Ana Schnabl discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.

Dog Behaviour: I’ve got two dogs, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out what they were actually saying.

The Concept of Universal Basic Income: I suspect that for a lot of people, Universal Basic Income sounds like a fantasy dreamt up by the lazy and the work-shy—a clever way to dodge the nine-to-five. In reality, it’s nothing of the sort.

Mina Mazzini: Known simply as Mina, she was nothing short of a force of nature—Italy’s greatest voice and legend. Her vocal range was outrageous and her stage presence magnetic.

Jellyfish: I grew up spending summers on the Slovene coast, where most beach conversations about jellyfish revolved around how nasty they are. I think it’s time to give them a bit of a rebrand.

Lojze Kovačič's The Newcomers: I know I sound like a total boomer saying this, but The Newcomers really is a masterpiece—a towering work of autofiction, written decades before “autofiction” was even a buzzword on Goodreads.

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Adam Lind discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Through living on a narrowboat on the British waterways, Adam Lind has unexpectedly built a large online community of over 900,000 loyal and engaged like-minded souls who enjoy soaking up his passion to live a life of meaning. Adam has appeared on Channel 4’s Narrow Escapes and has been featured in publications including The New York Post, Business Insider, The Sun, and others. His new book is Floating Home: Lessons from a life less ordinary, which is available at https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/floating-home-9781526683526/.

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Food critic Andrew Turvil discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Described by The Independent as one of the UK’s ‘arbiters of taste’, Andrew Turvil is the former editor of The Good Food Guide, AA Restaurant Guide and Which? Pub Guide. As a freelance restaurant critic, writer, and editor, he has spent his career writing about pubs and restaurants, and, undeterred, bought a pub in 2015 and ran it for 10 years. Blood, Sweat & Asparagus Spears is his first book and is available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blood-Sweat-Asparagus-Spears-Restaurant/dp/1783969113.

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Andy Reid discusses with Ivan six films chosen by previous guests which he thinks should not, after all, be better known. With apologies to Daria Lavelle, Steve Cross, Neil Brand, Tom Newman, Adam Higginbotham and Sam Sedgman.

Andy Reid is the founder of Buddy Up, a mentoring charity for young people across south London and Surrey. He has worked in the youth sector for over 20 years delivering programmes and training throughout the UK. You can find out more at https://buddyupcharity.org/.

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Matt Greene discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Matt Greene is an author, teacher, former screenwriter, and stay-at-home dad. His first novel, Ostrich, won a Betty Trask Award and his memoir Jew(ish) was described by Booker-shortlisted author Nadifa Mohamed as ‘wonderful’ and ‘acerbically funny’. He teaches critical and creative writing in South London, where he lives with his partner and two sons. His new book is The Definitions, which is at https://evewhite.co.uk/books/the-definitions/.

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Danny Scott discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Danny Scott grew up in an East Midlands mining village, serving his apprenticeship as an engineer on leaving school, before moving to London in the 1980s. After a job in counter (industrial) espionage, he became a private investigator, then a painter and decorator, then an engineer again, before becoming a journalist and interviewing people like Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, Usain Bolt and Dave Hill from Slade. He lives in Essex with his wife and their young son. His memoir, The Undisputed King of Selston (John Murray), was published in June 2025. It is available at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-undisputed-king-of-selston-danny-scott/7836018?ean=9781399816793.

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Alan Green grew up on the north coast of Cornwall and now lives in south London. As an environmental science graduate, he remains passionate about protecting and preserving the natural world. Alan spent nearly three decades at a Magic Circle law firm in the City of London, where he led a copy-editing team. A committed daily runner for over 35 years, Alan combines his love of nature with a commitment to wellbeing in all aspects of life. Sound Advice is his debut book, available at https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/sound-advice-9781784633585.

Our Sun is only 20 galactic years old The band Midnight Oil once asked, “How can we dance when our earth is turning?” The literal answer takes us from the Earth spinning at jet speed, to the Sun circling the Milky Way, to our galaxy itself hurtling through an expanding cosmos.

Ivan Wise has blue eyes. I have blue eyes. We may be related… We both have blue eyes — and they may trace back to a single ancestor, 6,000–10,000 years ago. Unlike brown eyes, blue eyes aren’t due to pigment but to the scattering of light, as with a blue sky.

You may not be as old as you feel. Our bodies are in perpetual renewal. Some cells live days, others last a lifetime. On average, our cells are only 7–10 years old — meaning we are all, in a sense, younger than our birthday-cake candles may suggest.

Yews, and why you often find them in churchyards. Step into a churchyard and you may find a yew that’s older than the church itself. These trees have stood as markers of sacred ground since before Christianity.

Our world without fungi wouldn’t function. From decomposing matter to building vast underground “wood-wide webs”, fungi are indispensable recyclers and collaborators.

Morgans don’t have wooden chassis. There’s a persistent myth that Morgan sports cars have wooden chassis. Not true: their chassis are steel or aluminium.

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Laurence Bergreen discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Laurence Bergreen is an award-winning biographer, historian, and chronicler of exploration. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages. They include Columbus: The Four Voyages, a New York Times bestseller, published by Viking in 2011. In 2007, Knopf published his Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu. For this book he crossed China from east to west and camped out on the steppe with hospitable Mongolians in their yurts. His bestselling Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, was published by William Morrow in 2003.  In its 40th printing, it was awarded the Medalla de Honor by the Asociación de Alcades de V Centenario (Spain). He has also published In Search of a Kingdom about Francis Drake's voyage of discovery (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and Voyage to Mars: NASA’s Search for Life Beyond Earth published by Riverhead in 2000.

His research for these books included extensive fieldwork.  He has sailed twice through the Strait of Magellan and is one of the few individuals to visit the volcanic island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland, thanks to the agile helicopters of the Icelandic Coast Guard, among other remote destinations. At NASA’s request, he named numerous geographical features around the crater Victoria on Mars. Find out more at https://laurencebergreenauthor.com/.

Louis Armstrong's favourite instrument https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-wonderful-world-with-typewriters.html

The Well Dressed Man with a Beard by Wallace Stevens https://allpoetry.com/The-Well-Dressed-Man-With-A-Beard

Vladimir Zworykin https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/vladimir-zworykin

Surtsey https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1267/

The Strait of Magellan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOOKr8Y2xsM

The Rubin Observatory https://rubinobservatory.org/

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Sam Sedgman discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Sam Sedgman is a bestselling children's author, confirmed nerd and enthusiastic ferroequinologist. Co-creator of the award-winning 'Adventures on Trains' and 'Isaac Turner Investigates' series, he writes fact-based mystery and adventure stories for the young and young at heart.

Before writing stories for children, Sam worked as a digital producer at the National Theatre, which meant nosing around backstage with a camera and a microphone, cajoling theatre makers into explaining how stories get made. Forever interested in piecing things together, Sam is a lifelong fan of puzzles, games and detective fiction, and once founded a company making murder mystery treasure hunts for adventurous Londoners. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

When he isn’t writing, Sam can usually be found admiring a handsome timepiece, watching Alfred Hitchcock movies, or explaining some weird fact to you. He lives in London, on top of a railway station. You can find out more at https://samsedgman.com/.

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Jordan Prosser discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Jordan Prosser is a writer, filmmaker and performer from Victoria, Australia. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, and his short films and screenplays have won multiple international accolades. His short story Eleuterio Cabrera’s Beautiful Game won the Peter Carey Short Story Award in 2022 and was published in Meanjin. Big Time is his debut novel.

The Philippines. I had the privilege of traveling to and working in the Philippines a number of times throughout the 2010s. It’s one of my favourite places on earth.

Ivan Sen. Perhaps my favourite Australian filmmaker, helmer of Mystery Road and Goldstone and their multiple spin-off TV series, which are just as good and as specific to the Australian outback as Scand-noirs are to their cultures and landscapes.

Wikipedia’s ‘Timeline of the far future’ and ‘Ultimate fate of the universe’ pages. Every year has its own dedicated Wikipedia page, including years in the future.

Andy Shauf. For my money, one of the best singer-songwriters of our generation, and something of a folk genius in the lineage of the Donovans and Nick Drakes of the world. His 2015 album The Bearer of Bad News is a modern-day Nebraska.

How LLMs actually work. Which is to say: they are statistical models based on pattern recognition and predictability, powered by tremendous amounts of data and processing power. Big tech marketing has seduced so many into seeing them as quasi-mystical entities, when really, they’re glorified spreadsheets.

Eggnog. Probably the finest beverage on earth, but when you mention it, in Australia at least, people become mystified and their eyes immediately glaze over. I inherited my recipe from my (American) mother and make it every year at Christmas.

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