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How do you change safety culture in an organization? What style of training is most effective? Mack sits down with Rachel Housman of Ally Safety to talk about her upbringing in the industry, why safety training is so important and how to make it exciting again, what teaching styles are most effective, how to change safety culture in an organization, differences between Gen Z and boomers with their approach to safety, and more!Learn more about Ally Safety here https://allysafety.com/?srsltid=AfmBOook9G6JOCnclbqCWlE5mbrUo4Fu5o93MG_V0hFx5BaEJyi3S0_ZVisit our website https://earthmoversmedia.com/

Nick Jeffery read Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, a Victorian epic poem about a murder mystery in 17th Century Italy, to test a theory. John Granger's best guess after surveying the chapter headings of Hallmarked Man last September was that, of all 77 sources for the 139 epigraphs in Strike8, Browning's poem was the most likely to hold a secret message or special meaning inside it. John had said something similar about another Browning poem and Ink Black Heart, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Nick had confirmed that through his own reading and confirmation by Rowling herself. He thought John's track record of spotting important epigraph sources merited a test reading.He published his findings on Friday in a post titled ‘The Ring and The Book – A Rowling Reading.' In brief, the murder in Browning's poem is a point-to-point model for the Ironbridge murder mystery in Hallmarked Man with characters in Rowling-Galbraith's book — most notably, Chloe Griffiths, Tyler Powell, and Ian Griffiths — having their astonishing equivalents in Ring. The less obvious but more important links between the two are in their implicit feminism and other messages: Both works critique abusive relationships and patriarchal power: Guido's control of Pompilia and Dino Longcaster's control of Decima Mullins. The legal system (Books 8–9 especially) is satirized as formalistic, pedantic, and often blind to moral reality. True justice requires personal moral intuition beyond mere evidence or procedure. The Pope's monologue (Book 10) weighs this tension most profoundly. In The Hallmarked Man the police are slow to act on new information gained by Strike and Robin and Farah Navabi manages to hoodwink the courts into escaping punishment for her part in Patterson's crimes.The Ring and The Book dramatizes the eternal struggle between good and evil. Pompilia embodies instinctive purity, sacrificial love, and spiritual insight despite her suffering. Guido represents sophisticated, calculating evil that twists morality to justify cruelty. Browning affirms that evil exists but that good can somehow arise from or shine through evil's consequences. In The Hallmarked Man evil is real, monstrous, and often cloaked in normalcy or power structures, but it can be exposed and defeated through persistence, intuition, and moral courage.Nick also discusses in this article the chiastic structure of Ring (!) and the ‘conversation' he heard between Robert Browning in this poem with Aurora Leigh, the masterpiece by his late wife. His ‘Rowling Reading' of Ring and the Book, consequently, will soon be a touchstone piece not only in Rowling Studies but Browning Studies as well (#ArmstrongBrowningLibraryAndMuseum @ Baylor). As they have done before with Nick's ‘Rowling Reading' articles. the Hogwarts Professor team recorded their conversation about the piece (listen to their discussions of I Capture the Castle and Aurora Leigh). Seven High Points of that Ring and the Book epigraph conversation include:* Nick's review of why Serious Strikers and Rowling Readers should read The Ring and the Book along with the story of his immersion in it;* John's explanation of why he was so confident that Browning's poem was a template of some kind for Hallmarked Man even though only six of Strike8's 139 epigraphs were taken from it;* Their survey of Rowling's previous work with epigraphs — Deathly Hallows and Casual Vacancy all the way to Running Grave and Hallmarked Man — for works with similar embedded-in-the-epigraph texts and those without one (or in which it hasn't yet been discovered);* Nick's discussion of Rowling's previous comments about epigraphs and her answer to the question, ‘Which Came First, the Epigraph or the Story?';* John's best guess pre-publication about the text that will be the epigraph source in Sleep Tight, Evangeline and which Strike text it will most resemble with its Whiskey Shambles title;* Nick's commitment to exploring Blue Oyster Cult epigraphs in Career of Evil to see if one of that band's albums, all of which supposedly had sci-fi themes and story continuity, served as a text-within-the-text for Strike3; and* John's suggestion that the relationship of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, a great love with a shared vocation, might be a point of reflection for Serious Strikers as a template for understanding the Strike-Ellacott partnership.Nick and John will be recording their group charting of Hallmarked Man's Part Eight this week with Sandy Hope and Ed Shardlow (and Presvytera Lois?), a survey of readers is in the works, and the long-awaited close look at the Strike series in light of the Cupid and Psyche myth draws ever nearer. Stay tuned!The Ten Questions, Epigraph Charting, and Links to Previous Epigraph Discussions Here and Elsewhere:The Ring and The Book – A Rowling Reading, Nick Jeffery, February 2026Intro to Epigraphs 101, John Granger, September 2022The Heart is Not About Emotions and Affection but the Human Spiritual Center, John Granger, October 2022A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh, Nick Jeffery, November 2025Beatrice Grove's Pillar Post Page at HogwartsProfessor.com* Scroll down for Prof Groves' posts about epigraphs and literary allusion in Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, Troubled Blood, and Ink Black HeartLethal White: Ibsen's ‘Rosmersholm', John Granger, December 2018Rowling, Dylan Thomas, and the I Ching: Three Thoughts on Strike7's Epigraphs, John Granger, April 2023‘Deathly Hallows' and Penn's ‘Fruits of Solitude,' John Granger, October 2008The Aeschylus Epigraph in ‘Deathly Hallows,' John Granger, October 2008Maid of the Silver Sea Epigraphs: Louise Freeman Davis' Collected Posts, 2025The Faerie Queene Epigraphs in Troubled Blood* Scroll down the Troubled Blood Pillar Post for the Faerie Queene commentary by Beatrice Groves, Elizabeth Baird-Hardy and John GrangerRobert-Galbraith.com Posts about the Epigraphs in Each Book* Hallmarked Man's Epigraphs: The Poetry* Hallmarked Man's Epigraphs: The Prose* Scroll Down the site's ‘Features' Page for all the other Epigraph PostsAgents of Fortune: The Blue Oyster Cult Story, Martin Popoff, May 2016Pompilia: A Feminist Reading Of Robert Browning'S The Ring And The Book, Anne Brady, May 1988Roman Murder Mystery: The True Story of Pompilia, Derek Parker, January 2001Sleep Tight, Evangeline: Nick Jeffery and John Granger talk with Dimitra FimiHallmarked Man Epigraphs: The Tally SheetMatthew Arnold: 17 poems, 25 epigraphs, 6 from Merope: A Tragedy* 3, 17, 52, 103, 108, 110 (Merope), 21, 33, 68, 38, 97, 41, 45, 59, 58, 69, 73, 76, 80, 86, 96, 106, 119, 122, 124Robert Browning: 26 poems, 38 epigraphs including frontispiece, 6 from The Ring and the Book* 44, 75, 62, 64, 102, 118 (Ring and Book), frontispiece, 2, 9, 11, 107, 13, 16, 20, 26, 28, 32, 35, 37, 114, 39, 42, 93, 44, 75, 47, 51, 62, 64, 67, 116, 71, 77, 79, 84, 87, 120, 90, 91, 100, 102, 109, 118, 126A. E. Housman: 5 works, 25 poems, 28 epigraphs, 10 from Last Poems* 1, 5, 7, 53, 19, 92, 56, 65, 74, 105 (Last Poems), 23, 30, 34, 36, 40, 43, 46, 49, 57, 63, 78, 82, 89, 94, 98, 112, 115, 125John Oxenham: 1 work, 26 epigraphs* Parts 1-10, Epilogue, 15, 18, 22, 25, 27, 55, 60, 66, 83, 85, 88, 95, 111, 113, 127 (Maid of the Silver Sea)Albert Pike: 3 works (?), 22 epigraphs, 16 from Morals and Dogma* 4, 16, 12, 121 (Liturgy), 8, 10, 14, 29, 31, 48, 50, 54, 61, 70, 81, 99, 101 (Morals and Dogma), 24, 72 (Ancient and Accepted Rite?)Most epigraphs: Robert BrowningFrontispiece: Robert BrowningMost from one poem: Tie, Robert Browning 6 Ring and Book, Matthew Arnold 6 Merope: A TragedyMost from one novel: John Oxenham 26 Maid of the Silver SeaMost from one didactic or discursive argument: Albert Pike 22 (24?) Morals and DogmaConclusions: Ring and Book your best bet as template, Re-read Maid of the Silver Sea, read Merope: A TragedyTally Sheet of Epigraphs for Ink Black Heart:Poet: epigraph numbers, (total)* Christina Rossetti: 8, 14, 22, 24, 25, 35, 38, 50, 52, 54, 56, 84, 86, 90, 98, 103, 105, 107 (18)* Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 12, 21, 33, 39, 42, 45, 47, 58, 67, 71, 72, 82, 96, 101, 102, 104 (16; all but #s 21 and 58 from ‘Aurora Leigh')* Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Book, 1, 18, 20, 49, 79, 81, 91, 93, 94, 106 (11)* Emily Dickinson: 11, 31, 53, 58, 59, 65, 70, 76, 99 (8)* Charlotte Mew: 16, 17, 40, 55, 66, 92, 95 (7)* Felicia Hemans: 6, 10, 15, 63, 100 (5)* Amy Levy: 7, 23, 32, 80, 85 (5)* Jean Ingelow: 9, 27, 29, 37, 64 (5)* LEL!: 62, 68, 69, 83 (4); see also Rossetti 52 ‘LEL')* Mary Tighe: 36 (Psyche), 43, 60, 88 (4)* Helen Hunt Jackson: 4, 87, 89 (3)* Joanna Baillie: 13, 21, 34 (3)* Augusta Webster: 44, 48, 51 (3)* Emily Pfeiffer: 3, 75 (2)* Charlotte Bronte: 19, 74 (2)* Adah Isaacs Menken: 30, 57 (2)* Constance Naden: 41, 46 (2)* Mathilda Blind: 61, 97 (2)* Mary Kendall: 73, 77 (2)* Martha Jane Jewsbury: 2 (‘To My Own Heart')* Anne Evans: 28* ‘Michael Field' (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper): 78The Heart and Vision epigraphs in Ink Black Heart by chapter number:* Heart: 20, 106 (MEC); 21, 67; 52, 107; 68, 85; 2; 63, 80, 85; 17, 40, 55, 95 (Mew); 19, 74; 27; 30; 36, 60; 87 (23)* Vision: Frontispiece, 1, 49, 81 (MEC); 22, 25, 38, 90, 98 (CR); 59; 3; 34; 95; 57; 88; 48; 46 (17)Tally Sheet of Epigraphs for Cuckoo's Calling:* Frontispiece: Rossetti -- A Dirge* Prologue: Lucius Accius, Telephus* Part One: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy* Part Two: Virgil, Aeneid* Part Three: Virgil, Aeneid* Part Four: Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis* Part Five: Virgil, Georgics* Epilogue: Horace, Odes* [Closing Poem: Tennyson, Ulysses]Brackets/Latch: 19th Century English poets (see Groves)Most epigraphs: Virgil (3); no other author has more than oneMost frequently referenced work: Aeneid (2), shades in UlyssesCenter of Chiasmus: Aeneid (true if ring has 5, 8, or 9 parts)Turtleback lines: Not evident in authors list, perhaps in meanings of specific epigraphsConclusions:* Read Aeneid to look for Cuckoo's parallels;* Study epigraphs to look for parallelsOnline Literature Review for ‘Epigraphs of Cuckoo's Calling:‘https://robert-galbraith.com/epigraphs-of-the-cuckoos-calling/* 2025 connecting the dots between epigraphs and chapter set to follow (generic)* No mention of Strike as Aeneashttps://strikefans.com/the-cuckoos-calling-epigraphs/* Reprinting of epigraphs without commentary* No mention of Strike as Aeneashttps://thesefilespod.com/blog/the-cuckoos-calling-epigraphs/* Includes a very helpful link to The Rowling Library and an article there about the ‘real world' crime serving as a template for the Landry murder* No mention of Strike as Aeneashttps://mugglenet.wpenginepowered.com/2017/09/literary-allusion-cuckoos-calling-part-1-christina-rossettis-dirge/* Brilliant discussion of the Rossetti poem but curiously without reference to resurrection meaning* No mention of Strike as Aeneashttps://mugglenet.wpenginepowered.com/2017/09/literary-allusion-cuckoos-calling-part-2-tennysons-ulysses/* Brilliant discussion of Strike as Ulysses* No mention of Strike as Aeneas, curious becauseh Virgil models Aeneas on UlyssesThe Ten Questions of This Conversation (Sort Of!)1, (Nick) So, John, I finally wrote up my findings about The Ring and the Book as the story template for Hallmarked Man's murder mystery and, as we did with my posts about Aurora Leigh and I Capture the Castle, let's talk about it, expanding on the correspondences between the Browning poem and Strike 8. The natural place to begin is with your guess about Ring and the Book being a template based on your tally of the Hallmarked Man epigraphs, a theory you shared on our first show post-publication. Can you explain your process and what made you so confident about Ring and the Book?2. (John) Looking at that tally, then, Arnold's Merope and Oxenham's Maid of the Silver Sea are quantitatively more likely equivalents to Aurora Leigh in Ink Black Heart, but the Browning frontispiece, number of his epigraphs, the hidden quality of the Ring and Book poem titles, and the relationship with Barrett Browning made it seem the most likely. That the poem is considered one of the great feminist tracts written by a man didn't hurt. I still want to go back to the Arnold poem, though, because of the centrality of his epigraphs in the center Parts and Oxenham deserves a re-read, too, or just a trip to Louise Freeman Davis site, the home of Oxenham Studies online. What struck me while reading your post, Nick, was in the correspondences you found between Ring and the Book and Hallmarked Man. Can you give us the highlights of that?3. (Nick) The Ironbridge murder mystery, then, is largely lifted from the death of Pompilia. Which is unusual isn't it? Has Rowling-Galbraith ever used her epigraphs to point to the template of her story?4. (John) I think, then, that at least four of the previous Strike novels give us the embedded template, per Beatrice Groves The White Divel and The Revenger's Tragedy (and even Hamlet) gives us important clues about The Silkworm crime, Rosmersholm and its incestuous backdrop inform the murder of Lethal White, the Janus deceiver in Faerie Queene should have been a give-away about the poisoner in Troubled Blood, and, as Rowling confirmed and you demonstrated Nick, Aurora Leigh is the working model for Ink Black Heart. I think the closest Rowling epigraph suggestions to story template was in the Rossetti poem that opens Cuckoo's Calling and the Aeschylus epigraph in Deathly Hallows. What has Rowling said, though, about her epigraph sources? Do they precede the novels or follow the writing?5. (Nick) So it's not one or the other, I think, that is, she has a template in mind and if the source doesn't have sufficient quotable pieces to serve a epigraphs for the whole book, she uses other sources from the genre in play or that highlight her central theme (cf., the Gray's Anatomy heart epigraphs in tandem with the hearty women Victorian poets in Ink Black). What I'm struck by here, though, is the shift in importance of epigraphs to Rowling-Galbraith. The numbers are startling, no, between Cuckoo and Hallmarked?6. (John) Not only do we see a jump from eight or nine epigraphs in Strike1 to 139 in Stike8, but Team Rowling is pushing readers to think more seriously about them by posting reviews of the epigraphs in each book, drawing the dot-to-dot correspondences. I confess the Strike novel whose epigraphs are not like the others, Nick, is Career of Evil and its Blue Oyster Cult lyrics. You've been reading a book about Blue Oyster Cult so I'll defer to you in this despite my great fondness for heavy metal groups with sci-fi themed lyrics...7. (Nick) What about the book we haven't got in hand, John: Sleep Tight, Evangeline? We have been told -- sort of! -- the title is from a 2014 song from an American blues band called ‘The Whiskey Shambles.' Which of the previous epigraph models Rowling has used, from Deathly Hallows to Hallmarked Man, do you think we'll be seeing in Strike9? What are your thoughts on that, especially as the best link we have for Sleep Tight, Evangeline is from a rock and blues band?8. (John) So I hope that we're going to see another Running Grave type epigraph experience in Evangeline, though Grave was unique among Rowling novels and their epigraphs in not having a story-book, poem, or play as its primary source. The I Ching, cannot be a story-template per se because it is a divination tool or means to reflection. Unless you think Pike's Morals and Dogmas Freemasonry encyclopedia qualifies as an equivalent of sorts to the I Ching? That's another outlier, isn't it?9. (Nick) To put a Fourth Generation focus on this, John, we should be looking for a technique that Serious Readers can use for Sleep Tight, Evangeline to hunt for the embedded source if its hidden as were Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book. You've found the ones no one else noticed in Ink Black Heart and Hallmarked Man, how did you do that and do you think the same method will work for Cuckoo and Career as well as Evangeline?10. (John) So, yes, I found them but you had the first confirmed by Mrs Murray and then connected the dots between the Browning poems and Rowling's work. If this method is going to work on Cuckoo, Career, and Evangeline it will have to involve a spotter and a shooter, though they can be the same person. The spotter technique is nothing but grunt work; chart the epigraphs used and spot the author most frequently referenced and the work of theirs most frequently cited. The shooter work is actually a lot more involved and interesting; tell us about your experiences with the two Browning's' epic poems, that thrill of discovering correspondences. Do you think that excitement is something Rowling is offering her readers a a treasure hunt or as a point of reflection in terms of meaning? 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Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love, the role of ideas in Stoppard's writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She's written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome.Hermione Lee: Thank you very much.Oliver: We're mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard's work?Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one.And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing, who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian.Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don't think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him.And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman, you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we're meant to be agreeing with.Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia, who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view.Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard's other work.Lee: It's long. Yes. I don't find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you're never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who's going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think.But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I'm so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that's a matter of opinion.Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that's un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer?Lee: I think it's a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it's both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia, and have you think about both at once.But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn't what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play.Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else?Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him.But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland, and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play.“I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone.Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I've always disliked the idea that it's a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described.Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can't get away from it.Oliver: Surface level.Lee: Beckett's there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard's favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It's two journalists on a story that doesn't add up, which is very clever and funny.”Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That's profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too.Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard?Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: “It's wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we're going out the way we came in.” So I think that's right at the heart of Stoppard's work, and it's right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it's mine or someone else's. If you can't know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up.You can't do it through impressions. You've got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I'm not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I've done that.It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me.I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that's obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I'm sure there were things he didn't tell me, but that's fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can't talk to a thousand people, or I'd have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who've worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said.Repetition's very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that's right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he'd lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel.And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director's permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber's wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner's production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast.And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz, which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can't get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one's very eyes, and that for a biographer, it's a pretty amazing privilege.Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think?Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn't enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It's physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing.Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't understand this.” You'd often get, “I don't really understand.”And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you've got to make it work.” I'm putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let's put another sentence or something like that.”Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that's available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean?Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes.Oliver: No, sure. Very important.Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties, he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it's the play in which you've got Joyce and you've got Tristan Tzara and you've got the Lenins, and they're all these real people and he makes him talk.But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you'll find.Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward?Lee: Oh, I think there's a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing, he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren't based on something else. They weren't based on Hamlet. They weren't based on The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models.Oliver: You don't think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it's all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce?The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you'll be damn lucky.” It's like a model for him, a loose model.Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays.Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean?Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian.My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language.Oliver: Because it's a funny word. It's hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it's an untypical Stoppard.Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let's get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here's a play like Arcadia, all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia, where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the '20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust.And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you've had these jumps through time.And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I'm sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn't seen Leopoldstadt. Because when it happens on the stage, it's an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people.Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors?Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because we shouldn't deviate, but there's always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people.But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that's why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn't always charming. Patrick Marber, who's a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt, is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I've heard that from other directors too—Jack O'Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love.If Stoppard felt it wasn't right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn't a sort of oleaginous character at all. It's not smooth, it's not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn't want to do was write a hagiography. You don't want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard.And I don't know the theater world; it's not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I'm sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who'd come up against the steeliness that there is in him.I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun. And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him.Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film.Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don't know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun, it's a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant.I know people like Brazil, the Terry Gilliam sort of surrealist way. And there's some interesting early work. Most of his film work was not one script; it was little bits that he helped with. So there's famously the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he did most of the dialogue for Harrison Ford.But there are others like the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, where I think there's one line, anonymously Stoppardian in there. One of the things about the obituaries that slightly narked me was that there, I felt there was a bit too much about the films. Truly, I don't think the film work was—he wanted it to be right and he wanted to get it right—but it wasn't as close to his heart as the theater work. And indeed the work for radio, which I thought was generally underwritten about when he died. There was some terrific work there.Oliver: Yes. And there aren't that many canonical writers who've been great on the radio.Lee: Absolutely. He did everything. He did film, he did radio. He wrote some opera librettos. He really did everything. And on top of that, there was the great work for the public good, which I think is a very important part of his legacy, his history.Oliver: How much crossover influence is there between the different bits of his career? Does the screenwriting influence the theater writing and the radio and so on? Or is he just compartmentalized and able to do a lot of different things?Lee: That's such an interesting question. I don't think I've thought about it enough. I think there are very cinematic aspects to some of the plays, like Night and Day, for instance, the play about journalism. That could easily have been a film.And perhaps Hapgood as well, although it could be a kind of John le Carré type film thriller, though it's such a set of complicated interlocking boxes that I don't know that it would work as a film. It's not one of my favorite players, I must say. I struggle a little bit with Hapgood. But, yes, I'm sure that they fed into each other. Because he was so busy, he was often doing several things at once. So he was keeping things in boxes and opening the lid of that box. But mentally things must have overlapped, I'm sure.Oliver: He once joked that rather than having read Wittgenstein from cover to cover, he had only read the covers. How true is that? Because I know some people who would say he's very clever in everything, but he's not as clever as he looks. It's obviously not true that he only read the covers.Lee: I think there was a phase, wasn't there, after the early plays when people felt that he was—it's that English phrase, isn't it—too clever by half. Which you would never hear anyone in France saying of someone that they were too clever by half. So he was this kind of jazzy intellectual who put all his ideas out there, and he was this sort of self-educated savant who hadn't been to Oxford.There was quite a lot of that about in the earlier years, I think. And a sense that he was getting away with it, to which I would countermand with the story of the writing of The Invention of Love. So what attracted him to the figure of Housman initially was not the painful, suppressed homosexual love story, but the fact that here was this person who was divided into a very pernickety, savagely critical classical editor of Latin and a romantic lyric poet. In order to work out how to turn this into a play, he probably spent about six years taking Latin lessons, reading everything he could read on the history of classical literature. Obviously reading about Housman, engaging in conversation with classical scholars about Housman's, finer points of editorial precision about certain phrases. And what he used from that was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg was real.He really did that work and he often used to say that it was his favorite play because he'd so much enjoyed the work that went into it. I think he took what he needed from someone like Wittgenstein. I know you don't like The Coast of Utopia very much, but if you read his background to Coast of Utopia, what went into it, and if you compare what's in the plays, those three plays, with what's in the writing about those revolutionaries, he read everything. He may have magpied it, but he's certainly knows what he's talking about. So I defend him a bit against that, I think.Oliver: Good, good. Did you see the recent production at the Hamstead Theatre of The Invention of Love?Lee: I did, yes.Oliver: What did you think?Lee: I liked it. I thought it was rather beautifully done. I liked those boats rowing around that clicked together. I thought Simon Russell Beale was extremely good, particularly very moving. And very good in Housman's vindictiveness as a critic. He is not a nice person in that sense. And his scornfulness about the women students in his class, that kind of thing. And so there was a wonderful vitriol and scorn in Russell Beale's performance.I think when you see it now, some of the Oxford context is a little bit clunky, those scenes with Jowett and Pater and so on, it's like a bit of a caricature of the context of cultural life at the time, intellectual life at the time. But I think that the trope of the old and the young Housman meeting each other and talking to each other, which I still think is very moving. I thought it worked tremendously well.Oliver: What are Tom Stoppard's poems like?Lee: You see them in Indian Ink where he invents a poet, Flora Crewe, who is a poet who was died young, turn of the century, bold feminist associated with Bloomsbury and gets picked up much later as a kind of Sylvia Plath-type, HD type heroine. And when you look at Stoppard's manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Austin, in Texas, there is more ink spent on writing and rewriting those poems of Flora Crewe than anything else I saw in the manuscript. He wrote them and rewrote them.Early on he wrote some Elliot—they're very like Elliot—little poems for himself. I think there are probably quite a lot of love poems out there, which I never saw because they belong to the people for whom he wrote them. So I wouldn't know about those.Oliver: How consistently did Stoppard hold to a kind of liberal individualism in his politics?Lee: He was accused of being very right wing in the 1980s really, 1970s, 1980s, when the preponderant tendency for British drama was radicalism, Royal Court, left wing, all of that. And Stoppard seemed an outlier then, because he approved of Thatcher. He was a friend of Thatcher. He didn't like the print union. It was particularly about newspapers because he'd been a newspaper man in his youth. That was his alternative university education, working in Bristol on the newspapers. He had a romance heroic feeling about the value of the journalist to uphold democracy, and he hated the pressure of the print unions to what he thought at the time was stifling that.He changed his mind. I think a lot about that. He had been very idealistic and in love with English liberal values. And I think towards the end of his life he felt that those were being eroded. He voted lots of different ways. He voted conservative, voted green. He voted lib dem. I don't if he ever voted Labour.Oliver: But even though his personal politics shifted and the way he voted shifted, there is something quite continuous from the early plays through to Rock ‘n' Roll. Is there a sort of basic foundation that doesn't change, even though the response to events and the idea about the times changes?Lee: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it can be summed up in what Henry says in The Real Thing about politics, which is a version of what's often said in his plays, which is public postures have the configuration of private derangement. So that there's a deep suspicion of political rhetoric, especially when it tends towards the final solution type, the utopian type, the sense that individual lives can be sacrificed in the interest of an ultimate rationalized greater good.And then, he's worked in the '70s for the victims of Soviet communism. His work alongside in support of Havel and Charter 77. And he wrote on those themes such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul. Those are absolutely at the heart of what he felt. And they come back again when he's very modest about this and kept it quiet. But he did an enormous amount of work for the Belarus exile, Belarus Free Theater collective, people in support of those trying to work against the regime in Belarus.And then the profound, heartfelt, intense feeling of horror about what happened to people in Leopoldstadt. That's all part of the same thing. I think he's a believer in individual freedom and in democracy and has a suspicion of political rhetoric.Oliver: How much were some of his great parts written for specific actors? Because I sometimes have a feeling when I watch one of his plays now, if I'd been here when Felicity Kendal was doing this, I would be getting the whole thing, but I'm getting most of it.Lee: I'm sure that's right. And he built up a team around him: Peter Wood, the director and John Wood who's such an extraordinary Henry Carr in in in Travesties. And Michael Hordern as George the philosopher in Jumpers. And he wrote a lot for Kendal, in the process of becoming life companions.But he'd obviously been writing and thinking of her very much, for instance, in Arcadia. And also I think very much, it's very touching now to see the production of Indian Ink that's running at Hampstead Theatre in which Felicity Kendal is playing the older woman, the surviving older sister of the poet Flora Crewe, where of course the part of Flora Crewe was written for her. And there's something very touching about seeing that now. And, in fact, the first night of that production was the day of Stoppard's funeral. And Kendal couldn't be at the funeral, of course, because she was in the first night of his play. That's a very touching thing.Oliver: Why did he think the revivals came too soon?Lee: I don't really know the answer to that. I think he thought a play had to hook up a lot of oxygen and attract a lot of attention. If you were lucky while it was on, people would remember the casting and the direction of that version of it, and it would have a kind of memory. You had to be there.But people who were there would remember it and talk about it. And if you had another production very soon after that, then maybe it would diminish or take away that effect. I think he had a sort of loyalty to first productions often. What do you think about that? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that.Oliver: I don't know. To me it seems to conflict a bit with his idea that it's a living thing and he's always rewriting it in the rehearsal room. But I think probably what you say is right, and he will have got it right in a certain way through all that rehearsing. You then need to wait for a new generation of people to make it fresh again, if you like.Lee: Or not a generation even, but give it five years.Oliver: Everyone new and this theater's working differently now. We can rework it in our own way. Can we have a few questions about your broader career before we finish?Lee: Depends what they are.Oliver: Your former colleague John Carey died at a similar time to Stoppard. What do you think was his best work?Lee: John Carey's best work? Oh. I thought the biography of Golding was pretty good. And I thought he wrote a very good book on Thackery. And I thought his work on Milton was good. I wasn't so keen on The Intellectuals and the Masses. He and I used to have vociferous arguments about that because he had cast Virginia Woolf with all the modernist fascists, as it were. He'd put her in a pile with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and so on. And actually, Virginia Woolf was a socialist feminist. And this didn't seem to have struck him because he was so keen to expose her frightful snobbery, which is what people in England reading Woolf, especially middle class blokes, were horrified by.And she is a snob, there's no doubt about it. But she knew that and she lacerated herself for it too. And I think he ignored all the other aspects of her. So I was angry about that. But he was the kind of person you could have a really good argument with. That was one of the really great things about John.Oliver: He seems to be someone else who was amenable and charming, but also very steely.Lee: Yes, I think he probably was I think he probably was. You can see that in his memoir, I think.Oliver: What was Carmen Callil like?Lee: Oh. She was a very important person in my life. It was she who got me involved in writing pieces for Virago. And it was she who asked me to write the life of Virginia Woolf for Chatto. And she was an enormous, inspiring encourager as she was to very many people. And I loved her.But I was also, as many people were, quite daunted by her. She was temperamental, she was angry. She was passionate. She was often quite difficult. Not a word I like to use about women because there's that trope of difficult women, but she could be. And she lost her temper in a very un-English way, which was quite a sight to behold. But I think of her as one of the most creative and influential publishers of the 20th century.Oliver: Will there be a biography of her?Lee: I don't know. Yes, it's a really interesting question, and I've been asking her executors whether they have any thoughts about that. Somebody said to me, oh, who wants a biography of a publisher? But, actually, publishers are really important people often, so I hope there would be. Yes. And it would need to be someone who understood the politics of feminism and who understood about coming from Australia and who understood about the Catholic background and who understood about her passion for France. And there are a whole lot of aspects to that life. It's a rich and complex life. Yes, I hope there will be someday.Oliver: Her papers are sitting there in the British Library.Lee: They are. And in fact—you kindly mentioned this to start with—I've just finished a biography of the art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, who won the Booker prize in 1984 for a novel called Hotel du Lac.And Carmen and Anita were great buddies, surprisingly actually, because they were very different kinds of characters. And the year before she died, Carmen, who knew I was working on Anita, showed me all her diary entries and all the letters she'd kept from Anita. And that's the kind of generous person that she was.That material is now sitting in the British Library, along with huge reams of correspondence between Carmen and many other people. And it's an exciting archive.Oliver: She seems to have had a capacity to be friends with almost anyone.Lee: Yes, I think there were people she would not have wanted to be friends with. She was very disapproving of a lot of political figures and particularly right-wing figures, and there were people she would've simply spat at if she was in the room with them. But, yes, she an enormous range of friends, and she was, as I said, she was fantastically encouraging to younger women writers.And, also, another aspect of Carmen's life, which I greatly admired and was fascinated by: In Virago she would often be resuscitating the careers of elderly women writers who had been forgotten or neglected, including Antonia White and including Rosamund Lehmann. And part of Carmen's job at Virago, as she felt, was not just to republish these people, some of whom hadn't had a book published for decades, but also to look after them. And they were all quite elderly and often quite eccentric and often quite needy. And Carmen would be there, bringing them out and looking after them and going around to see them. And really marvelous, I think.Oliver: Yes, it is. Tell me about Brian Moore.Lee: Breean, as he called himself.Oliver: Oh, I'm sorry.Lee: No, it's all right. I think Brian became a friend because in the 1980s I had a book program on Channel 4, which was called Book Four. It had a very small audience, but had a wonderful time over several years interviewing lots and lots of writers who had new books out. We didn't have a budget; it was a table and two chairs and not the kind of book program you see on the television anymore. And I got to know Brian through that and through reviewing him a bit and doing interviews with him, and my husband and I would go out and visit him and his wife Jean.And I loved the work. I thought the work was such a brilliant mixture of popular cultural forms, like the thriller and historical novel and so on. And fascinating ideas about authority and religion and how to be free, how to break free of the bonds of what he'd grown up with in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, the bombs of religious autocracy, as it were. And very surreal in some ways as well. And he was also a very charming, funny, gregarious person who could be quite wicked about other writers.And, he was a wonderfully wicked and funny companion. What breaks my heart about Brian Moore is that while he was alive, he was writing a novel maybe every other year or every three years, and people would review them and they were talked about, and I don't think they were on academic syllabuses but they were really popular. And when he died and there were no more books, it just went. You can think of other writers like that who were tremendously well known in their time. And then when there weren't any more books, just went away. You ask people, now you go out and ask people, say, “What about The Temptation of Eileen Hughes or The Doctor's Wife or Black Robe? And they'll go, “Sorry?”Oliver: If anyone listening to this wants to try one of his novels, where do you say they should start?Lee: I think I would start with The Doctor's Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. And then if one liked those, one would get a taste for him. But there's plenty to choose from.Oliver: What about Catholics?Lee: Yes. Catholics is a wonderful book. Yes. Wonderful book. Bit like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, I think.Oliver: How important is religion to Penelope Fitzgerald's work?Lee: She would say that she felt guilty about not having put her religious beliefs more explicitly into her fiction. I'm very glad that she didn't because I think it is deeply important and she believes in miracles and saints and angels and manifestations and providence, but she doesn't spell it out.And so when at the end of The Gate of Angels, for instance, there is a kind of miracle on the last page but it's much better not to have it spelt out as a miracle, in my view. And in The Blue Flower, which is not my favorite of her books, but it's the book of the greatest genius possibly. And I think she was a genius. There is a deep interest in Novalis's romantic philosophical ideas about a spiritual life, beyond the physical life, no more doctrinally than that. And she, of course, believes in that. I think she believed, in an almost Platonic way, that this life was a kind of cave of shadows and that there was something beyond that. And there are some very mysterious moments in her books, which, if they had been explained as religious experiences, I think would've been much less forceful and much less intense.Oliver: What is your favorite of her books?Lee: Oh, The Beginning of Spring. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow just before the revolution. And its concerns an Englishman who runs a print and publishing works. And it's based quite a lot on some factual narratives about people in Moscow at the time. And it's about the feeling of that place and that time, but it's also about being in love with two people at the same time.And, yes, and it's about cultural clashes and cultural misunderstanding, and it is an astonishingly evocative book. And when asked about this book, interviewers would say to Penelope, oh, she must have lived in Moscow for ages to know so much about it. And sometimes she would say, “Yes, I lived there for years.” And sometimes she would say, “No, I've never been there in my life.” And the fact was she'd had a week's book tour in Moscow with her daughter. And that was the only time she ever went to Russia, but she read. So it was a wonderful example of how she would be so wicked; she would lie.Oliver: Yes.Lee: Because she couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.Oliver: But wasn't she poking fun at their silly questions?Lee: Yes. It's not such a silly question. I would've asked her that question. It is an astonishing evocation of a place.Oliver: No, I would've asked it too, but I do feel like she had this sense of it's silly to be asked questions at all. It's silly to be interviewed.Lee: I interviewed her about three times—and it was fascinating. And she would deflect. She would deflect, deflect. When you asked her about her own work, she would deflect onto someone else's work or she would tell you a story. But she also got quite irritable.So for instance, there's a poltergeist in a novel called The Bookshop. And the poltergeist is a very frightening apparition and very strong chapter in the book. And I said to her in interview, “Look, lots of people think this is just superstition. There aren't poltergeists.” And she looked at me very crossly and said they just haven't been there. They don't know what they're talking about. Absolutely factual and matter of fact about the reality of a poltergeist.Oliver: What makes Virginia Woolf's literary criticism so good?Lee: Oh, I think it's a kind of empathy actually. That she has an extraordinary ability to try and inhabit the person that she's writing about. So she doesn't write from the point of view of, as it were, a dry, historical appreciation.She's got the facts and she's read the books, but she's trying to intimately evoke what it felt like to be that writer. I don't mean by dressing it up with personal anecdotes, but just she has an extraordinary way of describing what that person's writing is like, often in images by using images and metaphors, which makes you feel you are inside the story somehow.And she loves anecdotes. She's very good at telling anecdotes, I think. And also she's not soft, but she's not harshly judgmental. I think she will try and get the juice out of anything she's writing about. Most of these literary criticism pieces were written for money and against the clock and whilst doing other things.So if you read her on Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry James, there's a wonderful sense of, you feel your knowledge has been expanded. Knowledge in the sense of knowing the person; I don't mean in the sense of hard facts.Oliver: Sure. You've finished your Anita Brookner biography and that's coming this year.Lee: September the 10th this year, here and in the States.Oliver: What will you do next?Lee: Yes. That's a very good question, though a little soon, I feel.Oliver: Is there someone whose life you always wanted to write, but didn't?Lee: No. No, there isn't. Not at the moment. Who knows?Oliver: You are open to it. You are open.Lee: Who knows what will come up.Oliver: Yes. Hermione Lee, this was a real pleasure. Thank you very much.Lee: Thank you very much. It was a treat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

In today's episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In today's episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In today's episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of Gallatin Lectures at NYU, Foss discusses the state of American contemporary music, musical minimalism, and his own approach of combining serial elements with spontaneous composition. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, on August 15, 1922, the son of a lawyer and a painter. He began studying piano and music theory when he was 7, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. His family fled to Paris in 1933, and arrived in the U.S. in 1937. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and studied composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. In 1953, Foss succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962, “Time Cycle,” a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, premiered with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. From 1971 to 1988 Foss was music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. After he left the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in 1990, Foss appeared as a guest conductor and pianist with orchestras around the world. He died in New York City on February 1, 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

NB: Man, I so wanted to call this episode All Hail the Nuptial Fuck Chamber but out of respect for Elijah and his family, I gave it a nice title instead. Also, Chris followed up with an additional note: “Looking at (rather than just vaguely recalling) the bit from Catullus 62, the poem is amoebaean (the girls sing in answer to the boys). It opens with the boys claiming that the evening star, Venus, is shining over Olympus, understood as simply meaning that it's in the sky—that is, it is night, time for marriage (and consummation). The girls echo this claim, but they swap out Mount Oeta for Olympus, Oeta being close to Olympus and interchangeable with it. When Housman says that ‘the star from Oeta's steep / calls to bed but not to sleep,' I think he's just echoing this evocative, poeticizing way of saying ‘the ceremony's done, now it's time for fun.' Of course, if it is about MJ [Moses Jackson], the real emotion of the poem is in the speaker's self-abnegation, his giving the groom to the girl who loves him less than he does, his blessing on and defense of (hand on sword) the conjugal jollifications, and his own exclusion from bliss. But I wouldn't take any of the geography too literally! the main point is just that it's night time, and night time is the right time.” SLEERICKETS is a podcast about poetry and other intractable problems. My book Midlife now exists. Buy it here, or leave it a rating here or hereFor more SLEERICKETS, subscribe to SECRET SHOW, join the group chat, and send me a poem for Listener Crit!Leave the show a rating here (actually, just do it on your phone, it's easier). Thanks!Wear SLEERICKETS t-shirts and hoodies. They look good!SLEERICKETS is now on YouTube!For a frank, anonymous critique on SLEERICKETS, subscribe to the SECRET SHOW and send a poem of no more 25 lines to sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] com Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:– Pre-order Brian's book The Optimists! It's so good!– Let me know if you'd like a review copy of my forthcoming chapbook The Soft Black Stars: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] com– Secret Show Ep 29. Eyes! Nose! Throat!– Musical Order and New Babel: on Apocalypse Dance by Ethan McGuire by D. W. Baker– Six of my poems at The New Stylus– Epithalamium by A. E. Housman– To my Comrade, Moses J. Jackson, Scoffer at my Scholarship by A. E. Housman, trans. A. E. Stallings– The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, trans. & ed. Christopher ChildersFrequently mentioned names:– Joshua Mehigan– Shane McCrae– A. E. Stallings– Ryan Wilson– Morri Creech– Austin Allen– Jonathan Farmer– Zara Raab– Amit Majmudar– Ethan McGuire– Coleman Glenn– Chris Childers– Alexis Sears– JP Gritton– Alex Pepple– Ernie Hilbert– Joanna Pearson– Matt Wall– Steve Knepper – Helena Feder– David YezziOther Ratbag Poetry Pods:Poetry Says by Alice AllanI Hate Matt Wall by Matt WallVersecraft by Elijah Perseus BlumovRatbag Poetics By David Jalal MotamedAlice: In Future PostsBrian: @BPlatzerCameron: Minor TiresiasMatthew: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith

Dr. Michael Housman is the founder and CEO of AI-ccelerator and the author of Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI or Get Left Behind, where he helps organizations harness artificial intelligence to make better, faster, and less biased decisions. With a PhD in Applied Economics and Managerial Science from Wharton and an A.B. from Harvard, he has spent over 15 years architecting AI platforms across hiring, fraud detection, customer communications, and real estate lending—all while translating complex AI concepts into practical playbooks for business leaders. His work has been featured in major outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic, making him a rare blend of deep technical expertise and real-world business impact.​ On this episode we talk about: Why traditional hiring processes are riddled with bias, how data-driven models outperform “gut feel,” and surprising predictors of performance like browser choice and employment history patterns.​ How business owners can start using AI today to buy back time, automate repetitive work, personalize outreach at scale, and treat AI as a strategic thought partner instead of just a better search box.​ The core ideas behind Future Proof—why most AI content is too technical, how Michael translates it for non-technical leaders, and why ignoring AI now is like refusing to build a website or adopt social media 10–15 years ago.​​ How AI-ccelerator uses live keynotes and hands-on workshops to help teams build real outputs—like pitch decks and go-to-market plans—in 90 minutes instead of weeks.​ Where AI is headed next, how it will disrupt agencies and creative work, and why founders should imagine how a brand-new “AI-native” competitor would rebuild their business model from scratch.​ Top 3 Takeaways AI isn't just a tool for writing emails or posts; used correctly, it becomes a data-driven board member that helps you make sharper strategic decisions and challenge your own thinking.​ Companies that delay AI adoption risk being blindsided by AI-native competitors who use automation, synthetic data, and smarter decision systems to deliver better results at lower cost.​ The biggest barrier is not the technology but people—getting teams to experiment, build literacy, and embed AI into workflows so it actually drives revenue and efficiency.​ Notable Quotes “Algorithms, when designed correctly, don't care where you went to school or who you play squash with—they care whether you're actually the right fit for the job.”​ “Most leaders are using AI like a fancy spell-checker for emails when they should be treating it like a strategic thought partner sitting at the boardroom table.”​ “If you were starting your business from scratch today as an AI-native company, you'd design it completely differently—and that imaginary competitor is exactly who's coming for your lunch.”​ Connect with Dr. Michael Housman: Website: https://michaelhousman.com​ AI-ccelerator (consulting & education): https://ai-ccelerator.com​ ✖️✖️✖️✖️

AI is already changing how we work—and how we work together. In this episode, Dr. Michael Housman joins Brian Milner to explore how AI is reshaping team collaboration, decision-making, and the very structure of Agile teams.

On this shocking episode of Fishing the DMV, we uncover one of the biggest cheating scandals in kayak fishing history the Jacob Housman story. I'm joined by Jake Harshman as we break down the full chain of events that rocked the NYKBF community and the larger kayak fishing world.In the June 2025 NYKBF month-long online event, Housman submitted a suspicious photo of a large smallmouth bass caught from what appeared to be a cheap green kayak. Despite initial doubts, Tournament Director Nick Tammaro approved the fish at the time.A month later, red flags exploded across social media when Housman posted a nearly identical fish from the St. Lawrence River on his Instagram, except this time, it was clearly photographed on the deck of his aluminum Bass Tracker boat.Soon, forensic photo analysis and surveillance footage revealed a shocking discovery: Housman had rigged cut-out kayak pieces onto the back deck of his boat to fake kayak submissions. On November 9, 2025, Housman confessed to the deception, returning his $200 in winnings to NYKBF.However, this confession may only scratch the surface. Over the last two years, there's no way of truly knowing how much money Housman may have stolen from other competitors through this elaborate scheme — casting a dark shadow over countless events and anglers who played by the rules.As a result, NYKBF, NY Slay Nation, PA Kayak Bass Nation, PA Slay Nation, and TourneyX have all issued a lifetime ban, permanently barring Housman from all kayak and online-format fishing tournaments.Please support Fishing the DMV on Patreon!!! https://patreon.com/FishingtheDMVPodcast If you are interested in being on the show or a sponsorship opportunity, please reach out to me at fishingtheDMV@gmail.com   Jake Harshman social media: To book a trip, click on the link to his website down below: https://www.chocolatetownriverguide.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZO8WzpUoURUatFznOEv1MyWsBsSaqbryvzVQ53VZ6XU0D1-LU5cv1_SYo_aem_TK7bWVZUN7koK6Z6wXDG3Q   YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JakeHarshman    Instagram: https://instagram.com/pa.kayakbassin?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==   Chocolate town on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chocolatetownguide?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==  #kayakfishing #bassfishing #FishingtheDMVSupport the show

The ladies get manifesto on that butt! (And mouth.) Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTES:Read more about D.H. Lawrence here. Read William Carlos Williams's "Paterson" here and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"  here.Jericho Brown writes about A.E. Housman in Mentor to Muse hereRead Dylan Thomas's poem "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"Here's a link to Stevie Smith's poem "Not Waving But Drowning"For more about Keith Douglas, visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/keith-douglasAaron tosses off a quote from "Mayakovsky" by Frank O'Hara, which you can read here. Read Charles Olsen's "I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You"Here's Alan Dugan's "Internal Migration: On Being on Tour"Learn more about Judith Wright here.     

Tonight, we'll read the first half to “The Story of the Herons,” from a collection titled Moonshine and Clover written by Laurence Housman and published in 1922. The second half will air in our next episode. In addition to his fiction and poetry, Housman was a committed activist, championing both women's suffrage and the acceptance of gay people in society. His work often blended lyrical language with a touch of moral allegory, reflecting his interest in social progress. Herons, the birds at the center of tonight's tale, are found on every continent except Antarctica. They are long-legged, long-necked, long-billed freshwater and coastal birds, and include egrets—distinguished mainly by their characteristic white plumage. While they bear a passing resemblance to storks and cranes, herons are easily recognized in flight by the way they tuck their necks back in an elegant S-curve rather than extending them straight out. — read by 'V' — Sign up for Snoozecast+ to get expanded, ad-free access by going to snoozecast.com/plus! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New episode ft. special guest GMETZ

Before he was producing Netflix's #1 true crime documentary, Jon Housman was making salsa in Ithaca and hustling through NYU Stern (with Michelle). In this episode, the Emmy-winning storyteller shares his journey from Cornell history major to global media entrepreneur—and reveals how a spicy startup and a passion for untold stories led to streaming success.He's the best, he's the most fun, and we can't wait for you to hear his story.Find out more about Jon on his LinkedIn: Jon Housman,and more about his company, here: https://www.trulyadventure.us/Not sponsored by or affiliated with Cornell University

By Leslie Housman

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

Phenotypic variation within the skeleton has biological, behavioral, and biomedical functional implications for individuals and species. Thus, it is critical to understand how genomic, environmental, and mediating regulatory factors combine and interact to drive skeletal trait development and evolution. One way to do this is by studying skeletal diseases that disrupt skeletal function — like osteoarthritis (OA) which is a chronic disorder characterized by the degradation of cartilage and underlying bone in joints and can lead to severe pain and mobility limitations. This talk will discuss what is known about OA in humans and other primates, as well as recent advances that are further informing these topics. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 40695]

On this exciting episode of Fishing the DMV, I'm joined by Jake Housman for an in-depth breakdown of the late spring smallmouth bite on the legendary Susquehanna River. Although this episode was recorded just days before the recent massive flooding hit the region, Jake shares a ton of timely insights on how to locate active fish and dial in your presentation during this critical transitional period. If you're planning to fish the Susky this spring or just want to understand how the river sets up before and after major weather events, this is one episode you won't want to miss! Patreon: https://patreon.com/FishingtheDMVPodcastIf you are interested in being on the show or a sponsorship opportunity, please reach out to me at fishingtheDMV@gmail.comJake Housman on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yocooutdoors?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==  Jake Housman on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jake.housman.5 Chum Glides: https://chumglides.com/  River City Swimbaits: https://www.rivercityswimbaits.com/products Livfishing:https://livfishing.co/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwveK4BhD4ARIsAKy6pMIatQqajoQLo5crxO0AOc_j199XSS2STCcxrPg7FOtwEvDspskgf88aAmnlEALw_wcB   Lake & Lure: https://lakeandlure.co/?srsltid=AfmBOopH94iS3jCMMKSrLaVwaVt-nGXE3ccWYSgmt_NfZM_ldsGQVtnH  River Redemption LLC: https://www.facebook.com/river.redemption.llc  Please checkout our Patreon SponsorsJake's bait & Tackle website:                              http://www.jakesbaitandtackle.com/Catoctin Creek Custom Rods: https://www.facebook.com/CatoctinCreekCustomRodsTiger Crankbaits on Facebook!! https://www.facebook.com/tigercrankbaitsFishing the DMV Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Arensbassin/?ref=pages_you_manageFishing the DMV Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/fishingthedmv/?utm_medium=copy_link #bassfishing #fishingtheDMV #smallmouthfishingSupport the show

By Leslie Housman

Daily QuoteThe young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation. (Pearl S. Buck)Poem of the DayWhen I was one-and-twentyA. E. HousmanBeauty of Words儿时瞿秋白

In this episode we talk with writer and academic Serena Trowbridge about the poem that's been a friend to her: 'A Shropshire Lad 31: On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble' by A.E. Housman.This conversation was recorded in April 2022 at the Birmingham & Midland Institute. It is very special to listen back to this converation now, particularly to hear Fiona with all her usual passion and insights in conversation with Serena.Dr Serena Trowbridge is a writer and academic specialising in Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature. She is Reader in Victorian Literature at Birmingham City University.Serena is Vice-President and Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, and Senior Vice-President at the Birmingham & Midland Institute. You can find her thoughts on art and literature on Substack.Huge thanks to Serena for joining us for this conversation and allowing us to share it with you.We are so grateful to you all for listening and for all your continuous support of The Poetry Exchange. This is episode 99 and we are looking forward to sharing our special 100th episode with you soon.With love,Michael, John and The Poetry Exchange Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Housman established Yad Chessed so he could help his neighbors struggling in Boston's Jewish community. In the early years, he ran it by himself, with help from his wife Sue, as he worked full-time as a computer programmer. He directed Yad Chessed until the summer of 2012 when he became a member of its Board of Directors.

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

Today on the show Colin & Justin Housman talk about some of the stories making the rounds through the outdoor community.First up is an article that summarizes recent studies looking at the value of cold plunges. Turns out, there's not a lot science to support the claims that sitting in cold water is good for you. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't sit in cold water if you get something out of it! (5:55)Then the guys stop in at Housman's House to dig into a new feature that Justin wrote about some folks who weren't as bullish on the EXPLORE Act as most of us and really hammer home the issues that lie in the conservation vs recreation debate. (21:40)Lastly for this weeks Parting Shot, Colin reads the piece he wrote for Rock Fight about Outside's recent layoffs and he and Justin talk about the role Outside now occupies in the outdoor media landscape. (37:22)Check out hundreds of wildly cool products by visiting and shopping at Garage Grown Gear!Help those who have been impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires by clicking here.Thanks for listening! The Rock Fight is a production of Rock Fight, LLC. Sign up for NEWS FROM THE FRONT, Rock Fight's weekly newsletter by heading to www.rockfight.co and clicking Join The Mailing List.Please follow and subscribe to The Rock Fight and give us a 5 star rating and a written review wherever you get your podcasts.Want to pick a fight with The Rock Fight? Send your feedback, questions, and comments to myrockfight@gmail.com.

Today Colin and Justin pop into Housman's House to talk about Justin's big break down of the BOLT Act which is just one element of what's inside the seminal piece of conservation legislation known as the EXPLORE Act.Then the guys resurrect Gear & Beer to do a round of Overrated, Underrated or Properly Rated. The items being evaluated? Gaiters, insulated hiking boots, and snowshoes.They wrap things up with The Parting Shot. Justin has some advice for what to wear in the rain while Colin takes issue with the lack of pop culture references in this article. Check out hundreds of wildly cool products by visiting and shopping at Garage Grown Gear!Help those who have been impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires by clicking here.Thanks for listening! The Rock Fight is a production of Rock Fight, LLC. Sign up for NEWS FROM THE FRONT, Rock Fight's weekly newsletter by heading to www.rockfight.co and clicking Join The Mailing List.Please follow and subscribe to The Rock Fight and give us a 5 star rating and a written review wherever you get your podcasts.Want to pick a fight with The Rock Fight? Send your feedback, questions, and comments to myrockfight@gmail.com.

Today Colin and Justin break down some recent headlines to come out of the outdoor adventure community.First up is the news that Black Diamond is partnering with Rainier Mountaineering, Inc to help with their product development. This is a reunion between BD president Neil Fiske and RMI owner Peter Whittaker who teamed up at Eddie Bauer to create First Ascent.Next the boys make a stop at Housman's House to talk about Justin's story covering the efforts to get single use plastics out of our National Parks.Then they talk about the reports that the world's largest glacier could potentially collide with South Georgia Island. Lastly they of course wrap things up with The Parting Shot!Check out hundreds of wildly cool products by visiting and shopping at Garage Grown Gear!Help those who have been impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires by clicking here.Thanks for listening! The Rock Fight is a production of Rock Fight, LLC. Sign up for NEWS FROM THE FRONT, Rock Fight's weekly newsletter by heading to www.rockfight.co and clicking Join The Mailing List.Please follow and subscribe to The Rock Fight and give us a 5 star rating and a written review wherever you get your podcasts.Want to pick a fight with The Rock Fight? Send your feedback, questions, and comments to myrockfight@gmail.com.

The panel reads three poems by A.E. Housman, the renowned British classicist and poet, and discusses the presence of death in his poetry, the influences of Romanticism, the importance of the speaker's role, and the poetic ironies of his biography.Continue reading

Today on THE ROCK FIGHT (an outdoor podcast that aims for the head) Jessica Turner from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable returns to the show to talk about finally getting the EXPLORE Act through congress!The passage of the EXPLORE Act marks a significant milestone for the outdoor recreation community, as it is the first comprehensive recreation package to be enacted without being tied to other legislative measures. Jessica joins Colin and Justin to discuss the implications of this landmark legislation, emphasizing its potential to modernize land management and improve recreational opportunities across the country. That conversation starts at (28:20).Before that Colin & Justin hit a couple of headlines to come out of the outdoor adventure community over the past week including a hiker who made a poor footwear choice on a big hike in Nevada and a quick detour into Housman's House to talk about how the EXPLORE Act will impact filming in our National Parks.The whole episode wraps up with The Parting Shot: holiday edition!Hurricane Helene Relief Links:Support and Shop Western North Carolina BrandsFuel GoodsOutdoor Business Alliance Hurricane Relief FundGoFundMe for Bubba O'LearysWestern North Carolina Hurriance Helene Resource GuideEast Tennessee Foundation Relief FundSign up for NEWS FROM THE FRONT, Rock Fight's weekly newsletter by heading to www.rockfight.co and clicking Join The Mailing List.Please follow and subscribe to THE ROCK FIGHT and give us a 5 star rating and a written review wherever you get your podcasts.Want to pick a fight with THE ROCK FIGHT? Send your feedback, questions, and comments to myrockfight@gmail.com.Thanks for listening! THE ROCK FIGHT is a production of Rock Fight, LLC.

Today on THE ROCK FIGHT (an outdoor podcast that aims for the head) Colin and Justin run through some stories to come out of the outdoor community from the past week.First up they respond to emails received about last weeks episode which featured a story about how outdoor media and enthusiasts can possibly ruin unknown mountain towns.Then they talk about a hiker was rescued from quicksand and implore outdoor media sites to give us all a little more reporting about something crazy that happens in the backcountry before clicking that upload button.Next they enter the House of Housman to explore the controversial topic of wildlife management in Alaska, where plans to cull bears and wolves have raised ethical questions. The episode of course ends with The Parting Shot! This week Justin admonishes some over eager mountain bikers while Colin gives the definitive ranking of Rankin/Bass Christmas specials.Hurricane Helene Relief Links:Support and Shop Western North Carolina BrandsFuel GoodsOutdoor Business Alliance Hurricane Relief FundGoFundMe for Bubba O'LearysWestern North Carolina Hurriance Helene Resource GuideEast Tennessee Foundation Relief FundSign up for NEWS FROM THE FRONT, Rock Fight's weekly newsletter by heading to www.rockfight.co and clicking Join The Mailing List.Please follow and subscribe to THE ROCK FIGHT and give us a 5 star rating and a written review wherever you get your podcasts.Want to pick a fight with THE ROCK FIGHT? Send your feedback, questions, and comments to myrockfight@gmail.com.Thanks for listening! THE ROCK FIGHT is a production of Rock Fight, LLC.

The actor Simon Russell Beale speaks about playing the poet and scholar A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's play 'The Invention of Love', as well as discussing his memoir.The singer, songwriter and composer Rufus Wainwright was inspired to write a Requiem by his love of the composer Giuseppe Verdi and the loss of his dog, named Puccini. He speaks about the project and the involvement of Meryl Streep.And Kate Garner performs songs from the music halls, alongside the historian and writer Oskar Jensen discussing the stories behind the songs.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Ruth Watts

Catch up on some good wildlife news on this week's Microbruin!Find us on all the things: http://linktr.ee/bearsandbrewspodcastLinks We Discussed:California Wolf Project: https://wildlife.berkeley.edu/cawolfproject/Sources Cited:Charles, Drimal. “Breaking News: Montana Headwaters Legacy Act Passes Committee, Full Senate Vote Next.” Greater Yellowstone Coalition, 19 Nov. 2024, greateryellowstone.org/blog/2024/breaking-news-montana-headwaters-legacy-act-passes-committee-full-senate-vote-next. Cook, Meghan. “742 New Animal Species Discovered in the Congo Basin, according to Latest World Wildlife Fund Report.” Goodgoodgood.co, 4 Dec. 2024, www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/new-animal-species-africa-world-wildlife-fund. Corbley, Andy. “Once Locally Extinct, “Top Predator” River Otter Flourishing Again in New Mexico.” Good News Network, 4 Dec. 2024, www.goodnewsnetwork.org/once-extirpated-top-predator-river-otter-flourishing-again-in-new-mexico/.Justin, Housman. “Wolf Pack Spotted in Lassen Volcanic National Park for First Time.” Nationalparkstraveler.org, 25 Nov. 2024, www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2024/11/wolf-pack-spotted-lassen-volcanic-national-park-first-time. Wendt, John A F, et al. “A 2000-Year Record of Fecal Biomarkers Reveals Past Herbivore Presence and Impacts in a Catchment in Northern Yellowstone National Park, USA.” PLoS ONE, vol. 19, no. 10, 30 Oct. 2024, pp. e0311950–e0311950, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311950. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

By Leslie Housman

Did you know that almost all athletic shoes on the market have been designed, researched and tested on men? When Lindsay Housman discovered this, she and her husband, founded Hettas, a company creating running shoes optimized for women.  Today, Lindsay joins the podcast to share why becoming a disruptor in this space is so important to her. We discuss:  Why women are left out of research for shoes (and so many other things) Why women's feet are fundamentally different than men How wearing shoes designed for men impacts women's health.   How Hettas came to be and why she started this company much earlier than she thought.  Why it's important to her to never settle for the status quo Founding, self-funding and running this company while currently working another full time job What she hopes to accomplish with Hettas and exactly how their shoes are different Why she believes women would be in sports longer if they had proper athletic shoes.  How women are treated so differently when it comes to raising venture capital.  Follow Hettas on Instagram here! Book Rec:  Strong is the New Pretty by Kate T Parker

In this exciting episode of Fishing the DMV, I am joined by Jake Housman, winner of the Ike Foundation Kayak Event and the Native Watercraft Big Bass Power Hour event. Jake gives us insight on how to tackle the Susquehanna River going into early November.   Please support Fishing the DMV on Patreon!!!Patreon: https://patreon.com/FishingtheDMVPodcast  If you are interested in being on the show or a sponsorship opportunity, please reach out to me at fishingtheDMV@gmail.comJake Housman on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yocooutdoors?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==  Jake Housman on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jake.housman.5 Chum Glides: https://chumglides.com/  River City Swimbaits: https://www.rivercityswimbaits.com/products  Livfishing:https://livfishing.co/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwveK4BhD4ARIsAKy6pMIatQqajoQLo5crxO0AOc_j199XSS2STCcxrPg7FOtwEvDspskgf88aAmnlEALw_wcB   Lake & Lure: https://lakeandlure.co/?srsltid=AfmBOopH94iS3jCMMKSrLaVwaVt-nGXE3ccWYSgmt_NfZM_ldsGQVtnH  River Redemption LLC: https://www.facebook.com/river.redemption.llc  Please checkout our Patreon Sponsors Jake's bait & Tackle website:                             http://www.jakesbaitandtackle.com/ Catoctin Creek Custom Rods: https://www.facebook.com/CatoctinCreekCustomRods Tiger Crankbaits on Facebook!! https://www.facebook.com/tigercrankbaits Fishing the DMV Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Arensbassin/?ref=pages_you_manage Fishing the DMV Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/fishingthedmv/?utm_medium=copy_link   #bassfishing #fishingtheDMV #smallmouthfishing Support the show

Welcome back to Small Business School! In this episode I am thrilled to share this conversation with Lindsay Housman, founder and CEO of Hettas, a new Canadian performance footwear brand that researches, designs and tests shoes from the female perspective. Together we discuss Lindsay's journey, raising capital, social impact, and the importance of developing a brand that can grow and adapt over time. Let's dive in!Topics Covered:The initial vision behind Hettas and how it started with family goal setting and vision work.How foot health and the lack of female-focused designs in footwear spurred the creation of Hettas.The role of trusted advisors and mentors in shaping the brand's development.How Hettas Focused on extensive research with Simon Fraser University to create a product that truly serves women.Challenges of raising capital and overcoming investor setbacks.The significance of consistent brand storytelling across all channels.Understanding brand archetypes and challenger brands in defining your identity.How a living brand evolves with your business, and why it's important to revisit it.The challenges of raising capital.Lindsay's vision for Hettas over the next five years, including community building and athlete sponsorship.Lindsay offers valuable advice for business owners in the midst of scaling: be selective with advisors, avoid hiring too quickly, and take time to build a lean, committed team. Connect with Lindsay and Hettas using the links below!Hetta's Links:Lindsay's LinkedInInstagramWebsite : Use code: ‘SBS20' for 20% off!Check out the Small Business Club!Staci's Links:Instagram. Website.The School for Small Business Podcast is a proud member of the Female Alliance Media. To learn more about Female Alliance Media and how they are elevating female voices or how they can support your show, visit femalealliancemedia.ca.Head over to my website https://www.stacimillard.com/ to grab your FREE copy of my Profit Playbook and receive 30 innovative ways you can add more profit to your business AND the first step towards implementing these ideas in your business!

On this week's episode of the Tide Chasers podcast, we hit the Susquehanna River with Jake Housman of @yocooutdoors. Jake is a dedicated kayak angler who specializes in catching big Smallmouth on the river! We talk tackle, lures, and techniques for catching lots of Smallmouth in the fall. Tune in to learn more about this exciting fall fishery! Tide Chasers is a weekly podcast featuring local fishermen, charter captains, tackle shop owners and party boat captains among others. We discuss our local fisheries as well as opportunities to the north and south of our home waters of PA/NJ. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest, send us a message! Otherwise, we appreciate all the likes, shares, follows and subscribers as it helps us grow! Help us get the word out, hit that share button! Where to find Tide Chasers on Social media: Instagram: @tide_chasers Facebook: www.Facebook.com/tidechaserspodcast Hosts: Khoa @thatasianangler Bobby @fishingwithaphd Lee @ljssurfing Tyler @tmwilczek Guest : Jacob Housman IG@yocooutdoors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cullen's exact birthplace is unknown, but in 1918, at the age of 15, Countee LeRoy was adopted by Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the minster to the largest church congregation in Harlem.Cullen kept his finger on the pulse of Harlem during the 1920s while he attended New York University and then a graduate program at Harvard. His poetry became popular during his student years, especially his prize-winning poem “The Ballad of a Brown Girl.” In 1925, he published his first volume of poetry entitled Color. Within the next few years, Cullen became well-known, publishing several books and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 (to write poetry in France).At first, Cullen was critical of Langston Hughes' poetry, writing that, in using jazz rhythms in his poetry, Hughes was erecting barriers between race instead of removing them. In his own poetry, Cullen sought to erase these boundaries and took traditionalist poets, such as Keats and A.E. Housman, as models for his own poetry. However, despite his criticisms of other black poets, the majority of Cullen's own verses confront racial issues.By the 1930s, Cullen's influence had waned, though he continued to publish prolifically, including novels, a collection of poems for children, the autobiography of his cat, and an adaption of his novel God Sends Sunday into a Broadway musical.-bio via Song of America Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

The Daily Caller's Deputy news editor joins the show to talk about the media's coverage of Trump before and after the assassination attempt.  Visit the Howie Carr Radio Network website to access columns, podcasts, and other exclusive content.