The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.”

In his latest book, Waste Land, he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar period to give us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we’ve already entered into.

We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continues to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth.

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In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, a young girl chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths watches over this broad valley and protects the country and its people.

She’s the embodiment of Devi, the universal goddess, and Hindu kings have sought her blessings for centuries to legitimate their rule.

Isabella Tree uncovered the secrets of this strange tradition over many years and many visits to Nepal. She peeled away the layers of myth, religious belief and modern history, and she slowly overcame the reluctance of priests and caretakers to meet Kathmandu’s living goddess herself.

Isabella is the author of The Living Goddess, Islands in the Clouds, The Book of Wilding, and other books. Her work has appeared in Granta, National Geographic, The Sunday Times and other publications. She’s an award winning conservationist, and lives West Sussex, in the middle of the Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England.

We spoke about the powers of the living goddess, how she is chosen, the connection to tantric ritual, and how the goddess foreshadowed the massacre of Nepal’s royal family.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 

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Every book I read about Easter Island said roughly the same thing: a small, isolated group of people living on the world’s most remote inhabited island couldn’t have sculpted, moved and erected the enormous statues that are Easter Island’s most famous feature.

Or if they had, they must have been consumed by a monument building obsession that led them to cut down all the trees, causing mass starvation and warfare, and destroying their own civilization in the process.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts tells a very different and far more compelling story.

He draws on the latest research to build a picture of a remarkable cultural flourishing in a remote and unforgiving environment, by people with a highly sophisticated system of agriculture and a rich tapestry of myths, religion, political stratification and artistry.

His new book is one of my top reads of the year, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it.

We spoke about the small group of settlers who discovered the island, the genesis of the famous ecocide myth, and what those massive stone statues really mean.

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Moonlighting posed as a detective show, but it was actually an old-fashioned 1940s screwball-comedy. Mysteries were just a framework for the romantic tension between the two main characters, played by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.

In an era when television was serious and even the comedies were overly-earnest, Moonlighting threw out all the rules.

Chase scenes ended in food fights and soap suds. They did song and dance routines, made film noir and Shakespeare episodes, broke the fourth wall, and did cold opens where the lead actors spoke to the audience in character.

It really is a time-capsule of what was great about the 1980’s, when we could still laugh at ourselves without being ‘triggered’.

Today I’m bringing you the inside story on the creative chaos and private feuds at the heart of that decade’s most original TV show.

I'm joined by Scott Ryan, author of Moonlighting: An Oral History.

We spoke about Moonlighting’s most creative episodes, the chaos and fighting on-set, and the myth the so-called Moonlighting Curse.

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I first encountered Constantine Cavafy in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where ‘the old poet’ represented the ghostly voice of the city.

I was immediately attracted to the dreamlike quality of his poems, and the way he captured a sense of melancholy that I’ve always felt.

Cavafy wrote about human desire, inglorious epochs of Greek history, and civilizations in decline, using plain factual descriptions undressed by metaphor.

But how did a writer who showed little promise in his youth find a place in the literary canon and become ‘the poet of Alexandria’?

I’m joined by Gregory Jusdanis, co-author of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography.

We spoke about Cavafy’s childhood of faded aristocratic grandeur, the Mediterranean Greek world he grew up in, and his lifelong poetic preoccupations.

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Peter Matthiessen is a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, and the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction.

He’s also a difficult man to pin down because he accomplished so much in so many different areas.

He co-founded The Paris Review and spied for the CIA. He was best known for 'nature' books like The Snow Leopard, but thought of himself as a novelist. He was also a spiritual seeker who reached the highest ranks of Zen Buddhism. How do you come to grips with a life as varied as this?

I'm joined by biographer Lance Richardson, the author of True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen.

We spoke about Matthiessen’s privileged background, his life-changing journey to Nepal, his serial womanizing, and his greatest books.

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This drive to discover is deeply human, and as today’s guest will tell you, it might even be encoded in our genes.

Alex Hutchinson is the author of The Explorer's Gene. He draws on the latest insights from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to show how the urge to explore shaped our species, and how it continues to direct our actions, even when we’re sitting on the sofa.

We spoke about the explore-exploit dilemma, memorizing a route versus mapping a landscape, and how to find the sweet spot between predictability and chaos in your own exploring life.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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Film noir is is my favourite silver screen genre. I’ve seen every A-list film noir multiple times, and most of the B-movies, too. I’ve wanted to do a podcast conversation about it since I started Personal Landscapes.

These downbeat stories of ordinary lives gone hopelessly astray crackle with hard-boiled dialogue. They're set in modern urban wastelands, usually at night, in claustrophobic rooms where the actors are framed in tight shots that create a mood of entrapment.

The classic period only lasted from 1941 until the mid-1950s, but their visual style continues to influence movies today.

Who better to guide us through it than Foster Hirsch, film historian and author the definitive study, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. 

We spoke about film noir’s roots in hard-boiled fiction, how German Expressionism shaped its aesthetic, and what was happening in 1950s Hollywood as noir — and the studio system — came to an end.

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When his doctor told him to walk or die, Peter Carpenter transformed a health crisis into a feat of urban archaeology.

In wandering the streets where David Bowie honed his craft, Carpenter uncovered hidden dimensions and new connections to pivotal Bowie narratives, shining a light on the legendary artist’s conscious and subconscious influences.

Peter Carpenter is the author of Bowieland: Walking in the Footsteps of David Bowie, and of several volumes of poetry, including Just Like That and After the Goldrush.

We spoke about Bowie’s Berlin years, how the suburbs shaped his sound, and the Growth Arts Lab in Beckenham.

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The Atlantic slave trade began in the 15th century and was abolished in the United States in 1865, but slavery was practiced in the Muslim world for much longer. It dates back to the 7th century, and endured openly until late in the 20th century.

Why do we know so little about this? And what forms did it take?

Today’s guest set out to answer these questions — and more — in a compelling new book that traces the extraordinary variety of slavery in the Islamic world and brings life to voices of enslaved people, from 8th century concubines to 20th century pearl divers.

Justin Marozzi is the author of Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.

We spoke about courtesans and slave soldiers, the trans-Saharan slave trade, and how the Quran addressed slavery.

Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe