet States, Europe and its current season exploring Englishness, with Albion. This episode is an invitation to listen in on two decades of music that continues to challenge, delight, and change how we hear the world.In the podcast, we hear from:Josephine Burton - Artistic Director, Dash Arts Marie Horner - Podcast Producer, Dash ArtsWe also hear from and celebrate these incredible artists:Sto Let - Iva Bittová and Vladimír VáclavekMy Show - Lyrical Alliance (Rabah Donquishoot (Algeria), Shadia Mansour (Palestine), Rayess Bek (Lebanon), Samm (Jordan), Tamer Nafar (Palestine) And DJ MK (UK)) Shadia + Johnny Juice for Lyrical AllianceQuata3et - Lyrical AllianceAmy Kakoura at a Dash Cafe at Warwick Arts Centre - February 2020 Maspindzeli Choir at a Dash Cafe at Rich Mix, July 2014 Hilda Lansman & Tuomas Norvio - VizarditZugzwang - Langham Research Centre Olesya Zdorovetska at a Dash Cafe at Rich Mix, January 2017 Song About a Friend - Vladimir VysotskyIryna Muha at a Dash Cafe at Rich Mix, April 2017The Renegade Orchestra (Evelina Petrova, Slava Guyvronsky, Matyakubov Shavkat, Misha Alperin, Reso Kiknadze, Zoltan Almashi, Natasha Pshenitschnikova, Vladimir Volkov, Kryukova Marina, Sergei Starostin and Petr Glavatskikh and composer Alexander Manotskov, playwright Natalia Vorozhbyt and director Galina Pyanova) Sasha Ilyukevich and the Highly Skilled Migrants at the Dash Arts Dacha at Latitude Festival July 2017 One Hundred Moons from Dido's Bar - (recorded by Samira Brahmia and Marouf Majidi with Hattie Naylor, Tuukka Leppänen, Riku Kantola and Josephine Burton).The cast and house band of Dido's Bar (Gemma Barnett, Priscille Grace, Tuukka Leppänen, Lola May, Lahcen Razzougui, Georgina White, Marouf Majidi, Ben Sutcliffe and the Dido's Bar House Band) Songs for Babyn Yar - Music composed and arranged by Yuriy Gurzhy, Svetlana Kundish and Mariana Sadovska.Ey, Güzel Qırım sung by the cast from Crimea 5am.Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Dr. Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode we delve into the lack of a sense of self that exists in Europe. While the European Union for decades has tried and failed (for, to us, obvious reasons) to provide an erzats-identity to the eroding national ones in (mostly) western Europe we look at the alternatives. While European elites have abandoned the project of building and caring for national identity and are trying to replace it with the more malleable “values” we look back to try and move forward.In this we provide four rather different takes on patriotism for the Europe of yore. One mystic and christian - while also strikingly french is provided by Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. This is contrasted by the materialistic yet quintessential spiritual Englishness of George Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn. The ultimate defence of the very hobbitness of all that is England. Then we move to the liberal-republican Swedish contrarian Vilhelm Moberg and his plea for remembering the generations of toil by the unknown and unheard commoner whose legacy is the history of a nation in Svensk Stävan. Last we move to that prussian anarch, Ernst Jünger and his On the Marble Cliffs where honour and defiance to tyrannical authority is the last knightly virtue as well as a patriotism all of its own. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The rise of the organic movement is often remembered as a peaceful revolution - a return to the earth, to purity, to harmony with nature. But its true origins tell a far darker tale. Born not in the flower-strewn fields of 1960s counterculture, but in the grim laboratories of fascist ideology, the organic movement was shaped by the poisonous ideal of Blut und Boden - blood and soil - Hitler's vision of racial purity rooted in sacred, cultivated land.In the shadow of the First World War, as modernity fractured Europe, a coalition of aristocrats, ideologues, and agrarian radicals began to turn away from industrial farming and toward a mystical belief in soil as the lifeblood of the nation. Sir Albert Howard's composting theories were seized upon by those who dreamed not of sustainability, but of supremacy. Lord Lymington, a British peer and passionate fascist, declared modern agriculture a threat to the racial soul of Britain. And Lady Eve Balfour, often lauded as a pioneering environmentalist, helped found the Soil Association not just to heal the earth but to preserve a vanishing, hierarchical vision of Englishness under threat.As fascism spread through Europe in the 1920s and 30s, so too did the organic ideal - not as liberation, but as control. And even after Hitler's fall, those same roots crept into post-war Britain's environmental movements, disguised under new names.So how did a movement forged in the crucible of authoritarianism become the darling of the left? How did fascist soil science transform into the ideology of hippies, Whole Foods, and farmer's markets?Join John and Patrick as they descend into the murky, forgotten history of the organic movement and discover that the soil is far darker than it first appears.----------In Sponsorship with Cornell University: Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business-----------Join the History of Fresh Produce Club for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.Support us!Share this episode with your friendsGive a 5-star ratingWrite a review -----------Subscribe to our biweekly newsletter here for extra stories related to recent episodes, book recommendations, a sneak peek of upcoming episodes and more.-----------Step into history - literally! Now is your chance to own a pair of The History of Fresh Produce sneakers. Fill out the form here and get ready to walk through the past in style.-----------Instagram, TikTok, Threads:@historyoffreshproduceEmail: historyoffreshproduce@gmail.com

TL;DR Better out than in. Be bold. Tell people you love them while you still can. No regrets.

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez. Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez. Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez. Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caroline Lucas was elected as the first ever MP for the Green Party and served as their leader three times. Having completed a PhD in English, worked for Oxfam, and been involved in local Green Party politics, she went on to serve in the European Parliament for a decade. In 2010, she was elected to Parliament as the MP for Brighton Pavilion and, during her 14 years in Westminster, the Green Party went from 0.9% of the national vote to 6.4%. Although she stepped down, a record 4 Green Party MPs were elected at the 2024 election. On the podcast - the 150th episode of Women With Balls - Caroline tells Katy Balls about growing up with different politics to her Conservative-voting parents, why her views on nuclear weapons haven't changed, and whether the left can be patriotic. She also talks about being a peer of Nigel Farage in Brussels, what it's like being the sole parliamentary party representative, and why she never considered joining the Labour Party. She argues that there is a political urgency for the left to discuss ‘Englishness', as outlined in her bestselling book Another England: How To Reclaim Our National Story, which is available now in paperback.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Caroline Lucas was elected as the first ever MP for the Green Party and served as their leader three times. Having completed a PhD in English, worked for Oxfam, and been involved in local Green Party politics, she went on to serve in the European Parliament for a decade. In 2010, she was elected to Parliament as the MP for Brighton Pavilion and, during her 14 years in Westminster, the Green Party went from 0.9% of the national vote to 6.4%. Although she stepped down, a record 4 Green Party MPs were elected at the 2024 election. On the podcast - the 150th episode of Women With Balls - Caroline tells Katy Balls about growing up with different politics to her Conservative-voting parents, why her views on nuclear weapons haven't changed, and whether the left can be patriotic. She also talks about being a peer of Nigel Farage in Brussels, what it's like being the sole parliamentary party representative, and why she never considered joining the Labour Party. She argues that there is a political urgency for the left to discuss ‘Englishness', as outlined in her bestselling book Another England: How To Reclaim Our National Story, which is available now in paperback.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Today, we discuss the Chancellor Rachel Reeves looking at making spending cuts worth billions to the government's welfare budget. The Treasury will put the proposed cuts to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on Wednesday amid expectations the chancellor's financial headroom has disappeared. Adam is joined by economics editor Faisal Islam to unpack what we know about the proposed cuts, and the chancellor's Spring Statement later this month.And, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has spoken to the Nick Robinson in his first wide-ranging interview since leaving Downing Street. Nick and Adam unpack what Rishi had to say, including why he regrets the ‘Stop the Boats' slogan, how he felt about a podcast questioning his Englishness and what his political philosophy boils down to. You can now listen to Newscast on a smart speaker. If you want to listen, just say "Ask BBC Sounds to play Newscast”. It works on most smart speakers.You can join our Newscast online community here: https://discord.gg/NbuxWnmYNew episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Miranda Slade with Shiler Mahmoudi and Anna Harris. The technical producer was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham

Dave Rubin of "The Rubin Report" talks to Winston Marshall about his preference for identifying as English rather than British and the complexities of national identity in the UK; the danger of large numbers of Islamists immigrating into England; the social disunity caused by mass migration and the challenges of defining Englishness; why the education system neglects the positive aspects of British history, leading to a decline in national pride; the current fragile state of free speech in the UK; his thoughts on the influence of Trump-inspired political movements; his current skepticism about the UK's current leadership; and much more. #RubinReport #WinstonMarshall #westerncivilization #UK #britishculture #british #immigration #illegalimmigration #ARC #daverubin ----------------------------------------------- Reserve your 1st edition copy of our new book, The Best of Our Inheritance. Pre-Order open until March 14, 2025: Link to book: https://www.arcforum.com/store/p/the-best-of-our-inheritance-arc-research YouTube - @arc_conference Twitter - @arc_forum IG - @arc_forum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gareth Southgate OBE is the most successful England men's football manger in the modern game. He holds the record as the man who has represented England in more games than anyone else, with 102 games as men's senior team manager, 57 caps as a player and 37 as men's under-21 head coach, leading to a total of 196 games in which he has been involved as a player or coach.It's a remarkable career and one which shows his resilience and determination. Ever since he joined a football team as a schoolboy, he dreamed of being a footballer and perhaps one day, wearing the England shirt. He was rejected by Southampton as a teenager and was determined to come back and succeed. He managed to do that, playing for Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough as a defender and midfielder. After his playing career ended he went into management eventually becoming one of the England national team's most successful managers. Along the way, his different approach to leadership in sport, together with his quest to understand what is Englishness makes him one of the most impressive football managers in England's history. Southgate is an Ambassador for The Prince's Trust and Help for Heroes.DISC ONE: The Way It Is - Bruce Hornsby and the Range DISC TWO: Rainy Days and Mondays - Carpenters DISC THREE: Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears DISC FOUR: The Whole of the Moon - Waterboys DISC FIVE: One - Mary J. Blige, U2 DISC SIX: Shape of You (Stormzy Remix) - Ed Sheeran DISC SEVEN: Someone Like You - Adele DISC EIGHT: Experience - Ludovico Einaudi BOOK CHOICE: The Chimp Paradox by Dr Steve Peters LUXURY ITEM: Coffee CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Experience - Ludovico Einaudi Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Sarah Taylor

From the beginning of his career as a poet, W.H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. He came out with a collection of poems entitled On This Island, but what exactly was this island? A world in ruins? A beautiful (if morally compromised) haven? In this episode, Jacke talks to Nicholas Jenkins (The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England) about Auden's relationship with the land of his birth, including his preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity. PLUS Italian scholar Gabriele Pedullà (On Niccolò Machiavelli: The Bonds of Politics) stops by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read. Additional listening: 595 Machiavelli (with Gabriele Pedulla) 479 Auden and the Muse of History (with Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb) 138 Why Poetry (with Matthew Zapruder) The music in this episode is by Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal. Learn more at gabrielruizbernal.com. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices