Alain Elkann Interviews

Hanif Kureishi is the author of novels such as 'The Buddha of Suburbia' and 'Intimacy', story collections, plays and screenplays. 'The Buddha of Suburbia' was made into a BBC TV series with a soundtrack by David Bowie. 'My Beautiful Laundrette', a story about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980's London, won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. 'Intimacy' was loosely adapted in the controversial movie Intimacy that won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival.

Most recent of the many books the leading American historian and public intellectual Timothy Snyder has written is THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM: RUSSIA, EUROPE, AMERICA. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He speaks five and reads ten European languages.

Loyd Grossman is chairman of The Royal Parks of London. The Royal Parks charity supports and manages London's eight Royal parks, and other important open spaces. Loyd has a long association with the arts and heritage sectors, and is also known for his work on television, MasterChef, and his eponymous cooking sauces.

A NEW CAREER. George Osborne is a British Conservative politician who was a Member of Parliament from 2001 to 2017. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under David Cameron from 2010 to 2016. When he left politics George Osborne didn't want to walk away from the national conversation and he has been editor of the London Evening Standard since May 2017. Alain made this interview with him on March 12th at the height of the Brexit debates in parliament and with the UK poised to leave the European Union on March 29th 2019.

THE JOB OF THE ARTIST IS TO MAKE TIME STAND STILL says Tracey Emin the renowned British artist as she contemplates her life, saying "When I am old, even if I can't walk I still want to be able to work. Everything I have and I do is towards my art. Art is like a wall. You stop and it talks to you. Art is not competing with technology, machinery, spaceships. Art is something else. Art comes from another place. Art never left me. It looks after me financially as well as spiritually, socially, but most importantly I have to remain morally secure."

A MOMENT OF TRANSITION. Minouche Shafik is Director of the LSE, The London School of Economics and Political Science. She was the youngest vice-president in the history of the World Bank where she worked for 15 years, returning to the UK in 2004 as the UK Permanent Secretary of the Department of International Development. In 2011 she became Deputy Managing Director of the IMF and from 2014-2017 was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. Alain made this interview with Dame Minouche in her office at the LSE in early 2018.

A CHARMED LIFE. The renowned photographer David Bailey was born in 1938 in East London. His first published portrait was of Somerset Maugham for Today magazine in 1960, and he famously met the supermodel Jean Shrimpton while he was at Vogue. Since then Bailey has made many iconic images of legendary and diverse personalities, including Queen Elizabeth II, the Rolling Stones, Mother Teresa, the Kray twins, Damien Hirst, Desmond Tutu and Kate Moss. Bailey provided the inspiration behind Antonioni's 1966 mystery-thriller Blow-Up and is still working. Alain and he made this highly entertaining interview in Bailey's studio in December 2018, just a few days before his 81st birthday.