Podcasts about Wolf Hall

Will Trice is the Executive Director of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and has been since 2019. He has served as a producer for nearly 30 productions on Broadway, the West End, and National Tours. Trice is a three-time Tony Award winner for All The Way, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Porgy & Bess, though he gives away any credit to the fabulous actors, writers, and production crew. He is a five-time Tony nominee for Fiddler on the Roof, The Royal Shakespeare Company's Wolf Hall, You Can't Take It With You, The Glass Menagerie, and The Best Man. Other credits include: American Son, starring Kerry Washington; The Lifespan of A Fact, starring Daniel Radcliffe; American Buffalo; American Psycho; Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill, starring Audra McDonald (Broadway & West End); The Realistic Joneses, starring Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, & Marisa Tomei; Blithe Spirit, starring Angela Lansbury (West End & National Tour); The Bridges of Madison County; and Glengarry Glen Ross, starring Al Pacino. Prior to his career in producing, Trice served as a Business Analyst with management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, an Artistic Administration Associate with The Metropolitan Opera, and a Strategic Growth Associate with alternative asset managers D.E. Shaw & Company. He holds degrees from Southern Methodist and Northwestern Universities.

Oddaja je namenjena pogovoru z enim, po navadi pa z dvema sogovornikoma, in sicer o temi, ki je tako ali drugače povezana z literaturo. Največkrat je izhodišče pogovora konkretna knjiga - leposlovna, poljudno-znanstvena ali strokovna - ob kateri nato obravnavamo širšo temo ali problematiko. Ker skuša oddaja slediti sočasnemu dogajanju na literarnem prizorišču, so njeni gostje pogosto tudi aktualni nagrajenci. Takrat sta v njenem središču konkretni avtor in njegov ustvarjalni opus. Oddaja Sobotno branje govori o knjigah na drugačen način. Kakšen? Poslušajte jo.Ugledna britanska pisateljica Hilary Mantel se je v zadnjem obdobju svojega življenja intenzivno posvečala pisanju o Thomasu Cromwellu, sicer nizko na družbeni lestvici rojenem, a nenavadno zmožnem ministru razvpitega angleškega kralja Henrika VIII., tistega, ki je imel kar šest žena. Cromwellovo zgodbo je navsezadnje razgrnila v treh romanih. To so Wolf Hall, Pripeljite obtožence ter Zrcalo in luč in zahvaljujoč prevajalskim naporom Dušanke Zabukovec lahko zdaj vse tri prebiramo tudi v slovenščini. A kaj je britansko avtorico sploh pritegnilo h Cromwellu? Kaj takega je, drugače rečeno, ta mož storil, da si je navsezadnje prislužil pravo pravcato romaneskno trilogijo? – Ko beremo pričujoče romane, se zdi, da Hilary Mantel misli, da je prav Cromwell človek, ki je povlekel nekaj odločilnih potez, ki so Anglijo in, širše, Evropo pomagale iz srednjega veka povleči v novo, moderno dobo, v kateri – vsaj kar se tiče funkcioniranja države oziroma delovanja oblasti – križ in modra kri štejeta manj od cekina in individualnega talenta. Če to drži, tedaj lahko mirno rečemo, da je bil Cromwell velikan zgodovine ... A zakaj potem vsi poznamo Henrika in njegove žene, Cromwell pa ostaja bolj ali manj neznan? – Odgovor se nemara skriva v tem, kako se je njegova zgodba končala. In kako se je končala? – No, prav o tem govori roman Zrcalo in luč, ki je pred nedavnim izšel pri Cankarjevi založbi, mi pa smo zgodbo, ki jo spremljamo med platnicami te knjigami, v tokratnem Sobotnem branju pretresali v pogovoru z Dušanko Zabukovec. Foto: Goran Dekleva

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

It's mostly lollipops, ribbons and cakes for Clive Anderson this week as he meets Bake Off host Mel Giedroyc, Jane Austen improviser Rachel Parris and Romantic Novelist Mike Gayle (the only man to win the Romantic Writers Association's top award). But not all....Mel Giedroyc's new podcast - and she emphasises it's a comedy one - is taking over from Kathy Burke on Where There's a Will There's a Wake - all about death, funerals and everything in between. She reveals how she and Sue Perkins met and unsurprisingly enough it was love-friends at first sight. Rachel Parris is taking Austentacious, her improv show based on Jane Austen, on the road and to Edinburgh Fringe again. She explains why nothing quite hits the spot like Jane. But she's also written a novel based on the romance between Pride and Prejudice character Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins. And reader, Eliza Bennett does not come out of this well. Mike Gayle is the only man the Romantic Writers Association has bestowed its Outstanding Achievement Award upon and is a bestselling novelist. He describes his favourite reader letter from when he worked as an Agony Uncle for Bliss Magazine back in the day.All accompanied by the glorious sound of Debbie Wiseman's music for the TV series Wolf Hall, played by the composer herself with the Locrian Ensemble of London, soprano Grace Davidson and Alec Harmon on Cor Anglais.Presented by Clive Anderson Producer Olive Clancy

Too much of our history is looked at through either a colonial lens or a patriarchal one. Ira Mukhoty joins Amit Varma in episode 421 of The Seen and the Unseen to share her gaze on India's history, and all that it has taught her. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.)   Also check out: 1. Ira Mukhoty on Instagram, Twitter, Goodreads and Amazon. 2. Women in Indian History -- Episode 155 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ira Mukhoty). 3. The Lion and The Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh -- Ira Mukhoty. 4. Akbar: The Great Mughal -- Ira Mukhoty. 5. Song of Draupadi -- Ira Mukhoty. 6. Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire -- Ira Mukhoty. 7. Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History -- Ira Mukhoty. 8. Jahangir the Curious — Episode 147 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Parvati Sharma). 9. The Many Cities of Delhi — Episode 172 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rana Safvi). 10. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Manu Pillai: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 11. Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life -- Anna Funder. 12. Invisible Women -- Caroline Criado Perez. 13. An Immense World -- Ed Yong. 14. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel. 15. History of European Morals — WEH Lecky. 16. The Expanding Circle — Peter Singer. 17. Yuganta -- Irawati Karve. 18. The Great Indian Kitchen -- Jeo Baby. 19. Heart Lamp -- Banu Mushtaq. 20. Misogyny is the Oldest Indian Tradition -- Amit Varma. 21. One Bad Law Goes, but Women Remain Second-Class Citizens -- Amit Varma. 22. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee — Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen. 23. Mughal History as a window to Modern India -- Ira Mukhoty on The India Briefing. 24. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 26. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 27. In defence of suit, boot — Chandra Bhan Prasad. 28. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 29. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life — Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 30. Real Birds in Imagined Gardens -- Kavita Singh. 31. The Light in Winter -- Episode 97 of Everything is Everything, on Spanish art. 32. Tawaif — Episode 174 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Saba Dewan). 33. Swapna Liddle and the Many Shades of Delhi — Episode 367 of The Seen and the Unseen. 34. The Broken Script — Swapna Liddle. 35. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court -- Audrey Truschke. 36. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 37. The Year of Magical Thinking -- Joan Didion. 38. Blue Nights -- Joan Didion. 39. H is for Hawk -- Helen Macdonald. 40. The Procrastination Matrix -- Tim Urban. 41. The Age of the Partial Outsider -- Janan Ganesh. 42. Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light -- Hilary Mantel. 43. The Silence of the Girls -- Pat Barker. 44. The Hindus: An Alternative History -- Wendy Doniger. 45. Daily Rituals -- Mason Currey. 46. Daily Rituals: Women at Work -- Mason Currey. 47. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything. 48. Tawaifnama — Saba Dewan. 49. The Other Song -- Saba Dewan. 50. Sex and the Family in Colonial India -- Durba Ghosh. 51. Blueprint for Armageddon — Episode 50-55 of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. 52. Roam Research. 53. Zettelkasten on Wikipedia. 54. The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation -- Ian Cobain. 55. Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan -- Ruby Lal. 56. Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jehan -- Ruby Lal. 57. Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness -- Ruby Lal. 58. What is Islam? -- Shahab Ahmad. 59. Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity -- Manu Pillai. 60. The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East -- Barnaby Rogerson. 61. Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh -- ʽAbd al-Qadir Badayuni. 62. Sarkai Lo Khatiya Jada Lage -- Song from Raja Babu. 63. Edge of Empire -- Maya Jasonoff. 64. Shatranj Ke Khiladi -- Satyajit Ray. 65. That Obscure Object of Desire -- Luis Buñuel. 66. This House of Grief -- Helen Garner. 67. Joe Cinque's Consolation -- Helen Garner. 68. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers -- Max Porter. 69. Burial Rites -- Hannah Kent. 70. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. 71. The Wonder -- Emma Donahue. 72. When Montezuma Met Cortés -- Matthew Restall. 73. Stolen -- Karan Tejpal. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Unseen Histories' by Simahina.

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

Wolf Hall composer Debbie Wiseman and conductor Ben Gernon join Jeffrey Boakye and Anna Phoebe as they add the final five tracks to the playlist for the current series. From the UK's first Eurovision winner to a heavy metal classic via Europe's second-longest river, the team wrap up the series before returning in August.Producer: Jerome Weatherald Presented with musical direction by Jeffrey Boakye and Anna PhoebeThe five tracks in this week's playlist:Puppet on a String by Sandie Shaw The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II Hai, Dunărea mea by Elena Roizen 3rd movement of the Piano Concerto in A Minor by Edvard Grieg Overkill by MotörheadOther music in this episode:Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye Petit Pays by Cesária Évora Always Something There To Remind Me by Sandie Shaw Congratulations by Cliff Richard Back Home by the 1970 England World Cup Squad Shang-a-Lang by The Bay City Rollers 1st movement of the Piano Concerto in A Minor by Edvard Grieg

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light Thomas Cromwell navigates the Tudor court in the aftermath of the execution of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn. Based on the final book in Hilary Mantel's commanding trilogy (Neon). Smoke When an arson investigator begrudgingly teams up with a police detective, their race to stop two arsonists ignites a twisted game of secrets and suspicions (Apple TV+). Here We Go In this hilariously unfiltered portrait of family life, the Jessops are the subject of their son Sam's amateur documentary, as they go about their mundane but chaotic lives (TVNZ+). LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rick Wakeman was onstage from the age of five and looks back with us here on a life of live performance – jazz and blues bands, the Strawbs, Yes – and ahead to this autumn's tour performing King Arthur and the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. “I wake up every morning, throw off the duvet and – if nothing else has fallen off – have a great day!” There's more … ... how it feels when the rock press call you ‘Tomorrow's Superstar!' at the age of 24. … the contract he once had to sign that said “Mister Wakeman will wear at least one of his capes during the performance”. … seeing the Bonzos in 1965, “Viv Stanshall so paralytic he sang the entire set lying down”. … being on a packed tube to Gants Hill and suddenly realising he was on the cover of the Melody Maker he was reading. … Mrs Symes, his piano teacher, who launched his career (aged five). … his teenage band Atlantic Blues “who ended Wipe Out eight times faster than it started”. … the day his Strawbs' Hammond organ solos were applauded by the Telegraph and Times. … early piano sessions for Cat Stevens, Ralph McTell and Al Stewart. … aspects of touring that prove “financially non-viable”. … and how Wolf Hall rebooted the legend of Henry the Eighth. Plus Atomic Rooster, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Brown, green PVC trousers and a cape collection that includes “four originals”. Buy tickets here: https://www.rwcc.com/live.php#ere2025Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rick Wakeman was onstage from the age of five and looks back with us here on a life of live performance – jazz and blues bands, the Strawbs, Yes – and ahead to this autumn's tour performing King Arthur and the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. “I wake up every morning, throw off the duvet and – if nothing else has fallen off – have a great day!” There's more … ... how it feels when the rock press call you ‘Tomorrow's Superstar!' at the age of 24. … the contract he once had to sign that said “Mister Wakeman will wear at least one of his capes during the performance”. … seeing the Bonzos in 1965, “Viv Stanshall so paralytic he sang the entire set lying down”. … being on a packed tube to Gants Hill and suddenly realising he was on the cover of the Melody Maker he was reading. … Mrs Symes, his piano teacher, who launched his career (aged five). … his teenage band Atlantic Blues “who ended Wipe Out eight times faster than it started”. … the day his Strawbs' Hammond organ solos were applauded by the Telegraph and Times. … early piano sessions for Cat Stevens, Ralph McTell and Al Stewart. … aspects of touring that prove “financially non-viable”. … and how Wolf Hall rebooted the legend of Henry the Eighth. Plus Atomic Rooster, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Brown, green PVC trousers and a cape collection that includes “four originals”. Buy tickets here: https://www.rwcc.com/live.php#ere2025Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rick Wakeman was onstage from the age of five and looks back with us here on a life of live performance – jazz and blues bands, the Strawbs, Yes – and ahead to this autumn's tour performing King Arthur and the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth. “I wake up every morning, throw off the duvet and – if nothing else has fallen off – have a great day!” There's more … ... how it feels when the rock press call you ‘Tomorrow's Superstar!' at the age of 24. … the contract he once had to sign that said “Mister Wakeman will wear at least one of his capes during the performance”. … seeing the Bonzos in 1965, “Viv Stanshall so paralytic he sang the entire set lying down”. … being on a packed tube to Gants Hill and suddenly realising he was on the cover of the Melody Maker he was reading. … Mrs Symes, his piano teacher, who launched his career (aged five). … his teenage band Atlantic Blues “who ended Wipe Out eight times faster than it started”. … the day his Strawbs' Hammond organ solos were applauded by the Telegraph and Times. … early piano sessions for Cat Stevens, Ralph McTell and Al Stewart. … aspects of touring that prove “financially non-viable”. … and how Wolf Hall rebooted the legend of Henry the Eighth. Plus Atomic Rooster, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Brown, green PVC trousers and a cape collection that includes “four originals”. Buy tickets here: https://www.rwcc.com/live.php#ere2025Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas More is one of the most famous and controversial figures in English history. Was he truly the saintly man of conscience, immortalised by A Man for All Seasons? Or was he the stubborn zealot depicted in Wolf Hall? In the first of two episodes looking at Thomas More's rise and fall, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr. Joanne Paul, whose decade-long research into More drew upon new archival discoveries to unravel his complex legacy, his profound influence on modern Europe, the enduring debates about his faith and politics, and why his story still matters. Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Alice Smith, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcast.More: Thomas More on Film: The Historians' Verdict >Wolf Hall - Who's Who? >Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

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

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my anthologies at my Payhip store: JUNE25 The coupon code is valid through June 17, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 252 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 23rd, 2025, and today we are looking at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. We missed doing an episode last week for the simple reason that the day before I wanted to record, we had a bad thunderstorm that knocked down large portions of my fence, so my recording time was instead spent on emergency fence repair. However, the situation is under control, so hopefully we'll be back to weekly episodes for the immediate future. And now before we get to our main topics, let's have Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing projects.   So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook version of all my short story anthologies at my Payhip store and that is JUNE25. As always, the coupon code and links will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 17th, 2025, so if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered.   And now an update on my current writing projects. Ghost in the Corruption is finished. It is publishing right now. In fact, I paused the publishing process to record this and so by the time this episode goes live, hopefully Ghost in the Corruption should be available at all ebook stores. My next main project now that Ghost in the Corruption is done will be Shield of Power and as of this recording I am 15,000 words into it. My secondary projects will be Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest and I'm 97,000 words into that, so hopefully that will come out very shortly after Shield of Power and I'll also be starting Ghost in the Siege, the final book in the Ghost Armor series as another secondary project and I'm currently zero words into that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   In audiobook news, Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now out and should be available at all the usual audiobook stores so you can listen to that if you are traveling for the summer. Recording of Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is underway soon. I believe he's starting it this week, so hopefully we will have another audiobook in the Shield War series for you before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:02:17 Main Topic: Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup   And now let's move on, without any further ado, to our main topic. Summer is almost upon us, which means it's time for my Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup. As usual, the movies and streaming shows are listed in order for my least favorite to my most favorite. The grades are based upon my own thoughts and opinions and are therefore wholly subjective. With all of that said, let's get to the movies and our first entry is MacGruber, which came out in 2010 and in all honesty, this might be objectively the worst movie I have ever seen. The Saturday Night Live MacGruber sketches are a parody of the old MacGyver action show from the ‘80s. And so the movie is essentially the sketch stretched out to make a parody of an ‘80s action movie. It is aggressively dumb and crude. Its only redeeming feature is that the movie knows it's quite stupid and so leans into the stupidity hard. I'll say this in its favor, MacGruber has no pretensions that is a good movie and does not take itself seriously and then runs away hard with that fact. For that he gets a plus, but nothing else. Overall grade: F+   Next up is Down Periscope, which came out in 1996. Now the fundamental question of any movie is the one Russell Crowe shouted at the audience in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?” Sadly, I was not entertained with Down Periscope. This wanted to be a parody of Cold War era submarine thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, I say wanted because it didn't really succeed. Kelsey Grammer plays Lieutenant Commander Thomas Dodge, an unorthodox US Navy officer who wants command of his own nuclear sub, but he's alienated a few admirals, which is not traditionally a path to career advancement in the military. Dodge gets his chance in a Navy wargame where he has to command a diesel sub against nuclear subs. Sometimes parodies are so good that they become an example of the thing they are parodying (Hot Fuzz and Star Trek: Lower Decks are excellent examples of this phenomenon). The trouble is that the movie takes itself too seriously and just isn't all that funny. A few funny bits, true, but not enough of them. In the end, this was dumb funny but didn't resonate with me the way other dumb funny movies like Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder did. Overall grade: D   Next up is Deadpool and Wolverine, which came out in 2024. Unlike Down Periscope, I was entertained with this movie, though both movies reside on the dumb funny spectrum. Deadpool and Wolverine is basically one long meta in-joke/love letter for the last 30 years of superhero movies. If you've seen enough of those movies, you'll find those movies funny, if occasionally rather tasteless. If you haven't seen enough of those movies, Deadpool and Wolverine will just be incomprehensible. The plot is that Wade Wilson AKA Deadpool gets pulled into some Marvel style multiverse nonsense. To save his universe from destruction, he needs to recruit a Wolverine since in his universe, Wolverine died heroically.   In the process, Deadpool stumbles across the worst Wolverine in the multiverse. Together they have to overcome their mutual dislike and attempt to save Deadpool's universe from destruction at the hands of a rogue branch of the Time Variance Authority. This means the movie can bring in a lot of cameos from past Marvel films. Hugh Jackman's performance really carries the movie on its back. Like I said, this movie is essentially one very long Marvel in-joke. I thought it was funny. I definitely think it can't stand on its own without having seen a sufficient number of the other Marvel movies. Overall grade: C   Our next movie is the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which came out in 2024. This is very loosely (with an emphasis on “very”) based on Operation Postmaster during World War II, when British Special Forces seized some Italian ships that had been supplying parts for German U-boats. It was entertaining to watch but it couldn't quite make up its mind tonally if it was a war thriller or a heist movie about Western desperados recruited into a crew. It kind of tried to do both at the same time, which killed the momentum. Like, the first parts of the movie where the protagonists take out a Nazi patrol boat and then free a prisoner from a base were good thriller stuff, but then the plot fused with the heist stuff and really slowed down through the middle forty percent or so. It was also oddly stylized with a lot of spaghetti western-style music that seemed out of place and some stuff just didn't make sense, like at the end after pulling off the mission, the protagonists were all arrested. That just seems bizarre since if anything, Winston Churchill and a lot of the British wartime leadership were enthusiastic about special operations and probably had too much confidence in the effectiveness of covert operations. So I did enjoy watching this, but I can see why it didn't make a lot of money at the box office. Overall Grade: C   Next up is The Gorge, which came out in 2025. This was a peculiar mix of science fiction, romance, and horror. For the romance part, perhaps shooting zombies together is a good idea for a first date. Before I dig into the movie, a brief rant. In one scene, a character is using a chainsaw with no protective gear whatsoever and she's not fighting zombies or anything in a situation where she has to pick up a chainsaw without preparing first. She's trimming branches to pass time. If you're using a chainsaw, at a minimum you want protective eyewear and headphones. Ideally you'd want chainsaw pants as well to reduce the chance of serious injury if you slip and swing the saw into your leg. Since I became a homeowner, I've used a chainsaw a number of times and believe me, you definitely want good eye and ear protection. This has been your public safety announcement for this movie review.   Anyway, loner former sniper Levi is approached by a high ranking intelligence officer giving him a mysterious job. He needs to guard a tower overlooking a mysterious mist-filled gorge for one year. On the other side of the gorge is another tower, guarded by an elite Lithuanian sniper named Drasa. Like Levi, Drasa has a fair bit of emotional damage and they're officially forbidden to communicate. However, they're both lonely and they soon start communicating over the gorge using telescopes and whiteboard messages. Eventually Levi gets emotionally close enough to Drasa to rig a zipline to cross the gorge and speak with her in person.   Unfortunately, it turns out the gorge is full of twisted creatures that storm out and attack and the job of the two snipers is to keep them contained. If Levi and Drasa want to save their lives, they'll need to unravel the dark secret within the gorge. This movie was interesting and I enjoyed watching it, but it falls apart if you think about it too much (or at all). Like the chainsaw thing I ranted about above. The entire movie runs on that sort of logic. That said, I appreciate how the filmmakers were trying something new instead of something like Deadpool and Wolverine. Additionally, this was an Apple+ movie and it's interesting how Apple's approach to streaming is to just make a whole bunch of random stuff that's totally distinct, from Ted Lasso to Mythic Quest to Severance to The Gorge. It's like, “we have more money than most countries, so we're going to make Ted Lasso because we feel like it.” Then again, Apple+ is apparently losing a billion dollars every year, so maybe they'll eventually change their minds about that approach. Overall Grade: B-   Next up is Click, which came out in 2006. Cross It's a Wonderful Life with A Christmas Carol and the comedic style of Adam Sandler and you end up with Click. Basically Sandler plays Michael Newman, a workaholic architect with a demanding boss and increasingly strained relationship with his wife and children due to his workload. In a fit of exasperation with his situation, he goes to Bed Bath and Beyond, where he encounters an eccentric employee named Morty (played entertainingly by Christopher Walken). Morty gives him a remote control that lets him fast forward through time, which Michael then uses to skip the boring and tedious parts of his life, but he overuses the remote and goes too far into the future and sees the disastrous results of his current life choices. Definitely a story used in A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life but effectively told and I was entertained (rather on the crude side, though). Overall Grade: B- Next up is Mr. Deeds, which came out in 2002. This was actually one of Adam Sandler's better movies, in my opinion. It was a remake of the ‘30s movie Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. In this new version, Sandler plays Longfellow Deeds, a popular pizzeria owner in a small New Hampshire town. Unbeknownst to Deeds, his uncle is the owner of a major media mega corporation and when he dies, Deeds is his legal heir. When the company's CEO and chief lawyer arrive at the pizzeria to inform him of this fact, Deeds goes to New York and soon finds himself involved in the CEO's sinister machinations. Yet he happens to rescue an attractive woman from a mugger, but there is more to her than meets the eye. The movie was funny and not as crude, well, not quite as crude as some of Sandler's other stuff. It had good story structure and several great lines, my favorite of which was “he was weak and cowardly and wore far too much cologne.”   Sandler's movies, in a strange way, are often very medieval. Like various medieval fables had a savvy peasant outwitting pompous lords, greedy merchants, and corrupt clergymen. The best Adam Sandler protagonist tends to be a good natured everyman who defeats the modern equivalent of medieval authority figures- evil CEOs, arrogant star athletes, sinister bureaucrats and so forth. Overall Grade: B     Next up is House of David, which came out in 2025 and this is basically the story of King David from the Bible told in the format of an epic fantasy TV series. Like if someone wanted to do an epic fantasy series about Conan the Barbarian, it could follow the same stylistic format as this show. And of course Conan and David followed a similar path from adventurer to king. Anyway, if one were to pick a part of the Bible from which to make a movie or TV series, the story of David would be an excellent choice because David's life was so dramatic that it would hardly require any embellishments in the adaptation. The story is in the Books of First and Second Samuel. King Saul is ruling over the Israelites around 1000 BC or so, but has grown arrogant. Consequently, God instructs the prophet Samuel to inform Saul that the kingdom will be taken away from him and given to another. God then dispatches Samuel to anoint David as the new king of Israel. David is a humble shepherd but then enters Saul's service and undertakes feats of daring, starting with defeating the giant Goliath and leading Saul's troops to victory and battle against Israel's numerous enemies. (The Iron Age Middle East was even less peaceful than it is now.) Eventually, Saul's paranoia and madness gets the best of him and he turns on David, who flees into exile. After Saul and his sons are killed in battle with the Philistines. David returns and becomes the acknowledged king after a short civil war with Saul's surviving sons and followers.   If Saul's fatal flaw was his arrogance of pride, David's seems to have been women. While the story of David and Bathsheba is well known, David nonetheless had eight wives (most of them at the same time) and an unknown but undoubtedly large number of concubines. Naturally David's children from his various wives and concubines did not get along and David was almost deposed due to the conflicts between his children. Unlike Saul and later David's son Solomon, David was willing to repent when a prophet of God informed him of wrongdoing and to be fair to David, monogamy was generally not practiced among Early Iron Age Middle Eastern monarchies and dynastic struggles between brothers from different mothers to seize their father's kingdoms were quite common, but enough historical digression.   Back to the show, which covered David's life up to the death of Goliath. I thought it was quite well done. Good performances, good cinematography, excellent battles, good set design and costuming, and a strong soundtrack. All the actors were good, but I really think the standout performances were Stephen Lang as Samuel, Ali Sulaman is King Saul, Ayelet Zurer as Saul's wife Queen Ahinoam, and Davood Ghadami as David's jerkish (but exasperated and well-intentioned) eldest brother Eliab. Martyn Ford just looks extremely formidable as Goliath. You definitely believe no one in their right mind want to fight this guy.   Making fiction of any kind based on sacred religious texts is often tricky because no matter what you do, someone's going to get mad at you. The show has an extensive disclaimer at the beginning of each episode saying that it is fiction inspired by the Bible. That said, House of David doesn't really alter or deviate from the Biblical account, though it expands upon some things for the sake of storytelling. Queen Ahinoam is only mentioned once in the Bible as the wife of Saul, but she has an expanded role in the show and is shown as the one who essentially introduces Saul to the Witch of Endor. Goliath also gets backstory as one of the “Anakim,” a race of giants that lived in Canaan in ancient times, which is something that is only mentioned in passing in the Old Testament. Overall, I enjoyed the show and I hope it gets a second season.   What's interesting, from a larger perspective, is to see how the wheel of history keeps turning. In the 1950s and the 1960s, Biblical epics were a major film genre. The 10 Commandments and Ben Hur with Charlton Heston are probably the ones best remembered today. Eventually, the genre just sort of ran out of gas, much the way superhero movies were in vogue for about 20 years and began running out of steam around 2023 or so. Like, I enjoyed Thunderbolts (which we're going to talk about in a little bit), but it's not going to make a billion dollars the way Marvel stuff often did in the 2010s. The wheel just keeps turning and perhaps has come back around to the popularity of Biblical epics once more. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Chef, which came out in 2014. I actually saw this back in 2021, but I watched it again recently to refresh my memory and here are my thoughts. I quite liked it. It's about a chef named Carl Casper, who's increasingly unhappy with his work after he gets fired over a Twitter war with a writer who criticized his cooking. Carl is out of options and so he starts a food truck and has to both rediscover his love of cooking and reconnect with his ex-wife and 10-year-old son. In Storytelling: How to Write a Novel (my book about writing), I talked about different kinds of conflict. Carl's conflict is an excellent example of an entirely internal conflict. The critic is an external enemy, but he's basically the inciting incident.   Carl's real enemy is his own internal conflict about art versus commerce and a strained relationship with his son. I recommend the movie. It was rated R for bad language, but there's no nudity or explicit sexual content and honestly, if you've ever worked in a restaurant kitchen or a warehouse, you've heard much worse in terms of language. The movie also has an extremely valuable lesson: stay off social media when you're angry. Overall Grade: A     Next up is Thunderbolts, which came out in 2025 and I thought this was pretty good, both very dark and yet with quite a lot of humor to balance the darkness. Former assassin Yelena Belova has been working as a mercenary for the sinister director of the CIA, Valentina de Fontaine (now there's a villain name if there ever was one). Yelena has grown disillusioned with her life and career and is suffering from increasing depression since she never really dealt with the death of her sister. Valentina promises her one last job, only for Yelena to realize that Valentina decided to dispose of all her freelance contractors at once, which includes US Agent and Ghost (previously seen in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Antman and the Wasp). In the process of escaping Valentina's trap, Yelena stumbles across a mysterious man who identifies himself as Bob, who has no memory of how he got there, but shows increasingly unusual abilities. Yelena wants to deal with Valentina's betrayal, but it turns out one of Valentina's science projects has gotten out of control and is threatening the world. The movie was well constructed enough that it didn't rely too heavily on previous Marvel continuity. It was there, but you probably wouldn't be lost without it. It almost feels like Marvel looked at the stuff they did the last couple of years and said, okay, a lot of this didn't work, but makes great raw material for new things. It helped that the central conflict was in the end, very human and about the characters, not stopping a generic villain from getting a generic doomsday device. Overall Grade: A   Next up is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which came out in 1988. This is a movie length episode of The Return of Sherlock Holmes television series, which had Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Dr. Watson. The plot deals with Sir Henry Baskerville, the American heir to an English manor set in the Windswept moors of Dartmoor. Apparently there's an ancestral curse laid over the Baskerville estate that manifests in the form of a spectral hound. Local rumors hold that the previous holder of the manor, Sir Charles Baskerville, was killed by the ghostly hound and many of the local people fear it. The local physician, Dr. Mortimer, is so worried about the hound that he comes to Sherlock Holmes for help. Holmes, of course, is skeptical of any supernatural explanation and soon becomes worried that an extremely subtle and sinister murderer is stalking Sir Henry.   Jeremy Brett's version of Holmes is, in my opinion, the best portrayal of the character and Edward Hardwicke's version of Watson is a calm, reliable man of action who sensibly takes a very large revolver with him when going into danger. Definitely worth watching, Overall grade: A   Next up is Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which came out in 2024. The 2020s have been a downer of a decade in many ways, but on the plus side, between Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, people have finally figured out how to make good video game movies, so we've got that going for us. Sonic 3 was an excellent kids movie, as were the first two in the trilogy. In this one Sonic is living with Knuckles and Tails under the care of their human friends Tom and Maddy, but then a dark secret emerges. The government has been keeping a Superpowered hedgehog named Shadow in stasis and Shadow has broken out. It's up to Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails to save the day.   Meanwhile, Dr. Robotnik is in a funk after his defeat at Sonic's hands in the last movie, but then his long lost grandfather, Gerald Robotnik returns seeking the younger Dr. Robotnik's help in his own sinister plans. Keanu Reeves was great as Shadow (think John Wick if he was a superpowered space hedgehog in a kid's movie). Jim Carrey famously said he would retire from acting unless a golden script came along and apparently that golden script was playing Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his evil grandfather Gerald. To be fair, both the Robotniks were hilarious.   It is amusing that Sonic only exists because in the 1990s, Sega wanted a flagship video game character that won't get them sued by either Nintendo or Disney. It is also amusing that the overall message of the Sonic movies seems to be not to trust the government. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Paddington in Peru, which came out in 2024. This is also an excellent kids' movie. In this installment, Paddington has settled into London with the Brown family and officially become a UK citizen. However, he receives a letter from Peru that his Aunt Lucy has mysteriously disappeared into the jungle. Distraught, Paddington and the Browns set off for Peru at once. Adventures ensue involving mysterious lost treasure, a crazy boat captain, and an order of singing nuns who might not quite be what they appear. Anyway, it's a good kids' movie. I think Paddington 2 was only slightly better because Hugh Grant as the chief villain, crazy actor Phoenix Buchanan, was one of those lightning in the bottle things like Heath Ledger as the Joker in the Dark Knight. Overall Grade: A   Now for the two best things I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. The first of them is Andor Season Two, which came out in 2025. Star Wars kind of has an age range the way Marvel stuff does now. What do I mean by that? In the Marvel comics and some of the TV series like Jessica Jones, they get into some really dark and heavy stuff, very mature themes. The MCU movies can have some darkness to them, but not as much because they're aiming at sort of escapist adventures for the general audience. Then there are kid shows like Spidey and Friends that a relative of mine just loved when he was three. You wouldn't at all feel comfortable showing a 3-year-old Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Spidey and Friends is just fine.   Star Wars now kind of has that age range to its stuff and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you want to see a dark meditation upon human nature. Sometimes you need something kid friendly to occupy the kids you're babysitting and sometimes you just want to relax and watch Mando and Baby Yoda mow down some space pirates or something. All that said, Andor Season Two is some of the darkest and the best stuff that Star Wars has ever done. It successfully shifts genres from Escapist Pulp Space Fantasy to a gritty Political/Espionage Thriller. We in the audience know that the emperor is a Sith Lord who can use Evil Space Magic and wants to make himself immortal, but that fact is totally irrelevant to the characters. Even though some of the characters are high ranking in their respective organizations, this is essentially a “ground's eye” view of the Rebellion and life under the Empire.   In some ways, this is like Star Wars' version of Wolf Hall (which we're going to talk about shortly), in that we know how it ends already, but the dramatic tension comes from the harrowing emotional journey the characters undertake on the way to their inevitable destinations. Cassian Andor is now working for the nascent Rebellion under the direction of ruthless spymaster Luthen Rael. Mon Mothma is in the Imperial Senate, covertly funneling money to the Rebellion and realizing just how much the Rebellion will require of her before the end. Syril Karn, the ineffective corporate cop from Season One, has fallen in love with the ruthless secret police supervisor Dedra Meero, but he's unaware that Director Krennic has ordered Meero to manufacture a false flag incident on the planet Gorman so the planet can be strip-mined for resources to build the Death Star and Dedra has decided to use Syril to help accomplish it. All the actors do amazing jobs with their roles. Seriously, this series as actors really should get at least one Emmy. Speaking of Director Krennic, Ben Mendelson returns as Orson Krennic, who is one of my favorite least favorite characters, if you get my drift. Krennic is the oily, treacherous middle manager we've all had to deal with or work for at some point in our lives, and Mendelson plays him excellently. He's a great villain, the sort who is ruthless to his underlings and thinks he can manipulate his superiors right up until Darth Vader starts telekinetically choking him. By contrast, the villain Major Partagaz (played by Anton Lesser) is the middle manager we wish we all had - stern but entirely fair, reasonable, and prizes efficiency and good work while despising office drama. Unfortunately, he works for the Empire's secret police, so all those good qualities are in the service of evil and therefore come to naught. Finally, Episode Eight is one of the most astonishing episodes of TV I've ever seen. It successfully captures the horror of an episode of mass violence and simultaneously has several character arcs reach their tumultuous climax and manages to be shockingly graphic without showing in a lot of actual blood. Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but then Peak Streaming collapsed, and so the remaining four seasons were compressed down to one. I think that was actually to the show's benefit because it generates some amazing tension and there's not a wasted moment. Overall Grade: A+   Now for the second of my two favorite things I saw, and that would be Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, which came out in 2024, but I actually saw it in 2025. This is a dramatization of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, who is King Henry VIII's chief lieutenant during the key years of the English Reformation. The first series came out in 2015, but the nine year gap between this and between the second series and the first series actually works quite well since Thomas Cromwell looks like he ages nine years in a single year (which may be what actually happened given how stressful working for someone like Henry VIII must have been). Anyway, in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell has successfully arranged the downfall and execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry's previous queen. Though Cromwell is haunted by his actions, Henry still needs a queen to give him a male heir, so he marries Jane Seymour. Cromwell must navigate the deadly politics of the Tudor Court while trying to push his Protestant views of religion, serve his capricious master Henry, fend off rivals for the King's favor, and keep his own head attached to his shoulders in the process. Since Cromwell's mental state is deteriorating due to guilt over Anne's death and the downfall of his former master Cardinal Wolsey and Henry's a fickle and dangerous master at the best of times, this is an enterprise that is doomed to fail. Of course, if you're at all familiar with the history of Henry's reign and the English reformation, you know that Cromwell's story does not have a happy ending. Rather, Wolf Hall is a tragedy about a talented man who didn't walk away from his power until it was too late and he was trapped. Anyway, in my opinion, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light was just excellent. All the performances were superb. Mark Rylance is great as Cromwell and has some excellent “WTF/I'm SO screwed” expressions as Cromwell's situation grows worse and worse. Bernard Hill played the Duke of Norfolk in the first series, but sadly died before Series Two, so Timothy Spall steps in and he does an excellent job of channeling Hill's portrayal of the Duke as an ambitious, crude-humored thug.   Damien Lewis is amazing as Henry VIII and his performance captures Henry's mixture of charisma, extreme vindictiveness, and astonishing self-absorption. The real Henry was known for being extremely charming even to the end of his life, but the charm was mixed with a volcanic temper that worsened as Henry aged and may have been exacerbated by a severe head injury. Lewis's performance can shift from that charm to the deadly fury in a heartbeat. The show rather cleverly portrays Henry's growing obesity and deteriorating health by having Lewis wear a lot of big puffy coats and limp with an impressively regal walking stick.   Overall, I would say this and Andor were the best thing I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. I wouldn't say that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is an accurate historical reputation. In real life, Cromwell was rather more thuggish and grasping (though far more competent than his rivals and his master) and of necessity the plot simplifies historical events, but it's just a superb historical drama. Overall Grade: A+ As a final note, I should say that of all the 2024 and 2025 movies mentioned here, the only one that actually saw in the theater was Thunderbolts, and I hadn't actually planned to see it in theaters, but a family member unexpectedly bought tickets for it, so I went along. Which I suppose is the movie industry's biggest problem right now. The home viewing experience is often vastly superior to going to the theater. The theater has the big screen and snacks, but at home you can have a pretty nice setup and you can pause whatever you want, go to the bathroom, and you can get snacks for much more cheaply. That's just much more comfortable than the movie theater.   Additionally, going to the theater has the same serious problem as booking a flight in that you're an enclosed space with complete strangers for several hours, which means you're potentially in a trust fall with idiots. All it takes is one person behaving badly or trying to bring their fake service dog to ruin or even cancel a flight, and the theater experience has much of the same problem, especially since the standards for acceptable public behavior have dropped so much from a combination of widespread smartphone adoption and COVID. The difference between the movie industry and the airline industry is that if you absolutely have to get from New York to Los Angeles in a single day, you have no choice but to book a flight and hope for the best. But if you want to see a movie and are willing to exercise some patience, you just have to wait a few months for it to turn up on streaming. I'm not sure how the movie industry can battle that, but sadly, it is much easier to identify problems than to solve them.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

We're back with another This Week in YouTube where we highlight some recent content from my YouTube channel. This week: Heather Reacts - Wolf Hall Recap on the Pilgrimage of Grace; The Heretic and the King - Henry VIII Debates John Lambert in Wolf Hall? Make sure you're subscribed at https://www.youtube.com/@hteysko so you don't miss all the content we put out!Support the podcast for even more exclusive contenthttps://www.patreon.com/englandcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Trumps tullar sände chockvågor genom världen. Är globaliseringen över? Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Globalisering har flera betydelser. Det kan syfta på internationell handel, nyliberal ideolog med minimal stat och frihandeln som ideal, en gränslös värld där kultur inte är bunden till en plats och en kommunikationsteknologi som krymper världen. Globaliseringen har en lång historia och har förändrats över tid. På vilket sätt har dagens globalisering påverkat oss som människor och vår syn på världen?Förespråkarna för globaliseringen lyfter fram att frihandel och marknadsekonomi har lett till att världsfattigdomen har sjunkit, valfriheten och välståndet ökat. Historiskt har kritiken mot globaliseringen varit starkast från vänster som pekat på hur globaliseringen ökat klyftorna, förstört miljön och inte främjat mänskliga rättigheter. Idag hörs kritiken mest från den konservativa högern som vill skydda det egna landets industri och pekar på problem med invandring. Det har skett en omsvängning mot ekonomisk nationalism. Vilken är den nya tidsandan som kommer med den?Medverkande: Lars Magnusson, professor i ekonomisk historia vid Uppsala universitet och Lisa Dellmuth, professor i internationella relationer Stockholms universitet.Programledare: Cecilia Strömberg WallinProducent: Marie LiljedahlVeckans tips:TV-serie:Wolf Hall - som bygger på författaren Hilary Mantels böckerSamtal och möten genom konst: Carola Grahn: Moderna Museet och Liljevalchs konsthallVerket: Horizon of Me(aning)

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

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

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Six of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Actor Sir Mark Rylance earned multiple awards for his nuanced portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall. He returns to the role in the sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, and explores a more vulnerable side to Henry's infamous fixer. Today, Mark discusses saying goodbye to this character, the importance of mentors, and the beauty of mystery.

The most astonishing men lie in the far, forgotten corners of history. Kavitha Rao joins Amit Varma in episode 416 of The Seen and the Unseen to shed light on the life and times of two magnificent failures, Chatto and Roy. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Kavitha Rao on Twitter, Instagram, Amazon and her own website. 2. Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy -- Kavitha Rao. 3. Lady Doctors : The Untold Stories Of India's First Women In Medicine -- Kavitha Rao. 4. Kavitha Rao and Our Lady Doctors -- Episode 235 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Chatto: The Life and Times of an Anti-Imperialist in Europe -- Nirode K Barooah. 6. In Freedom's Quest : A Study of the Life and Works of MN Roy -- Sibnarayan Ray. 7. The collected works of MN Roy. 8. Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity — Manu Pillai. 9. The Forces That Shaped Hinduism -- Episode 405 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manu Pillai). 10. Ira Mukhoty on Instagram. 11. The Difficulty In Dating Good Men -- Aella. 12. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus -- John Gray. 13. Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh — Shrayana Bhattacharya. 14. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 15. The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj -- Anita Anand. 16. Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka -- Srikar Raghavan. 17. Lady Doctors on Goodreads. 18. The Spectacular Life of Prahlad Kakar -- Episode 414 of The Seen and the Unseen. 19. Vinayak Calling Vinayak — Episode 385 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinayak Chaturvedi). 20. Daughter of Earth -- Agnes Smedley. 21. The Gilded Age and The White Lotus. 22. Rumours -- Fleetwood Mac. 23. The Day I Became a Runner -- Sohini Chattopadhyay. 24, Brotherless Night -- VV Ganeshananthan. 25. Miss Austen, Wolf Hall and The Traitors. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Lenin Speaks Bengali' by Simahina.

This month on GLoP: Rob has an important announcement to make, some unfortunate serial killer names, The Last of Us, Andor, Wolf Hall, and various other cultural non-sequiturs.Head to http://lumen.me/GLOP for 15% off your purchase.

This month on GLoP: Rob has an important announcement to make, some unfortunate serial killer names, The Last of Us, Andor, Wolf Hall, and various other cultural non-sequiturs.

This week Kim and Alice have been locked in the cupboard with the Christmas decorations to bring you Tudor drama series, Wolf Hall. We're talking about Hans Holbein: portrait artist / historical catfisher and Henry VIII never getting to just enjoy a joust. Also kittens!Sound Engineer: Keith NagleEditor: Helen Hamilton / Keith NagleProducer: Helen Hamilton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Five of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Screenwriter, and newly minted Oscar winner, Peter Straughan is fascinated by stories of loyalty and betrayal. In Episode Five of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell's loyalty is under question. Today, Peter joins the podcast to discuss adapting and writing this captivating drama series.

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

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Four of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Actor Damian Lewis is well-known to MASTERPIECE viewers for his iconic roles in The Forsyte Saga and Wolf Hall. He joins the podcast to discuss the sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, and reflects on playing one of the most notorious kings in English history. In Episode 4, King Henry VIII's health is deteriorating, and there's threat of invasion from France and Spain, but Henry also gets what he has wanted most of all, a male heir.

In this week's episode, we take a look at marketing for writers, and discuss how it can both benefit and hinder writers. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, Book #5 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: BARBARIAN50 The coupon code is valid through May 2, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 247 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at marketing challenges for writers.   First, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, Book Five in the Dragonskull series (as excellent narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is BARBARIAN50. We will have the coupon code in the show notes along with links to the store. This coupon code is valid through May 2, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered.   Now let's have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I am done with the rough draft of Shield of Battle and its accompanying short story, Raven's Hunt. I am currently editing them and making good progress on that. The book should come out either right before or right after Easter, with right after being the more likely option the way it looks right now. I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which will be my main project once Shield of Battle comes out. Audio recording is still underway for Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. So more updates on that to come. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:01:17 Question of the Week   And now let's take a look at Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is the best TV show you started watching in 2025 (if any)? No wrong answers, obviously.   Justin says: Television shows? The TV in my house is used for video games and movies. It has been 18 years since I watched any TV shows. Surabhi says: Nowadays the only non-Marvel series I watch are animes like Doraemon and Shinchan XD.   Perry says: I never watched a lot of TV but I do catch the odd European football or hockey game. That said, I'm enjoying The Wheel of Time.   Sam says: Clarkson's Farm. He might be a love him/hate him chap, but he certainly does make for entertaining shows. It also shows just how fickle the farming industry can be and shines a much needed light on the issues they face.   I would like to second Sam's recommendation of Clarkson's Farm. It's definitely well worth watching if you have access to Amazon Prime. Bonnie says:  I'm totally out of the loop. Haven't really watched any TV since I binged Avengers and Star War when home with Covid in 2021. I read during downtime.   Andrew says: Tracker is okay. Matlock is good, well-written. I want to like Watson, but have given up. Dark Winds is excellent. 1923 got so dark, I quit. Landman started great, got worse when wife character entered the picture. Re-watching Lonesome Dove. Love it.   David says: The Blacklist.   Michael says: No particular series as I don't really watch much on TV, but a shout out to the Japanese NHK World Channel, which is essentially their international service in English available to watch live on their website, at least in my country or via their app. There's so much good content on there, really interesting documentaries, news features, Japanese shows, and of course the highlights of the Sumo tournaments.   Larry says: Starting The Outpost.   John says: My brother has recommended Wolf Hall. My most anticipated series is Andor. I think of what I watched this year thus far my guilty pleasure was Reacher, most emotional was 1923, most cerebral has been Severance, and funniest has been The Residence. No favorite standout yet.   Juana says: Tracker.   William says: Poker Face was enjoyable.   For myself, I think it would be Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light about the downfall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. I'll have more to say about that later in my Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup post in a few weeks.   00:03:29 Main Topic: Marketing   Now let's move on to our main topic, writing adjacent activities: marketing. This is part of my podcast series about what I call writing adjacent activities. What do I mean by this? I'm talking about the tasks that seem like they're part of the writing process but really belong in a different category. These tasks are important, don't get me wrong, but they can also be a pitfall if you spend too much time on them or don't use that time correctly. In this series, we are focusing on a few of these tasks and how they can benefit or hinder your writing process, even though they seem like good uses of time and may in fact be beneficial. In this episode, we will talk about marketing. For the self-published author, it is an absolutely essential thing to do. Even traditionally published authors are becoming involved in their marketing or hiring marketing firms apart from their publishers to help with that work. Even important tasks can still take time away from the most important one, writing.   First, how does marketing work for writers in the first place? Even as traditional advertising and print media like newspapers and periodicals has all disappeared by 2025, there are still many, many ways to advertise a book. Here are some examples:   Social media and I don't mean ads, I mean posting content about your book or engaging readers on social media about your book. It's become increasingly common in this age of a video-based social media like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels for authors to post short clips about them interacting with their book or doing things with their book and so forth. And that is, I think, a distinct category from ads.   Ads of course are another type of marketing such as Amazon Ads, Facebook, BookBub, etc.   An email newsletter where you send out an email to your newsletter subscribers when a book comes out   Having an author website   Group promotions where you work together with a group of authors to promote   Doing interviews with podcasts, local media, etc. (though these days podcasts have essentially superseded local media)   Sending out advanced reader copies   Permafree/discounts   I should note that of everything on this list, I've done them all except for advanced reader copies, which I never really bothered to do because I write so fast that it seems to be kind of pointless at that point. Now I got to admit that list seems overwhelming, but you're not going to do them all simultaneously. Most authors pick a few from the list and then focus on them, and then some of them take some work upfront like setting up your author website and then it's less work to maintain it and update it as you go along than it is to set it up to begin with.   For example, making many of my series starters permafree has been an extremely successful strategy for me. For an author who only has two books, that strategy would not be as effective, but if you have a series of nine books then that is a good idea.   So why is it beneficial to market your books? A couple years ago (and I've told this story before, but it bears repeating), I was at a Subway waiting in line to order lunch. The person in front of me was staring at the menu in great confusion. “Does this shop sell submarine sandwiches?”, she finally asked the sandwich artist. Even with 40,000 locations worldwide and millions of dollars in advertising each year, this person was completely unaware of Subway's offerings.   This moment made me realize that marketing must be constant even for big legacy brands like Subway or Coca-Cola because there is always someone out there who isn't familiar with what you have to offer them. If multi-billion dollar corporations like Coca-Cola and Subway have people who haven't heard of them, how much more [work is there for] indie authors like us? There is in my opinion, an erroneous sentiment that getting too involved in marketing as an author somehow cheapens your work, devalues your art, or means that you're not as committed to your art. That sentiment is frankly, in my opinion, self-destructive and keeping a lot of people from reaching new readers or keeping existing ones as new books come out.   Marketing is necessary and needs to be ongoing to work. It's important to remember that readers love new books and want to know more about them. Your goal is to just let them know what's available and how to find your work. You're not being annoying by creating an ad or sending out a newsletter when a new book drops. Even if you have loyal readers, it's likely only a very tiny percentage of them are obsessively checking ebook stores daily for your latest publications. Social media and newsletters in particular are effective ways to let people know when the latest content is ready or can help them get excited for an upcoming release. Just as importantly, good marketing can help you find people who are interested in your genre or read authors similar to you.   So marketing is a good thing and it is in fact necessary if you want to have a career as an indie author or sell books in any quantities. However, it can become a pitfall that takes time away from actually writing new books. So when can it be a pitfall? There are about five different ways it can become a hindrance to writing.   #1: The most obvious pitfall is that time spent working on marketing is time not spent on writing. Although marketing is an essential part of how writers make income, it's only going to go so far compared to creating new books. This is in fact a decision I've had to make many times where if there's only so many hours in the day, and if I have an hour and I have to choose an hour spent fiddling with ads to try and optimize them to sell old books or to focus on writing new books, very often I have decided to focus on writing new books. Or if I have ads that are underperforming, I just shut them off and don't think about them until I have a free moment when the current book is done because writing the latest book is where my attention and priority should be. #2: The second pitfall is that spending too much time on social media or various forums like Reddit can also skew your perspective and give you an unreal view of the preferences of your readership. You'll likely only engage with a small percentage of your readers online. Just because they're reaching out to you or sharing their opinions online doesn't mean that their opinion matches the rest of your readership. An example of this is when Warner Brothers thought there was a massive demand for the Snyder Cut of the Justice League movie based on an online fan campaign and spent a very large amount of money for the recut of the movie, only for it to have a fairly modest audience that didn't recoup the cost. Later it came out that much of the Twitter campaign for the recut were bot accounts, people with multiple social media accounts, or people that ultimately pirated the movie instead of getting an HBO subscription to watch it when it finally became available on streaming. The Internet is a very useful tool, but it's best to take it with a grain of salt and remember that that just because one person is saying something on the Internet doesn't mean there are ten or even a hundred silent people who share their views. As with the example with the Justice League movie, large businesses have run into that trouble where they assume just because a particular audience segment is very loud on social media, therefore it must be a large segment when in fact it turns out to be just a very loud minority that ultimately isn't going to have much buying power. So that is something to keep in mind when you examine [social media], that opinions expressed online may not necessarily reflect reality.   #3: There is also the temptation to get so lost in thinking of how a book will be marketed, that when you write it, you don't try to write a book that is authentic to you or your readers. Trying to piece together a book based on the latest tropes or sales trends will likely mean that by the time the book is ready, social media will have moved onto another one. Writing to market is a form of marketing that sometimes works, but often results in something that feels formulaic or doesn't match your writing style. You can't always tell if the author hated the book when they were writing it, but sometimes you can. And it's sometimes very obvious to tell if an author wrote a book not because he or she enjoyed writing it but because they thought it would sell. And I think deep down, you really have to enjoy the genre you're writing in, which is why many frustrated mystery, fantasy, and science fiction authors saw how well romance doing and so decided to try writing romance only to deep down they didn't enjoy reading romance and so they didn't write a romance book that anyone would enjoy reading. So that is the potential risk of that temptation.   #4: Another pitfall is the urge to market your way out of a book that isn't connecting with readers. If a book doesn't meet reader expectations, no amount of marketing is going to significantly change that. Sometimes it's best to cut your losses with a book or series if it's not performing the way that you expect instead of throwing even more money marketing at it. I'm afraid I have a very recent example for my own life in the form of these Stealth and Spells Online series.   I think the problem with that series is I fundamentally misread what the LitRPG audience wants. Stealth and Spells Online is about a virtual reality game, but what the LitRPG audience really seems to want these days is either Portal Isekai or System Apocalypse Fantasy, which Stealth and Spells Online most definitely isn't. I told the narrator that I intended to write a LitRPG, but what I ended up with was a science fiction espionage thriller with LitRPG elements. So that, as you might expect, has been very hard to market and very hard to turn a profit while marketing it. So what I decided to do was I originally planned for seven or eight books in the series, but I'm going to cut it down to three and wrap up the story in hopefully a satisfying way with book number three this summer. That is a lived experience example of a changing course when some marketing doesn't work.   #5: There can be a feeling that you're missing out if you're not trying a marketing strategy that worked for someone else, so you'll end up stretching yourself thin by trying everything, stretching your marketing time across social media, newsletters, video content, posting the spaces like Goodreads, assembling a launch team, sending out advanced reader copies, going on podcasts, doing interviews with local media, and doing guest blog posts simply is not sustainable. There is a potential value in doing a short-term marketing sprint like that where you do all the things for a few days, but doing that all the time is not a good idea. As we mentioned earlier, it can take away time that should be spent writing. So really the best marketing course is to pick a few tactics that you enjoy and are comfortable using and then do those most of the time and save everything else for special occasions or if an opportunity comes up. For myself, I mostly focus on setting first in series permafree and doing various ad campaigns on Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub. I tend to stay away from TikTok and video marketing and some of the more time intensive things. I prefer things like permafree or various CPC ads where I can set it up and let it run and then check on it every few days to make sure it's working or not spending too much. So how can you balance time spent on marketing with making progress with your writing? The best way to market your old books is to publish a new one. Algorithms on online stores like Amazon and all the others reward fresh books and readers have short memories, so taking years between series risks them forgetting you.   Finishing a series in a timely fashion is crucial now many readers, especially in Epic Fantasy (for a variety of reasons), will only start series that are already completed, having been burned by series that were left unfinished. Having a polished product should also precede your marketing efforts. If your cover looks bad, your money would be better spent on getting a professional looking cover instead of more Facebook ads. Taking the time to make a good cover and good ad copy for your ads is also important before you spend money on marketing. For marketing, it will save you time and money to map out your goals for it each year just like you map out a set of goals for what you'll publish each year. Having a clear set of goals will keep you from trying every new thing that you hear about just because it worked for someone else. It's also wise to be honest with yourself about your strengths when considering how you spend your marketing time. If you hate TikTok, forcing yourself to make videos there isn't going to lead to compelling content that would make people want to buy your book. The authors who have had success with TikTok had that because they were able to genuinely connect with an audience there, not just because they threw a book trailer on the platform and hoped for the best. As with many writing adjacent activities, it is best to have a set block of time to work on marketing and to plan even the time spent checking ads and responding to social media comments so it doesn't take over your writing time. Just like having a plan for each year with some larger goals is a good idea, having a daily or weekly set of goals for marketing can help keep you focused.   In conclusion, the true pitfall of any writing adjacent activity is they need to be kept adjacent to the actual production of new writing. All the tasks we covered in the series are important, but writing should always be the priority if you are a writer.   So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this episode, Jodi talks with Louise Brogan about her journey as a LinkedIn expert and her experience writing her new book on LinkedIn. Louise shares her love of writing, the challenges she faced during the publishing process, and how her book is enhancing her business strategy.    Time Stamps: 00:00 Book marketing for business growth 04:26 Becoming a paid writer 07:53 Remote work challenges and motivation 11:00 Questionable editing offer 14:02 LinkedIn branding restrictions impact business 18:13 Unplanned book launch challenge 22:57 LinkedIn logo usage restriction 26:40 LinkedIn video guide promotion" 29:59 Bruce Springsteen and royal encounters 36:01 Original idea 38:15 Interactive book reading structure 39:45 Collaborative editing and book recommendations   Keywords: Wrigte Publish Market podcast, business owner, book marketing asset, book publishing strategist, business growth, writing, publishing, marketing a book, louise brogan, solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, linkedin expert, brand building, online results, visibility on linkedin, youtuber, silver play button, content creation, book origin story, book cover design, networking, business book club, international speaking gigs, Social Media Examiner, editorial collaboration, trademark approval, book launch, business card, Social Media Marketing World Resources Mentioned: Coffee + Commas signup: https://bit.ly/coffeeandcommassignup Ready Set Write Challenge: www.jodibrandoneditorial.com/readysetwrite Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel About Our Guest: Beyond her passion for helping solopreneurs, coaches, and consultants through workshops and 1-2-1 training, Louise Brogan also works with larger organizations like BT, BBC, the Chartered Institute of Accountants England & Wales, and the Law Society. Whether you're a small business or a larger company, Louise is dedicated to helping you build your brand and drive results online.   www.raiseyourvisibilityonline.com www.louisebrogan.com/workwithme www.youtube.com/@raiseyourvisiblityonline www.linkedin.com/in/louisebrogan https://leveluplinkedin.teachable.com/courses LINK TO FULL EPISODE (RAW) TRANSCRIPT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s5dwDLFPy64VDkKPIlPgvOhvDxH49vMPMbwSSUKRfcQ/edit?usp=sharing  

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Three of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Actor Lilit Lesser is a familiar face to MASTERPIECE audiences, appearing in both Wolf Hall and Endeavour. Lilit joins us today to discuss playing Lady Mary in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, and examine how the character balances faith with fortitude.

Episode 522 - Julie Strong - The Tudor Prophecy, An epic, literary tale blending Game of Thrones and Little WomenJulie Strong is a soon-to-be-retired family physician in Halifax, Nova Scotia; she has an ongoing shamanic practice where she addresses the spiritual causes of illness. Julie was born in Manchester, England, grew up in Wales, Australia, and Ireland, and emigrated to Canada in 1980. Her medical degree is from Trinity College, Dublin University, Ireland, and she holds a BA in Classics from Dalhousie University, Halifax. Her shamanism training is from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Marin County, California. Dr. Strong has given presentations in Canada, the US, and Europe on the subject of insanity in ancient Greek literature. She presented a three-part series on Greek mythology at Halifax Central Library in spring 2018 and also “Finding Comfort in Difficult Times,” an overview of shamanism, in fall 2021. She is a lecturer with the Senior College Association of Nova Scotia (SCANS) and delivered a six-week course, The Goddess in Antiquity, in spring 2024, which emphasized humanity's need to reconnect with Nature and the Divine Feminine. Book: The Tudor ProphecyEngland, 1541. An ailing Henry VIII reigns from a contested throne. In parallel story lines, The Tudor Prophecy follows two young women, Lady Alice Grantmire and Hester Vaughan, cousins who each suffer greatly from the King's unjust decrees. Lady Alice and her mother are evicted from their estate and take residence in a cottage where they earn a subsistence selling herbal remedies--until they are accused of witchcraft. After being molested by the King, Hester is summoned to her estranged father's home in Wales. There she becomes betrothed to a Welsh bard whose mentor has visions foretelling the ascendancy of Henry's second daughter, Elizabeth. When Hester encounters the eight-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the two forge a relationship whereby Hester can persuade the future queen to temper her own rule with mercy. This epic, literary tale—a Game of Thrones meets Little Women—is also for readers who loved the Wolf Hall trilogy by Booker-Prize winner Hilary Mantelhttps://ocpublishing.ca/julie-strongSupport the show___https://livingthenextchapter.com/podcast produced by: https://truemediasolutions.ca/Coffee Refills are always appreciated, refill Dave's cup here, and thanks!https://buymeacoffee.com/truemediaca

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Episode Two of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.Historian and production researcher Kirsten Claiden-Yardley returns to the podcast to discuss the world of King Henry VIII and his court and distinguish fact from fiction in the first two episodes of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. 

In episode 69 we spotlight the PBS Masterpiece series WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT with a behind-the-scenes visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, “How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition” with the curator Dr. Heather Wolfe Curator of Manuscripts for the Folger (in Washington, DC), which holds the world's largest Shakespeare collection. WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT traces the final four years of Thomas Cromwell's life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared, influential figure of his time as a principal advisory to England's King Henry VIII. The series is based on the final novel by Hilary Mantel in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. As an added bonus, Heather Wolfe shared documents from the Folger collection for the real-life Thomas Cromwell, Henry the VIII, and Henry's 4th wife, Anne of Cleves,. Go to the podcast website (for Ep. 69) to see images of these artifacts and for more information about the Foger Shakespeare Library's exhibit "How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition" on display through July 2025.------TIMESTAMPS0:19 - A Visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, DC)0:56 - Folger “How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Style” exhibit2:02 - “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” overview and cast3:18-  Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at Folger Shakespeare Library3:30 - Roles and Responsibilities of Curator of Manuscripts4:22 - Paleography, the study of handwriting5:14 - Inspiration behind “How To Be A Power Player: Tudor Style” and relevance to 20256:48 - Tudor power players' relationships, skills, and power dynamics7:38 - Tudor "playbooks" from Machiavelli and Castiglione 12:19 - Power dressing, fashion policing, and personal branding in Tudor times15:13 - Hospitality power plays: napkin folding and meat carving22:48 - Break23:32 - Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Anne of Cleves artifacts and letters29:57 - Class status and social mobility in Tudor Times32:36 - Women's power and influence in the Tudor court36:09 - Visitor takeaways from “How to Be A Power Playe: Tudor Edition”r exhibit38:21 - Folger Shakespeare Library resources38:50 - How to watch “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” on PBS “Masterpiece”41:04 - DisclaimerSUBSCRIBE to the podcast on your favorite podcast platformLISTEN to past past podcasts and bonus episodesSIGN UP for our mailing listSUPPORT this podcast  SHOP THE PODCAST on our affiliate bookstoreBuy us a Coffee! You can support by buying a coffee ☕ here — buymeacoffee.com/historicaldramasistersThank you for listening!

The director of Wolf Hall, Peter Kosminsky, and CEO of Bad Wolf, Jane Tranter, discuss a TV industry in crisis. As the editor of the Atlantic magazine reveals he was added to a White House group chat on Signal, we profile the founder of the messaging app. Also on the programme, how authors and publishers are responding to their works allegedly being used to train AI models. And as protests continue in Turkey, we speak to a reporter about the detention of journalists covering the events.Guests: Peter Kosminsky, Director, Wolf Hall; Jane Tranter, Co-founder, Bad Wolf; Alex Reisner, programmer and contributing writer, The Atlantic; Rosie Wilby, author, The Breakup Monologues; Catriona MacLeod Stevenson, Deputy CEO, Publishers Association; James Ball, Political Editor, The New European; Selin Girit, journalist, BBC Presenters: Katie Razzall and Ros Atkins Producer: Lucy Wai Assistant Producers: Flora McWilliam and Elena Angelides

March has been a busy month for the Boston Sisters. This is an extended trailer for Episode 69. The complete podcast will be available for download Thursday, March 27th where we spotlight  the PBS MASTERPIECE series WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT and our visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC for the exhibit "How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition."Our guest for Episode 69 is Dr. Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts and curator of the exhibition “How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition.” The trailer for Ep. 69  also includes a clip from a previous podcast (Episode 60) released in October 2024 with PBS MASTERPIECE executive producer and head of scripted content Susanne Singer who gave a preview of WOLF HALL: THE MIRROR IN THE LIGHT (now broadcasting) and other MASTERPIECE dramas. Subscribe to “Historical Drama with The Boston Sisters” so you won't miss Episode 69 featuring our conversation with Dr. Healthier Wolfe of the Folger Shakespeare Library about Thomas Cromwell and what it takes to be a power player in Tudor times.------SUBSCRIBE to the podcast on your favorite podcast platformLISTEN to past past podcasts and bonus episodesSIGN UP for our mailing listSUPPORT this podcast  SHOP THE PODCAST on our affiliate bookstoreBuy us a Coffee! You can support by buying a coffee ☕ here — buymeacoffee.com/historicaldramasistersThank you for listening!

Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Trump envoy Steve Witkoff dismisses Starmer plan for Ukraine Grassroots anger tests Nigel Farages grip on Reform UK Newspaper headlines Reeves to wield axe on Civil Service and boxing says bye George End of hedonism Why Britain turned its back on clubbing Oxfam staff shocked as Bible donated in Chelmsford sells for 56k British TV industry is in crisis, says Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky Pet owners in shock after dogs seized for XL bully checks The man with a mind reading chip in his brain, thanks to Elon Musk Pope Francis to be discharged from hospital on Sunday Rachel Reeves confirms accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets

Morse code transcription: vvv vvv The man with a mind reading chip in his brain, thanks to Elon Musk Oxfam staff shocked as Bible donated in Chelmsford sells for 56k Trump envoy Steve Witkoff dismisses Starmer plan for Ukraine Pet owners in shock after dogs seized for XL bully checks Newspaper headlines Reeves to wield axe on Civil Service and boxing says bye George Rachel Reeves confirms accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets End of hedonism Why Britain turned its back on clubbing British TV industry is in crisis, says Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky Pope Francis to be discharged from hospital on Sunday Grassroots anger tests Nigel Farages grip on Reform UK

Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Grassroots anger tests Nigel Farages grip on Reform UK End of hedonism Why Britain turned its back on clubbing Pet owners in shock after dogs seized for XL bully checks Pope Francis to be discharged from hospital on Sunday Newspaper headlines Reeves to wield axe on Civil Service and boxing says bye George The man with a mind reading chip in his brain, thanks to Elon Musk British TV industry is in crisis, says Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky Rachel Reeves confirms accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets Oxfam staff shocked as Bible donated in Chelmsford sells for 56k Trump envoy Steve Witkoff dismisses Starmer plan for Ukraine

Morse code transcription: vvv vvv Oxfam staff shocked as Bible donated in Chelmsford sells for 56k Trump envoy Steve Witkoff dismisses Starmer plan for Ukraine Pope Francis to be discharged from hospital on Sunday Rachel Reeves confirms accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets British TV industry is in crisis, says Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky End of hedonism Why Britain turned its back on clubbing Pet owners in shock after dogs seized for XL bully checks The man with a mind reading chip in his brain, thanks to Elon Musk Newspaper headlines Reeves to wield axe on Civil Service and boxing says bye George Grassroots anger tests Nigel Farages grip on Reform UK

Damian Lewis shares details on new series 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.' Also, Michael Urie stops by to discuss his role in 'Shrinking.' Plus, ways to keep pets safe and healthy this spring. And, Chef Marcus Samuelsson shares a delicious roast jerk chicken recipe.

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

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

This week it's the rose red empire of Hackney famous residents from the 1500s. We discover why Alex didn't watch Wolf Hall. She's a sensitive gal you know. And we go way back to 600bc, before returning, via the world's first coal powered electricity generating station, where? Really!? How Extraordinary! To the bright lights and power hungry pubs of Shoreditch in the late 1800s. Time for some civic minded Victorian engineering, to produce: More Light, More Power. The unassuming brick building on Coronet St hides a powerful past life, disguised now with the glitz, glamour and muscles of steel needed for aerial circus skills. Plus Crossness dates - 5th Apr, get in touch if you want to join us at the pumping station. Important Hat news, Rev and Amazing Grace, and at some point everyone lives near Krapy Rubsnif. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join vassals Michal (inkasrain), Bina (Bina007), Stephanie (gsgd), and Marie (Nymeria) as they pass time with good company and get deep in discussion of the jaw-dropping BBC series Wolf Hall. Based on the epic novels by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall … Continue reading →

Professor Suzannah Lipscomb explores the lives of the cast of Tudor courtiers who appear in Wolf Hall, including Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich, Thomas Howard and Eustace Chapuys. She's joined by Dr. Lauren Mackay to discuss their portrayal in Wolf Hall and what happened to them in real life after the demise of Cromwell. The episode reveals the intricate politics, personal loyalties and enduring impacts of these characters on English history.Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Alice Smith, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Theme music from All3Media. Music by Epidemic Sound.Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

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

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

WARNING: This episode contains spoilers for Wolf Hall.Production researcher Kirsten Claiden-Yardley is an Oxford educated historian, researcher, and author with a particular interest in 15th and 16th century British history. Today, Kirsten takes us behind the tapestry to discuss working on MASTERPIECE's 2015 production Wolf Hall, and provides the real life historical context for this monumental historical drama. 

In the spring of 1540 Thomas Cromwell was at the height of his power, but just a few months later he found himself at the scaffold on Tower Hill preparing to be executed for treason and heresy. What had gone so badly wrong for Henry VIII's right-hand man? As the BBC drama Wolf Hall returns for a second series, Rob Attar speaks to Cromwell biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch about the precipitous downfall of a man who seemed to have it all. The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices