Podcast appearances and mentions of William Boyd

In 1949, film star William Boyd brought his most famous character, cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy (based on a literary character), to television. The series was initially presented in the form of edited versions of the original films, then as a series of half-hour episodes from 1952 to 1954.

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

(00:46) Die «Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt» – so der Titel der Schweizer Ausstellung an der Architekturbiennale in Venedig. Weitere Themen: (05:46) «Zwei weibliche Halbakte»: die neue Graphic Novel des französischen Zeichners Luz – erzählt aus der Perspektive eines Gemäldes. (10:01) In Basel kommt Game-Musik auf die Bühne – beteiligt ist das Sinfonieorchester Basel. (14:39) William Boyd veröffentlicht seinen 18. Roman «Brennender Mond» – Auftakt einer neuen Trilogie.

Welcome back to another Friday special. This week's bonus episode features an interview with The Times and Sunday Times' Literary Editor, Robbie Millen, from our Times Radio afternoon show (2–4 pm, Monday to Thursday). Robbie joins us for our weekly round-up of the best book releases. His picks this week were: 'The Homemade God' by Rachel Joyce'Consider Yourself Kissed' by Jessica StanleyVE Day piece by William Boyd in The Times'The Names' by Florence KnappSpeaking of books, get your next book club suggestion in! We'll make a selection at the end of next week. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: janeandfi@times.radioFollow us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Boyd braucht nur wenige Seiten, um seine Figuren äußerst lebendig vor unserem geistigen Auge erscheinen zu lassen.

Die Biografie über einen begnadeten Künstler. So geschrieben und erzählt, dass man sich lange an ihn erinnern wird. Ein rasanter Aufstieg vom Tellerwäscherkind zum gefeierten Maler. Durch Boyd lebt er dermaßen wieder auf, dass David Bowie sein größter Fan wird. Und Stanz und der Keidel auch. Der Waaahnsinn!

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William Boyd is the author of eighteen novels, five short story collections and numerous screenplays. His first published novel, A Good Man in Africa, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. He is well known for writing ‘whole life' novels including Any Human Heart which he adapted as a BAFTA-winning television series. He was born in Accra in Ghana where his Scottish father worked as a doctor, specialising in tropical medicine. In 1964 the family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where he witnessed the Nigerian Civil War – the Biafran War – which had a profound effect on him both personally and professionally.He read English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and became a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. During this period he wrote novels and short stories on the side until his breakthrough novel, A Good Man in Africa, was published in 1981. In 2005 he was appointed CBE for services to literature.William lives in London with his wife Susan and over 10,000 books.DISC ONE: Sunday - Mandy Patinkin (George), Sunday in the Park with George Original Broadway Cast Ensemble and Orchestra DISC TWO: Sorry Sorry - Femi Kuti DISC THREE: Away Down the River - Alison Krauss DISC FOUR: Que reste-t-il de nos amours - Charles Trenet DISC FIVE: Daniel - Elton John DISC SIX: Britten: Violin Concerto, Op. 15: 1. Moderato con moto. Performed by Janine Jansen (violin) London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Paavo Järvi DISC SEVEN: Brahms: Horn Trio In E Flat, Op. 40 - 1. Andante - Poco più animato. Performed by György Sebök (piano) Arthur Grumiaux (violin), Francis Orval (horn) DISC EIGHT: Al Otro Lado del Río - Jorge DrexlerBOOK CHOICE: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov LUXURY ITEM: A piano CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Daniel - Elton JohnPresenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Beatrice speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of health safety and environmental law since the 1970s, and how the political and economic factors that structure how those risks are assessed have resulted in law and policy far less likely to protect against environmental and health hazards. This episode was originally released for patrons on August 5th, 2024, as Artie explains in a brief note at the top of the show. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod Find William's articles here: How Environmental Law Created a World Awash in Toxic Chemicals (LPE Blog) - https://lpeproject.org/blog/how-environmental-law-created-a-world-awash-in-toxins/ De-Risking Environmental Law - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4753197 Find our book Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new book, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny Death Panel merch here (patrons get a discount code): www.deathpanel.net/merch As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod

Wenzel, Tobias www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

Wenzel, Tobias www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

Wenzel, Tobias www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Lesart

This week: Nigel's gang – Reform's plan for power. Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it's clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage's new gang. There are ‘the lifers' – Dan Jukes and ‘Posh George' Cottrell. Then there are the Tory defectors, trained by Richard Murphy, a valued CCHQ veteran, who is described as a ‘secret weapon'. The most curious new additions are the Gen Zers, who include Tucker Carlson's nephew, Charles Carlson, and Jack Anderton, known as ‘the Matrix'. Katy and James joined the podcast to lift the lid on Nigel Farage's inner circle. (02:14) Next: is technology a help or hindrance when it comes to missing people? While smartphones are no doubt useful in emergency situations, they create the expectation that you will always be in touch – when sometimes, of course, you can't be. But what happens when technology fails? Ross Clark tells the hilarious story of how he mistakenly became a ‘missing person' after his phone died while hiking in Scotland. Ross joins the podcast to unpack the lessons from his day getting the full Lord Lucan treatment, alongside journalist and political correspondent for GB News Katherine Forster. Katherine's sons, who used smartphones to track a hiking route, went missing last year in Bali when their phones died and they were unable to contact anyone. (17:33) And finally: how do you make Bond great again? James Bond seems to have lost his way. Gone is the charm, wit and romp of the original Connery and Moore Bonds, replaced by a grittier, more vengeful Bond with bloated plotlines that are far too referential. Amazon – which took full ‘creative control' of the franchise this week – faces quite the task in rebooting the world's most famous spy once again. Journalist Madeline Grant gives her prescription in the magazine on how to save Bond, but we are joined on the podcast by William Boyd, who is part of an elite class of authors to have written their own James Bond novels. (28:29) Hosted by William Moore and Lara Prendergast. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.

This week: Nigel's gang – Reform's plan for power. Look at any opinion survey or poll, and it's clear that Reform is hard to dismiss, write Katy Balls and James Heale. Yet surprisingly little is known about the main players behind the scenes who make up Nigel Farage's new gang. There are ‘the lifers' – Dan Jukes and ‘Posh George' Cottrell. Then there are the Tory defectors, trained by Richard Murphy, a valued CCHQ veteran, who is described as a ‘secret weapon'. The most curious new additions are the Gen Zers, who include Tucker Carlson's nephew, Charles Carlson, and Jack Anderton, known as ‘the Matrix'. Katy and James joined the podcast to lift the lid on Nigel Farage's inner circle. (02:14) Next: is technology a help or hindrance when it comes to missing people? While smartphones are no doubt useful in emergency situations, they create the expectation that you will always be in touch – when sometimes, of course, you can't be. But what happens when technology fails? Ross Clark tells the hilarious story of how he mistakenly became a ‘missing person' after his phone died while hiking in Scotland. Ross joins the podcast to unpack the lessons from his day getting the full Lord Lucan treatment, alongside journalist and political correspondent for GB News Katherine Forster. Katherine's sons, who used smartphones to track a hiking route, went missing last year in Bali when their phones died and they were unable to contact anyone. (17:33) And finally: how do you make Bond great again? James Bond seems to have lost his way. Gone is the charm, wit and romp of the original Connery and Moore Bonds, replaced by a grittier, more vengeful Bond with bloated plotlines that are far too referential. Amazon – which took full ‘creative control' of the franchise this week – faces quite the task in rebooting the world's most famous spy once again. Journalist Madeline Grant gives her prescription in the magazine on how to save Bond, but we are joined on the podcast by William Boyd, who is part of an elite class of authors to have written their own James Bond novels. (28:29) Hosted by William Moore and Lara Prendergast. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119936307 Beatrice speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of health safety and environmental law since the 1970s, and how the political and economic factors that structure how those risks are assessed have resulted in law and policy far less likely to protect against environmental and health hazards. Get Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new book here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny Runtime 1:22:10

Today's episode is a chat with the acclaimed and bestselling author, William Boyd. He has written countless books including a Solo a Bond novel, screenplays, operas and he even took part in a brilliant art hoax with David Bowie. Last month I had the chance to talk with him about his new book, Gabriel's Moon, the first in a trilogy of espionage novels set in the 1960s featuring the hero Gabriel Dax. We cover that period, spy writing and plenty of other subjects. I should mention that this episode first appeared on our sister podcast SpyMasters and you should definitely check it out where my colleague Antonia Senior interviews spy authors, historians and maybe even a few spooks themselves. William Boyd Links Gabriel's Moon William Boyd & David Bowie Art Hoax Aspects of History Links Latest Issue out - Annual Subscription to Aspects of History Magazine only $9.99/£9.99 Ollie on X Aspects of History on Instagram Get in touch: history@aspectsofhistory.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Support us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/user?u=4279967Jack Benny TV Videocasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6BDar4CsgVEyUloEQ8sWpw?si=89123269fe144a10Jack Benny Show OTR Podcast!https://open.spotify.com/show/3UZ6NSEL7RPxOXUoQ4NiDP?si=987ab6e776a7468cJudy Garland and Friends OTR Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/5ZKJYkgHOIjQzZWCt1a1NN?si=538b47b50852483dStrange New Worlds Of Dimension X-1 Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6hFMGUvEdaYqPBoxy00sOk?si=a37cc300a8e247a1Buck Benny YouTube Channelhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrOoc1Q5bllBgQA469XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891281/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2f%40BuckBenny/RK=2/RS=nVp4LDJhOmL70bh7eeCi6DPNdW4-Support us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/user?u=4279967

Join Oliver Webb-Carter as he talks to William Boyd, the best-selling novelist, about his new book Gabriel's Moon. Gabriel Dax is a young man in sixties London who becomes drawn into the murky world of espionage. William and Oliver talk about why literary writers are drawn to writing spy novels. They talk about James Bond, and Graham Greene and the art of writing. Buy the book here. Follow William Boyd here. Thank you for listening to Spymasters. Don't forget to give us a follow and tell your friends, so we can keep bringing you the best authors in the business talking about spies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Meg Wolitzer presents stories of inspiration small and large. In these tales, writers investigate moments in which art inspires life, or life inspires art, especially in a visual medium. In Elizabeth Crane's “Blue Girl,” read by Valorie Curry, a young woman's secret life is given an unusual public forum. In Jai Chakrabarti's “Lessons with Father,” commissioned for our Small Odysseys anthology, a middle-aged child tries to connect with her late father through brushstrokes. The reader is Purva Bedi. And in William Boyd's “Varengeville,” read by Dan Stevens, a young man strays from his famous family as he discovers himself on canvas. 

Best selling author and screenwriter William Boyd returns to our bookshelves, again drawn to the world of espionage.

Ewald Engelen en Marianne Thieme gaan in gesprek met acteur Gijs Scholten van Aschat. Enkele dagen daarvoor zagen ze hem optreden in de schouwburg in de hilarische maar ook beklemmende voorstelling Cliënt E. Busken, naar het boek van Jeroen Brouwers. In deze aflevering praten ze met Gijs over de kunst van het onthouden, het verschil tussen de taal van vroeger en nu, het gebrek aan verbeelding in de politiek, de terreur van jeugdigheid en de marginalisering van ouderdom en sterven. Gijs had niet één, niet twee, maar maar liefst drie tips voor de luisteraar! Allereerst de voorstelling De zaak Shell, die na vier jaar opnieuw wordt opgevoerd. Daarnaast Antigone in regie van Nina Spijkers door het Nationaal Theater. En als klap op de vuurpijl: een prachtig boek om dagenlang bij weg te dromen, The Romantic van de Britse schrijver William Boyd.Redactie en editing: Gizelle Mijnlieff Muziek: Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati), Alain Romans & Frank Barcellini Logo Podcast: Herman van BostelenSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Michael and Pax finish watching the Budd Boetticher / Randolph Scott Westerns with Comanche Station, also starring Nancy Gates and Claude Akins. And Michael also watched a couple of 1930s Westerns: Buck Jones and Louise Brooks in Empty Saddles (1936) and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy in Partners of the Plains (1938).

Elisabeth Easther reviews Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd published by Penguin Random House

Their second picture My Friend Irma Goes West (1950) https://archive.org/download/01-martin-lewis/03%20MY%20FRIEND%20IRMA%20GOES%20WEST.1950.mp4 Support us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/user?u=4279967Jack Benny TV Videocasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6BDar4CsgVEyUloEQ8sWpw?si=89123269fe144a10Jack Benny Show OTR Podcast!https://open.spotify.com/show/3UZ6NSEL7RPxOXUoQ4NiDP?si=987ab6e776a7468cJudy Garland and Friends OTR Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/5ZKJYkgHOIjQzZWCt1a1NN?si=538b47b50852483dStrange New Worlds Of Dimension X-1 Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6hFMGUvEdaYqPBoxy00sOk?si=a37cc300a8e247a1Buck Benny YouTube Channelhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrOoc1Q5bllBgQA469XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891281/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2f%40BuckBenny/RK=2/RS=nVp4LDJhOmL70bh7eeCi6DPNdW4-Support us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/user?u=4279967

This week, we take a look back at Fintan O'Toole's pre-election assessment of Keir Starmer; and revisit a conversation with William Boyd.'Keir Starmer: The Biography', by Tom Baldwin'November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World WarII', by Peter Englund', translated by Peter GravesProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/109524186 Beatrice speaks with William Boyd about how “risk assessment” became a central focus of health safety and environmental law since the 1970s, and how the political and economic factors that structure how those risks are assessed have resulted in law and policy far less likely to protect against environmental and health hazards. Get Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism Find Jules' new book here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3054-a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny Runtime 1:22:10, 5 August 2024

Esi Edugyan's thrilling novel follows the astonishing adventures of its titular character, Washington Black, whose escape from the brutal cane plantations of Barbados was only the beginning. Shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize and set to be released as a glitzy television adaptation starring Sterling K Brown and co-produced by Edugyan later this year, what better excuse to dive into the novel? In this episode Jo and James: Introduce our April Monthly Spotlight pick Share a brief biography of Esi Edugyan and her work to date Summarise the novel Discuss the plot and their thoughts Suggest the kind of reader who will love the book Reading list: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/half-blood-blues Washington Black by Esi Edugyan: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/washington-black Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-amber-spyglass Any Human Heart by William Boyd: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/any-human-heart This Other Eden by Paul Harding: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/this-other-eden A full transcript of the episode is available at our website. Follow The Booker Prize Podcast so you never miss an episode. Visit http://thebookerprizes.com/podcast to find out more about us, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok @thebookerprizes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Outdoor Biz Podcast Adventure Travel Series, where we embark on thrilling journeys and share captivating stories exploring the world of adventure travel. Join me as I share the stories of guides, outfitters, and destinations that will ignite your wanderlust and inspire your next great adventure. Whether it's scaling majestic peaks, diving into turquoise waters, We're traversing vast wilderness. We unveil the hidden gems that every outdoor enthusiast dreams of exploring. Facebook​ ​Twitter​ ​Instagram​ Love the show? Subscribe, ​rate, review, and share!​ Sign up for my Newsletter ​HERE​ I'd love to hear your feedback about the show! You can contact me here: ​rick@theoutdoorbizpodcast.com   Show Notes 00:00 Entrepreneur recounts excitement of starting river company. 06:19 Excited guides seek new adventure on Omo River. 11:47 Hidden creatures ambush and devour prey underwater. 16:43 Encountered naked tribes, photographed and shared images. 23:43 Started small, wrote, and grew into success. 26:42 Pioneering adventure travel company explores new frontiers. 41:04 Sustainable travel, small groups, local engagement emphasized. 43:37 Enjoying meeting locals and sharing meals worldwide. 49:15 Global adventure travel company survives through challenges. 58:32 First trip to Uganda, fascinated by exploration. 01:01:06 Couple explores Africa together, she becomes hero. 50:21 Books: I'm currently reading a novel called The Romantic by William Boyd; some memorable books are River of the Gods by Candace Millard, The Devil Drives, To the Heart of the Nile by Pat Shipman 49:46 Uganda article  54:31:01 Favorite Gear under $100: Moleskine Notebook.   Thanks for listening and visiting our website. Don't forget to subscribe and spread the word!   Learn More To learn more about Richard, visit his website at: https://www.richardbangs.com/ and on these social sites You Tube Linkedin Facebook Instagram   You can find Mtn Travel Sobek here Next Steps If you enjoy interviews devoted to the outdoor industry, find us online at ricksaez.com/listen. We love likes and comments, and if you know someone who is also an outdoor enthusiast, go ahead and share our site with them, too. Keywords #Textile waste, #Ethical sourcing, #Forever chemicals #PFAS #Environmental impact #Environmental regulations #Publishing process #Speciesism #Outdoor Minimalist book #Podcast creation #Conservationists Podcast produced using Descript, CastMagic Podcast hosted by Libsyn use code 'outdoorbizpod' for 20% OFF Show Notes powered by Castmagic Website powered by Wordpress Note: As an Affiliate of Amazon and others, I earn from qualifying purchases.  

This week, novelist William Boyd praises a polyphonic account of a pivotal wartime moment; and Sarah Richmond explores how we may escape ceaseless toil.‘November 1942: An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II', by Peter Englund, translated by Peter Graves‘Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take it Back', by Elizabeth Anderson‘After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time', by Helen Hester and Nick SrnicekProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I tell you about a case filled with mystery, conflicting evidence, and a verdict that was based soley on circumstantial evidence.Join me, Ky as we go through the details surrounding the death of Sharon Guthrie, and the circumstances that led to her husband's conviction. From fingerprint analysis to internet searches and the discovery of a suspicious suicide note, this case will leave you questioning every twist and turn.So, sit back, grab your favorite true crime snack, and prepare to uncover the truth in the case of William Boyd Guthrie right now on Love and Murder. Remember.Here's the Forensic Files episode on this case: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4NK2045uWrc************************************************************************************************Commercials:BJs - Save $35 on a yearly membership with my link: www.murderandlove.com/BJs✨✨For a commercial-free episode, pictures, and more head to our exclusive group at www.patreon.com/loveandmurder✨✨*************************************************************************************************

Schneider, Wolfgangwww.deutschlandfunk.de, Büchermarkt

Sara Cox, host of BBC Two's TV book club, Between the Covers, joins Jo and James to discuss our December Book of the Month: Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Told through the journals of Logan Mountstuart, it's an engrossing – and often funny – novel that takes in many of the defining events of the 20th century and the people who shaped them. The Booker Prize 2002-longlisted book was recently discussed on Between the Covers, so tune in to our podcast as Sara, James and Jo talk about William Boyd's beloved novel, as well as Sara's own reading habits and inspirations. In this episode Jo, James and Sara talk about: The idea behind television book club Between the Covers The variety of books guests have been bringing to this series of Between the Covers The novels that got Sara into reading at a young age Sara's favourite Booker Prize books How Sara balances reading and her own writing – and whether what she's reading influences her work What the book clubbers on Between the Covers thought of Any Human Heart A brief summary of Any Human Heart and a discussion about its plot Who they'd recommend the book to Reading List: Any Human Heart by William Boyd: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/any-human-heart Life of Pi by Yann Martel: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/life-of-pi The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Pessimism is for Lightweights by Salena Godden Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume Catherine Cookson novels Jilly Cooper novels Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha John Boyne novels Margaret O'Farrell novels Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/redhead-by-the-side-of-the-road A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/a-spool-of-blue-thread A full transcript of the episode is available at our website. Follow The Booker Prize Podcast so you never miss an episode. Visit http://thebookerprizes.com/podcast to find out more about us, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok @thebookerprizes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Misfits Makin' It is the podcast component of the misfit comedy shows produced by Lauren LoGiudice. Show dates and info at www.laurenlogiudice.com In this podcast episode Lauren interviews Australian comedians William Boyd and Connor Dariol. They discuss their experiences as comedians in Melbourne, Australia, and share anecdotes about their lives. The conversation also touches on more serious topics such as family dynamics, coming out, and the importance of support and acceptance. HOW TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST: Rate and review: Misfits like hearing from other misfits. Tell a friend: Misfits trust other misfits to tell them what's good. Sponsor a podcast: Affordable for individuals and makes the perfect gift. Support this art directly with a podcast that's custom-tailored to you or your friends. Make it happen by reaching out to inthemidstprod@gmail.com. CONNECT WITH WILLIAM BOYD AND CONNOR DARIOL'S FRIEND OF THE POD Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/friend-of-the-pod/id1624642407 CONNECT WITH LAUREN LOGIUDICE: Instagram: @laurenlogi Twitter/TikTok/Threads: @laurenlogi Website: www.laurenlogiudice.com TIMESTAMPS, BROUGHT TO YOU BY AI The iPhone Generation (00:01:13) Discussion about the younger generation growing up with iPhones and not being able to imagine a world without them. Misfit Melodrama (00:03:29) Introduction to the Misfit Melodrama episodes where comedians riff on audience-submitted stories, making fun of themselves. Weirdos in Melbourne (00:06:40) Conversation about the weirdos in Melbourne, distinguishing between good weirdos who monetize their weirdness and bad weirdos who don't. The secret dad baby (00:12:55) Discussion about a recently discovered secret adoption within the family and the emotions surrounding it. Family drama country (00:14:48) Exploring a family's complicated dynamics and the challenges that come with divorce and new relationships. Coming out at a family reunion (00:16:02) Questioning the appropriateness of coming out in a potentially hostile environment and the importance of support from loved ones. Jumping on Dad (00:23:43) A listener shares a childhood memory of jumping on their drunk dad like a trampoline, and the hosts discuss drinking habits in Australia. Coming Out Stories (00:18:04) The hosts discuss their experiences and reactions to people coming out as queer, emphasizing the importance of finding joy and celebration in the process. Caramello Koala Trick (00:22:43) One of the hosts shares a funny childhood story of their mom secretly hiding painkillers inside a chocolate treat called Caramello Koala. Jumping on Six Kids (00:24:44) Discussion about kids jumping on each other and the potential injuries they could sustain. Drinking Martinis (00:25:39) Conversation about the effects of drinking martinis and finding the right balance to maintain wit and coherence. Living in Boca Raton (00:26:26) Mention of living in Boca Raton, Florida and the community's use of golf carts, including a drug dealer who rides around with drugs.

TOM BENJAMIN chats to Paul Burke about LAST TESTAMENT IN BOLOGNA, British private eye Daniel Leicester, the porticos of the ancient city, Giallo, AirBnB and tourism in a university town.  LAST TESTAMENT IN BOLOGNA: When an old man makes a bequest to investigate the mysterious death of his son, English detective Daniel Leicester follows a trail leading to one of Bologna's wealthiest families - makers of some of the world's most coveted supercars - and discovers that beneath the glitz and glamour of the Formula One circuit lurk sinister interests that may be prepared to kill to keep their secrets. Time and tide wait for no man - or woman - and while biology obliges one of Faidate Investigations' team to finally undergo a long-delayed operation, history catches up with another. Shadowing a suspect along one of Bologna's blood-red porticoes or mixing with the glitterati in the paddock at Imola, the English detective comes to learn in Italy the past not only has a long tail, but its sting can be deadly.Tom Benjamin grew up in the suburbs of north London and began his working life as a journalist before becoming a spokesman for Scotland Yard. He later moved into public health, where he developed Britain's first national campaign against alcohol abuse, Know Your Limits, and led drugs awareness programme FRANK. He now lives in Bologna. A Quiet Death in Italy is the first novel in his Daniel Leicester crime series, LAST TESTAMENT IN BOLOGNA is the fifth mystery.Find Tom on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at tombenjaminsays.Recommendations:Tobias Jones - Blood in the Altar, The de Luca Trilogy - Carlo Lucarelli, Loriano Machiavelli, William Boyd, Robert Harris - Officer and a Spy, Trevor Wood,Naples 44  - Norman Lewis , Louise Fein - The London Bookshop Affair (Feb 24),Victoria Dowd - Murder Most Cold, The Blazing World - Jonathan Healey,True Crime Story - Joseph Knox, Byzantium Endures - Michael Moorcock.Paul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.Music courtesy of  Guy Hale author of The Comeback Trail trilogy, featuring Jimmy Wayne - KILLING ME SOFTLY - MIKE ZITO featuring Kid Anderson.GUY HALE Produced by Junkyard DogCrime TimeCrime Time FM is the official podcast ofGwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023CrimeFest 2023CWA Daggers 2023& Newcastle Noir (December)

In this bonus episode, Elin and Tim travel virtually across the pond to Scotland to interview one of their favorite writers of the English language, Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. The three discuss the differences between publishing in the UK and in the US, what it means to Maggie to be Irish, how she researches her settings, point of view and experimentation with the craft of language, publishing a plague novel during COVID-19, writing fiction about real people, and her memoir I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. You'll immediately want to order every Maggie O'Farrell novel you can get your hands on because, as Tim and Elin say in the episode, they would "read her grocery list!"A special thank you to our Episode Sponsors:Lovango Resort & Beach Club - limited time, 10% off your stay at Lovangovi.com/ELINBook of the Month - limited time, first book for just $9.99 with code ELINMaggie O'Farrell Reading List:After You'd Gone Instructions for a Heatwave The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox This Must Be the Place I Am I Am I Am Hamnet The Marriage PortraitWhat else are we reading in this episode:The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi DarThe Wren, The Wren by Anne EnrightOther authors mentioned:Rudyard Kipling, Louis MacNeice, William Shakespeare, Alice Munro, Ann Patchett, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, William Boyd, and Anne Enright.Follow/Subscribe to the 'Books, Beach, & Beyond' podcast now to stay current on new episodes.And find us on Instagram at @booksbeachandbeyondHappy Reading!

We're talking to William Boyd, unquestionably one of our greatest living novelists. He's also a screenwriter, television writer, playwright and director, who has won multiple accolades and awards along the way, including a BAFTA Television Award for Best Drama Serial of Any Human Heart.  Following The Romantic, his latest ‘whole life' novel, a new book The Mirror and the Road comprises a series of in-depth conversations between William and the acclaimed interviewer Alistair Owen, which covers William's entire career as a writer.  We talk to William about that life, in which he's moved effortlessly between the solitary novelist's study and Hollywood.  We ask him about his favourite writers and films, whether he prefers writing novels to screenplays and try to discover just how he's produced such a prodigious output, including 22 works of fiction, 20 produced screenplays, three stage plays and five radio plays. For all fans of William Boyd, this is unmissable listening. The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd, edited by Alistair Owen, is published by Penguin  

Georgina Godwin interviews former editor in chief of Bloomsbury Publishing, Alexandra Pringle, who held the post for twenty years. Her list of authors includes William Boyd, Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Khaled Hosseini and Kamila Shamsie. She joined Virago Press in 1978 and helped to launch their Modern Classics series, which championed out-of-print books by forgotten female authors. She speaks to Georgina about her early failures, trusting your editorial gut and her latest venture, Silk Road Slippers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's episode, I welcome the all-singing, all-writing, all-dancing POWERHOUSE that is Geri Halliwell-Horner. She started out as Ginger Spice, in the most iconic girl band of all time (simple facts), the Spice Girls, selling over 100 million records worldwide. After the birth of her first child in 2006, she started writing while a single mother and released a series of bestselling children's books - the Ugenia Lavender novels. Now, she returns with the publication of the young adult novel Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen, a mixture of fantasy and history carrying a message that we can all be our own heroes.Geri joins me to talk about her love of writing (and why an early mentor was none other than William Boyd), not applying herself enough at school, why the Spice Girls belongs to everyone, how she dealt with grief after the death of her father and why it's morally important to her to 'age with grace and power.'Geri is my second ever Spice Girl on the podcast (the first was the amazing Melanie Chisholm) and it is a podcast goal of mine to have them all on as guests. They were such an amazing and empowering part of my teenage life. Three more to go. CAN YOU IMAGINE? IT WOULD BE A DREAM COME TRUE.--Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen by Geri Halliwell-Horner is out now and available to order here.--I'm going on tour! To AUSTRALIA, mate! You can now purchase tickets to see me live at Sydney Opera House on 26th February 2024 or the Arts Centre Melbourne on 28th February 2024.--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email howtofailpod@gmail.com--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpodGeri Halliwell-Horner @gerihalliwellhorner

One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is Not a Globe was written and self-published by William Boyd Carpenter in 1885. However, Chris found this on a homeschooler's Twitter page where it was recommended for teaching children in 2023, so we figured it was worth a review. Folding Ideas: In Search of a Flat Earth Science of Our Spherical Earth: Neil deGrasse Tyson Demonstrates Absurdity of Flat Earth Dave Explains: The Earth is Definitely Not Flat Dave Explains: The 10 Things That All Flat Earthers Say Wikipedia: Empirical Evidence for the Spherical Shape of Earth  

durée : 00:55:07 - Le masque et la plume - par : Jérôme Garcin - À lire ou pas sur le sable : "L'Etreinte de l'eau " de Chantal Thomas, "Le Médecin de Cape Town" de Ellen J. Levy, "Le Romantique" de William Boyd, "Un œil dans la nuit" de Bernard Minier, "Eloge des oiseaux de passage" de Jean-Noël Rieffel. - réalisé par : Xavier PESTUGGIA

In this episode of Flanigan's Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with William Boyd, Michael J. Klein Chair, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, and Professor at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He is also a Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and Project Lead for the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF).William and Ted discuss his background, growing up in South Carolina. He received his B.A. from University of North Carolina, his M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, and his J.D. from Stanford Law School. He then moved to Washington D.C. and worked for the World Resources Institute, and was previously a Professor of Law and a John H. Schultz Energy Law Fellow at University of Colorado Boulder School of Law. His primary research and teaching interests are in energy law and regulation, climate change law and policy, and environmental law. He continues to be actively involved in climate, energy, and environmental policy matters at multiple levels of governance. Since 2009, he has served as the Project Lead for the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF), a unique subnational collaboration of 38 states and provinces from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Spain, and the United States that is working to develop regulatory frameworks to reduce emissions from deforestation and land use. Boyd is also the founding Director of the Laboratory for Energy & Environmental Policy innovation (LEEP), a policy innovation lab based in Boulder, Colorado that works with partners around the world to develop and support real-time policy experiments, establish robust networks for learning and exchange, and contribute to effective and durable policy outcomes.

In Toy Fights poet Don Paterson recounts his childhood in working-class Dundee. This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. ‘A tremendously engaging memoir' writes William Boyd, ‘seasoned with Don Paterson's customary wit, total recall and love of language. A classic of its kind.' Paterson talks about the book with poet Declan Ryan, whose whose debut collection, Crisis Actor, will be published by Faber in July. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I discuss the life of Grace Bradley. A petite and extremely lovely blonde "B" film actress who eventually deserted her career in favor of standing by her man (cowboy icon William Boyd, aka, "Hopalong Cassidy"), Grace Bradley spent the rest of her life in his shadow and devoting herself to her husband's career. Bill's Hoppy was the longest span of any fictional character played by the same actor. Following his death in 1972, she spent a good deal of her time keeping his good name and image in tact. Doug Hess is the host!

Host Meg Wolitzer presents stories of inspirations small and large. In these tales, writers investigate moments in which art inspires life, or life inspires art, especially in a visual medium. In Elizabeth Crane's “Blue Girl,” read by Valorie Curry, a young woman's secret life is given an unusual public forum. In Jai Chakrabarti's “Lessons with Father,” commissioned for our Small Odysseys anthology, a middle-aged child tries to connect with her late father through brushstrokes. The reader is Purva  Bedi.  And in William Boyd's “Varengeville” read by Dan Stevens, a young man strays from his famous family as he discovers himself on canvas.

The eponym in William Boyd's whole-life novel “The Romantic” is one Cashel Greville Ross, whose time on earth spans most of the 19th century and a decent amount of the events within it. Born an apparent orphan in County Cork, Cashel's romantic instinct to always choose his heart over his head took him to the Battle of Waterloo, the social circles of Lord Byron and the Shelley's, and even through a mid-life crisis after becoming a farmer in Massachusetts. If that wasn't enough of a life, Cashel also embarks on an exploration to discover the source of the Nile and, in his role as a diplomat, gets caught up in an international smuggling ring for antiquities. If you're looking for a life of adventure, Boyd's “The Romantic” won't let you down. Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include: "The Romantic” by William Boyd “Agamemnon” by Aeschylus “The New York Times” Additional segments throughout the podcast include: Inner Shelf Fact or fiction What are you reading? On that Quote Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gF2zVhQT Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gTHtxVh5 Podbean: https://onthesamepagepodcast.podbean.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesamepagepod_ Email: seamusandblake@gmail.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/on.the.same.page.podcast/  -------- #bookpodcast #podcast #book #novel #stories #shortstories #apassagenorth #anukaradpragasm #tolstoy #poetry #shortstoryskirmish #litfacts #paris #literature #books #novels #salmonrushdie #spotifypodcasts #applepodcasts #audible #samsungpodcasts #books #novels #audibleau #lit #onthesamepage #whatareyoureading #literaryfacts #podbean #whatareyoureading

Oh to be sitting in front of a roaring fire at your favourite pub. Book in one hand, pint in the other... is there any better feeling? It's almost impossible to capture the sheer perfection of such a moment in print. However, a handful of writers have been able to bring moments like that to life, and this week's guest is one of the finest novelists the Other Realm has ever produced. It's the incredible William Boyd.William is an acclaimed author whose works of fiction have been celebrated the world over. His novels include A Good Man in Africa, The New Confessions and Any Human Heart, and his latest book The Romantic has received widespread critical acclaim. His experiences in pubs all over the world have helped him create pubs in his own pieces of fiction, meaning that he arrives at The Moon Under Water armed with a deep knowledge of what makes the perfect drinking establishment.. and we cannot wait for him to join us. Want to hear an extended version of this episode (featuring a Patreon-only choice), gain access to our bonus podcast ‘Behind The Cellar Door' and support the upkeep of the pub? If so, head to moonunderpod.com and sign up to our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

*This is part 2 of William Boyd's episode. Though you are free to listen in whichever order you so desire we really do recommend listening to part 1 first or things might be slightly confusing*Oh to be sitting in front of a roaring fire at your favourite pub. Book in one hand, pint in the other... is there any better feeling? It's almost impossible to capture the sheer perfection of such a moment in print. However, a handful of writers have been able to bring moments like that to life, and this week's guest is one of the finest novelists the Other Realm has ever produced. It's the incredible William Boyd.William is an acclaimed author whose works of fiction have been celebrated the world over. His novels include A Good Man in Africa, The New Confessions and Any Human Heart, and his latest book The Romantic has received widespread critical acclaim. His experiences in pubs all over the world have helped him create pubs in his own pieces of fiction, meaning that he arrives at The Moon Under Water armed with a deep knowledge of what makes the perfect drinking establishment.. and we cannot wait for him to join us. Want to hear an extended version of this episode (featuring a Patreon-only choice), gain access to our bonus podcast ‘Behind The Cellar Door' and support the upkeep of the pub? If so, head to moonunderpod.com and sign up to our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Boyd discusses his new novel, The Romantics.