Podcast appearances and mentions of Hilary Mantel

Jane and Campbell talk about their favourite historical novels including those of Hilary Mantel, James Clavell, Bernard Cornwell and Kate Grenville.And they chat to guest Clay Zane Comber, Kiama local, about his upcoming book release. Clay's first book book, 100 Remarkable Feats of Xander Maze, was shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister's Literary Awards.KCR: live streaming at kcr.org.au or via the Kiama Community Radio App. Contact us: admin@kcr.org.au

What do we mean by a “good book”? Some people choose a holiday read that demands time and attention. Others pick rip-roaring novels that require little thought. Our bookworms discuss whether art has to be improving to be praiseworthy, and give genre fiction some much-needed air time. This is a full list of the books mentioned in the show:“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen“Red Rising” by Pierce BrownJack Reacher series by Lee Child“The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy“Riders” and the other Rutshire chronicles by Jilly CooperDungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman“Middlemarch” by George Eliot“Ulysses” by James Joyce“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel“The Diamond Age” by Neal StephensonThe Murderbot series by Martha Wells “The Martian” by Andy Weir“American Wife” by Curtis SittenfeldGuests and host:Catherine Nixey, culture and Britain correspondentTom Standage, Economist deputy editorAlexandra Suich Bass, culture editorAlex Hern, AI writerRosie Blau, host of “The Intelligence”Topics covered: Fiction, romance, sci-fi, crime, thrillers, fantasy, romantasyJane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lee ChildMatt Dinniman, Pierce Brown, Neal StephensonListen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—Subscribe to Economist Podcasts+For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do we mean by a “good book”? Some people choose a holiday read that demands time and attention. Others pick rip-roaring novels that require little thought. Our bookworms discuss whether art has to be improving to be praiseworthy, and give genre fiction some much-needed air time. This is a full list of the books mentioned in the show:“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen“Red Rising” by Pierce BrownJack Reacher series by Lee Child“The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy“Riders” and the other Rutshire chronicles by Jilly CooperDungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman“Middlemarch” by George Eliot“Ulysses” by James Joyce“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel“The Diamond Age” by Neal StephensonThe Murderbot series by Martha Wells “The Martian” by Andy Weir“American Wife” by Curtis SittenfeldGuests and host:Catherine Nixey, culture and Britain correspondentTom Standage, Economist deputy editorAlexandra Suich Bass, culture editorAlex Hern, AI writerRosie Blau, host of “The Intelligence”Topics covered: Fiction, romance, sci-fi, crime, thrillers, fantasy, romantasyJane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lee ChildMatt Dinniman, Pierce Brown, Neal StephensonListen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—Subscribe to Economist Podcasts+For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especially to people under forty), it does recognize that our moral views change. But, as the Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl argues in his new book Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, the most interesting question is why our moral principles always seem in flux. Why people who say cheating is wrong cheat. Why people who say violence is wrong turn a blind moral eye to their own insurrections. Dahl is a psychologist, not a moralist. He is not interested in what we should believe, but in what we think we believe. His central finding is that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle. People change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to — reasons they can, indeed, articulate. The problem isn't hypocrisy per se. It's that we struggle to understand why the other side believes what it does. In morally polarised societies like contemporary America, we over-attribute psychopathy to political opponents. Most Republicans and most Democrats do have genuine moral commitments. But they are just different principles, applied to parallel moral hierarchies. Rather than morality perhaps, we need more empathy. Don't judge. Understand. Five Takeaways •       Two Kinds of Moral Change: Dahl identifies two forms of moral change that should trouble us. Situational moral change: people espouse one principle and act against it in a specific situation — the person who says cheating is wrong and cheats on an exam, the January 6th rioter who says violence is wrong. Historical moral change: the same principles coexisting with practices that contradict them — Thomas Jefferson proclaiming inalienable rights while enslaving hundreds. Both are not simply hypocrisy: they reflect the genuine messiness of moral life, where competing principles create constant conflict. •       Morality Emerges in the First Three Years of Life: Dahl's most striking empirical finding: by around age three, virtually all children develop an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings. It is not taught as an external rule. It emerges. A three-year-old will say: it's wrong to harm others, you shouldn't steal. No other animal acquires this. It is a uniquely human characteristic. The question is not whether people have moral commitments — almost everyone does. The question is how those commitments interact with other concerns, pressures, and competing principles. •       We Over-Attribute Psychopathy to the Other Side: One of the most robustly documented findings in political psychology: Republicans and Democrats don't merely think the other side is wrong. They think the other side is evil — likely to condone things they would never condone. Research shows both sides significantly over-estimate the other's extremism and moral depravity. Dahl's prescription: develop better theories of why the other side believes what it does. An accurate theory includes recognising genuine psychopaths and bad actors when they exist. It also includes recognising that they are rarer than we think. •       Jefferson, Epstein, and the Exceptions: Two historical anchors. Jefferson: the author of the Declaration of Independence's inalienable rights, who enslaved hundreds. The question is not whether he was a hypocrite — he clearly was — but how someone could hold both positions simultaneously. The answer Dahl finds most compelling: conflicting moral principles applied with different weights in different contexts, not the absence of moral concern. Epstein: the opposite case, a man who concealed an absence of moral concern behind a veneer of respectability. The lesson: some people genuinely lack it, but they are exceptions. •       Elbow Room: The Hilary Mantel Closer: Dahl's two wishes for a more moral world. First: that we understand why the other side disagrees. Second: that we have more “elbow room” — the phrase from Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy — to make decisions based on what we actually think is right rather than what we need to do to survive. Machiavelli and Cromwell operated in a world where survival left almost no room for principled action. If that is becoming our world again, the prospects for moral progress are bleak. Dahl is cautiously hopeful. The creative, restless energy of each new generation — willing to say this is unjust, this is unfair — is what abolished slavery. It is what drives moral change still. About the Guest Audun Dahl is Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard University Press, April 2026). He grew up in Norway and is based in Ithaca, New York. References: •       Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing by Audun Dahl (Harvard University Press, April 2026). •       Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall trilogy — cited by Dahl as capturing the “elbow room” problem of moral action under survival pressure. •       Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — referenced in the same context as Mantel. •       Episode 2906: Dylan Gottlieb on Yuppies — the companion episode on how professional class morality was shaped by competing incentives. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - The Churchill/Adams quote: liberal at 20, conservative at 40 (02:08) - Dahl's Norwegian grandpa and the disputed attribution (02:30) - Two kinds of troubling moral change: situational and historical (03:10) - Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and his enslaved peopl...

Critics Ben Luke and Aviva Dautch bring us all the news from The Venice Biennale. Following the death of the great Shakespearean actor Michael Pennington, we speak to former RSC Director Gregory Doran about his impact on the stage. A new small exhibition Elizabeth I: Queen and Court Is running in London. It includes rarely seen portraits of The Virgin Queen that are normally held in private collections. Historians Tracy Borman and Siobhan Clarke join Tom to talk about the crossover between portraits and propaganda for 16th century monarchs Hilary Mantel's controversial 2015 short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, has been adapted for stage at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. We speak to playwright Alexandra Wood about why she chose to re-tell this story now.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

When back in 2014, the Guardian published Hilary Mantel's short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, it sparked intense controversy. Critics called it a "distasteful fantasy" and "dangerous nonsense”, while others, our Mickey included, would argue that actually it's a smart, creative exploration of a polarised political era from a literary heavyweight.  It's also now a play, with Mantel's short story in the safe hands of playwright Alexandra Wood. As if that wasn't enough for Mick to want to get Alex on the Zoom, it's opening in Liverpool, famously a bastion of anti-Thatcher sentiment.  They're chatting the brilliance of Mantel, alternative pasts and futures, Maggie's legacy and political violence.  The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher opens at the Liverpool Everyman on Saturday 2 May and runs until May 23. Tickets and more info available from everymanplayhouse.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.HENRY OLIVER: Today I'm talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people's ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.He's nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he's hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people's manuscripts?OLIVER: Other people's. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He's particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke's many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It's so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He'd become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people's manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I'll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He'd grown up in Wiltshire, he'd known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who've used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn't finish them. He doesn't publish those manuscripts. So it's very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.OLIVER: You mean if he'd published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?SCURR: Well, I think there's two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he's a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people's talents.There aren't that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people's talents. Most people want to be at the center. They're happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people's lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it's sort of waste paper really. So he doesn't write his own life. Other people's lives he's going to convey to posterity. He doesn't see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.OLIVER: He's born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he's obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it's dangerous to be there. And he's really, really upset by that because, it's like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you've never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.And suddenly there's a war on and you've got to go home. So there's that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey's childhood, and then he would've been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that's a very important time in his life.And it's not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it's different from the others. There's a different sort of origin. And it's after he's done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people's lives. And now I've got my hand in, I might start on those as well.So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we'll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there's this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It's a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.OLIVER: How English is he?SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?OLIVER: Welsh.SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he's very invested in English customs and stories and people. He's not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he's interested in is the inherited ways of living.And he's very interested in language and different dialects. That's one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I'd say it's a very decentered England that's rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.And there's a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey's not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It's one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn't want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it's so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he's in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he's an Elizabethan, but at the same time he's doing a very sort of Baconian project. He's influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there's a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he's stopped and told, “No, you can't get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can't I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that's going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.So there's another example of someone's life includes, I wouldn't be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.OLIVER: And Aubrey's happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?SCURR: And not just astrology. He's very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn't look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he's got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won't be that much work. You'll just get a curate who'll do it all, and you'll get the living, and then you won't have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven't got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there's another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn't want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?SCURR: Well. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he'd seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.I don't have any reason to think he's an atheist. He's got a beautiful way of writing about death and there's this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they're short, but everybody's life is brief.And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there's these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone's buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I'd put at the end of that DNB entry where she's actually buried, that would've made sense to do that. And I didn't do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they've got their formula and you need to stick to it.But maybe I'll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he's told by people who did know them.There's an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it's an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He's extremely precise. He'll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he'll tell you what people's close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he's been told that he's passing on.And then he doesn't pass moral judgment. He doesn't adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he's not going to tell them what to find. He's not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.He will give you the raw materials, he'll give you the stories, he'll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who've written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who've written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn't write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn't to say Mr.Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer's Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it's still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I'd written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I'd gone mad actually, because you're not supposed to do that, are you?I mean, you're supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would've been okay, that would've made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.That's the other thing that you don't associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.OLIVER: A lot of historians don't think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won't remember it exactly—but it's about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I'm a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.And it's difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don't really mean people's lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I'm actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it's perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.OLIVER: Why?SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn't want to make up things for him. As someone who's come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it's very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.And, like her, I think that it's not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It's about imagining what isn't in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn't actually matter that much.There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that's wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I'd found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they'd say, “Ruth, there you are. You've written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don't you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn't trespass on somebody else's ground.And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you've been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there's somebody in Cambridge who's going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it's fine. I was doing my thing. She's doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They're not rivalrous in that sense.SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate's book, it's not just an addition. It's as much as you can ever do. It's a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it's an astonishing thing. Because it's not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we'll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?SCURR: As we know, there's the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it's very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.And that's what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon's death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn't been aired for a long time, and dies. And that's the end of Lord Bacon.So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he's lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey's.Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey's story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king's physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It's a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what's going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let's build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn't comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they've also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I'm getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I'm extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that's the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It's interesting.In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it's called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It's going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven't yet read Vigil. I'm only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That's it, basically.OLIVER: That shows very good taste.SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen's The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln's son. It's so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn't want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn't have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?And then he said he'd got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there's a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It's been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.SCURR: But those people aren't just historical fiction writers. It's very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn't matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it's those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner's novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that's a fantastic book. So there's a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don't think that's what I'm following. I think I'm following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.OLIVER: Because they're all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it's not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.SCURR: No, no.OLIVER: It's been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I'm just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I've had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don't regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don't regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn't been reviewing them.And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn't. But here's an example: Because I'd been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who's been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn't make it one of our two, but we think it's absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it's so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.And I knew Anne Enright's writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It's not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I'd done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?SCURR: Well, we've already talked about Janet Malcolm. She's a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser's historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it's like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I'm extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she's got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?OLIVER: Yes.SCURR: It's so beautifully constructed. It's got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it's got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn't—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn't rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral's head. Right? It's so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she's capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you're actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.OLIVER: I like her because she's so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he's boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they've been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That's so important, so wonderful.Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf's essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that's a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won't let him go. He thought he'd hooked a minnow. He wasn't expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.And that's the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else's life at the center of your book, that's a humane act. It's to say, no, I'm going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person's life. And that's a very wonderful thing to do.OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it's just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she's deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it's just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You've obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.SCURR: I'd never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn't it?OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—OLIVER: Page 28.SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey's really got this wrong, or he's gotten in a muddle about that. She's not saying, and therefore let's just chuck it out because it's inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that's fine actually.Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he's got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that's probably why I couldn't write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It's just what they're doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.OLIVER: Is the genre dying?SCURR: Not so far as I'm aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren't we? Those things are always dying.OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven't been listening to that. Why do they say it's dying?OLIVER: Because you can't sell these 700-page lives of people.SCURR: We can't sell most books. I mean, if we're going to go buy sales . . .OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren't there. And the whole civilization's dying routine.SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it's so changeable, it's so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?SCURR: I'm like Aubrey; I think that's going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn't possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn't possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn't think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?SCURR: I'll ask her. I think she's supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I'm trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I'm going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.SCURR: Thank you, Henry. 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

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: Book adaptations and giving out book recs IRL Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: How to audiobook Before We Go: our new segment featuring bookish friend posts and something Kaytee is curious about Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site). . . . 1:21 - Bookish Moments of the Week 1:35 - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas 1:41 - PBS app 2:31 - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 3:07 - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 3:46 - A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 3:48 - Call Her Daddy podcast w/Sarah J. Maas 4:55 - A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas 6:55 - Crescent City by Sarah J. Maas 7:09 - @hollyslitmagic on Instagram 9:15 - All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle 9:31 - The Day the World Came To Town by Jim DeFede 9:48 - Search by Michele Huneven 10:16 - Current Reads 11:00 - The Night She Died by Dorothy Simpson (Meredith, ebook only) 16:52 - Courtroom Drama by Neely Tubati Alexander (Kaytee) 17:02 - Literally A Bookshop 21:30 - The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer (Meredith) 22:51 - We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer 26:23 - Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver (Kaytee) 29:04 - Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (pre-order releases Oct 6, 2026) 29:08 - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 29:44 - A Box Full of Darkness by Simone St. James (Meredith) 29:59 - The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James 34:02 - The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James 35:46 - The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion (vol. 1) by Beth Brower (Kaytee) 43:15 - How To Listen To Audiobooks 55:14 - Before We Go Kaytee highlights a bookish friend post 56:26 - Greenwood by Michael Christie  56:29 - The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah Meredith brings something she's curious about 57:20 - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 57:35 - Footnotes and Tangents   Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. March's IPL is brought by our lovely friends at An Unlikely Story in Plainville, MA. Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads | Substack | Youtube The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Send a textThis month Canongate publish Nation of Strangers, the third ‘instalment' in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Following on from How To Lose A Country and Together it is, once more, rooted in Ece's forced displacement from her homeland.Recorded last December at Canongate's offices Sam met Ece to discuss this deeply personal and unflinching account of being ‘unhomed'. Nation of Strangers is centred on a loss that will resonate deeply with anyone who struggles - in the face of rising global authoritarianism - to recognise the country they call home. Written as a set of letters to a stranger it embraces humility and love as a rejection of the politics of cynicism and asks us once we recognise what is happening, (fascism) what choice do we have but to act?'Her most ambitious an dazzling book yet.'BRIAN ENO'Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker, and her work here is as conceptually illuminating as it is beautifully written .... both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone.'OMAR EL AKKADMeanwhile, Lara meets up with James Meek to hear about his latest novel ‘Your Life Without Me'; a tale of loss, provocation and the radical discomfort of the new. Centred around a single act of destruction (the attempted demolition of St Paul's Cathedral) it is a book which asks how much of the past we can hold on to if we are to build a future worth living in. And whether change is inherently and unavoidably destructive.Praise for the novels of James Meek 'A story so original and so fully imagined.'HILARY MANTEL 'The language is so fresh and crisp and sparkling.'PHILIP PULLMANMusic used in this episode:Norfik - RealizationIda Urd & Ingrid Høyland- DuvetIan Hawgood - I Don't Think We Belong HereNorfik - Denial@fieldzine www.fieldzine.comwww.patreon.com/fieldzine

On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: Kaytee's San Francisco bookstore adventure and Meredith's Wolf Hall slow read Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: Boss My TBR - helping two listeners prioritize their reading stacks Before We Go: our new segment featuring bookish friend posts and TBR triage Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site). .  .  .  :10 Bite Size Intro 1:04 - Currently Reading on Youtube 2:39 - Bookish Moments of the Week 3:13 - City Lights Bookstore 5:00 - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel  5:35 - Footnotes and Tangents 07:53 - Current Reads 8:01 - History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook (Kaytee) 11:18 - Sarah's Bookshelves Live 11:52 - Sphere by Michael Crichton (Meredith) 14:21 - Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 15:58 - The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton 16:02 - Timeline by Michael Crichton 16:15 - Outlander by Diana Gabaldon 16:34 - Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb (Kaytee) 22:12 - The Sleeper Lies by Andrea Mara (Meredith, Blackwell's link) 24:01 - All Her Fault by Andrea Mara 26:11 - Someone in the Attic by Andrea Mara 26:12 - The Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Mara (Blackwell's link) 26:54 - The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Kaytee) 28:25 - CR Season 2: Episode 22 when Kayytee first brought The Dutch House 29:20 - Commonwealth by Ann Patchett 31:48 - Tom Lake by Ann Patchett 33:30 - Snap by Belinda Bauer (Meredith) 37:30 - Boss My TBR 38:11 - Gretchen's Stack For Whom the Belle Tolls by Jaysea Lynn When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain Bride by Ali Hazelwood A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers Gilded by Marissa Meyer 39:29 - Field Day Books and Bottles 39:35 - Cannon Beach Book Company 43:09 - Lauren's Stack I, Medusa by Ayana Gray Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven Fear and Fury by Heather Ann Thompson Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman 44:26 - Fabled Bookshop 44:49 - Blood in the Water by Heather Ann Thompson 48:32 - Before We Go Meredith highlights bookish friend posts from the Facebook group 50:08 - Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson 50:13 - On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 51:39 - Nothing Much Happens podcast 52:57 - Currently Reading Patreon 53:14 - Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots 53:39 - Timeline by Michael Crichton Kaytee's TBR Triage: Kaytee brings a book that has been on her TBR for a long time and decides whether to keep and read, or remove from her TBR. 54:28 - The Sinister Booksellers of Bath (Foyles link) 54:31 - Foyle's 54:56 - The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix (Foyles link) Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. February's list is a special romance curated list from Open Door Romance, The Novel Neighbor's Romance adjacent bookstore in Plainville, MA. Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Welcome to another episode of the Bowie Book Club, where wild speculation and grasping for straws about Bowie's favorite books has reigned supreme since 2016. This time we read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which tells the tale of arch-fixer Thomas Cromwell without a mention of turkey legs.

On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: experimenting with our reading and taking on choker books Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: answering the questions of how or why we rate our books The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site). .  .  .  2:39 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 3:01- The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor 3:05 - Bookshelf Thomasville 3:07 - From the Front Porch podcast 3:31 - It by Stephen King 4:53 - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#1 in the Cromwell series) 5:30 - Footnotes and Tangents on Instagram 6:45 - The Stand by Stephen King 6:47 - Laura Tremaine on Substack 8:52 - Our Current Reads 9:00 - Matched by Ally Condie (Kaytee) 9:32 - The Giver by Lois Lowry 11:26 - The Selection by Kiera Cass 11:30 - The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 13:04 - Turns of Fate by Anne Bishop (Meredith) 14:45 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett 18:15 - Cultish by Amanda Montell (Kaytee) 18:21 - Wordslut by Amanda Montell 21:52 - Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain (Meredith) 23:00 - The Secret by Rhonda Byrne 23:35 - The Painted Porch 23:40 - The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holliday 26:05 - The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron 27:37 - When the Tides Held the Moon by Vanessa Vida Kelley (Kaytee) 30:43 - CAWPILE 31:38 - The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark (Meredith) 35:51 - The God of the Woods by Liz Moore 36:28 - The Last Flight by Julie Clark 36:50 - Deep Dive: How And Why We Rate Our Reads 37:53 - A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson 37:59 - Dante and Aristotle Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz 38:04 - Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes 38:14 - Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito  49:41 - CAWPILE system 51:53 - Meet Us At The Fountain 52:41 - I wish that we would all pick one small way to challenge our reading this year. (Kaytee) 54:23 - I wish you would sign up for our newsletter! (Meredith) 54:25 - Sign up for the newsletter on our website  Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. January's IPL is our annual visit to Fabled Bookshop in Waco, Texas. Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business.  All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Happy New Year! We're excited to be podcasting for another year. For our first podcast of 2026 we decided to wrap up our holiday season by talking about the books we received and the holiday movies we watched. In addition, we also decided to offer a glimpse into the content our followers over at Patreon can be expecting. We have Peter's new reading project, plus nominations for the 2026 author project. And finally, we close with our initial thoughts on Hilary Mantel's novel "A Place of Greater Safety." Jam packed episode to kick off the new year. Enjoy!Contact Us:Instagram @therewillbbooksTwitter @therewillbbooksEmail willbebooks@gmail.comGoodreads: Therewillbebooksko-fi.com/therewillbbookspatreon.com/therewillbbooks

Liz and Sarah dive into the Mailroom with an all listener questions episode! What are their top tips for making sure your voice is heard in a meeting? Would Liz rather be a Traitor or a Faithful? Where in the world does Sarah most want to shoot a show? What do they think about the sale of WBD? They answer all these questions and many more! Sign up for Liz & Sarah’s free weekly Substack newsletter at https://happierinhollywoodpod.substack.com. It will come right to your inbox! Get in touch on Instagram: @Sfain & @LizCraft Get in touch on Threads: @Sfain & @LizCra Visit our website: https://happierinhollywood.com Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/HappierinHollywood/ Happier in Hollywood is part of ‘The Onward Project,’ a family of podcasts brought together by Gretchen Rubin—all about how to make your life better. Check out the other Onward Project podcasts—Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and Side Hustle School . If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends! LINKS: A Man on the Inside Season Two trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6UXdDbuNFc The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman: https://amzn.to/4aeLcZa Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller: https://amzn.to/4s6AoD1 How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast: https://amzn.to/3MC5emG Squid Game: The Challenge Season Two trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ4D7HA7Ov4 War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy: https://amzn.to/4j8nOPy Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel: https://amzn.to/48u01Vj Simon Haisell’s Footnotes and Tangents: https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade by Elyse Arons: https://amzn.to/4j2mxtl Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/hollywood/ #rulapod #adSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Executive Coach and Friend of the Pod Michael Melcher joins Sarah to discuss the benefits of networking up. Making connections with higher ups is intimidating but worth it! Michael stays on as Guest Host to discuss the idea of an Admin Night— which is, essentially, a group Power Hour. Then, in Take Two, they discuss their current personal canaries in a coal mine. This week’s Hollywood Hack is Slidelock Carabiners! Finally, Sarah recommends the novel Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel and Simon Haisell’s accompanying Slow Read. Sign up for Liz & Sarah’s free weekly Substack newsletter at https://happierinhollywoodpod.substack.com. It will come right to your inbox! Get in touch on Instagram: @Sfain & @LizCraft Get in touch on Threads: @Sfain & @LizCra Visit our website: https://happierinhollywood.com Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/HappierinHollywood/ Happier in Hollywood is part of ‘The Onward Project,’ a family of podcasts brought together by Gretchen Rubin—all about how to make your life better. Check out the other Onward Project podcasts—Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and Side Hustle School . If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends! LINKS: Michael Melcher: https://m2leaders.com/team/michael-melcher/ Your Invisible Network, by Michael Melcher: https://amzn.to/440xy87 Slidelock Carabiners: https://amzn.to/4pHVLbs Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel: https://amzn.to/48u01Vj Simon Haisell’s Footnotes and Tangents: https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com Photo by Thomas Le on Unsplash Note: Go to the Happier In Hollywood Facebook Group for Liz and Sarah’s extensive Teens/Tweens Gift Guide. Thanks to listeners for such great ideas! Link below. https://www.facebook.com/groups/903150719832696/permalink/3081705578643855/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if the key to surviving cutthroat office politics was mastered in 1536?  Juliet Corbett joins me to discuss Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall + Bring Up the Bodies - and the business lessons from Thomas Cromwell's rise at Henry VIII's court. We discuss how Cromwell mastered managing up to volatile leaders, why his network crossed every level of hierarchy + why mentors are meant to be outgrown. Plus, why checking your sources matters + how training people who leave still benefits you. Look for more Classics episodes where we take stories that definitely aren't business books + treat them as full-on business texts. Books discussed in this episode: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel Juliet's Website + Free Ebook: consultjuliet.co.uk/ebook Juliet's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/julietcorbett ==== If you'd like my help with your Business go to www.lizscully.com/endlessClients ==== And don't forget to get your reading list of the 10 essential reads for every successful biz owner - these are the books Liz recommends almost on the daily to her strategy + Mastermind clients. This isn't your usual list of biz books, these answer the challenges you've actually got coming up right now. Helpful, quick to read and very timely. Click here lizscully.com/reading to get your book list

 I'm so excited to say that today's guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is the esteemed curator, writer, broadcaster and cultural trailblazer, Ekow Eshun. Born in North-west London in 1968, Eshun has been at the forefront of creative culture for decades. Writing across subjects and presenting documentaries, Eshun has curated groundbreaking exhibitions. From the 2022 In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward in London – to The Time Is Always Now, a study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art, that began at London's National Portrait Gallery, and has since travelled across the US. The author of multiple books: in 2006, he published his memoir: “Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa” an exploration of identity and race, that sees Eshun travelling through Ghana in search of his roots. And in 2024, The Strangers, a stunning work of creative nonfiction that tells the story of five pioneering Black men set against a vivid backdrop of art, culture, and resistance. So for this special episode we are going to deep dive into the women writers and artists who have influenced his life and career, including Morrison, the pioneering science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, the Rotterdam based artist Ellen Gallagher, and photographer Liz Johnson Artur. Because, as Eshun himself says, “The great thing about working with artists is they don't walk a straight line or think along linear paths; they think in patterns, allowing us to approach long-established conversations from a novel perspective.” Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) Hilary Mantel (1952–2022) Wangechi Mutu (b.1972) Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) Liz Johnson Artur (1964) Toni Morrison (1931–2019) Exhibitions mentioned: In the Black Fantastic, 2022, Hayward Gallery, London: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery/past-exhibitions/in-the-black-fantastic/ The Time Is Always Now, 2024-present, touring: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2024/the-time-is-always-now The Clearing, space Un gallery, Tokyo, November 2025; https://www.artweektokyo.com/en/institution-gallery/space-un/ Books mentioned: Octavia Butler - Parable of the Sower (1993) https://www.waterstones.com/book/parable-of-the-sower/octavia-e-butler/9781472263667 Octavia Butler - XenoGenesis trilogy; Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989) https://www.octaviabutler.com/xenogenesis-series Hilary Mantel - The Wolf Hall trilogy; Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and The Mirror & the Light (2020) https://www.waterstones.com/book/wolf-hall/hilary-mantel/9780008381691 Ekow Eshun - Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa (2006): https://www.waterstones.com/book/9780141010960?sv1=affiliate&sv_campaign_id=117976&awc=3787_1761656125_d069bd054bf50de1a9bfc45991a52d17&utm_source=117976&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=Penguin+Books Ekow Eshun - The Strangers (2024): https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-strangers/ekow-eshun/9780241990698 Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851) https://www.waterstones.com/book/moby-dick/herman-melville/andrew-delbanco/9780142437247 Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987) https://www.waterstones.com/book/beloved/toni-morrison/9780099760115

Welcome back to another Friday special! This week's bonus episode features an interview with Nicholas Pearson, editor and friend to Hilary Mantel.It's been three years since the Wolf Hall author and two time Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel died. Now, her friends and colleagues are honouring her memory with a literary prize. The Hilary Mantel prize seeks to support unpublished writers, with the aim of offering mentoring and financial support. You can find out more here: https://hilarymantelprize.com If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Podcast Producer: Eve Salusbury Executive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Director, writer and producer Peter Kosminsky, who directed of the BBC's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, has worked in the television industry for 45 years. The BAFTA and Golden Globe winner is one of the most respected voices in the industry.Kosminsky spoke to the New Statesman's Hannah Barnes in a wide ranging discussion about the state of British television, and why he is calling upon the government to stand up for public service broadcasting against the might of the streaming giants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst is an engrossing true account of a shocking shipwreck that's part love story and part peril on the high seas. Sophie joins us to talk about the 70s, marriage, sailing, survival and more with host Miwa Messer. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. Featured Books (Episode): A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst Adrift by Steven Callahan Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Triple Click brings on Tom Bissell, writer of video games, books, TV shows and the final three episodes of Andor season 2. They talk about how he went from reporting in Iraq to writing dialogue for Battlefield, his journey to become a writer on Andor, and what it was like to pen the conclusion to one of the most acclaimed TV shows of all time.One More Thing:Kirk: James (Percival Everett)Maddy: Metroid: Zero MissionJason: Never Flinch (Stephen King)LINKS:“The Writer Will Do Something” by Matthew Seiji Burns and Tom Bissell: https://matthewseiji.itch.io/twwdsNicholas Quah on “The Death Star Trilogy”: https://www.vulture.com/article/andor-rogue-one-new-hope-star-wars-trilogy-viewing-order.htmlPaste Magazine interview with Tom about writing his Andor episodes: https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/andor/andor-season-2-finale-postmortem-with-writer-tom-bissellTom's Related Reading Recs: The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine, A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, and anything by John Le CarréTriple Click LIVE in Portland, July 11: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/triple-click-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/

Critic Linda Burgess discusses David Attenborough's documentary 'Ocean' and the new series of 'The Mirror and the Light' the show based on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall books.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden — winner of the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction — is an indelible debut novel about love, loss, war and want. Yael joins us to talk about writing historical fiction, creating messy characters, repression, home and family with host Miwa Messer. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. Featured Books (Episode): The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

In today's episode another trial that forms the basis for great drama: the case of Thomas More, tried and executed in 1535, events dramatised by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons and Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. How did More try to argue that silence was no evidence of treason? Why was his defence so legalistic? Was he really ‘the Socrates of England'? And who was the true villain in this case: Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich or the King himself? Available now on PPF+: Socrates part 2, in which David explores the verdict of history on this case and the fierce arguments it still inspires. Sign up now to get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus Next time in Politics on Trial: Mary Queen of Scots vs the Secret State Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Preeti and Jenn recorded live with Patrons for a special retrospective, WoT readalikes, and Q&A!Read-Alikes:Dandelion Dynasty by Ken LiuBetween Earth and Sky series by Rebecca RoanhorseInheritance Trilogy by NK Jemisin (and then everything else)The Expanse series by James S.A. CoreyDead Djinn Universe series by P. Djeli ClarkBeverly Jenkins, Vivid (for Romanda)The Kushiel series (incl the Joscelin book) by Jacqueline CareyThe Thief / Megan Whalen Turner The Emily Wilde trilogy Babel by RF Kuang Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel anything Kit Rocha (Jenn loves Mercenary Librarians)It's Not Me, It's You by Stephanie Kate Strohm THE FLOATING WORLD by Axie OhDiviners by Libba BrayCirce by Madeline MillerHild / Menewood by Nicola GriffithPayal Mehta's Romance Revenge Plot is out now!Merch:tar-valon-or-bust.printify.me/products and northingtron.redbubble.com [new designs available!] Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Director Peter Kosminsky worked closely with late author Hilary Mantel to bring the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise and fall to the screen. Today, he shares his experience working with Hilary, filming on the same Hampton Court Palace flagstones where King Henry VIII once stood, and finally saying goodbye to Thomas Cromwell. 

A show about how Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell and their presentations by the BBC in the Wolf Hall series from 2015 and 2025 help to tell the story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. A nice economic history lesson.

Last summer, when The New York Times Book Review released its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, one of the authors with multiple titles on that list was Hilary Mantel, who died in 2022. Those novels were “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first two in a trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the all-purpose fixer and adviser to King Henry VIII.Those books were also adapted into a 2015 television series starring Mark Rylance as Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry. It's now a decade later and the third book in Mantel's series, “The Mirror and the Light,” has also been adapted for the small screen. Its finale airs on Sunday, April 27.Joining host Gilbert Cruz on this week's episode is Mantel's former editor Nicholas Pearson. He describes what it was like to encounter those books for the first time, and to work with a great author on a groundbreaking masterpiece of historical fiction. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The Mirror and the Light is the final book in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy, showcasing the final years of Thomas Cromwell. Before you watch the newest season of the tv show, listen to Mantel talk about crafting her beloved series, her unique approach to historical fiction, planning the end of the trilogy and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Top Off book recommendations from Marc and Donald.  This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                      New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.  Featured Books (Episode): The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel  Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel  Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel  A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel   Featured Books (TBR Top Off):   Firebrand by Elizabeth Fremantle  The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell 

Jane and Fi are back with their eighth book club, and this one's gone internationale - get the nibbles ready... Plus, Nicholas Pearson, Hilary Mantel's editor and publisher of 20 years, joins Jane and Fi to discuss her life and work. Thank you so much for your engagement and interaction. We hope you'll join us for the next one.Get your suggestions in at: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jane and Fi have something to get off their collective podcast breasts, and amid that, there's also chat about space travel, rumours of who will be the next Archbishop, advice on Mother's Day, and more twin towns. Please excuse the brief funny noise in this episode — the aliens have finally landed. Plus, broadcaster Sara Cox and her best friend Clare Hamilton discuss their podcast 'The Teencommandments'. The next book club episode is coming this Friday. The book is 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Accent alert in this podcast — proceed with caution! Jane and Fi chat saucy postcards, sex work, twin towns, and space nappies. Plus, actor Ruth Wilson discusses narrating the new audio books for the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. The next book club episode is coming this Friday. The book is 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Lady has landed, and it's causing a stir... Jane and Fi also chat sufferable men, bonny babies, Lucozade, and 80085. Plus, Phyllida Lloyd — director of The Iron Lady, Mamma Mia!, and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical — joins them (with some minor tech issues). The next book club episode is coming this Friday. The book is 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is an encore release of an earlier podcast episode.WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Wolf Hall.We're pleased to bring you this special recap episode of Wolf Hall, the award-winning 2015 adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. This episode outlines major plot points, historical details, and character arcs, so if you're not caught up on Wolf Hall yet, all six episodes are available to watch on PBS Passport. Now let's travel back to England in the year 1529, right at the start of one of the most tempestuous times in English history.

Welcome to this unspecial email-only podcast episode — Jane and Fi chat Cockney frogs, twinned towns, and St. Patrick's Day. The next book club episode is coming this Friday. The book is 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Podcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to another Friday special. This week's bonus episode features an interview with The Times' Literary Editor, Laura Hackett, from our Times Radio afternoon show (2–4 pm, Monday to Thursday). Today, we're bringing you our weekly round-up of the best book releases with The Times literary team. Deputy Literary Editor at The Times and The Sunday Times, Laura Hackett, joins Jane and Fi to share her thoughts. The next book club pick has been announced! Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Book club is coming (finally), so prepare yourselves and get in touch! Jane and Fi chat bird song, burly beavers, sex workers, pets on zoom, divorce, a pig in a poke and Australia, amongst other things... Plus, broadcaster and journalist Emma Barnett discusses her latest book 'Maternity Service'. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you have been impacted by any of the dross discussed on Off Air, just contact an action line... This episode's dross includes turtle soup, the Adelphi, quilting, and harmony on the heath. Plus, campaigner, investor, and former Twitter board member Baroness Lane-Fox talks tech. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're all about minimum effort, maximum impact round here. Jane and Fi chat Pepper Pig, the gynaecology of hens and hairdresser etiquette. Plus, campaigner and mother of two autistic children Lisa Lloyd, discusses her book 'Raising the SEN-Betweeners'. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to this carefully curated episode. We begin with the admin section before moving on to toddler Crufts, ear health and pet anal glands... Enjoy! Plus, Fi speaks to actress Jodie Whittaker about her new show 'Toxic Town'. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to another Friday special. This week's bonus episode features an interview from our Times Radio afternoon show (2–4 pm, Monday to Thursday). The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed tells the stories of five women deceived into relationships with undercover police officers. Fi speaks with Belinda Harvey, one of the women involved. The next book club pick has been announced! Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Hannah Quinn Podcast Producer: Eve Salusbury Executive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jane and Fi somehow manage to link the gendering of chickens to bedside chocolate bars... tune in to find out how. And Jane speaks to Sue Campbell, Former Director of Women's Football at the FA, about her memoir 'The Game Changer'. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Hannah Quinn Podcast Producer: Eve Salusbury Executive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's episode, Jane and Fi delve into whether it's acceptable to make use of someone else's Ring doorbell, the gynaecology of a hen, and Jane's robot companion, Craig. Additionally, Fi speaks with Lindsey Burrow, widow of rugby league legend Rob Burrow, about her heartfelt memoir 'Take Care'. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Hannah Quinn Podcast Producer: Eve Salusbury Executive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy flipping on this fine Shrove Tuesday! Today, Jane shares a memory of being left fully exposed on the loo at a National Trust property, while Fi recalls delivering a lesson on life at the Britannia swimming baths. Fi also speaks with actor Jared Harris about his role in the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of Hamlet. The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radio Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfiAssistant Producer: Hannah QuinnPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Global events can't be ignored, but there's still room for more vasectomy debate and the ladies ponder how Americans know the week has ended without a Sunday roast.Plus, Jane speaks to Esther Ghey about her new book 'Under A Pink Sky'.The next book club pick has been announced! 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' is by Hilary Mantel.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiAssistant Producer: Hannah QuinnPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The screenwriter Peter Straughan has become adept at taking well known — and beloved — books and adapting them for the big and small screens. He was first nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the 2011 film “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” based on the classic John le Carré spy novel, and then adapted Hilary Mantel's “Wolf Hall” trilogy into an award-winning season of television, with an adaptation of the third novel coming out soon. Now he has been nominated for a second Oscar: for his screenplay for “Conclave,” based on Robert Harris's political thriller set in the secret world of a papal election.“It's almost like mosaic work,” Straughan tells Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, about adapting books. “You have all these pieces; sometimes they're going to be laid out in a very similar order to the book, sometimes a completely different order. Sometimes you're going to deconstruct and rebuild completely.”In the third episode of our special series devoted to Oscar-nominated films adapted from books, Cruz talks with Straughan about his process of translating a book to the screen, and about the moments in ‘‘Conclave” that he found most exciting to adapt.Produced by Tina Antolini and Alex BarronEdited by Wendy DorrEngineered by Daniel RamirezOriginal Music by Elisheba IttoopHosted by Gilbert Cruz Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In this episode, we get excited about two new books: The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War by Adrian Tinniswood and Playworld: A Novel by Adam Ross. Then Mel shares her reading and loving doorstopper novels of 500+ pages. Links The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War by Adrian Tinniswood The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II by Adrian Tinniswood Playworld: A Novel by Adam Ross Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross Adrian Tinniswood's website Podcast: History Extra — The Golden Age of the Country House The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Mel's Favorite Doorstopper Novels Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson REAMDE by Neal Stephenson The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (translated by Ruth Martin & Charlotte Collins) Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth - reviewed on our Hollywood podcast Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel - reviewed on our London podcast The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - reviewed on our Library podcast The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - reviewed on our Cemetery podcast The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - reviewed on our Library podcast The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Fairy Tale by Stephen King Transcript of this episode. The Library of Lost Time is a Strong Sense of Place Production! https://strongsenseofplace.com Join our FREE Substack to get our (awesome) newsletter and join in chats with other people who love books and travel. Do you enjoy our show? Do you want to make friends with other (lovely) listeners? Please support our work on Patreon. Every little bit helps us keep the show going and makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside - https://www.patreon.com/strongsenseofplace As always, you can find us at: Our site Instagram Substack Patreon Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio! Some effects are provided by soundly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the ladies return on our new day, TUESDAYS, to discuss their favorite things right now amid the Los Angeles wildfires. The ladies discuss their favorite things for various categories, including books, TV shows, skin care, makeup, clothing, and more! Please find their recommendations below. With the L.A. wildfires still going on, we also want to take the time to spread the word and help those in need. We have linked a few Google Docs below containing links to various GoFundMes for families who need support after their homes were destroyed. If you are able, please consider donating. Thank you! Hosts: Juliet Litman and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jade Whaley LA WILDFIRE RELIEF Displaced Black Families GoFund Me Directory https://shorturl.at/FziM1 Additional Aid/Resource List https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1w7Rxmcw8naEqRXc6UoXCYSoR3_k-u8elafDk-GFteDY/htmlview?usp=gmail JULIET AND AMANDA'S FAVORITES LIST  BOOKS Juliet: Wolf Half by Hilary Mantel, Best Land Under Heaven by Michael Wallis  Amanda: The Talent by Daniel D'Addario, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner TV SHOWS Juliet: Day of the Jackal on Peacock  Amanda: Say Nothing on FX, Anora (a movie) SKINCARE/MAKEUP  Juliet: Youth To the People's Kale + Spinach Superfood Cleanser, Cerave Skin Renewing Night Cream  Amanda: Dennis Gross LED Mask, Merit Flush Blush, T3 Airebrush, Chanel Roussy lipstick from Marisa Meltzer's Soft Power substack CLOTHING Juliet: Uniqlo Waffle Long Sleeved  Amanda: J. Crew Cotton Poplin Pajamas INTERNET DISTRACTION  Juliet: Nordstrom's January Sale  Amanda: Kaitlin Phillips's Substack and Tina Brown's Substack CELEB PHOTO Juliet: Jamie Dornan  Amanda: The Graham Norton show INTERNET STORY Juliet: Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag getting her music to the top of the charts after losing their house  Amanda: The Timothee Chalamet experience Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

China's rapid surge in electric vehicle manufacturing, adoption, and export has variously encouraged, delighted, impressed, frightened, and even enraged people around the world. What did China get right in facilitating the explosive development in this industry? Was is just subsidies, or were there other important policies that helped jumpstart it? How have other geographies responded? And what can they learn? Ilaria Mazzocco, deputy director and senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) joins me to share her rich insights into the Chinese EV industry.3:49 – How Ilaria became interested in green industrial policy5:59 – The reality of progress in EVs in China 11:21 – The role of state subsidies and other things that tend to get missed in trying to understand EVs in China 16:51 – How other countries are trying to adopt China's approach 19:21 – The differences between the EU and U.S. approaches 24:17 – The outlook for competition in the Chinese market 26:08 – Business models in the Chinese EV sector and the example of BYD30:53 – Chinese firms' push for internationalization and how the rapidity of becoming multinationals [multinational companies?] may pose challenges 35:54 – Alignment between host countries and Chinese companies 39:58 – What the U.S. is doing and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)42:27 – How U.S. protectionist measures may affect third markets, and whether restrictions may backfire 48:57 – The coming shift to next-generation batteries, and the potential for international collaboration in advancing more circular practices 55:43 – How Ilaria's fieldwork shifted her perspective on the EV industry 59:38 – How we can improve industrial policy Recommendations:Ilaria: My Antonia by Willa Cather; the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel; The Army of Sleepwalkers by Wu Ming (an Italian novelist collective) about the French Revolution Kaiser: The Wolf Hall audiobooks read by Ben Miles; the HBO series Rome (2005-2007) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Wolf Hall.We're pleased to bring you this special recap episode of Wolf Hall, the award-winning 2015 adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. This episode outlines major plot points, historical details, and character arcs, so if you're not caught up on Wolf Hall yet, all six episodes are available to watch on PBS Passport. Now let's travel back to England in the year 1529, right at the start of one of the most tempestuous times in English history.