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Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love, the role of ideas in Stoppard's writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She's written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome.Hermione Lee: Thank you very much.Oliver: We're mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard's work?Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one.And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing, who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian.Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don't think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him.And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman, you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we're meant to be agreeing with.Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia, who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view.Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard's other work.Lee: It's long. Yes. I don't find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you're never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big. And who's going to put on a nine-hour free play, 50 people cast about 19th-century Russian revolutionaries? Nobody, I would think.But I find it very absorbing actually. And partly because I'm so interested in Isaiah Berlin, who is a very strong presence in the anti-utopianism of those plays. But that's a matter of opinion.Oliver: No. I like Berlin. One thing about Stoppard that's un-Shavian is that he says his plays begin as a noise or an image or a scene, and then we think of him as this very thinking writer. But is he really more of an intuitive writer?Lee: I think it's a terribly good question. I think it gets right at the heart of the matter, and I think it's both. Sorry, I sound like Turgenev, not making my mind up. But yes, there is an image or there is an idea, or there are often two ideas, as it were, the birth of quantum physics and 18th-century landscape gardening. Who else but Stoppard would put those two things in one play, Arcadia, and have you think about both at once.But the image and the play may well have been a dance between two periods of time together in one room. So I think he never knew what the next play was going to be until it would come at him, as it were. He often resisted the idea that if he chose a topic and then researched it, a play would come out of it. That wasn't what happened. Something would come at him and then he would start doing a great deal of research usually for every play.Oliver: What sort of influence did T. S. Elliot have on him? Did it change the dialogue or, was it something else?Lee: When I was working with him on my biography, he gave me a number of things. I had extraordinary access, and we can perhaps come back to that interesting fact. And most of these things were loans he gave them to me to work on. Then I gave them back to him.But he gave me as a present one thing, which was a black notebook that he had been keeping at the time he was writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and also his first and only novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, which is little known, which he thought was going to make his career. The book was published in the same week that Rosencrantz came up. He thought the novel was going to make his career and the play was going to sink without trace. Not so. In the notebook there are many quotations from T. S. Elliot, and particularly from Prufrock and the Wasteland, and you can see him working them into the novel and into the play.“I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.” And that sense of being a disconsolate outsider. Ill at ease with and neurotic about the world that is charging along almost without you, and you are having to hang on to the edge of the world. The person who feels themself to be in internal exile, not at one with the universe. I think that point of view recurs over and over again, right through the work, but also a kind of epigrammatical, slightly mysterious crypticness that Elliot has, certainly in Prufrock and in the Wasteland and in the early poems. He loved that tone.Oliver: Yes. When I read your paper about that I thought about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quite differently. I've always disliked the idea that it's a sort of Beckett imitation play. It seems very Elliotic having read what you described.Lee: There is Beckett in there. You can't get away from it.Oliver: Surface level.Lee: Beckett's there, but I think the sense of people waiting around—Stoppard's favorite description of Rosencrantz was: “It's two journalists on a story that doesn't add up, which is very clever and funny.”Yes. And that sense of, Vladimir going, “What are we supposed to be doing and how are we going to pass the time?” That's profoundly influential on Stoppard. So I don't think it's just a superficial resemblance myself, but I agree that Elliot just fills the tone of that play and other things too.Oliver: In the article you wrote about Stoppard and Elliot, the title is about biographical questing, and you also described Arcadia as a quest. How important is the idea of the quest to the way you work and also to the way you read Stoppard?Lee: I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: “It's wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we're going out the way we came in.” So I think that's right at the heart of Stoppard's work, and it's right at the heart of any biographical work, whether or not it's mine or someone else's. If you can't know, in the sense of knowing the person, knowing what the person is like, and also knowing as much as possible about them from different kinds of sources, then you might as well give up.You can't do it through impressions. You've got to do it through knowledge. Of course, a certain amount of intuition may also come into play, though I'm not the kind of biographer that feels you can make things up. Working on a living person, this is the only time I've done that.It was, of course, a very different thing from working on a safely dead author. And I knew Penelope Fitzgerald a little bit, but I had no idea I was going to write her biography when I had conversations with her and she wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was so wicked and evasive. But it was a set up thing; he asked me to do it. And we had a proper contract and we worked together over several years, during which time he became a friend, which was a wonderful piece of luck for me.I was doing four things, really. One was reading all the material that he produced, everything, and getting to know it as well as I could. And that's obviously the basic task. One was talking to him and listening to him talk about his life. And he was very generous with those interviews. I'm sure there were things he didn't tell me, but that's fine. One was talking to other people about him, which is a very interesting process. And with someone like him who knew everyone in the literary, theatrical, cultural world, you have to draw a halt at some point. You can't talk to a thousand people, or I'd have still been doing it, so you talk to particularly fellow playwrights, directors, actors who've worked with him often, as well as family and friends. And then you start pitting the versions against each other and seeing what stands up and what keeps being said.Repetition's very important in that process because when several people say the same thing to you, then you know that's right. And that quest also involves some actual footsteps, as Richard Holmes would say. Footsteps. Traveling to places he'd lived in and going to Darjeeling where he had been to school before he came to England, that kind of travel.And then the fourth, and to me, in a way, almost the most exciting, was the opportunity to watch him at work in rehearsal. So with the director's permissions, I was allowed to sit in on two or three processes like that, the 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic with David Lavoie. And Patrick Marber's wonderful production of Leopoldstadt and Nick Hytner's production of The Hard Problem at the National. So I was able to witness the very interesting negotiations going on between Tom and the director and the cast.And also the extraordinary fact that even with a play like Rosencrantz, which is on every school syllabus and has been for 50—however many years—he was still changing things in rehearsal. I can't get over that. And in his view, as he often said, theater is an event and not a text, and so one could see that actual process of things changing before one's very eyes, and that for a biographer, it's a pretty amazing privilege.Oliver: How much of the plays were written during rehearsal do you think?Lee: Oh, 99% of the plays were written with much labor, much precision, much correction alone at his desk. The text is there, the text is written, and everything changes when you go into the rehearsal room because you suddenly find that there isn't enough time with that speech for the person to get from the bed to the door. It's physics; you have to put another line in so that someone can make an entrance or an exit, that kind of thing.Or the actors will say quite often, because they were a bit in awe—by the time he became well known—the actors initially would be a bit in awe of the braininess and the brilliance. And quite often the actors will be saying, “I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't understand this.” You'd often get, “I don't really understand.”And then he would never be dismissive. He would either say, “No, I think you've got to make it work.” I'm putting words into his mouth here. Or he would say, “Okay, let's put another sentence or something like that.”Oliver: Between what he wrote at his desk and the book that's available for purchase now, how much changed? Is it 10%, 50? You know what I mean?Lee: Yes. You should be talking to his editor at Faber, Dinah Wood. So Faber would print a relatively small number for the first edition before the rehearsal process and the final production. And then they would do a second edition, which would have some changes in it. So 2%. Okay. But crucial sometimes.Oliver: No, sure. Very important.Lee: And also some plays like Jumpers went through different additions with different endings, different solutions to plot problems. Travesties, he had a lot of trouble with the Lenins in Travesties because it's the play in which you've got Joyce and you've got Tristan Tzara and you've got the Lenins, and they're all these real people and he makes him talk.But he was a little bit nervous about the Lenin. So what he gave him to say were things that they had really said, that Lenin had really said. As opposed to the Tzara-Joyce stuff, which is all wonderfully made up. The bloody Lenins became a bit of a problem for him. And so that gets changed in later editions you'll find.Oliver: How closely do you think The Real Thing is based on Present Laughter by Noël Coward?Lee: Oh, I think there's a little bit of Coward in there. Yes, sure. I think he liked Coward, he liked Wilde, obviously. He likes brilliant, witty, playful entertainers. He wants to be an entertainer. But I think The Real Thing, he was proud of the fact that The Real Thing was one of the few examples of his plays at that time, which weren't based on something else. They weren't based on Hamlet. They weren't based on The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not based on a real person like Housman. I think The Real Thing came out of himself much more than out of literary models.Oliver: You don't think that Henry is a bit like the actor character in Present Laughter and it's all set in his flat and the couples moving around and the slight element of farce?The cricket bat speech is quite similar to when Gary Essendine—do you remember that very funny young man comes up on the train from Epping or somewhere and lectures him about the social value of art. And Gary Essendine says, “Get a job in a theater rep and write 20 plays. And if you can get one of them put on in a pub, you'll be damn lucky.” It's like a model for him, a loose model.Lee: Yes. Henry, I think you should write an article comparing these two plays.Oliver: Okay. Very good. What does Stoppardian mean?Lee: It means witty. It means brilliant with words. It means fizzing with verbal energy. It means intellectually dazzling. The word dazzling is the one that tends to get used. My own version of Stoppardian is a little bit different from, as it were, those standard received and perfectly acceptable accounts of Stoppardian.My own sense of Stoppardian has more to do with grief and mortality and a sense of not belonging and of puzzlement and bewilderment, within all that I said before, within the dazzling, playful astonishing zest and brio of language and the precision about language.Oliver: Because it's a funny word. It's hard to include Leopoldstadt under the typical use of Stoppardian, because it's an untypical Stoppard.Lee: One of the things about Leopoldstadt that I think is—let's get rid of that trope about Stoppardian—characteristic of him is the remarkable way it deals with time. Here's a play like Arcadia, all set in the same place, all set in the same room, in the same house, and it goes from a big hustling room, late 19th-century family play, just like the beginning of The Coast of Utopia, where you begin with a big family in Russia and then it moves through the '20s and then into the terrible appalling period of the Anschluss and the Holocaust.And then it ends up after the war with an empty room. This room, is like a different kind of theater, an empty room. Three characters, none of whom you know very well, speaking in three different kinds of English, reaching across vast spaces of incomprehension, and you've had these jumps through time.And then at the very end, the original family, all of whom have been destroyed, the original family reappears on the stage. I'm sorry to tell this for anyone who hasn't seen Leopoldstadt. Because when it happens on the stage, it's an absolutely astonishing moment. As if the time has gone round and as if the play, which I think it was for him, was an act of restitution to all those people.Oliver: How often did he use his charm to get his way with actors?Lee: A lot. And not just actors. People he worked with, film people, friends, companions. Charm is such an interesting thing, isn't it? Because we shouldn't deviate, but there's always a slightly sinister aspect to the word charm as in, a magic charm. And one tends to be a bit suspicious of charm. And he knew he had charm and he was physically very magnetic and good looking and very funny and very attentive to people.But I think the charm, in his case, he did use it to get the right results, and he did use it, as he would say, “to look after my plays.” He was always, “I want to look after my plays.” And that's why he went back to rehearsal when there were revivals and so on. But he wasn't always charming. Patrick Marber, who's a friend of his and who directed Leopoldstadt, is very good on how irritable Stoppard could be sometimes in rehearsal. And I've heard that from other directors too—Jack O'Brien, who did the American productions of things like The Invention of Love.If Stoppard felt it wasn't right, he could get quite cross. So this wasn't a sort of oleaginous character at all. It's not smooth, it's not a smooth charm at all. But yes, he knew his power and he used it, and I think in a good way. I think he was a benign character actually. And one of the things that was very fascinating to me, not only when he died and there was this great outpouring of tributes, very heartfelt tributes, I thought. But also when I was working on the biography, I was going around the world trying to find people to say bad things about him, because what I didn't want to do was write a hagiography. You don't want to do that; there would be no point. And it was genuinely quite hard.And I don't know the theater world; it's not my world. I got to know it a little bit then. But I have never necessarily thought of the theater world as being utterly loving and generous about everybody else. I'm sure there are lots of rivalries and spitefulness, as there is in academic life, all the rest of it. But it was very hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about him, even people who'd come up against the steeliness that there is in him.I had an interview with Steven Spielberg about him, with whom he worked a lot, and with whom he did Empire of the Sun. And I would ask my interviewees if they could come up with two or three adjectives or an adjective that would sum him up, that would sum Stoppard up to them. And when I asked Spielberg this question, he had a little think and then he said, intransigent. I thought, great. He must be the only person who ever stood up to him.Oliver: What was his best film script? Did he write a really great film.Lee: That one. I think partly the novel, I don't know if you know the Ballard novel, the Empire of the Sun, it's a marvelous novel. And Ballard was just a magical and amazing writer, a great hero of mine. But I think what Stoppard did with that was really clever and brilliant.I know people like Brazil, the Terry Gilliam sort of surrealist way. And there's some interesting early work. Most of his film work was not one script; it was little bits that he helped with. So there's famously the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he did most of the dialogue for Harrison Ford.But there are others like the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, where I think there's one line, anonymously Stoppardian in there. One of the things about the obituaries that slightly narked me was that there, I felt there was a bit too much about the films. Truly, I don't think the film work was—he wanted it to be right and he wanted to get it right—but it wasn't as close to his heart as the theater work. And indeed the work for radio, which I thought was generally underwritten about when he died. There was some terrific work there.Oliver: Yes. And there aren't that many canonical writers who've been great on the radio.Lee: Absolutely. He did everything. He did film, he did radio. He wrote some opera librettos. He really did everything. And on top of that, there was the great work for the public good, which I think is a very important part of his legacy, his history.Oliver: How much crossover influence is there between the different bits of his career? Does the screenwriting influence the theater writing and the radio and so on? Or is he just compartmentalized and able to do a lot of different things?Lee: That's such an interesting question. I don't think I've thought about it enough. I think there are very cinematic aspects to some of the plays, like Night and Day, for instance, the play about journalism. That could easily have been a film.And perhaps Hapgood as well, although it could be a kind of John le Carré type film thriller, though it's such a set of complicated interlocking boxes that I don't know that it would work as a film. It's not one of my favorite players, I must say. I struggle a little bit with Hapgood. But, yes, I'm sure that they fed into each other. Because he was so busy, he was often doing several things at once. So he was keeping things in boxes and opening the lid of that box. But mentally things must have overlapped, I'm sure.Oliver: He once joked that rather than having read Wittgenstein from cover to cover, he had only read the covers. How true is that? Because I know some people who would say he's very clever in everything, but he's not as clever as he looks. It's obviously not true that he only read the covers.Lee: I think there was a phase, wasn't there, after the early plays when people felt that he was—it's that English phrase, isn't it—too clever by half. Which you would never hear anyone in France saying of someone that they were too clever by half. So he was this kind of jazzy intellectual who put all his ideas out there, and he was this sort of self-educated savant who hadn't been to Oxford.There was quite a lot of that about in the earlier years, I think. And a sense that he was getting away with it, to which I would countermand with the story of the writing of The Invention of Love. So what attracted him to the figure of Housman initially was not the painful, suppressed homosexual love story, but the fact that here was this person who was divided into a very pernickety, savagely critical classical editor of Latin and a romantic lyric poet. In order to work out how to turn this into a play, he probably spent about six years taking Latin lessons, reading everything he could read on the history of classical literature. Obviously reading about Housman, engaging in conversation with classical scholars about Housman's, finer points of editorial precision about certain phrases. And what he used from that was the tip of the iceberg. But the iceberg was real.He really did that work and he often used to say that it was his favorite play because he'd so much enjoyed the work that went into it. I think he took what he needed from someone like Wittgenstein. I know you don't like The Coast of Utopia very much, but if you read his background to Coast of Utopia, what went into it, and if you compare what's in the plays, those three plays, with what's in the writing about those revolutionaries, he read everything. He may have magpied it, but he's certainly knows what he's talking about. So I defend him a bit against that, I think.Oliver: Good, good. Did you see the recent production at the Hamstead Theatre of The Invention of Love?Lee: I did, yes.Oliver: What did you think?Lee: I liked it. I thought it was rather beautifully done. I liked those boats rowing around that clicked together. I thought Simon Russell Beale was extremely good, particularly very moving. And very good in Housman's vindictiveness as a critic. He is not a nice person in that sense. And his scornfulness about the women students in his class, that kind of thing. And so there was a wonderful vitriol and scorn in Russell Beale's performance.I think when you see it now, some of the Oxford context is a little bit clunky, those scenes with Jowett and Pater and so on, it's like a bit of a caricature of the context of cultural life at the time, intellectual life at the time. But I think that the trope of the old and the young Housman meeting each other and talking to each other, which I still think is very moving. I thought it worked tremendously well.Oliver: What are Tom Stoppard's poems like?Lee: You see them in Indian Ink where he invents a poet, Flora Crewe, who is a poet who was died young, turn of the century, bold feminist associated with Bloomsbury and gets picked up much later as a kind of Sylvia Plath-type, HD type heroine. And when you look at Stoppard's manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Austin, in Texas, there is more ink spent on writing and rewriting those poems of Flora Crewe than anything else I saw in the manuscript. He wrote them and rewrote them.Early on he wrote some Elliot—they're very like Elliot—little poems for himself. I think there are probably quite a lot of love poems out there, which I never saw because they belong to the people for whom he wrote them. So I wouldn't know about those.Oliver: How consistently did Stoppard hold to a kind of liberal individualism in his politics?Lee: He was accused of being very right wing in the 1980s really, 1970s, 1980s, when the preponderant tendency for British drama was radicalism, Royal Court, left wing, all of that. And Stoppard seemed an outlier then, because he approved of Thatcher. He was a friend of Thatcher. He didn't like the print union. It was particularly about newspapers because he'd been a newspaper man in his youth. That was his alternative university education, working in Bristol on the newspapers. He had a romance heroic feeling about the value of the journalist to uphold democracy, and he hated the pressure of the print unions to what he thought at the time was stifling that.He changed his mind. I think a lot about that. He had been very idealistic and in love with English liberal values. And I think towards the end of his life he felt that those were being eroded. He voted lots of different ways. He voted conservative, voted green. He voted lib dem. I don't if he ever voted Labour.Oliver: But even though his personal politics shifted and the way he voted shifted, there is something quite continuous from the early plays through to Rock ‘n' Roll. Is there a sort of basic foundation that doesn't change, even though the response to events and the idea about the times changes?Lee: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it can be summed up in what Henry says in The Real Thing about politics, which is a version of what's often said in his plays, which is public postures have the configuration of private derangement. So that there's a deep suspicion of political rhetoric, especially when it tends towards the final solution type, the utopian type, the sense that individual lives can be sacrificed in the interest of an ultimate rationalized greater good.And then, he's worked in the '70s for the victims of Soviet communism. His work alongside in support of Havel and Charter 77. And he wrote on those themes such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul. Those are absolutely at the heart of what he felt. And they come back again when he's very modest about this and kept it quiet. But he did an enormous amount of work for the Belarus exile, Belarus Free Theater collective, people in support of those trying to work against the regime in Belarus.And then the profound, heartfelt, intense feeling of horror about what happened to people in Leopoldstadt. That's all part of the same thing. I think he's a believer in individual freedom and in democracy and has a suspicion of political rhetoric.Oliver: How much were some of his great parts written for specific actors? Because I sometimes have a feeling when I watch one of his plays now, if I'd been here when Felicity Kendal was doing this, I would be getting the whole thing, but I'm getting most of it.Lee: I'm sure that's right. And he built up a team around him: Peter Wood, the director and John Wood who's such an extraordinary Henry Carr in in in Travesties. And Michael Hordern as George the philosopher in Jumpers. And he wrote a lot for Kendal, in the process of becoming life companions.But he'd obviously been writing and thinking of her very much, for instance, in Arcadia. And also I think very much, it's very touching now to see the production of Indian Ink that's running at Hampstead Theatre in which Felicity Kendal is playing the older woman, the surviving older sister of the poet Flora Crewe, where of course the part of Flora Crewe was written for her. And there's something very touching about seeing that now. And, in fact, the first night of that production was the day of Stoppard's funeral. And Kendal couldn't be at the funeral, of course, because she was in the first night of his play. That's a very touching thing.Oliver: Why did he think the revivals came too soon?Lee: I don't really know the answer to that. I think he thought a play had to hook up a lot of oxygen and attract a lot of attention. If you were lucky while it was on, people would remember the casting and the direction of that version of it, and it would have a kind of memory. You had to be there.But people who were there would remember it and talk about it. And if you had another production very soon after that, then maybe it would diminish or take away that effect. I think he had a sort of loyalty to first productions often. What do you think about that? I'm not quite sure of the answer to that.Oliver: I don't know. To me it seems to conflict a bit with his idea that it's a living thing and he's always rewriting it in the rehearsal room. But I think probably what you say is right, and he will have got it right in a certain way through all that rehearsing. You then need to wait for a new generation of people to make it fresh again, if you like.Lee: Or not a generation even, but give it five years.Oliver: Everyone new and this theater's working differently now. We can rework it in our own way. Can we have a few questions about your broader career before we finish?Lee: Depends what they are.Oliver: Your former colleague John Carey died at a similar time to Stoppard. What do you think was his best work?Lee: John Carey's best work? Oh. I thought the biography of Golding was pretty good. And I thought he wrote a very good book on Thackery. And I thought his work on Milton was good. I wasn't so keen on The Intellectuals and the Masses. He and I used to have vociferous arguments about that because he had cast Virginia Woolf with all the modernist fascists, as it were. He'd put her in a pile with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and so on. And actually, Virginia Woolf was a socialist feminist. And this didn't seem to have struck him because he was so keen to expose her frightful snobbery, which is what people in England reading Woolf, especially middle class blokes, were horrified by.And she is a snob, there's no doubt about it. But she knew that and she lacerated herself for it too. And I think he ignored all the other aspects of her. So I was angry about that. But he was the kind of person you could have a really good argument with. That was one of the really great things about John.Oliver: He seems to be someone else who was amenable and charming, but also very steely.Lee: Yes, I think he probably was I think he probably was. You can see that in his memoir, I think.Oliver: What was Carmen Callil like?Lee: Oh. She was a very important person in my life. It was she who got me involved in writing pieces for Virago. And it was she who asked me to write the life of Virginia Woolf for Chatto. And she was an enormous, inspiring encourager as she was to very many people. And I loved her.But I was also, as many people were, quite daunted by her. She was temperamental, she was angry. She was passionate. She was often quite difficult. Not a word I like to use about women because there's that trope of difficult women, but she could be. And she lost her temper in a very un-English way, which was quite a sight to behold. But I think of her as one of the most creative and influential publishers of the 20th century.Oliver: Will there be a biography of her?Lee: I don't know. Yes, it's a really interesting question, and I've been asking her executors whether they have any thoughts about that. Somebody said to me, oh, who wants a biography of a publisher? But, actually, publishers are really important people often, so I hope there would be. Yes. And it would need to be someone who understood the politics of feminism and who understood about coming from Australia and who understood about the Catholic background and who understood about her passion for France. And there are a whole lot of aspects to that life. It's a rich and complex life. Yes, I hope there will be someday.Oliver: Her papers are sitting there in the British Library.Lee: They are. And in fact—you kindly mentioned this to start with—I've just finished a biography of the art historian and novelist, Anita Brookner, who won the Booker prize in 1984 for a novel called Hotel du Lac.And Carmen and Anita were great buddies, surprisingly actually, because they were very different kinds of characters. And the year before she died, Carmen, who knew I was working on Anita, showed me all her diary entries and all the letters she'd kept from Anita. And that's the kind of generous person that she was.That material is now sitting in the British Library, along with huge reams of correspondence between Carmen and many other people. And it's an exciting archive.Oliver: She seems to have had a capacity to be friends with almost anyone.Lee: Yes, I think there were people she would not have wanted to be friends with. She was very disapproving of a lot of political figures and particularly right-wing figures, and there were people she would've simply spat at if she was in the room with them. But, yes, she an enormous range of friends, and she was, as I said, she was fantastically encouraging to younger women writers.And, also, another aspect of Carmen's life, which I greatly admired and was fascinated by: In Virago she would often be resuscitating the careers of elderly women writers who had been forgotten or neglected, including Antonia White and including Rosamund Lehmann. And part of Carmen's job at Virago, as she felt, was not just to republish these people, some of whom hadn't had a book published for decades, but also to look after them. And they were all quite elderly and often quite eccentric and often quite needy. And Carmen would be there, bringing them out and looking after them and going around to see them. And really marvelous, I think.Oliver: Yes, it is. Tell me about Brian Moore.Lee: Breean, as he called himself.Oliver: Oh, I'm sorry.Lee: No, it's all right. I think Brian became a friend because in the 1980s I had a book program on Channel 4, which was called Book Four. It had a very small audience, but had a wonderful time over several years interviewing lots and lots of writers who had new books out. We didn't have a budget; it was a table and two chairs and not the kind of book program you see on the television anymore. And I got to know Brian through that and through reviewing him a bit and doing interviews with him, and my husband and I would go out and visit him and his wife Jean.And I loved the work. I thought the work was such a brilliant mixture of popular cultural forms, like the thriller and historical novel and so on. And fascinating ideas about authority and religion and how to be free, how to break free of the bonds of what he'd grown up with in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, the bombs of religious autocracy, as it were. And very surreal in some ways as well. And he was also a very charming, funny, gregarious person who could be quite wicked about other writers.And, he was a wonderfully wicked and funny companion. What breaks my heart about Brian Moore is that while he was alive, he was writing a novel maybe every other year or every three years, and people would review them and they were talked about, and I don't think they were on academic syllabuses but they were really popular. And when he died and there were no more books, it just went. You can think of other writers like that who were tremendously well known in their time. And then when there weren't any more books, just went away. You ask people, now you go out and ask people, say, “What about The Temptation of Eileen Hughes or The Doctor's Wife or Black Robe? And they'll go, “Sorry?”Oliver: If anyone listening to this wants to try one of his novels, where do you say they should start?Lee: I think I would start with The Doctor's Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. And then if one liked those, one would get a taste for him. But there's plenty to choose from.Oliver: What about Catholics?Lee: Yes. Catholics is a wonderful book. Yes. Wonderful book. Bit like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, I think.Oliver: How important is religion to Penelope Fitzgerald's work?Lee: She would say that she felt guilty about not having put her religious beliefs more explicitly into her fiction. I'm very glad that she didn't because I think it is deeply important and she believes in miracles and saints and angels and manifestations and providence, but she doesn't spell it out.And so when at the end of The Gate of Angels, for instance, there is a kind of miracle on the last page but it's much better not to have it spelt out as a miracle, in my view. And in The Blue Flower, which is not my favorite of her books, but it's the book of the greatest genius possibly. And I think she was a genius. There is a deep interest in Novalis's romantic philosophical ideas about a spiritual life, beyond the physical life, no more doctrinally than that. And she, of course, believes in that. I think she believed, in an almost Platonic way, that this life was a kind of cave of shadows and that there was something beyond that. And there are some very mysterious moments in her books, which, if they had been explained as religious experiences, I think would've been much less forceful and much less intense.Oliver: What is your favorite of her books?Lee: Oh, The Beginning of Spring. The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow just before the revolution. And its concerns an Englishman who runs a print and publishing works. And it's based quite a lot on some factual narratives about people in Moscow at the time. And it's about the feeling of that place and that time, but it's also about being in love with two people at the same time.And, yes, and it's about cultural clashes and cultural misunderstanding, and it is an astonishingly evocative book. And when asked about this book, interviewers would say to Penelope, oh, she must have lived in Moscow for ages to know so much about it. And sometimes she would say, “Yes, I lived there for years.” And sometimes she would say, “No, I've never been there in my life.” And the fact was she'd had a week's book tour in Moscow with her daughter. And that was the only time she ever went to Russia, but she read. So it was a wonderful example of how she would be so wicked; she would lie.Oliver: Yes.Lee: Because she couldn't be bothered to tell the truth.Oliver: But wasn't she poking fun at their silly questions?Lee: Yes. It's not such a silly question. I would've asked her that question. It is an astonishing evocation of a place.Oliver: No, I would've asked it too, but I do feel like she had this sense of it's silly to be asked questions at all. It's silly to be interviewed.Lee: I interviewed her about three times—and it was fascinating. And she would deflect. She would deflect, deflect. When you asked her about her own work, she would deflect onto someone else's work or she would tell you a story. But she also got quite irritable.So for instance, there's a poltergeist in a novel called The Bookshop. And the poltergeist is a very frightening apparition and very strong chapter in the book. And I said to her in interview, “Look, lots of people think this is just superstition. There aren't poltergeists.” And she looked at me very crossly and said they just haven't been there. They don't know what they're talking about. Absolutely factual and matter of fact about the reality of a poltergeist.Oliver: What makes Virginia Woolf's literary criticism so good?Lee: Oh, I think it's a kind of empathy actually. That she has an extraordinary ability to try and inhabit the person that she's writing about. So she doesn't write from the point of view of, as it were, a dry, historical appreciation.She's got the facts and she's read the books, but she's trying to intimately evoke what it felt like to be that writer. I don't mean by dressing it up with personal anecdotes, but just she has an extraordinary way of describing what that person's writing is like, often in images by using images and metaphors, which makes you feel you are inside the story somehow.And she loves anecdotes. She's very good at telling anecdotes, I think. And also she's not soft, but she's not harshly judgmental. I think she will try and get the juice out of anything she's writing about. Most of these literary criticism pieces were written for money and against the clock and whilst doing other things.So if you read her on Dorothy Wordsworth or Mary Wollstonecraft or Henry James, there's a wonderful sense of, you feel your knowledge has been expanded. Knowledge in the sense of knowing the person; I don't mean in the sense of hard facts.Oliver: Sure. You've finished your Anita Brookner biography and that's coming this year.Lee: September the 10th this year, here and in the States.Oliver: What will you do next?Lee: Yes. That's a very good question, though a little soon, I feel.Oliver: Is there someone whose life you always wanted to write, but didn't?Lee: No. No, there isn't. Not at the moment. Who knows?Oliver: You are open to it. You are open.Lee: Who knows what will come up.Oliver: Yes. Hermione Lee, this was a real pleasure. Thank you very much.Lee: Thank you very much. It was a treat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk
A new independent report from the Provincial Forestry Advisory Council has been released saying that B.C's current forest management system is failing to meet the needs of communities, First Nations, businesses, and the environment. UBC Forestry professor Peter Wood reacts to the report and we ask how B.C's forestry industry should be rethought.
Peter Wood brought back the same peple from last month's show... State Representative's Natalie Zeleznikar, District 3B and Ned Carroll, District 42A as well as Pete Aube from Bemidji who talked about SAF or Sustainable Aviation Fuel...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Seeing the Wood for the Trees in Mission Find more episodes on Sanctuary First This week on the Emerging Emmaus Podcast we spoke to Peter Wood. Peter can certainly ‘see the wood for the trees' when it comes to mission. From The Congo, to Cambridge to Mission Officer of Lothian & Borders Presbytery, with warmth, passion & insight Pete shares about his role & how they're listening prayerfully & carefully to congregations, parishes & people to find ways to grow can-do cultures of Christ's mission. Short courses for the Church Community Be encouraged & inspired! Find all past episodes of the podcast on the Sanctuary First website, via our App and on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Join us as we discover, faith hope and stories of grief in the Church of Scotland. Come! Emmaus, Emerge from the gloom. Come Holy Spirit Come! #podcast #onlinechurch #sanctuaryfirst #emergingemmauspodcast
Peter Wood with State Representative's Natalie Zeleznikar, District 3B (Proctor, Hermantown, Two Harbors, etc.) and Ned Carroll, District 42A (western Twin Cities, Plymouth, etc.) as well as Pete Aube from Bemidji who talked about SAF Sustainable Aviation Fuel...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It's always a pleasure to welcome a member of the country training ranks to the podcast. This week it's Sally Taylor from the busy Coffs Harbour training hub, home to more than 100 horses. Sally's training career began with a bang in 2016 when she won the time honoured Grafton Cup with former Victorian galloper Rednav. She bases her training technique on giving horses a change of environment as often as possible. The thirty two year old joins us on the podcast to look back on her journey from pony club to the show ring and later to a six months stint with dual Melbourne Cup winning trainer Sheila Laxon in Victoria. The decision to train in her own right was encouraged by Peter Wood, owner of the Coffs Harbour Telstra shop in which Sally was working a decade ago. The lifetime horse lover talks of the benefits of keeping her team numbers under control. Sally acknowledges three recent wins by Mission To Win. She speaks of regular trips to nearby Boambee Beach where her horses enjoy working on “nature's racecourse.” Sally has been riding from an early age and still handles 10-12 horses in trackwork six days a week. She talks about two nearby properties where she's able to give her horses frequent changes of routine. Sally talks of childhood days at Corindi Beach and early tuition from her father Brian, owner and part time trainer. The thirty two year old remembers her six months with successful trainers John Symons and Sheila Laxon at Seymour. The talented trainer remembers her stint with expat Victorian Jim Jarvis who'd relocated to Coffs. She wonders how she ever found the time to complete an online course in vet nursing. Sally acknowledges the support of Peter Wood who encouraged her to train in her own right. She was working at the time in Peter's Coffs Harbour Telstra shop. She looks back on Peter's acquisition of the unsound Rednav, formerly a member of the Greg Eurell team in Melbourne. Sally takes us through Rednav's progression to the Grafton Cup and the thrill of winning one of country racing's most coveted prizes. Almost as thrilling as the Grafton Cup win was Rednav's success at Doomben sixteen days later, her first metropolitan win as a trainer. She pays tribute to another great favourite Zanardee's Lane whose owner is a member of the Sally Taylor Racing team. Sally looks back on Coffs Harbour Cup day 2024 when her only two runners scored impressive wins. She acknowledges a few other horses who've helped to get her training career off the ground. Taylor talks of Brett Dodson, fellow Coffs Harbour trainer and her partner of seven years. Sally pays special tribute to the staff members who contribute to the smooth running of Sally Taylor Racing. She talks about the online nursing degree she's currently undertaking. It's a laid back chat with a young horse devotee who's made a rapid impact in the NSW country training ranks.
Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy on Newark, air travel...stress on an aging system 13:26- Melee with ICE, local Dem pols in Newark 32:19- BLM Brandon reflects Dan has plans for Columbus statue 52:12- President of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, shares The unforgiving history of student loans Check out Peter’s most recent books Wrath: America Enraged and 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project 1:08:47- Steven Bucci, visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, covers the busy weekend of geo-political news from peace talks to gifted airplanes 1:31:19- Christopher Whalen, chairman of Whalen Global Advisors LLC & editor for The Institutional Risk Analyst: the chances of getting a tax deal done are falling rapidly Check out Chris’ just released Inflated: Money, Debt and the American Dream – 2nd Edition 1:47:43- Why DP is single 2:04:57- Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy...retained all safety personnel See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Joint Readiness Training Center is pleased to present the one-hundredth-and-one episode to air on ‘The Crucible - The JRTC Experience.' Hosted by the Senior Intelligence Observer-Coach-Trainer for the Intelligence Task Force, COL Cory Reiter on behalf of the Commander of Ops Group (COG). Today's guest is the senior military analyst at the China Desk within the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, KS, Mr. Peter Wood You can access Mr. Wood's intro to China reference booklet at: https://tr.ee/ukc6JINPfn The Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), located at the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is a key research organization dedicated to analyzing foreign military trends, doctrine, and operational concepts to inform U.S. military understanding and readiness. Within FMSO, the China Desk plays a crucial role by providing focused, open-source research on the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military strategies, and China's evolving approaches to multi-domain operations. The China Desk produces analytical reports, threat assessments, and scholarly publications that help inform U.S. Army and joint force planners about Chinese doctrine, modernization efforts, and lessons learned from regional and global conflicts. By maintaining deep subject matter expertise, the China Desk equips military leaders and planners with the insights needed to better prepare for competition and potential conflict with a sophisticated and adaptive peer adversary. This podcast episode provides a detailed introduction to China's threat tactics, offering U.S. military leaders and planners a foundational understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) approach modern warfare. The conversation highlights that China is assessed as the United States' primary pacing threat—not simply because of a single capability, but because of the integrated strength of its modernization efforts, personnel, training, and cross-domain investments. The episode explores how China blends military and civilian power through its concept of “military-civil fusion,” builds operational depth through advanced space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities, and sharpens its military edge through sophisticated training programs, including its own combat training centers. The discussion also addresses the widespread misunderstanding in U.S. circles that China's economic interdependence with the West deters it from military action, underscoring that China continues to develop systems and posture itself for protracted conflict, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. Additionally, the episode explores China's multi-domain approach to warfare, combining kinetic capabilities with influence operations, psychological warfare, legal maneuvers, and advanced technology integration. The discussion explains how China has invested in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, uncrewed systems, and resilient satellite communications to build decision advantage and disrupt U.S. capabilities. One critical takeaway is that the PLA is a learning organization—adapting through lessons from other global conflicts and continuously refining its doctrine and training. Best practices suggested for U.S. leaders include regularly incorporating China-based threat injects into training exercises, familiarizing staffs with Chinese operational concepts, and leveraging available resources such as the TRADOC G-2 China Landing Zone and red-team scenario materials. The episode closes by encouraging listeners to approach the China threat with intellectual rigor and humility, recognizing that the competition space is dynamic and requires constant adaptation and informed preparation. Part of S11 “Conversations with the Enemy” series. Again you can access Mr. Wood's intro to China reference booklet at: https://tr.ee/ukc6JINPfn For additional information and insights from this episode, please check-out our Instagram page @the_jrtc_crucible_podcast. Be sure to follow us on social media to keep up with the latest warfighting TTPs learned through the crucible that is the Joint Readiness Training Center. Follow us by going to: https://linktr.ee/jrtc and then selecting your preferred podcast format. Again, we'd like to thank our guests for participating. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us wherever you listen or watch your podcasts — and be sure to stay tuned for more in the near future. “The Crucible – The JRTC Experience” is a product of the Joint Readiness Training Center.
Mr. Peter Wood joins the Operational Arch to deep dive into China's counter-intervention strategy. This episode explores how this strategy fits into China's broader military doctrine as well as examining the nuances of China's approach to regional and global strategic competition.
Freddy Gray speaks to Peter Wood who is the President of the National Association of Scholars about Trump's decision to block Harvard funding after the university denied the President's DEI demands.
Freddy Gray speaks to Peter Wood who is the President of the National Association of Scholars about Trump's decision to block Harvard funding after the university denied the President's DEI demands.
This week, I sit down with Peter Wood, co-founder of The Graduate Guide, to discuss the biggest challenges facing university graduates in today's job market.With AI, automation, economic downturns, and the decline of traditional corporate careers, graduates are questioning whether a 9-to-5 job is still the best path.We explore why the graduate job market is so challenging, how to stand out in a competitive job market, the importance of personal branding on LinkedIn, and how to leverage social media for career success.Peter also shares his journey from history student to startup founder, offering insights on networking, breaking free from societal career norms, and finding opportunities beyond traditional corporate jobs.If you're a student, recent graduate, or considering a career change, this episode will give you practical strategies to future-proof your career, land better job opportunities, and navigate today's evolving job market.00:00 Trailer01:08 Challenges Facing Graduates02:03 Navigating the Job Market03:48 The Graduate Guide Mission05:12 Corporate vs. Entrepreneurial Paths08:04 Advice for Non-Traditional Career Paths09:10 Building a Personal Brand21:26 The Role of AI in Recruitment35:56 The Power of Personal Branding38:41 Building Your LinkedIn Presence41:50 Balancing Career and Personal Life45:47 Overcoming Social Pressure and Cringe56:14 The Journey of Building a Business01:00:20 Joining the Entrepreneurial Community Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Interview with Jesse Ferguson about traditional Irish songs on the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast #696. Subscribe now! Jesse Ferguson, Juha Rossi, The Byrne Brothers, Spoil the Dance, Telenn Tri, Fig for a Kiss, Mànran, Jigjam, Ironwood, Reilly, Misty Posey GET CELTIC MUSIC NEWS IN YOUR INBOX The Celtic Music Magazine is a quick and easy way to plug yourself into more great Celtic culture. Enjoy seven weekly news items for Celtic music and culture online. Subscribe now and get 34 Celtic MP3s for Free. VOTE IN THE CELTIC TOP 20 FOR 2025 This is our way of finding the best songs and artists each year. You can vote for as many songs and tunes that inspire you in each episode. Your vote helps me create this year's Best Celtic music of 2025 episode. You have just three weeks to vote this year. Vote Now! You can follow our playlist on Spotify and YouTube to listen to those top voted tracks as they are added every 2 - 3 weeks. THIS WEEK IN CELTIC MUSIC 0:02 - Intro: Jesse Ferguson 0:11 - Juha Rossi "Spotted Dog / Kataroni" from Irish Tunes on Mandolin 2:44 - WELCOME 5:33 - The Byrne Brothers "Trilogy" from The Boys of Doorin 10:25 - Spoil the Dance "The Maid on the Shore" from The Maid on the Shore - Single 14:52 - Telenn Tri "Mountain Road set" from The Cat's Meow 20:18 - Fig for a Kiss "Kildalton Bridge" from Wherever You Go 25:44 - FEEDBACK 29:47 - INTERVIEW WITH JESSE FERGUSON 30:38 - INTRO / THE MINSTREL BOY 34:07 - Jesse Ferguson “The Minstrel Boy” from TEN 36:23 - NEW ALBUM / DANNY BOY 40:05 - Jesse Ferguson “Danny Boy” from TEN 42:58 - YOUTUBE / FAIR AND TENDER LADIES 48:22 - Jesse Ferguson “Fair and Tender Ladies” from TEN 51:44 - THANKS 54:35 - The Stubby Shillelaghs “The Vodka Song” from Whiskey Business 56:48 - Mànran "San Cristóbal" from Ùrar 1:00:24 - Jigjam "Water's Hill" from Across The Pond 1:04:10 - Ironwood "Trip to Goa" from Gretna Green 1:07:09 - Reilly "Whiskey Grease" from Durty Pool 1:09:51 - CLOSING 1:11:06 - Misty Posey "Auld Lang Syne" from Celtic Voice of the Ancients 1:15:43 - CREDITS The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn, The Celtfather and our Patrons on Patreon. The show was edited by Mitchell Petersen with Graphics by Miranda Nelson Designs. Visit our website to follow the show. You'll find links to all of the artists played in this episode. Todd Wiley is the editor of the Celtic Music Magazine. Subscribe to get 34 Celtic MP3s for Free. Plus, you'll get 7 weekly news items about what's happening with Celtic music and culture online. Best of all, you will connect with your Celtic heritage. Please tell one friend about this podcast. Word of mouth is the absolute best way to support any creative endeavor. Finally, remember. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and talk with others about climate change. What are you doing to combat climate change? Let me know what you're doing. Start a discussion with someone today. Promote Celtic culture through music at http://celticmusicpodcast.com/. WELCOME THE IRISH & CELTIC MUSIC PODCAST * Helping you celebrate Celtic culture through music. I am Marc Gunn. I'm a Celtic musician and host of Folk Songs & Stories. This podcast is for fans of Celtic music. It is here to build a diverse Celtic community and help the incredible artists who so generously share their music with you. If you hear music you love, please email artists to let them know you heard them on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast. Musicians depend on your generosity to release new music. So please find a way to support them. Buy a CD, Album Pin, Shirt, Digital Download, or join their community on Patreon. You can find a link to all of the artists in the shownotes, along with show times, when you visit our website at celticmusicpodcast.com. Email follow@bestcelticmusic to learn how to subscribe to the podcast and get a free music - only episode. If you are a Celtic musician and want your music featured on the show, I would love to play your music. Please submit your band to be played on the podcast. You don't have to send in music or an EPK. You will get a free eBook called Celtic Musicians Guide to Digital Music and learn how to follow the podcast. It's 100% free. Just email follow@bestcelticmusic THANK YOU PATRONS OF THE PODCAST! I am blown away by your generosity. You are why I keep sharing new episodes four times per month. You're also how I am able to do that. Your kindness pays for our engineer, graphic designer, Celtic Music Magazine editor, and promotion of the podcast. Your kindness allows me to buy the music I play here. It also pays for my time creating the show each and every week. As a patron, you get ad - free and music - only episodes before regular listeners. You get to vote in the Celtic Top 20. You get free music downloads and sheet music. And you get a private feed to listen to the show or you can listen through the Patreon app. All that for as little as $3 per month. A special thanks to our Celtic Legends: Rick Boyce, Bruce, Daniel Ide, Brian McReynolds, Marti Meyers, Alan Schindler, Karen Harris, Margreta Silverstone, Emma Bartholomew, Dan mcDade, Gerald F Boyle, Miranda Nelson, Nancie Barnett, Kevin Long, Gary R Hook, Lynda MacNeil, John Sharkey White, II, Kelly Garrod, Mike Schock, Annie Lorkowski, Shawn Cali HERE IS YOUR THREE STEP PLAN TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST Go to our Patreon page. Decide how much you want to pledge every month, $3, $12, $25. Keep listening to the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast to celebrate Celtic culture through music. You can become a generous Patron of the Podcast on Patreon at SongHenge.com. TRAVEL WITH CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS Every year, I take a small group of Celtic music fans on the relaxing adventure of a lifetime. We don't see everything. Instead, we stay in one area. We get to know the region through its culture, history, and legends. You can join us with an auditory and visual adventure through podcasts and videos. In 2025, we're going to the Celtic nation of Galicia in Spain. We're gonna learn about the history and legends behind the Celts there and experience some amazing Galician Celtic music. Learn more about the invasion at http://celticinvasion.com/ #celticmusic #irishmusic #celticmusicpodcast I WANT YOUR FEEDBACK What are you doing today while listening to the podcast? I'd love to see a picture of what you're doing while listening. Is there a new Celtic CD or Celtic band that you heard of or saw? Send a picture. Email me at follow@bestcelticmusic. Peter Wood emailed about Stubby Shillelaghs: "Hi Mark, I wrote a few years ago about playing the show with my wife in the car on dates and on our wedding day, and now we are expecting our first child. We don't listen to the show together much anymore, but when we go to the Renaissance Faire we played it (just missed you again!) and I put it on when we went for a swim on a summer evening when she wanted music without getting interrupted by YouTube Music ads. Since this year's Renaissance festival she's asked a few times for Tartanic when she's been in the mood for "my" music. Recently I was listening to a different podcast that plays novelty songs around a theme (Bitslap with KBC if you're curious), and the theme of the week was Drinking, so of course some Celtic - sounding music came up, and for part of a set I thought I was listening to your show! Of the two songs in particular that got me confused, the first was the Vodka Song by Stubby Shillelaghs (https://youtu.be/h9YRbJSbPw0) which I'm unsure if it or the band have ever been played on your show. It was followed by Sober on St. Patrick's Day, and at first I thought I might have heard it on your show, but then when it got going I realized it wouldn't have fit in on your family friendly show. Turns out it's by Psychostick. I know you've got ties to the FuMP collective so you're probably already aware of it. The Vodka Song at least would be a fun one to play if you've got the permission." Patrick Rieger emailed photos from Ohio Renaissance Festival: "Hi Marc, My family and I, along with our friend Chenna from Nashville, spent Labor Day Weekend at the Ohio Renaissance Festival, three days of faire. Ohio is a big faire with plenty of celtic musicians, but even with three days we didn't see them all. We did see Captain John Stout (aka Richard Brentar), Donal Hinely, The Harper and the Minstrel, The Toasted Clover, The Jackdaws, Bettina Baudville, Seán Nós, and The Lady Victoria. I had never heard of a nose harmonica until I met Bettina Baudville; that is what she is playing in the photo. Also I never heard celtic music played on a ukulele until I met The Toasted Clover. Donal Hinely was featured on the Renaissance Festival Podcast years ago when you were still a host, but until this year I had not seen or heard him in person." Despite three long days of working the faire, Victoria was able to join us for a quick dinner one night. And before the weekend was done, the four of us already planned to go back next year."
It's Thursday Therapy, and we're bringing you a fiendishly good transfer special! Peter Wood, Matt Kandela, and Jacob Hawley dive into the latest Arsenal news, from our win over Girona to the Ollie Watkins rumors. Is he the missing piece for a title-winning squad, or should Arsenal hold out for a younger striker like Benjamin Šeško?
In this episode we were joined Peter Wood and Mike Jackson, from The Great Escape Project. They have spent a number of years first looking at what it was the POWs in the Great Escape produced, and then working out how they managed to make them given the limited resources available within the camp. We were therefore delighted to be joined by Peter and Mike to talk about the tailoring and manufacturing production line within the Great Escape.For You The War Is Over is a podcast that looks at the real life stories of Prisoner-of-War escapes from the the Second World War. Hosted by Dave Robertson and Tony Hoskins, each episode looks at a new escape. If you would like to follow us on Twitter we can be found @FYTWIO we can also be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/FYTWIO/ or if you would prefer to send a more long form message we can also be reached via email at FYTWIOpodcast@gmail.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
BC Conservatives announce their Forestry Plans Guest: Dr. Peter Wood, Lecturer and coordinator, Master of international forestry, UBC Dept of Forest resources management Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Baxie talks to longtime New Jersey rock fixture Tom Kanach. After years of playing around New York and New Jersey, Tom is out with a new band which features top notch players like former David Johansen guitar player Johnny Rao and Peter Wood from Dramarama. The name of the new band is KANAK and their first EP (which came out earlier this year) called "On the Outside" was produced by the legendary Ed Stasium! Their next EP is slated to come out next month. And their music has been great! Tom talk all about that and many of the other people who have been instrumental in his music career! Incredible story! Listen on Apple Podcast, SoundCloud, Spotify, and on the Rock102 website! Brought to you by Metro Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Chicopee
In the last episode of season three, Mark Smith is joined by one of the most talented historians of the American South and author of the one of the most important books ever written on the region: Peter H. Wood. Professor Wood is author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740. A landmark work published fifty years ago, Black Majority has stood the test of time. Find out why on today's episode.
Obstetrician and Gynecologist Doctor Peter Wood from the Sydney Adventist Hospital joins John to discuss Perimenopause and Menorrhagia. Listen to John Stanley live from 8pm-12am, Monday to Thursday on 2GB/4BCSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, joins Mark Reardon to discuss his latest piece in The Spectator headlined, "How NPR Became a Joke."
Hour 2: Sue has today's Sue's News on Caitlin Clark's Nike endorsement, an unfortunate resume typo, and the Random Fact of the Day on deaths caused by deer. Then, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, joins Mark Reardon to discuss his latest piece in The Spectator headlined, "How NPR Became a Joke." Later, Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, joins Mark to share her Title IX concerns.
"It's a beautiful life that we could be living in each moment, but what many of us decide to do is to drown ourselves in false electronic contentment," said Michael Toscano, executive director of the Institute for Family Studies. In his new First Things article "Recovering our Memory" Michael writes, "It became quickly apparent to me that smartphones and social media were beginning to subject the people around me—smart, disciplined, hard-working people—to a profound change. They were more hunched over, prone to glancing at the device during conversations, and scrolling. Always scrolling." Michael is a leader in efforts nationwide to adopt laws to make technology safer for kids. He has written on family policy, tech policy, the uses of technology to reshape work, and the effect of technological change on America's republican form of government. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The New York Post, First Things, Compact, The American Conservative, National Review, and elsewhere. Under his leadership, IFS has more than doubled its annual budget and quadrupled its research output. He is co-author with Peter Wood of "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Liberal Arts College Shapes Students" (2013). Follow Michael and his work at the Institute for Family Studies at https://ifstudies.org
For the first Americano episode of 2024, Freddy Gray is joined by Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars to discuss Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard University. On the podcast Freddy and Peter discuss Gay's accusations of plagiarism; how the row has became wrapped up in racism, and what this means for the future of affirmative action in America. The Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts – including this one – as well as our YouTube channel Spectator TV. Follow the link to read the full job listing: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wanted-a-broadcast-producer-for-the-spectator-2/
For the first Americano episode of 2024, Freddy Gray is joined by Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars to discuss Claudine Gay's resignation from Harvard University. On the podcast Freddy and Peter discuss Gay's accusations of plagiarism; how the row has became wrapped up in racism, and what this means for the future of affirmative action in America. The Spectator is hiring! We are looking for a new producer to join our broadcast team working across our suite of podcasts – including this one – as well as our YouTube channel Spectator TV. Follow the link to read the full job listing: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wanted-a-broadcast-producer-for-the-spectator-2/
Fresh off his appearance on the season premiere of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, David Schwartz chats with Peter Wood about the crazy, winding path that finally got him onto national television.Follow @DavidSchwartzMagic on Instagram, and check out http://DavidSchwartzMagic.com for David's events in the NYC area!To support Peter's Museum of the Impossible, visit http://MuseumoftheImpossible.comFor Peter Wood's public shows, private events, and more, head on over to http://OfTheImpossible.com and follow @TheImpossiblePW on social media.
In our second and final hour from Lou Fusz Plaza and the CITY SC playoff rally, Nate & Jen discuss last night's lost to Seattle and preview the playoffs. Plus, we chat with Peter Wood, Charles Boehm and Diego Gigliani.
China's infiltration of American K-12 schools is “almost everywhere,” according to Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. “That is, in every state that we've looked at, we have found instances of it, but I would say it's concentrated in the feeder schools to elite education, which means mostly West Coast and East Coast, but not exclusively those,” Wood says. “The effort here is, China's not just spreading around its resources promiscuously across the land. It's looking for places where buying influence will yield results in the long term,” he adds. “So, it's widespread, but much more prevalent here on the East Coast and California.”In April, The Heritage Foundation awarded the National Association of Scholarsits Innovation Prize, which “is intended to spark creative disruption in the conservative movement as we strive to ensure the future of American self-governance.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)Wood joins today's episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss some of the concerns surrounding the Chinese Communist Party's influence in our education system and some of the other work the National Association of Scholars has been doing in addition to digging into China's infiltration of and influence in K-12 schools. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
China's infiltration of American K-12 schools is “almost everywhere,” according to Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. “That is, in every state that we've looked at, we have found instances of it, but I would say it's concentrated in the feeder schools to elite education, which means mostly West Coast and East […]
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Barry Anderson and Mariam Memarsadeghi interview Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. Dr. Wood discusses the invention of the modern concept of diversity and how it has replaced earlier understandings of human unity, liberty, and equality as exemplified by […]
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Barry Anderson and Mariam Memarsadeghi interview Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars. Dr. Wood discusses the invention of the modern concept of diversity and how it has replaced earlier understandings of human unity, liberty, and equality as exemplified by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights message of “a single garment of destiny." He traces the history of U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the use of diversity in college admissions while also addressing how a culture of anger seems to pervade American life, including our music and politics. Dr. Wood concludes the interview with a reading from his latest book Wrath: America Enraged.Stories of the Week: Barry discussed a piece in First Things in which Mark Bauerlein discusses rising Catholic school enrollments and gives a defense of traditional liberal arts education; Mariam cited an Axios story discussing a recent Gallup poll which found declines in American patriotism, with just 18 percent of those ages 18-34 feeling very proud to be Americans.
Only 72% of Americans can read to 6th grade level. Freddy is joined by Peter Wood to talk about how this has happened, and why it is getting worse. What political and cultural factors have diminished the importance of reading and writing in education, and with students already using AI, where does America go from here?
0:00 - Dan & Amy react to NU's firing of Pat Fitzgerald 14:08 - THE GREAT DISINTEGRATION: The incompetence of the gun banners 30:52 - Climate change hype not so hot 50:25 - Dan & Amy want to know if you're ready for your "everyday COVID shot" 01:00:57 - We all agree Pat Fitzgerald got a raw deal, right? 01:23:24 - President at Wirepoints, Ted Dabrowski: "Illinois is like a third world country." Get Ted's latest at wirepoints.org 01:38:16 - President of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, on the Supreme Court's Harvard decision and a better way to go to college 01:52:35 - Dan Proft's Parenting Tips: Amy's son won't tell her where he's workingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode of The P.A.S. Report Podcast, Professor Nick Giordano talks with Professor Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, about the dire state of higher education. Focusing on Professor Wood's thought-provoking article, “After College: The coming cultural collapse of American higher education,” published in Quillette, they explore the downward spiral in enrollment and the shifting narrative away from the once-ubiquitous belief that "college is for everybody." With keen insight, Professor Wood sheds light on the pervasive anti-American sentiment on college campuses nationwide, exposing the unsettling paradox of institutions relying on the very citizens they denigrate. The value of higher education continues to plummet as a direct result of numerous self-inflicted wounds. More Information If you enjoyed this episode and found it useful, please give The P.A.S. Report Podcast a 5-star rating and take 30 seconds to write a review. Make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Please share this episode on social media and with your family and friends. Support The P.A.S. Report Podcast by Visiting Our Advertisers Stock up on all your survival needs and visit 4Patriots. 4Patriots champions freedom and self-reliance. Use code PAS to get 10% off your order. Protect your money from the out-of-control Washington D.C. spending. Visit Goldco today to get the Gold IRA Kit Americans are using to protect their retirement savings. Goldco is offering up to $10,000 in bonus silver when opening a qualified IRA account, just for being a P.A.S. Report listener. Don't forget to visit https://pasreport.com. *PA Strategies, LLC. may earn advertising revenue or a small commission for promoting products or when you make a purchase through any affiliate links on this website and within this post.
We sat down with Peter Wood in March of 2023 to discuss his long and storied history on Block Island. As owner of the Block Island Times back in the 70's-80's Peter kept island residents abreast of what was happening on the island. It wasn't always an easy job.Sadly, the island lost Peter a bit over two weeks ago. Please enjoy this episode and our chat with another island icon.
Peter was invited to be a guest on the PREMIERE episode of the Cardtopia World Podcast, along with Tricia Bouras, President of Global Entertainment Division at Cartamundi AND President & CEO of United States Playing Card Company. M Aroonrut, Creative Director at Universal Admedia, led a fun discussion about playing cards, magic, and the upcoming Cardtopia convention this November in NYC!For more about Cardtopia, including more podcast episodes and convention registration, head on over to http://CardtopiaWorld.com Also, don't forget to follow @cardtopiaworld on the socials.To support Peter's Museum of the Impossible, visit http://MuseumoftheImpossible.comFor Peter Wood's public shows, private events, and more, head on over to http://OfTheImpossible.com and follow @TheImpossiblePW on social media.
0:00 - Dan & Amy critique outsider views of Chicago's mayoral race, take a look at last night's debate and address John Catanzara's comments 15:33 - Dan & Amy react to yesterday's senate testimony from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas 35:02 - Dan & Amy go over new information about the school shooting Nashville, including the hero police officer who is from Chicago 55:20 - President of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, asks How real is America's discontent? For more from Peter, check out his book Wrath: America Enraged 01:10:24 - THE PURGE/THE REVOLT: Matt Taibi vs The IRS 01:23:11 - Dan & Amy find a silver lining from the police response in Nashville and offer more info on our local hero Officer Rex Engelbert 01:25:43 - Noted economist Stephen Moore shares the time the IRS came to his house and busts a few union myths that may have affected Michigan's repeal of the right to work law. For more from Steve @StephenMoore 01:43:10 - Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Corrects the Record on Social Transition and shows how good intentions can have bad results 01:58:45 - Single and Conservative in the city See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On Friday's Mark Levin Show, the Biden Administration knowingly chose their climate activism ideology and agenda over American national security and the needs of American citizens. This was confirmed in a leaked internal memo, admitting charging fossil fuel companies less drill would provide greater energy security, but instead chose to hike up royalty fees in the name of climate change. The Biden administration is literally putting their radical climate agenda before the needs of the citizens of the United States. Also, Hunter Biden advised then-Vice President Joe Biden's press secretary on how to handle questions about Hunter's involvement with Burisma. This is a glaring conflict of interest because of Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine policy at the time. How many more breadcrumbs does the FBI and DOJ need to finally prosecute the Biden crime family? Also, Nikole Hannah-Jones was all over the media to push her docuseries about the racist 1619 Project, but opponents of the 1619 Project like Peter Wood aren't allowed on the same shows to defend themselves. This ideology used to be considered only for kooks and radicals, but now Critical Race Theory is the mainstream ideology of the Democrat party. Later, Mark is joined by author and Tablet Magazine columnist Lee Smith about how the Biden State Department is trying to topple and smear Benjamin Netanyahu just like they did to President Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Introducing my biggest and most ambitious project ever: The Museum of the Impossible!http://MuseumoftheImpossible.comBy day, it'll be a walk-through attraction featuring unique, interactive magic illusions. By night, it'll become a theater space for ticketed public shows and private events.I want it to feel like Ripley's Believe It or Not meets Harry Potter. Just the right theatrical lighting, the perfect background music, and one-of-a-kind interactive exhibits that let folks experience impossiblilities first hand.If you're able to throw a few bucks my way each month, we can build it together. The more you're able to help out, and the more folks we can get on board, the faster we can turn this dream into a reality!Thanks for your support, and I can't wait to welcome you into the Museum of the Impossible.To support Peter's Museum of the Impossible, visit http://MuseumoftheImpossible.comFor Peter Wood's public shows, private events, and more, head on over to http://OfTheImpossible.com and follow @TheImpossiblePW on social media.
In this episode we chat to Peter Wood a comedian with many stories to tell, with 14 years experienced who has become a regular MC at one of Scotlands biggest comedy, Breakneck comedy, here is what we discussed:[[03:18]] How being taken the piss out of led to me being a comic [[05:02]] How a lot of comedy comes from pain [[11:43]] How Glasgow and Edinburgh hate each other [[18:03]] How people from different places banter and engage [[19:41]] Comedians are a lot like high school children [[22:08]] Comedy vs music [[29:22]] Is the reason for offence people not going through enough hard knocks [[41:17]] At what point do we forgive and forget If you would like to know more about Peter, you can reach him on Facebook at peterwoodcomedy, Twitter at @pwcomedian and Tiktok at scottishlion. If you enjoyed the episode you can help support the podcast by donating to the Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/thecomediansparadise (https://www.patreon.com/thecomediansparadise) or follow Marvin through his Linktree at https://linktr.ee/theflopmaster?fbclid=IwAR0rA0Ybj-P-sF1jpUdbl22JNpY8stfnZtM0QswrTea3frDvNl3sP0H6V1Q (https://linktr.ee/theflopmaster).
In this episode of The CITY Voice, St Louis CITY SC's Director of Sports Performance Jarryd Phillips sits down with Peter Wood for a deep dive on kinesiology and exercise science – and how it's woven into the fabric of our playing style.
CITY Voice host Peter Wood sits down with St Louis CITY SC goalkeeper Roman Bürki to talk about his journey to America and how he's adjusting to life with his new MLS club.
The Christian Outlook – July 30, 2022 Don Kroah turns to Katie Tubb, of the Heritage Foundation, to talk about President Biden's intent to take executive action to address climate change. Kevin McCullough talks with New York Congressman Lee Zeldin about increasing violence directed at our leaders following the recent attempt on his life. Brian From and Steven Coble, of “The Common Good” program, talk with Jay Kim, Silicon Valley pastor, about his book, “Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age.” Tim Gaydos and Gregory Jantz talk about Jantz's book, “Social Media and Depression: How to be Healthy and Happy in the Digital Age.” Georgene Rice talks with Peter Wood, about his book, “Wrath: America Enraged.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Christian Outlook – May 21, 2022 Dr. Albert Mohler looks at the mass shooting at the grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Craig Roberts turns to Lance Izumi, of the Pacific Research Institute, to talk about the heavy price our children have paid because of the government's response to the virus and their parent's frustration. Bob Burney turns to Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance to talk about the political process if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Charlie Kirk talks with pro-life activist Seth Gruber about the challenge and the opportunity to make the case for life anew and afresh. Tim Gaydos talks with Gregory Jantz about his book, “Social Media and Depression: How to be Healthy and Happy in the Digital Age.” Georgene Rice and author Peter Wood, talk about his book, “Wrath: America Enraged.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
0:00 - Dan and guest host Jeanne Ives ask “Should the FBI still exist?” 13:48 -Buy me some peanuts and Cracker… 28:26 -Disney Doubles Down 50:55 - Dan & Jeanne head to the Wiener Circle with Lori Lightfoot to learn more about her Big Love initiative 01:07:26 - Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation, Lt Col James Carafano, and the question of proportionality. Check out Jim's most recent book Brutal War: Jungle Fighting in Papua New Guinea, 1942 01:26:30 - Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars: How ‘questioning authority' gave us wokeness. Check out Peter's latest for Spectator World here 01:39:59 - Former Chief Asst. U.S. Attorney & Contributing Editor at National Review, Andrew McCarthy, weighs on on the Whitmer kidnapping verdict. Follow Andy on twitter @AndrewCMcCarthy 01:57:38 - Senior Contributor for American Greatness and author of Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President, Julie Kelly, discusses FBI misconduct and how the Whitmer kidnapping case Was Flagrant Election Interference. Follow Julie on twitter @julie_kelly2 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
An examination of the reasons why people believe the 2020 election was "rigged," stolen, or otherwise illegitimate. This includes a talk with Peter Wood, a sociologist and political thinker and writer, who strongly believes that the 2020 election was stolen. Other topics discussed: election distrust by liberals (in 2016, for example), and how election distrust and chaos is a common endpoint for very polarized democratic nations.
TOPICS: Safety in the game of football, the recent book WRATH, drug addiction at the atomic level, & Hillsdale's Visiting Writers ProgramHost Scot Bertram talks with John J. Miller, Director of Hillsdale's Dow Journalism Program and author of THE BIG SCRUM, discusses changes made to keep the game of football safe and how President Teddy Roosevelt helped save the sport. Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, talks about his recent book WRATH: AMERICA ENRAGED. Kelli Kazmier, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Hillsdale, describes drug addiction at the atomic level and shares some of her research. And Dutton Kearney, Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale and director of the school's Visiting Writers Program, gives us an overview of the project.John J. Miller (0:51), Peter Wood (12:53), Kelli Kazmier (25:46), and Dutton Kearney (40:50)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We're taking a bit of a New Year's break but we are offering up two previously featured Season Pass stories. “The Man in the Alley” written by T. Michael Argent (Story starts around 00:03:50) Produced by: Phil Michalski Cast: Amanda – Nichole Goodnight, Claire – Mary Murphy “The Lost Sound of Peter Wood” written by Neil Noon (Story starts around 00:22:45) Produced by: Jesse Cornett Cast: Annie Lantham – Erika Sanderson, Peter Wood – James Cleveland, 1971 News Announcer – Andy Cresswell, 1946 News Announcer – David Ault, 2019 News Announcer – Penny Scott-Andrews This episode is sponsored by: Truebill – Truebill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need, want, or simply forgot about. Start cancelling today at Truebill.com/nosleep. It could save you THOUSANDS a year. ShipStation – ShipStation makes it super easy to manage and ship all your online orders faster, cheaper and more efficiently. Let Shipstation make the busy holiday shopping season goes smoothly for you. Go to shipstation.com and click the microphone icon at the top of the page. Enter code NOSLEEP to get a 60-day free trial. Click here to learn more about The NoSleep Podcast team Click here to learn more about T. Michael Argent Click here to learn more about Neil Noon Executive Producer & Host: David Cummings Musical score composed by: Brandon Boone “Holiday Hiatus Vol. 1” illustration courtesy of Alexandra Cruz Audio program ©2022 – Creative Reason Media Inc. – All Rights Reserved – No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steve Bannon, Jack Maxey, and Greg Manz discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic as the gang celebrates Thanksgiving. Calling in is Heather MacDonald, Matt Guedes, Dr. Peter Wood, Francesca DiPaola to celebrate and honor our nation's heritage.