Podcast appearances and mentions of John Webster

What Worship Is Jonathan Parnell Download Psalm 100,Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!2 Serve the Lord with gladness!Come into his presence with singing!3 Know that the Lord, he is God!It is he who made us, and we are his;we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving,and his courts with praise!Give thanks to him; bless his name!5 For the Lord is good;his steadfast love endures forever,and his faithfulness to all generations.Last Sunday, my family and I had the joy to worship with Kenny Ortiz and his family at Horizon City Church in Orlando. For those of you who don't know Kenny, he was a pastor here at Cities before we sent him out to Florida a few years ago to plant Horizon City. And it was so good to see him and spend a little time with him — and we had a funny moment together …Each of my kids had new backpacks they were toting around, and Kenny had the same kind — I think it's pronounced ‘Os-pree.' It's a backpack for hiking. Well, they have straps that buckle across the front, and my kids figured out right away that there's a whistle attached to the buckle. It's kind of discreet, but the kids figured it out, and so they, of course, were walking around blowing this whistle. Pastor Kenny sees this, realizes he has the same kind of backpack, with that same buckle, and that same whistle, and he says: “Hey, I never knew what that was!” And of course he starts blowing the whistle too. There was a lot of whistling going on! It was a funny moment!And Kenny made this a great moment. Because he thought it was incredible that he had this thing for so long, that was literally right under his nose, and he didn't know what it was. We've probably all been there before about something, but look, one thing I hope we never say that about is worship. This thing we do together on Sundays, and what we're called to do in all of life — we need to know what it is.Because being a worshiper is most fundamentally who we are as humans. Being a worshiper of Jesus is most fundamentally who we are as disciples of Jesus.Our worship of Jesus is the most important action we ever do as humans — so we should understand what we're doing when we worship.Psalm 100 helps us here.Today we're gonna look closely at Psalm 100, and I want to show you three truths about what worship is.The first is this:1. Worship is a declaration of our allegiance. We're gonna see this right away in verse 2, but before we get there, let me remind you about the context: Going back to Psalm 93, we're in a section of psalms all about the reign of the Lord, or the final coming of the Lord in judgment and salvation. And we established (back in Psalm 97) that what's in view here is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These psalms are talking about the end of the world when Jesus returns in final judgment for his enemies and salvation for his people. And our response on that day as his people, as those saved by Jesus, will be worship — it'll be praise, thanksgiving, gladness, joy, singing — all the happy words we see in these psalms. That's what we're gonna do together with all of creation. Psalm 100 is right in line with this theme we've been seeing.In Psalm 100, the reader is commanded to worship God now with seven different imperatives. I'm gonna read all of them, starting in verse 1, but follow with me and see if you can spot them:Verse 1: Make a joyful noiseVerse 2: Serve the LordCome into his presence (v. 2b)Verse 3: Know that the Lord, he is God!Verse 4: Enter his gatesGive thanks to him (v. 4b)Bless his name (v. 4c)There's no doubt this whole psalm is about worship, but I want to call special attention to verse 2, that first line: “Serve the Lord with gladness!”What does that word “serve” mean?What Does It Mean to Serve?The word for “serve” is interesting because it can literally mean to work and serve as a servant, and it can mean to worship. And in a lot of cases, it has a double sense. To worship God is to serve God, to be submitted to him, to swear allegiance to him. That's what's intended most times when this word is used in the Old Testament. And it was Israel's biggest problem. Their problem was who they served. For example, in the Book of Deuteronomy, first, God is very clear. He says, Chapter 6, verse 13:“take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods …”Then he says, Chapter 8, verse 19:“And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.”11:16,“Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them…”So one thing we know for sure here is that worship must mean more than an experience a few times a month on Sundays. Instead, worship is about an all-of-life allegiance, and it is a choice. It's a choice between two options: You either serve other little-g gods (bad idea), or you serve Yahweh, the one true God. Those are your choices.Those are the choices that Joshua set before the people of Israel in the Book of Joshua, Chapter 24. This is an epic scene in the Old Testament. Joshua gathered all of Israel, and he addressed all the people. He reminded them of their history and all that God has done for them from the calling of Abraham to the rescue from Egypt to the possession of the Promised Land, and he said, to all the people: “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord …” (v. 14) He said:“choose this day whom you will serve … But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (v. 15)It was an amazing moment. Joshua is saying, Me and my house are devoted to the one true God! My allegiance is to him — it's to Yahweh alone. That's what it means to serve the Lord, and that's what Psalm 100, verse 2 is getting at. To worship God, to serve him, is to declare your allegiance to him. It is about loyalty to our true King!A Daily ChoiceAnd we basically have that choice every morning when we wake up … Imagine, when you wake up, that Joshua says to you, personally: Hey, choose this day whom you will serve. Who's it gonna be? …And don't rush the moment . …Of course we know the right answer, but really think about it: at the end of the day if you were to assess your time and your energy, and what you give your best attention to, and what motivates you, who are you serving? Is it comfort? Reputation? Success? Power? Money? Who's it gonna be? To whom is your highest allegiance?Look, when it comes to worship, the real contrast throughout the storyline of Scripture is not worship versus non-worship, but it's who you worship: either you will serve the Lord or you will serve something else.Church, serve the Lord.And that is one reason Sundays are the best day of the week. Worship is more than a Sunday experience, but man, Sundays are important. Because on Sunday, the first day of the week, is the day that launches us into the next six days. We come together to say to God, before one another, “As for me, I will serve the Lord.”And of course we serve him with gladness. Let's not act like it's a hard choice. The way of Jesus is the only way. He alone has the words of life! We are gladly all in with Jesus. Worship is a declaration of our allegiance.2. Worship is congruent to our existence. We see this in verse 3. This is actually the center of the psalm — the center of the seven imperatives. The psalmist says, verse 3: Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.This is very straightforward. Get this: we worship God because he made us.This logic is repeated in all the great Confessions. I love how the 1689 London Confession puts it. This is Chapter 2, paragraph 2. The Confession says: God is most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands; to Him is due from angels and men, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience, as creatures they owe unto the Creator, and whatever He is further pleased to require of them.What it means to be a creature is that our Creator has the authority to require our worship. Because: God is God; we are not God; God made us.Resistance to CreaturelinessAnd look: the spirit of the age hates this fact. The mindset of the world, people of the world, hate the fact that they are made. They can't stand it. Because they worship the Self. We've talked about this recently: that in our sin, humans want to be their own gods. They want control over reality — even if it means murdering their pre-born children or mutilating their own bodies. They want to be gods to themselves. And the best explanation I've ever read of this is by the late theologian John Webster. He describes the essence of sin as the despising of our creatureliness. He writes:“To be a creature is to have one's being in relation to God, for ‘to be' is ‘to be in relation' to the creator, and only so to have life and to act. To be a sinner is to repudiate this relation, and so absolutely to imperil one's life by seeking to transcend creatureliness and become one's own origin and one's own end.” (Webster, Holiness, 84)The people of this world, dead in their sins, hate that they are creatures — and we know what this is like. It used to be all of us!In sin, you try to do everything you can to pretend you are not creature, you try so hard to be you're own god … but the problem is that there was a time when you did not exist. You did not exist, and then, when you did come into existence, you had nothing to do with it. That's what it means to be made.Have you ever thought about that?The Wonder of Being MadeI was thinking about this last week. We were having family dinner, and it was a beautiful moment together, it just hit me. I said: Y'all there was a time when none of us existed. …We had no existence at all. We were simply not. But then, we did exist. We do exist. We're here right now. Because we were made!And so what do we do as those who are made? We worship our Maker! It just make sense!The worship of God is congruent to the basic truth that he created us.And here are two very practical things we do with this — First is for parents, for moms and Dads (and since it's Father's Day, I mean this especially for Dads.) Here it is: 1) Teach your children that they are made. When Elizabeth was a toddler and just learning to talk, Melissa and I did a little catechism with her, and one of the first questions was, “Who made you?” Except we didn't ask that way. We would say it like this: “Elizabeth, who made you?” And she would say, “God!”And recently I asked all of my kids that question, and they all got the answer right. They all said God.And look, I know I'm not a perfect dad, and I'd never claim to be, but I feel pretty good about this one. Parents, we can all do it. Teach your children that God made them. And their eye color, and their hair color, and their skin color — it's all wonderful because God did it. And second, for all of us …2) Be amazed that God made you. It is so good to be made! It is so good that God is God; we are not; and God made us! And yes, we owe him everything — like the 1689 says, to Him is due whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he requires. But remember, the worship we owe him is not drudgery for us, but it's actually what satisfies the deepest longings of our soul. It's why we were made! It's why we exist!Psalm 100, verse 3: “It is God who made us and we are his!” Worship is congruent to our existence.3. Worship is grounded in the character of God. This is verse 5. And it's the verse that grounds everything said in verses 1–4. It's the ultimate reason why we … make a joyful noise, and serve the Lord, and come into his presence, and know that he is God, and enter his gates, and give him thanks, and bless his name.The reason we worship God is “for” — verse 5 — or because:the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.We worship God because he is worthy of worship, and his worthiness is evident in his character.That is what this verse is saying, and the grammatical construction makes that clear: Worship God because of his character — and in particular, because of his goodness.And we see this construction and this reason show up over and over again from Psalm 100 onward. Now we're gonna see this, but let me go ahead and tell you:Psalms 106 and 107 start the same way: “Oh give thanks to the Lord ... for he is good.”Psalm 117:3, “Extol him, all peoples ... for great is his steadfast love toward us.”Psalm 118:1, “Oh give thanks to the Lord ... for he is good.”Psalm 135:3 “Praise the Lord ... for the Lord is good.Psalm 136:1 “Give thanks to the Lord ... for he is good.”And then in Psalm 136 the psalmist repeats 26 times that God's steadfast love endures forever.Church, look, the Lord is good; his steadfast love really does endure forever. That's why we worship him. It's because of who he is, and who he is is good.Even in the Valley?But you might say: “Pastor, it doesn't seem that way for me right now.”Maybe you're going through a season of suffering. Maybe you've been battling discouragement and disappointment, and you feel stuck. You're just in the pit and you don't know what to do. You certainly don't ‘feel' the goodness of God where you are, and yet you hear this call to worship God for his goodness — and we just need some help here. I want you to know that even in the valley — in your valley, in your pit — God is still good, and you can worship him. In fact, your praise from the pit has a unique glory and sweetness to it that honors God more, shames the devil, and baffles the world.And I was trying to think here of some historical examples — like who are the saints in church history who have modeled this for us? There are many.But then it occurred to me: God has given us examples within our own church. The Examples God Has Given UsI think about Jen Jacobs, who died in 2022 at 38 years old. She had been diagnosed with cancer and fought hard, and I remember being at her house one day with a small group of people surrounding her, trying to bring encouragement. And Jen couldn't even open her eyes, but she wanted to sing the song “Good, Good Father.” And we did: we all sat there and sang “You're a good good Father, that's who you are!”And then I think about Kayla Rigney, our dear sister who died two years ago at 35 years old. She also battled cancer, and used to help lead worship on Sunday mornings. And one Sunday, the last Sunday she ever sang up here, she stood right there, half her hair was gone, and she led us in singing:I love You, LordFor Your mercy never failed meAnd all my days, I've been held in Your handsFrom the moment that I wake upUntil I lay my headOh, I will sing of the goodness of GodChurch, do we realize the examples God has given us? … right under our nose.And then of course I think of our dear sister Jean Swenson, who for decades was bound to a wheelchair after being paralyzed from the neck down. Jean modeled for years that we don't measure the goodness of God by our circumstances, but that our circumstances must be interpreted through the goodness of God. We start there! We start with: God is good.And because God is good, he therefore must have good purposes in hard things. Jean was an example for us of what her friend, Joni Erickson Tada, has been saying for over fifty years: “God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.”And that is his goodness. And church, we're gonna worship him because he's good. No matter where we are. And what God has done to prove his goodness is that he sent his only Son here. While we were sinners, when we deserved nothing but his wrath, God showed us his love in that Jesus died for us. Jesus took our sins upon himself. He suffered in our place. He defeated sin and death, and he has given us himself. We are united to him by faith. We are forgiven and free. Heaven is our home. Eternal joy is our future. Church, we can worship him now. And that's how we're gonna close. I get that there are some moments in life when we might say, about certain things, “Hey, I never knew what that was!” But Cities Church is not gonna say that about worship:Worship is a declaration of our allegiance.Worship is congruent to our existence.Worship is grounded in the character of God. And at this Table, this morning, we worship him. The TableEach week this Table directs our hearts to the cross of Christ where God's goodness displayed. If you're not a Christian, this is a moment for you to believe. Right now, wherever you are, turn from your sin and trust in Christ. Ask Jesus to save you, and he will save you. That is our story as Christians, and that is who this ritual meal is for. This is a soul-reviving cordial where we remember the goodness of God to us through the cross of Jesus Christ.Brothers and sisters, we who trust in Jesus, let us eat and drink together, and give him thanks.

In this Q&A episode, Peter Leithart, Jeff Meyers, and James Bejon take up listener questions on John Webster, the structure of 1 Corinthians, church polity, and the modern debate over race and marriage. They commend Webster as a rigorous and uplifting Reformed theologian, then trace the unifying threads of 1 Corinthians through Paul's concerns for love, unity, the body, and rightly ordered freedom. The conversation also explores Theopolitan instincts on polity—holding together local rule, presbyterial order, and episcopal responsibility—before turning to the church as the new humanity in Christ, a chosen people drawn from every tribe, tongue, and nation. GIVE TO THEOPOLIS! theopolisinstitute.com/give/ Get the Theopolis App! app.theopolisinstitute.com/menu Use Code "theopolitan" to get your first month free! Sign up for In Medias Res mailchi.mp/0b01d726f2fe/inmediasres

I never knew Martin at BMP.He kept a desk there.So I'd occasionally spot his green Bentley in Bishopsbridge Road.There'd be the odd a sighting in the building, a bit like Bigfoot or the Yeti, a glimpse of a blurry Martin moving through corridors, but way in the distance.Perhaps because of this, it didn't occur to me to pick up the phone and ask him to do a podcast about his amazing career.But Charlie Crompton pushed me to do so, offering to broker the deal.(Thanks Charlie.)The timing is odd – BMP, or BMP/Univas/BDDP/ReevesRobertshaw/Davidson Pearce/Needham/DDB/Adam&Eve have just left 12 Bishopsbridge Road.After 55 years.It's difficult to even know where to begin to talk about the impact of Boase Massimi Pollitt.Obviously there's the birth of planning, the work of John Webster, all the agencies and people it gave birth too, but there's so much more.I'm also anxious about listing Martin's achievements as he was so reluctant to take credit for them when we chatted.Or accept a compliment.Or criticise any employee who ever traipsed up their spiral staircase.Gossip? You try getting gossip out of a guy who's been trained to interrogate Russian spies, it's really hard.Despite this, we had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

In this episode, the we welcome back guest host, Dr. Neelou Weeker, and ED nurse, Leigh Clary, to discuss the critical intersection of language barriers, patient equity, and emergency care. Through two powerful clinical scenarios, the team explores the “gold standards” of medical translation, the challenges of resource-limited community settings, and how TeamSTEPPS tools—specifically closed-loop communication and situational monitoring—can be leveraged to ensure true informed consent and patient safety. The Gold Standard vs. Clinical Reality Providing equitable care means ensuring every patient, regardless of language or culture, fully understands their medical team. While academic centers are often highly resourced, executing communication seamlessly remains a universal challenge. 1. Translation Tools and Hierarchy The Gold Standard: Video- or audio-based professional interpretation tablets allow face-to-face or direct vocal translation. The Secondary Backup: In-house dual-handset “blue phones” connect directly to professional phone lines when tablets experience connectivity issues. The Tertiary Backup: Multilingual staff members can help act as a bridge. Many institutions feature language fluencies on staff ID badges. Note: Staff members should only be used to establish initial rapport or identify the required dialect, not as official medical interpreters. The Danger of Family Interpreters: While family members bring invaluable cultural context and an understanding of the patient’s baseline, studies show they only correctly interpret medical dialogue 19% of the time. The Bottom Line: Always utilize the official route first. When technology fails, do your absolute best—never settle for “good enough” when better communication is possible. 2. Academic vs. Community and Rural Settings Emergency medicine requires extreme adaptability. In resource-limited community or rural hospitals, finding an interpreter for less commonly spoken languages can take upwards of 30 minutes. Physicians must sometimes physically carry translation phones from room to room while managing other patients just to maintain an open line with a rare-dialect interpreter. Applying TeamSTEPPS to Patient Communication We routinely use TeamSTEPPS tools to communicate with our fellow clinicians, but we must remember that the patient is the most important member of the healthcare team. 1. Closed-Loop Communication & The Teach-Back Method To confirm true patient understanding, avoid simple “yes or no” questions, nods, or smiles. Instead, utilize the Teach-Back Method, requiring the patient to repeat the instructions or choices back to you in their own words. How to Phrase It (Taking Responsibility): “I want to make sure that I have been clear in what I’ve said to you. To help me feel reassured that I communicated everything correctly, could you tell me what you understand is going on?” Clinical Value: This is particularly vital for high-stakes decisions and ED discharge instructions. Multimodal Approach: In high-stakes moments, combine professional translation, family context, and teach-back to minimize errors. 2. Situational Monitoring Resuscitative environments are chaotic, and the primary physician trying to run a cod or secure an airway has immense cognitive load. The Team Safety Net: Other team members (nurses, techs, scribes) can help monitor the situation and catch critical communication errors. Reconciling Clinical Urgency with Informed Consent How do you balance the immediate need to save a life with the time-consuming process of formal translation? The ABC Priority: First and foremost, secure Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. If a patient presents to the ED in extremis and cannot communicate, clinicians must operate under the assumption that the patient wants life-saving measures performed. Task Delegation: While the medical team manages the immediate ABCs, immediately task support staff (such as social workers) with finding an official interpreter, locating family members, and gathering background information. Next Steps: Once the ABCs are stable, the team has the time and space to pause, establish formal translation, and dive deeper into informed consent for further procedures. Key Takeaways Acknowledge the Bias of Urgency: Time pressure can tempt us to bypass official translation channels. Guard against this by maintaining an equity-first mindset. Close the Loop with Patients: Ensure they can paraphrase their care plan or consent choices. Protect the Team via Shared Roles: Trust your teammates to monitor the big picture and catch subtle communication gaps during high-stress resuscitations. Do you use TeamSTEPPS or a similar model in your ED? We'd love to hear what has been successful for your team. Hit us up on social media @empulsepodcast or connect with us on ucdavisem.com Host: Dr. Julia Magaña, Professor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at UC Davis Guest Host: Dr. Neelou Tabatabai, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at UC Davis Guest: Leigh Clary, RN, BSN, RN, CEN, ADCES, MICN , ED Nurse and TeamSTEPPS Project Lead at UC Davis Resources: TeamSTEPPS Player of the Month Program, Presentation by Leigh Clary and Jose Metica TeamSTEPPS™: Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety Heidi B. King, MS, CHE, James Battles, PhD, David P. Baker, PhD, Alexander Alonso, PhD, Eduardo Salas, PhD, John Webster, MD, MBA, Lauren Toomey, RN, BSBA, MIS, and Mary Salisbury, RN, MSN. TeamSTEPPS Pocket Guide – Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality EM Pulse: TeamSTEPPS, September 17, 2021  *** Thank you to the UC Davis Department of Emergency Medicine for supporting this podcast and to Orlando Magaña at OM Productions for audio production services. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the hosts or guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of UC Davis Department of Emergency Medicine, UC Davis Health, or their parent organizations.  

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

ABOUT RICK HUGHES: Singer of the legendary heavy-metal band Sword and of Saints & Sinners....during his career he has played hundreds of headline shows and has opened for Metallica, Motorhead, Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, Anthrax, Rob Zombie, WASP, Styx and more. Rick's latest solo album "Redemption" was produced by John Webster in Vancouver and Los Angeles and features some of the top metal and hard-rock musicians in the world, including an incredible reunion for a remake of The Who's "The Real Me" that features Rudy Sarzo, Brad Gillis and Tommy Aldridge. ABOUT THE PODCAST:  Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ABOUT RICK HUGHES: Singer of the legendary heavy-metal band Sword and of Saints & Sinners....during his career he has played hundreds of headline shows and has opened for Metallica, Motorhead, Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, Anthrax, Rob Zombie, WASP, Styx and more. Rick's latest solo album "Redemption" was produced by John Webster in Vancouver and Los Angeles and features some of the top metal and hard-rock musicians in the world, including an incredible reunion for a remake of The Who's "The Real Me" that features Rudy Sarzo, Brad Gillis and Tommy Aldridge. ABOUT THE PODCAST:  Candid discussions with and about those behind the scenes in the music business including industry veterans representing the segments of: Musician, Design & Live ABOUT THE HOSTS: All three Music Buzzz Podcast hosts (Dane Clark, Hugh Syme and Andy Wilson) have spent their careers working with the biggest names in entertainment and have been, and still are, a fly on the wall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Chasing Leviathan, host PJ Wehry sits down with Rev. Andrea Ferrari—Reformed pastor, theologian, and author of The Fall and Redemption of Conscience: A Reformed Biblical Theology—to explore one of the most neglected yet foundational topics in Christian thought: the nature of the human conscience. From John Calvin's sensus divinitatis to Thomas Aquinas' intellectual approach to moral reasoning, Rev. Ferrari uncovers how Scripture, church history, and theological tradition shape our understanding of what it means to be human before God.Together, PJ and Rev. Ferrari discuss how conscience functions not merely as a moral calculator but as a spiritual sense, an innate awareness of the presence, judgment, and goodness of God. The conversation ranges from the spiritual senses tradition of the early church and medieval theologians like Bonaventure, to modern debates about whether conscience existed before the Fall, engaging voices like Herman Bavinck, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Webster. Along the way, they explore the implications of conscience for everyday moral experience, the universality of moral awareness in Romans 2, and the relationship between law, grace, and the human person in Reformed theology.If you're interested in biblical theology, Christian anthropology, Reformed doctrine, spiritual perception, Calvin vs. Aquinas, or the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and theology, this deep and accessible conversation sheds new light on the heart of what it means to perceive God and respond to Him. A rich and thoughtful dialogue for pastors, scholars, students, and anyone curious about how conscience shapes the Christian life.Make sure to check out Rev. Ferrari's book: The Fall and Redemption of Conscience: A Reformed Biblical Theology

In this episode of EM Pulse, guest host Dr. Neelou Tabatabai joins Julia in a discussion with ED nurse and TeamSTEPPS advocate, Leigh Clary, to explore how structured communication tools can transform even the most high-stress medical and trauma resuscitations. Through a real-life story of conflict and resolution in the emergency department, Leigh illustrates how TeamSTEPPS strategies—like assertive communication, the Two-Challenge Rule, and CUS words—empower teams to speak up, de-escalate tension, and protect patient safety. Together, they unpack how calm, composed dialogue preserves respect, strengthens teamwork, and ensures every voice is heard when it matters most. Do you use TeamSTEPPS or a similar model in your ED? We'd love to hear what has been successful for your team. Hit us up on social media @empulsepodcast or connect with us on ucdavisem.com Hosts: Dr. Julia Magaña, Professor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at UC Davis Guest Host: Dr. Neelou Tabatabai, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at UC Davis Guest: Leigh Clary, RN, BSN, RN, CEN, ADCES, MICN , ED Nurse and TeamSTEPPS Project Lead at UC Davis Resources: TeamSTEPPS Player of the Month Program, Presentation by Leigh Clary and Jose Metica TeamSTEPPS™: Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety Heidi B. King, MS, CHE, James Battles, PhD, David P. Baker, PhD, Alexander Alonso, PhD, Eduardo Salas, PhD, John Webster, MD, MBA, Lauren Toomey, RN, BSBA, MIS, and Mary Salisbury, RN, MSN. TeamSTEPPS Pocket Guide - Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality EM Pulse: TeamSTEPPS, September 17, 2021  **** Thank you to the UC Davis Department of Emergency Medicine for supporting this podcast and to Orlando Magaña at OM Productions for audio production services.

“Perfect power does not absorb, exclude or overwhelm and dispossess other dependent powers and agents, but precisely the opposite: omnipotent power creates and perfects creaturely capacity and movement. … what God in his perfect wisdom, power and goodness causes is creatures who are themselves causes. The idea whose spell must be broken is that God is a supremely forceful agent in the same order of being as creatures, acting upon them and so depriving them of movement.”—John Webster, “Love is Also a Lover of Life” Exodus 7:14-18; 10:21-29

Welcome to this full audio adaptation of the 1624 Lord Mayor's Show - The Monuments of Honour by John Webster. This is a playful reconstruction of the show performed on the 29th October 1624. It was a massive civic event created by the city for it's new Lord Mayor. This reconstruction was SUPPOSED to have been recorded live on the 400th anniversary of the show - but, alas, the production fell through at the last minute. Instead we recorded this piecemeal over the last six months around other shows. Full coverage of the 400 year old event, fed into our studio via the latest scrying glass link up... It features Robert Crighton, as radio Host John doing the live commentary. With Liza Graham as Hostess Joan on the street. Karim Kronfli plays the author of the pageant, John Webster, and the speeches of the shows are performed by Keith Hill and Emma Kemp. Our advisor was Professor Tracey Hill, our city chronologer. More from the civic world of London will come as we can pull it together. Our patrons received this episode a month early. The Beyond Shakespeare Podcast is supported by its patrons – become a patron and you get to choose the plays we work on next. Go to www.patreon.com/beyondshakespeare - or if you'd like to buy us a coffee at ko-fi https://ko-fi.com/beyondshakespeare - or if you want to give us some feedback, email us at admin@beyondshakespeare.org, follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram @BeyondShakes or go to our website: https://beyondshakespeare.org You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel where (most of) our exploring sessions live - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLa4pXxGZFwTX4QSaB5XNdQ The Beyond Shakespeare Podcast is hosted and produced by Robert Crighton.

Elokuvaohjaaja John Websterin uutuusdokumentti vie meidät keskelle Etelä-Euroopan liekehtiviä metsiä, missä suomalaiset pelastajat kohtaavat Portugalin tuhoisat maastopalot vuosina 2023 ja 2024. Palava maa kertoo Kymenlaakson, Etelä-Karjalan, Pohjois-Karjalan, Etelä-Savon ja Pohjois-Savon pelastuslaitosten sekä Nurmeksen sopimuspalokunnan ammattilaisten ja vapaaehtoisten matkasta, jossa suomalaiset taistelevat yhdessä portugalilaisten pelastajien kanssa tulta vastaan. Dokumentti tarjoaa intensiivisen, dramaattisen ja realistisen näkymän pelastustyöhön, jossa tulipalo näyttäytyy Portugalissa lähes myyttisenä vastustajana – lohikäärmeenä, jolla on oma tahto ja arvaamaton luonne. Elokuvassa korostuvat paitsi luonnonvoimien arvaamattomuus, myös pelastajien vahva yhteisöllisyys, solidaarisuus ja kansainvälinen yhteistyö, jotka ovat avainasemassa äärimmäisissä olosuhteissa. Haastateltavana ovat ohjaaja John Webster, pelastaja Toni Salmi, Etelä-Karjalan pelastuslaitoksen pelastusjohtaja Jani Kareinen ja Keski-Suomen pelastuslaitoksen itäisen toiminta-alueen aluepalomestari Mika Siitonen sekä Ilmatieteen laitoksen tutkija Outi Kinnunen. Lähetyksen toimittaa Pauliina Grym.

Being one, I'm very aware of my fellow double d's out there in advertising.Dave Droga - met once, gave him a lift after judging D&AD together.Donny Deutsch - never met, seen him on Morning Joe though.David Denton - did a few ads with him at BMP, did Cointreau 'Ice melts', amongst many others.Don Draper – never met, seems cool.And Derek Day - less known than the first three, but well worth checking out.I'd hear his quotes on a regular basis back in the early nineties.My then writer, Mike McKenna, had worked for Derek twice, first at Ted Bates, then Butterfield Day Devito Hockney, and would regale me with 'war' stories.I was new to the business, so ate them up, desperate for clues on how it worked.Mike's most repeated was a version of this - "I showed him our campaign for (insert various campaign names here)...Derek pulled a face, like a bulldog chewing a wasp, pull a face, then said (insert various clever critiques here)... and the scales fell from my eyes”.In a sea of dumb, crass ads, Derek's work always seemed clever and considered.Often not criteria that wins big awards.They tend to go to flashy and different.If I had a brief and wanted to win an award, quite a few writers spring to mind, if it needed help to my family business grow, Derek's would spring to mind.Looking at his career, there's a whiff of Zelig* about it. (*You'll have to google it, soz.)Hired by Alan Parker to work at the best shop of the sixties - Collett Dickenson Pearce.Hired by John Webster to join arguably the best shop of the seventies - Boase Massimi Pollitt.(In part 2, we find he was also hired by David Abbott to join arguably the best shop of the eighties - Abbott Mead Vickers.)Then onto Doyle Dane Bernbach.Smith/Greenland in America, under futurist Faith Popcorn.Back to Blighty to become Creative Director at 25.Setting up a Cramer Saatchi-like creative consultancy for seven years, earning a ‘Seymour' when Geoffrey was still in short pants. (Again, I refer you to google.)Then taking a 75% pay cut to join new agency Wight Collins Rutherford Scott in an attempt to win creative awards.And that's just part one.We had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

Today's Mystery: A man is found murdered at the funeral for a wealthy woman.Original Radio Broadcast Date: October 20, 1950Originating from HollywoodStarring: Larry Thor as Lieutenant Danny Clover; Charles Calvert as Sergeant Gino Tartaglia; Jack Kruschen as Sergeant Muggavan; Jeanette Nolan; Francis X. Bushman; Ted Osborne; Peggy WebberSupport the show monthly at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day: Adrienne, Patreon supporter since January 2020Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectivesJoin us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.

Today's Mystery: A man is found murdered at the funeral for a wealthy woman.Original Radio Broadcast Date: October 20, 1950Originating from HollywoodStarring: Larry Thor as Lieutenant Danny Clover; Charles Calvert as Sergeant Gino Tartaglia; Jack Kruschen as Sergeant Muggavan; Jeanette Nolan; Francis X. Bushman; Ted Osborne; Peggy WebberSupport the show monthly at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day: Adrienne, Patreon supporter since January 2020Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectives

This week we're traveling back to 1970s Britain with Joy! Join us as we learn about the real people who invented IVF, including Patrick Steptoe, Jean Purdy, and Matron Muriel, as well as how papers like the Daily Mirror covered the whole thing.  Sources https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/nov/10/screenwriter-jack-thorne-ivf-joy-film-netflix https://deadline.com/2024/10/joy-movie-thomasin-mckenzie-shines-as-test-tube-baby-pioneer-in-joy-1236115393/ https://time.com/7178799/joy-true-story-jean-purdy-netflix/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(2024_film) Litynski GS. Patrick C. Steptoe: laparoscopy, sterilization, the test-tube baby, and mass media. JSLS. 1998 Jan-Mar;2(1):99-101. PMID: 9876723; PMCID: PMC3015256. Edwards Robert Geoffrey 1996Patrick Christopher Steptoe, C. B. E., 9 June 1913 - 22 March 1988Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc.42433–452 Daily Mirror articles from 21 January 1960 to 14 December 1979, accessed through the British Newspaper Archive Bourn Hall Fertility Clinic: https://www.bournhall.co.uk/fertilityblog/international-nurses-day-12-may-recognising-the-dedication-of-fertility-nurses/ John Webster, "Muriel Harris: Nursing IVF to Success," Science Museum Blog, available at https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/muriel-harris-nursing-ivf-to-success/ https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=7101718324  Web of Science Josh Halliday, "Female nurse who played crucial role in IVF ignored on plaque," The Guardian (2019), https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/10/jean-purdy-female-nurse-who-played-crucial-role-in-ivf-ignored-on-plaque  Johnson, Martin H. "Edwards, Sir Robert Geoffrey (Bob) (1925–2013), physiologist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

A young widow stands against the expectations of her family. A woman striving for love and agency in a society which demands she claimed neither, she stands firm in the face of torture and even death.Unravel the gripping layers of John Webster's 17th-century masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi, with Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and Dr. Will Tosh.The harrowing plot of the Duchess asserting her place in the world is all the more remarkable for being written by a man in the 1600s. Suzannah and Will explore why this tale of love, power, and betrayal remains a fixture on the stage, resonating across the centuries, and discuss the dramatic history of its performances, the transformative power of early modern theatre lighting, and the poignant representation of female agency.MORE:Going to the Theatrehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/7lbdfK2fbgxtXReriTyydMNormal Women with Philippa Gregoryhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/0b5aXZh1HLVhJxyTyQuf2yPresented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Alice Smith, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

You can count the number of Creatives who embrace research on one finger.The rest of us desperately try to fight it with lines like 'you can't research original ideas', 'the group gets lead by its most vocal member', 'the public can only judge finished ads, not research material', and on and on.Good arguments.But the argument against is better - John Webster.Once delivered, it's hard for us sceptics to know where to go.He loves research.He does the best work.So why did he embrace it?How did he use it?And why doesn't everyone who loves his work follow his lead?I asked these and more to Sarah Carter, Adam&Eve/DDB Global Planning Partner, who worked with John as his planner for over fifteen years and who knows how many ads.Hope you enjoy it.

British advertising may have had more successful businessmen.More accomplished creative directors.Bigger award winners.But never a better Creative.No one has more ideas living in British people's heads than John Webster.They didn't gatecrash either – they were invited in.Singing and dancing their way past the barriers and into the national consciousness.One big, happy conga line; Smash Martians, Cresta Bear, Honey Monster, John Smith's Arkwright, the Prize Guys, the Humphreys, and on and on.Born across four different decades.Created, unlike other ads at the time – alone and using research.Occasionally John and a writer are credited, but primarily John was both the art director and writer.At the time, Bernbach's 1+1=3 was the law, so that was very rare.Rarer still, were Creatives who embraced research.Creatives viewed it as a killer of creativity and innovation.I thought I'd look into these aspects of John's process.First, by talking about how John created ideas.Fortunately, Dave Trott broke his anti-podcast rule, which is great, because I couldn't think of anyone better to talk to on the subject.Dave worked with John through the seventies and is obviously a brilliant Creative in his own right. (He's not just a blogger kids.)Next, I'll talk to planner Sarah Carter about how John used research to shape ideas, but first, here's Dave…

Clairsy & Lisa's Perth Pub Crawl was back for 2025 and this time they spoke to even more legends of the Perth Pub Scene including Suze DeMarchi from Baby Animals, Peter Borg from Flash Harry, Tod Johnstone from V-Capi, Peter Dean from The Jets, Tom Tapping from The Rookies, Martin Cilia from The Flying Fonzarelli's, John Webster and Dave Cook from The Motors and Tom Jennis from Clutch Cargo. So get ready to reminisce about those great old Perth pubs and the bands that played in them and of course sticking to the carpet as you stumble to the bar. It's Clairsy & Lisa's Perth Pub Crawl 2025-The Full Gig Guide Edition.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ahead of this Friday’s Clairsy & Lisa’s Perth Pub Crawl at Pinocchio’s, the guys chatted with John Webster and Dave Cook from The Motors/Formula 1. Topics discussed included the band’s surprising Singapore connection as well as the band’s favourite venues, The Charles Hotel’s sticky carpet. Plus the band’s ‘Almost Famous’-Esque emergency landing in farmer’s wheat field. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After Roger Cook suggested a change to the date of WA Day, Clairsy & Lisa took calls and texts on the topic ‘What should we have another public holiday for? Elliot Yeo dropped in to chat about the Eagles loss to the kangaroos, their expectations for this weekend’s game against Carlton and most importantly.. . how fatherhood is going. Nicholas Hammond popped in to give the team the inside scoop on his latest role in the play ‘And Then There Were None’ as well the upcoming 60th anniversary of The Sound of Music and his keen interest in the ‘Mushroom Murder’ trial. Ahead of Clairsy & Lisa’s Perth Pub Crawl at Pinocchio’s this Friday, John Webster and Dave Cook (The Motors) came into the studio for a coffee and to talk about their Almost Famous style emergency plane landing, their first gig at The Herdsman and other rock n roll moments. On today’s The Shaw Report, Lisa reports that Sly Stone has passed away after a battle with COPD. Snoop Doogg’s exciting new biopic and Aussie actress Sarah Snook’s big win at The Tony Awards. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flesh & Blood, the third studio album by Poison, finds the group at the top of their form.  The team of Bret Michaels on lead vocals, C.C. DeVille on lead guitar, Bobby Doll on bass, and Rikki Rockett on drums had been quite successful in the glam metal genre of the mid-80's, and had developed a reputation for a "work hard, play hard" mentality.  While they had a legendary stage presence, they also were plagued with fights both within and outside of the band.  A number of lawsuits in various cities were predicated on Michaels' tendency to get into fights at parties and other events.  Despite these issues - or perhaps because of them - their reputation only grew over time. Flesh & Blood is an album that is more challenging musically than the earlier ones.  The band is toning down their glam metal persona and taking on more serious lyrical themes.  Songs cover a wide range from sex and motorcycles, to struggles with long term relationships, to frustration with the struggles seen in society.  The band would drop the excessive makeup of their earlier career, and found the songs on a more blues-oriented rock.  More piano work is included, with keyboardist John Webster contributing to the album sessions.The result was a success, reaching triple platinum status by 1991.  The album peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and number 3 on the UK albums chart. This album would be a kind of high water mark for the group, as the industry was moving away from the metal sound of the late 80's and into the grunge sound of the mid-1990's.  However, the group would go on to record and tour into the new millennium, and Bret Michaels would become both a solo act and a celebrity with his MTV reality show "Rock of Love with Bret Michaels."Lynch brings us a look at a somewhat more mature Poison on this week's for today's podcast. Unskinny BopNot every song has deep or significant lyrics.  This hit single from the album started as a nonsense lyric, a placeholder that stuck.  The catchy repetition would make it a crowd favorite at concerts, and it was a top 10, going to number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.Valley of Lost SoulsA deeper cut, this song lyrics talk about the life of a rock artist struggling to make it in a place without compassion.  It is a slower piece, but definitely not a ballad.  Life Goes OnC.C. DeVille brought the original draft of this song to the band.  The lyrics were inspired by a girlfriend of DeVille who was shot and killed in a California bar fight, and describe the quest for light at the end of a dark period in life.Something to Believe InThis ballad was the second single released from the album, and went to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Bret Michaels dedicated this song to his friend and bodyguard James Kimo Maano who had died previously.  The lyrics reflect the frustration in the failures of society, from poverty, to the treatment of Vietnam veterans, to the hypocrisy of televangelists. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:You're In the Doghouse Now by Brenda Lee (from the motion picture “Dick Tracy”)This action movie based on the comic series from the 1930's starred Warren Beatty in the title role, along with Al Pacino and Madonna. STAFF PICKS:Ball and Chain by Social DistortionWayne kicks off the staff picks with a more alternative rock song penned by a punk rock band from their third and self-titled album.  The lyrics describe a hard luck story of a man who can't escape his difficulties.  It could be about a relationship, a rut in life, or about any vice that holds you down.Way Down Now by World PartyRob's staff pick is the first single from World Party's second studio album, "Goodbye Jumbo."  If you hear echoes of "Sympathy for the Devil," that is deliberate - though the song is much more upbeat.  It reached number 1 on the U.S. Modern Rock Tracks chart.  World Party is primarily a one-man project from multi-instrumentalist Karl Wallinger from the Waterboys.Tie Dye on the Highway by Robert PlantBruce brings us a song off plant's fifth studio album "Manic Nirvana."  The spoken line, "What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000." is from Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm Collective, delivered at the Woodstock festival in 1969 announcing the intention to provide free breakfast to the crowd.  Kool Thing by Sonic YouthLynch closes out the staff picks with a song critical of the over-the-top masculinity of LL Cool J.  It was the first single from their sixth studio album, "Goo."  The track never mentions LL Cool J personally, but references a number of his works.  Chuck D. of Public Enemy provides the spoken vocals to the song.INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Mildred Pierce by Sonic YouthWe double up on Sonic Youth as we end today's podcast with their instrumental based on a 1945 film noir starring Joan Crawford.   Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock-worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

In this episode, Caleb is joined by Ronni Kurtz (PhD, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) professor of theology at Cedarville University to discuss his newest book, Light Unapproachable: Divine Incomprehensibility and the Task of Theology. Together they discuss how our inability to see God in his totality should not lead us to despair, but rather; through God's gracious accommodation, to joy in the reality that we can learn to speak of God faithfully, truthfully, and prayerfully with the help of Scripture and faithful voices from our theological heritage. Resources: Light Unapproachable: Divine Incomprehensibility and the Task of Theology by Ronni Kurtz On the Incomprehensible Nature of God by John Chrysostom Reformed Dogmatics Vol. II: God and Creation by Herman Bavinck The Mystery of God: Theology for Knowing the Unknowable by Chris Hall and Steven Boyer The Culture of Theology by John Webster

Message from John Webster on February 1, 2025

This week's Island Influencers podcast features John Webster, Chairman of Manx Technology Group. From his early days growing up near Liverpool and spending summers on the Isle of Man, to becoming an accomplished economist, entrepreneur, and leader in both public and private sectors. John has been a key figure in shaping the Isle of Man's economic landscape. During the 1970s and 1980s, he played a crucial role in establishing the island's finance sector, laying the groundwork for its modern-day success. Transitioning to the private sector, John co-founded prominent businesses, including Web Tech and the Manx Technology Group, while continuing to make significant contributions to the community through his involvement with the Island Games Association and the Chamber of Commerce.   John's philosophy and business insights bring a practical and motivational edge to this episode. He shares his perspectives on the Isle of Man's future, how he stays grounded, and his vision for quality-driven progress. With a mix of wisdom, humour, and a deep love for the Isle of Man, John's perspective is as thought-provoking as it is inspiring. Join us for episode 122 of Island Influencers as we delve into the life and career of John Webster.

Two friends and academics recap classic literature and take it off its pedestal. In our sixty-third episode, we open Season 6 with a look at banned and controversial books with John Webster's hyper-violent Jacobean revenge tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi (1614). This play gives us our first authentic himbo sting in a while, as well as an Oscars-worthy In Memoriam.Cover art © Catherine Wu.Episode Theme: Carlo Gesualdo, Moro lasso al mio duolo (1611), Performed by the MIT Chamber Chorus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we look at predictions for 2025 - including Escape to the Country;  Luxury Travel;  The New Orleans Attack; Normalisation of Trans and Paedophilia; The Durrells;  The Simpsons;  Dawkins leaves the Freedom from Religion Foundation; German Elections;  The Ukraine War; Jimmy Carter;  Rotherham inquiry denied; Country of the Week - Colombia; Quasi Religious beliefs destroying Western Europe; Woke Hollywood;  The Greatest Song Ever - according to Bob Dylan;  Last Pearl Harbour Veteran dies;  The Declining Church;  Mark Driscoll Again; Feedback; John Webster;  and Christus Victor  with music from Peter, Paul and Mary, Lady Gaga, Alex Campos, Glen Campbell;  and the Gettys....

Intro - Phil explains why he's trying to read 100 books this year Content (8:03) - Discussion of Part 1 of Chapter 1 of In Green's Jungles, by Gene Wolfe. This Week's Play - The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster. Check out more at alzabosoup.com.

On this episode of Voices of Renewal, we interview Dr. Michael Allen, the John Dyer Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando), on the life and ministry of Dr. John Webster. Rev. Dr. John Webster (1955-2016) was an English systematic, historical, and moral theologian. At the time of his death, he was the Chair of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. Dr. Webster is known today for his retrieval of classic theology for today's church. To learn more about Dr. John Webster, please read Dr. Allen's book, T&T Clark Reader in John Webster.

Jodie Whittaker talks to Tom Sutcliffe about returning to the stage for the first time in over a decade to star in an updated version of John Webster's 17th-century revenge tragedy The Duchess [of Malfi]. The super-realism of Japanese food replicas is on show in London exhibition Looks Delicious! Curator Simon Wright and Japanese food expert Akemi Yokoyama reflect on this distinctive art. Baroness Ludford discusses buying single theatre seats. Canadian writer Anne Michaels talks about her Booker Prize shortlisted novel Held, which begins on the French battlefield in 1917 and spans 4 generations.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Claire Bartleet

“Because this act was done by this one, there and then, acts of reconciliation are more than an attempt to create reality by establishing imagined communities which offer a different sort of social space from that of the world's routine violence. Human acts of reconciliation are in accordance with the structure of reality which God in Christ creates and to the existence of which the gospel testifies; and therefore they are acts which tend toward the true end of creation which God's reconciling act establishes once and for all in Christ's person and work.”— John Webster 1 Corinthians 12:12-31

Send us a Text Message.Let's head back to the theatre for a really blood-soaked tragedy!  And while we're at it, let's think about the intersection between art and social criticism.Support the Show.Please like, subscribe, and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you listen. Thank you!Email: classicenglishliterature@gmail.comFollow me on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, and YouTube.If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it with a small donation. Click the "Support the Show" button. So grateful!Podcast Theme Music: "Rejoice" by G.F. Handel, perf. The Advent Chamber OrchestraSubcast Theme Music: "Sons of the Brave" by Thomas Bidgood, perf. The Band of the Irish GuardsSound effects and incidental music: Freesounds.orgMy thanks and appreciation to all the generous providers!

In this episode, Dr. John Patrick delves into the transformative power of Christianity, exploring how the faith spread and the profound impact of Christ's life, death, and resurrection on the world. Drawing from John Webster's insightful writings, Dr. Patrick reflects on the story of the Philippian Jailer from Acts 16, examining the deep existential question, "What must I do to be saved?" He discusses the nature of true belief in Jesus, the crisis that births Christian life, and the inescapable reality of salvation through Christ alone   // LINKS // Website: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ Podcast: https://doctorjohnpatrick.podbean.com/ Biblical Literate Quiz: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/meaning-metaphor-and-allusion/ Recommended Reading list: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/book-list/ Ask Doctor John: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ask/ LINKS: https://beacons.ai/doctorjohnpatrick  

John Webster joins Maury Jackson and Nathan Brown to discuss John's conclusion to the book, A House on Fire: How Adventist Faith Responds to Race and Racism. Drawing on his experience in South Africa at the end of Apartheid, John speaks to the two dimensions of “confession.” The work of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission […]

Message from John Webster on February 24, 2024

We chat to Legend Creative Director, Commercials Director and Creative Floor 2024 judge Steve Hudson. Hear his inspiring story into ad land and his best lessons from John Webster, Frank Budgen and Sir John Hegarty to name but a few. Everything you need to know about getting your best work through market research and how to think of an idea when you just can't. This conversation will help make you a better Creative (even if you're technically not one). Check out Steve's ground-breaking work and creative education platform: thepowerofadvertising.com  Thank you to this episodes sponsor: boomcgi.com If you want a shout out for any open job roles, production services on future episodes email: awards@thecreativefloor.com

Kimlyn Bender joins the podcast to discuss the theology of the word and preaching that has formed the context for the Fellowship gatherings of CPT Fellows. We talk about the nature of the word of God and how that relates to preaching, particularly within the context of evangelicalism's focus on the text of Scripture, expanding particularly on the statement in the Second Helvetic Confession of Faith that the preaching of the word of God is the word of God. Our conversation touches on Karl Barth, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, authority in the pulpit, the presence of the risen Christ, and more!

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) rejected the liberal theology of his time which, he argued, used the Bible and religion to help humans understand themselves rather than prepare them to open themselves to divine revelation. Barth's aim was to put God and especially Christ at the centre of Christianity. He was alarmed by what he saw as the dangers in a natural theology where God might be found in a rainbow or an opera by Wagner; for if you were open to finding God in German culture, you could also be open to accepting Hitler as God's gift as many Germans did. Barth openly refused to accept Hitler's role in the Church in the 1930s on these theological grounds as well as moral, for which he was forced to leave Germany for his native Switzerland.WithStephen Plant Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall, University of CambridgeChristiane Tietz Professor for Systematic Theology at the University of ZurichAnd Tom Greggs Marischal Professor of Divinity at the University of AberdeenProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Karl Barth, God Here and Now (Routledge, 2003)Karl Barth (trans. G. T. Thomson), Dogmatics in Outline (SCM Press, 1966)Eberhard Busch (trans. John Bowden), Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids, 1994)George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford University Press, 1993)Joseph L. Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Routledge, 2004)Paul T. Nimmo, Karl Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013)Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2021)John Webster, Karl Barth: Outstanding Christian Thinkers (Continuum, 2004)

Welcome to another episode with Dr. John Patrick. In today's discussion, we delve into the future of the church, its adaptation in global crises, and the important lessons to glean from our own shortcomings. Leveraging insights from John Webster's "Confronted by Grace", Dr. Patrick discusses the concept of domesticating faith, the significance of confession, and the transformative power of humility. He explores the intricacies of spiritual growth and its necessity for both personal journeys and the broader church community. Tune in to this enlightening discussion about the evolving role of the church and the grace of introspection and repentance. This is a dialogue not to be missed. // LINKS //  Website: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ Podcast: https://doctorjohnpatrick.podbean.com/ Biblical Literate Quiz: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/meaning-metaphor-and-allusion/ Recommended Reading list: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/book-list/ Ask Doctor John: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ask/ LINKS: https://beacons.ai/doctorjohnpatrick

The christocentric character of Herman Bavinck's thought has long been acknowledged, but an analysis of Bavinck's christocentrism has not been forthcoming. The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) redresses this situation, offering a comprehensive study of Bavinck's concept of a christocentric theological system. Building on the more recent secondary literature, Bruce Pass draws attention to many unexplored avenues in Bavinck's writings. In particular, Pass sheds light on the intimate connection between Bavinck's christocentrism and his organicism. Delving deeply into Bavinck's appropriation of Reformed Orthodoxy and German Idealism, Pass presents a compelling account of this thinker's attempt to establish Neo-Calvinism as a modern orthodoxy. By way of conclusion, pertinent ways in which Bavinck's christocentrism may prove a useful resource for contemporary projects of theological retrieval are explored in a comparison of Bavinck and John Webster. Bruce Pass is a senior honorary research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published numerous articles on Bavinck and modern theology as well as translated several of Bavinck's Academic Orations (Brill 2021). Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. 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

The christocentric character of Herman Bavinck's thought has long been acknowledged, but an analysis of Bavinck's christocentrism has not been forthcoming. The Heart of Dogmatics: Christology and Christocentrism in Herman Bavinck (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) redresses this situation, offering a comprehensive study of Bavinck's concept of a christocentric theological system. Building on the more recent secondary literature, Bruce Pass draws attention to many unexplored avenues in Bavinck's writings. In particular, Pass sheds light on the intimate connection between Bavinck's christocentrism and his organicism. Delving deeply into Bavinck's appropriation of Reformed Orthodoxy and German Idealism, Pass presents a compelling account of this thinker's attempt to establish Neo-Calvinism as a modern orthodoxy. By way of conclusion, pertinent ways in which Bavinck's christocentrism may prove a useful resource for contemporary projects of theological retrieval are explored in a comparison of Bavinck and John Webster. Bruce Pass is a senior honorary research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. He has published numerous articles on Bavinck and modern theology as well as translated several of Bavinck's Academic Orations (Brill 2021). Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku joins to talk about his new book, “Quantum Supremacy: How The Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.” (1:01) Then, John Webster of the US Biochar Initiative talks biochar which is a carbon-rich material made from simple biomass and its uses go way beyond just enhancing our soil. (27:23)

In this episode of Doctor John breaks from the regular scheduled program to bring a special Easter message. He reads the first chapter of "Confronted by Grace" by John Webster, which delves into the nature of truth and falsehood and how it relates to the events of Holy Week. Webster's homily is based on Matthew 21:33-39, the Parable of the Vineyard, and draws parallels to the rejection of truth in our own world. The podcast explores the power of lies and how they can have deadly consequences when they go public. It concludes with the message of hope that despite humanity's rejection of God and the covenant of grace, it still stands, and we can approach Holy Week with the prayer for God's mercy and life. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review.   // LINKS // Website: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ Podcast: https://doctorjohnpatrick.podbean.com/ Biblical Literate Quiz: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/meaning-metaphor-and-allusion/ Recommended Reading list: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/book-list/ Ask Doctor John: https://www.johnpatrick.ca/ask/ LINKS: https://beacons.ai/doctorjohnpatrick

John Webster on what biochar is made from and how it's different from compost. Catch past episodes and more at https://republicen.org/podcast

U.S. Biochar Initiative communications director John Webster explains what biochar is. Listen to the entire episode: https://republicen.org/podcast!

U.S. Biochar Initiative's John Webster shares what industry currently utilizes biochar the most. All episodes are available online at https://republicen.org/podcast

This week's episode is all about biochar. What is biochar you ask? We'll let long-time listener and U.S. Biochar Initiative's John Webster tell you everything that you needed or ever wanted to know about biochar. And he'll share where it's most applicable today, what industries are utilizing it the most along with the many benefits of biochar.A native of Utah, John is a tireless advocate for biochar, promoting it uses across the country for sustainable food security, improved soil fertility, environment, and climate resilience. Catch this episode of the EcoRight Speaks and any past episode from our previous five seasons!

This coming May 6, the United Kingdom will celebrate its first coronation of a new monarch in seventy years. According to the announcement from Buckingham Palace, “The Ceremony will see His Majesty King Charles III crowned . . . . The Coronation will reflect the monarch's role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry.” Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on June 2, 1953. You can find videos online. There was indeed pageantry, and I'm sure we'll see great pomp and circumstance this coming May. But amazing as the scene might be — when a kingdom marshals all its collective energy and resources to mark, with pageantry, the crowning, of a new monarch — the first chapter of Hebrews tells us of the coronation that even the most impressive on earth (times ten) can only faintly anticipate.Jesus's CoronationThe opening scene of Hebrews is the coronation of Jesus Christ, eternal second person of the Godhead, who came to earth as man, lived, suffered, died for sins not his own, rose again to new life, and forty days later ascended to heaven — and Hebrews gives us a glimpse into that moment when Jesus returned to heaven, with angels looking on, to be crowned Lord of all by his Father, on the throne of heaven itself.Can you imagine the scene in heaven? Around the throne are innumerable angels in festal gathering, waiting with joy, when the God-man appears at the periphery, and one eye after another sees him. And the energy and anticipation of heaven quickly turns silent. And Jesus processes to the throne, signaled by his Father. He sits down, his work complete, exalted, in universe's seat of honor, and heaven crowns Jesus Lord of all, with many diadems and praises.So, as we come to Hebrews 1 this morning, and to verses 3–6 in particular, let's keep this scene in mind. There are some challenging concepts in this first chapter, and in all of Hebrews, but we will be helped with some of those challenges if we remember the setting, which I want to show you in the text. So let's look briefly at the timing and the location of Christ's coronation, and then we'll focus most of our time on its significance.1) Its TimingFirst, the timing. There is a particular “when” that anchors this chapter — the other side of Christ's ascension. Jump down and see that verse 6 says, “when [God] brings the firstborn into the world, he says, ‘Let all God's angels worship him.'” Now, that might sound like the incarnation (the first time Jesus came) or the second coming, but chapter 2, verse 5, clarifies it for us (using this same word world from 1:6): “it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.” What do you mean “of which we are speaking”? Well, in chapter 1. Chapter 1 is speaking of “the world to come,” that is, the world to come for believers, “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (12:22), the heaven to which Jesus ascended to reign till his return.But an even clearer time indicator is the end of verse 3: “After making purification for sins, he sat down.” That is, after accomplishing his sacrificial work on the cross — and rising again, and ascending — Jesus sat down, on heaven's throne, for the great coronation that is Hebrews' opening scene.2) Its LocationSecond is the location. We have a particular “where” that anchors this chapter: heaven. The end of verse 3: “he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” — in the place of honor, with God himself. As we've already seen in verse 6: “when [God] brings the firstborn into the world,” which Hebrews 2:5 says is “the world to come,” heaven.Note this carefully: heaven is a superior location than earth for a king, not inferior. This is a challenge for modern people. As God says in Isaiah 66:1, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool,” Earth is where he rests his feet. And as we'll see later in Hebrews, heaven is also a superior, not inferior, place for a high priest, as Hebrews 8:1–2 says, “we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man.” Earthly thrones are made by men, and limited by men. But the heavenly throne is God's, not made and limited by human hands.And so when our children ask, Daddy, where is Jesus? Why have I never seen him? — as my children have asked at least twice — we say something like this: “Buddy” or “Sweetie, Jesus is seated, in power, as King and Lord of all, at the right hand of God in heaven. Jesus is real, human, risen, glorified, and reigning over all, waiting patiently for all his enemies, in his perfect timing, to be put under his feet. Jesus is as real as I am, and as real as Mommy is. In fact, he's even more real, because he rose to new life in a glorious body, which we too one day will have, when our seeing him with our hearts, by faith, turns into our seeing him, face to face, with our eyes.Heaven is no less real than earth, but more real, and superior. Our material world, in all its glories, is derivative and secondary, not ultimate.3) Its SignificanceNow, the significance of Christ's coronation. This is where we'll linger for the rest of our time, in what it means. To do so, let's ask, and answer, three questions about verses 4–6: Why angels? How do these Old Testament quotations work?What is “the name” he has inherited?Why angels?Verse 4 links Jesus's coronation with his “having become . . . superior to angels.” Angels? Where did they come from? And besides, wasn't the eternal Son, as God, always superior to angels, who, spectacular as they might be, are just created beings? Yes, as God, the Son has always been superior to angels — but not as man. There is an order of being, you see: God, and God alone, uncreated, at the top. Then under him, angels; then man; then animals. Psalm 8 celebrates that God “made [humanity] a little lower than the [angels] and crowned him with glory and honor [and gave] him “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).So, humans are superior to animals (and sadly, many humans today have lost touch with this!). And angels are superior to humans, by order of creation. However, God the Son became man, and thus became a little lower than the angels, and now has surpassed the angels. As God, he's always been superior to the angels. But now, by virtue of his life, and sacrificial death, and triumphant resurrection, Jesus, as man, has become superior to the angels. In other words, there is now (in the order of new creation) a man who is better than the angels.And so we have our first “better than” comparison, as Jonathan mentioned last week. The theme that we will see Hebrews return to again and again is that Jesus is better — better than the angels, better than Moses, better than Joshua, better than the first covenant and its place and priests and sacrifices. And Jesus makes better promises and gives us a better covenant and a better hope, a better country, and he is the better possession, than all worldly possessions.Cities Church, rehearse this theme explicitly for your souls. Whatever the comparison, Jesus is better. Better than comfort and ease, money and possessions, status and fame, marriage and children, work and leisure, sports and entertainment, all food and drink. And we do well not to forget or minimize it, but like Jesus says in Acts 20:35 remember it, and rehearse it.So, why angels? For one, they are present at the coronation. And angels serve as a standard of comparison to show the incarnate Son's progress — from below angels as man (Psalm 8) to above them as man by virtue of his achievement in human life, death, and resurrection. The point of starting with angels isn't that Hebrews' audience is tempted to worship them; the point is that the angels worship Jesus. How, then, can Hebrews' first readers, even ponder not worshiping the one the angels worship? You love the Jewish Scriptures; you think highly of angels. And the angels worship Jesus.How do these OT quotes work?This is the hardest part of the passage, and one of the toughest parts of Hebrews for us today: how he uses the Old Testament. What verses 5–6 are doing is plain enough: showing Jesus's superiority to angels. But how these quotations do that might make us scratch our heads.Jesus says in Matthew 13:52: “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Hebrews is a master at this. Hebrews is a master class in how to use the Old Testament. And Hebrews does not leave the moment to go back and explain the ancient meaning of texts and leave them there, but he brings them into the present to show his readers their fullness of meaning and applications and significance now in Jesus — how God's word is living and active, that God is not just the one who has spoken, but the one who is speaking.Let me summarize how Hebrews uses these three OT quotations, and I'll keep it brief, and you can open up to the larger contexts, read these for yourself, and learn what Hebrews has to teach us (which will be an ongoing project in 2023).Look first at the middle quotation, which is from 2 Samuel 7:14: “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” This is from a massively important chapter in the Old Testament, where God makes an eternal royal covenant with King David. Unlike King Saul, before him, who had no dynasty, and never had a son on Israel's throne, David's dynasty, God promises, will never end: “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up [to the throne] your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom . . . and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. [And then:] I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” In other words, David, your son will be Israel's king. Israel's king was God's “son” in the sense that God ruled the nation through the human king. And God's promise here in 2 Samuel 7 anticipates the coronation to come after David. At that coronation, when David's son is crowned king of God's people, he too, as David is as king, will be “son.” So, in 2 Samuel 7:14, God promises to crown David's son, and sons, in a kingly line that will endure until one king sits enthroned forever.Which leads to the first quote in verse 5, which is from Psalm 2 (which Acts 13 says is from David). Psalm 2 is a coronation psalm, written for the day a new king in David's line is crowned king of God's people. In verses 1–2, Israel's enemies may rage and conspire against God “and against his Anointed,” that is, the one anointed king, Messiah, the Christ. But, in verse 7, as his enemies conspire, David remembers God's decree from the day of his coronation: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” So, on the surface, 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 2 are about human kings: David and his dynasty, one son, then the next, declared at his coronation to be God's “son,” his specially chosen and anointed human king of God's people. But remember our timing and location in Hebrews. We're not in Jerusalem in roughly 1000 B.C. Our setting is heaven, after Jesus's ascension. And so what Hebrews does is draw forward these coronation declarations for David's line to the climactic coronation of David's promised offspring, who is not just a christ, and a son, but the Christ, and the Son — the one whom previous anointed royal sons anticipated.So verse 5 is about Jesus, and God applying the promises and pageantry of Israel's ancient coronation declaration to him as his great, climactic crowning as King of kings. And verse 6, then, mentions the angels, quoting Deuteronomy 32:43: “Let all God's angels worship him.” In some ways, this one is easier on the application, though more tricky in the original text.Deuteronomy 32 is a “song of Moses,” before he gives the people his final blessing before his death. From verse 1 till 20, Moses is the speaker. Then God speaks from verse 20 to 27. Then Moses speaks again from verse 28 to 33. But then a third speaker seems to emerge in verses 34 to 42, who both speaks of himself as heaven's agent (verses 39-40) yet also says in verse 39, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me.” Then, a new voice, which Hebrews takes to be the voice of God, enters in verse 43 and speaks about the agent: “Rejoice with him, O heavens; bow down to him, all [angels].” Which sounds like the coronation. So Hebrews brings verse 43 to the enthronement of Christ.So, we're back to our coronation scene in heaven. Jesus, who was lower than the angels with respect to his humanity, now has ascended to heaven and with his Father's welcome has taken his seat on the throne. And as the Father crowns his Son Lord of all, we hear the ancient coronation decree for David's line: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” Then he turns and declares to the hosts of heaven, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” And then: “Let all God's angels worship him.” And if the angels worship him, how much more might we!Finally, then, what about “the name”?What is the more excellent “name”?Verse 4 again: “After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” If you only have these few verses in front of you, it sure looks like the name is “Son.” He is introduced as “Son” in verse 2, and “Son” again in the coronation quotes in verse 5. And we'll see next week that verses 7–13 go back and forth comparing “the angels” and “the Son.” Most readers take “the name” here to be “Son,” and that very well may be it. Others have suggested God's own first-covenantal name.Recently I read an essay by the late British theologian John Webster who says, about Hebrews 1:4, “Perhaps there is a deliberate withholding of the name” (God Without Measure, 79). Pageantry? That got me thinking, What is “the name” everywhere else in the New Testament? Think of Acts, and the feverish attention to “the name” in Acts 2–5, and then in Acts 8–10 and the rest of the book. And what is “the name” that the apostle Paul says in Philippians 2 is “the name that is above every name”?And what if we take a step back from this immediate context of the opening scene of Hebrews, and ask: what name does Hebrews itself use for the next 12 chapters, and in particular in all the key passages, like 3:1–3; 4:14–16; 10:19; 12:1–2; 13:8; and the great doxology 13:20–21? The name of Jesus.And if Hebrews adds to the pageantry of heaven's coronation by deliberately withholding the name, then when does the name Jesus first appear? With dramatic flare in Hebrews 2:9: “At present [in this fallen world under the curse and sin, and in these last days] we do not yet see everything in subjection to humanity [as God designed it from the beginning], but we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” At the end of the day, the issue is not exactly what Hebrews means by “the name” (if he even has one exact name in mind, among others), but that Jesus, the Son, is clearly better.Jesus Sat DownAs we close, let's finish with his sitting down, and the seat upon which he sat, and what his sitting made that seat.First, Jesus sat down as the long-promised greater son of David, now on heaven's throne, and now shown to be even greater than anticipated, not only David's heir but his Lord. He is exalted to the universe's seat of honor, to be served, praised, and worshiped, by men and angels.Second, he sat down to rule over all, as sovereign and judge, with all authority already his. From this throne, he speaks, sitting to teach his church (Matthew 5:1; 13:2; 15:29; Luke 5:3; John 6:3; 8:2), through his apostles and pastor-teachers, as well as rule the nations, and this will be his judgment seat on which he will sit to deliberate and judge (Luke 14:28, 31).Finally, he sat down with his atoning, purifying work at the cross having been completed. Now he sits in joyful, satisfied repose, anointed with oil of gladness. As we saw in Leviticus, the old-covenant high priest only stood in God's presence, when he entered once a year, but Jesus sits in the presence of God, and in doing so makes heaven's throne a mercy seat. So, brothers and sisters, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16).At this Table, we draw near to the throne to sit and eat with the one who made purification for our sins, and as we eat, we join with the angels and worship him.

John Webster is one of the most profound theologians in recent history. While some may not recognize the name, his works have set a trajectory for theology and dogmatics in evangelical scholarship. Webster not only had a great understanding of the Great Tradition and a deep grasp of exegesis, but he also summoned the next… Download Audio