Podularity Books Podcast

Louise Foxcroft: Hot Flushes, Cold Science “There was a physician called John Fothergill in the late eighteenth century who said that it was amazing that women had been taught to dread this natural phenomenon.” As Louise Foxcroft’s sometimes shocking history of the menopause shows, Fothergill was very much in the minority. The medical profession in Fothergill’s day was just beginning to cotton on to the idea that the menopause offered a lucrative new subject for treatment. Earlier centuries had viewed the cessation of female fertility as also marking the end of a woman’s meaningful existence, but the medical profession saw in what came to be called the menopause a business opportunity. If the menopause was pathologized – treated like a disease rather than a process – then medics were on hand to offer a cure, or at least a course of treatment. This was not, of course, the result of some deliberate policy so much as the outcome of the increasing professionalization of medicine, the growth of an affluent middle class, and an underlying misogyny …

Catherine O’Flynn: What Was Lost “As he reached for his crisps something caught the corner of his eye and he looked back at the wall of monitors. He saw the figure standing in front of the banks and building societies on level 2. “It was a child, a girl, though her face was hard to see. She stood perfectly still, a notebook in her hand and a toy monkey sticking out of her bag.” When I was in Birmingham earlier this year, I met Catherine O’Flynn, who won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 for What Was Lost. The girl with the monkey is Kate Meaney, a bright, solitary child with a taste for mysteries and detection. She disappeared two decades ago but her image seems to appear on the monitor screens that security guard Kurt spends his nights watching in the Green Oaks shopping centre. Green Oaks itself is fictional, but draws both on Catherine’s own previous experience working in a record store (which she deploys to wonderful comic effect in the book) and …

Neil Gregor: Haunted City – Nuremberg and the Nazi Past “By the end of the war, Nuremberg had a reputation second to none as a Nazi town.” In this week’s podcast I talk to historian Neil Gregor about Germany’s often difficult process of coming to terms with the second world war in the decades that followed its defeat. To bring sharper focus to his book, Neil decided to concentrate on how one city in particular – Nuremberg in Bavaria – reached its accommodation with the past. Neil’s own father grew up in the city and one of Neil’s earliest memories of learning about history was hearing his German godparents describe RAF bombing raids on Nuremberg. As the quote from our interview above makes clear, Nuremberg, site of the infamous rallies and power base of the arch-Nazi Julius Steicher, was no run-of-the-mill  town; but it faced many of the same challenges of mental and psychological reconstruction as other German cities in the post-war period, while having some acute problems of its own. In the interview I …

In Le Monde diplomatique‘s February podcast, I talk to Middle East expert and deputy director of the French edition of the paper, Alain Gresh. His article in this month’s edition focuses on the consequences of the Israeli action against Hamas, both for the participants and the wider region. In the podcast he talks about the reactions of nations such as Iran and Turkey to the conflict and considers why Israel’s relations with the EU are more cordial than at any time since 1967. He also responds to my question about what we can tell about the Obama administration’s approach to the Middle East. Listen to the podcast by clicking here. (Image © Joel Carillet)

Rodge Glass – Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography In this week’s podcast, Rodge Glass tells me how, after his first disastrous meeting with Alasdair Gray in a bar in Glasgow, he later went on to be the writer’s student, amanuensis and eventually biographer. Rodge recalls how Gray (a self-described “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”, who is also the author of Lanark, widely regarded as the finest Scottish novel of the past century, as well as a host of other books and creator of many art projects), reacted when the biography was first mooted: “Be my Boswell!” he shouted, dancing a jig around the room and raising a finger to the heavens. “Tell the world of my genius!” In the interview, Rodge reflects on the experience of being himself a character in this unconventional life, and is frank about such things as his own feelings for Gray (“I have great affection for him”) and his uncertainty over what to make of Gray’s artwork. You can read Gray’s own reaction to Glass’s biography here. And …

“Pushkin died romantically, famously in a duel in 1837. He’s often thought of as the founding father of modern Russian literature, which makes him sound rather dusty and old-fashioned, but in fact he’s a great innovator and experimenter…” “His career is very important in the history of Russian letters because he is perhaps the first writer who tries to make his career as a professional man of letters… Unfortunately for him he was an inveterate gambler who dug himself into a financial hole.” My guest on Podularity this week is Andrew Kahn of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. I met him last autumn to talk about Russia’s national poet, Alexander Pushkin. For his latest book, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence, Andrew set himself the task of reading as much of Pushkin’s library of some 4,000 volumes as possible, the better to trace the development of his ideas and influences, and in particular how they found expression in his lyric poetry. In the interview, we also talk about Pushkin’s amatory career and capacity for self-mythologizing. If the interview whets …

The first Podularity podcast of 2009 is an interview with polymath Raymond Tallis about his most recent book, Hunger, which appears in the Art of Living series from Acumen Publishing. The Times has described Tallis as “the Lennox Lewis of the intellectual world – a formidable heavyweight” and, as you might expect from such a wide-ranging thinker, his essay on hunger goes beyond the satisfaction of our physiological desires to look at a whole range of human appetites and desires. But the title of this post (a quote from Brecht) is a reminder, as Tallis shows, that the ways in which the affluent world satisfies its “higher-order” appetites has real consequences for the parts of the world where not having enough to eat is an everyday reality. To hear my conversation with Raymond Tallis click on the player above. I also recommend Sharman Apt Russell’s book on hunger (also called simply Hunger), which looks at the effects of hunger on the human body (and mind) and also tackles the profound way in which hunger affects …

Here’s a link to the Faber podcast I did just before Christmas with Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater about their book, Is this Bottle Corked?, in which they explore the “secret life of wine”. Listen to it and not only will you discover how to tell with confidence when a bottle is corked, you’ll also discover why elephants may be capable of making booze but are unlikely ever to aspire to the status of a grand cru. In fact, the stories Kathy and Michael come up with are so entertaining, they could be just what you need to help you through January, even if you’ve forsworn drink…

When Cathy Cassidy was in Bath for the Children’s Literature Festival in September, my daughters Livi and Abby, along with their friend Ellie, were lucky enough to get the chance to interview her. In the interview, Cathy talks about how she started out as a writer, how she creates her characters and gives some hints about her next books. She also has tips for aspiring young writers. You can listen to the interview by clicking here. [20:36]

The latest podcast I’ve produced for Faber has just gone up on their site. In it I talk to novelists Paul Auster and Nadeem Aslam about the books they published this autumn. You can find the podcast here. In Auster’s book, Man in the Dark, an ageing literary critic, August Brill, spends a night imagining a dystopian future in which America is embroiled in a civil war as a way of distracting him from the ghosts that trouble his sleep, not least of which is the death of his granddaughter’s boyfriend in Iraq. And Aslam’s Wasted Vigil brings an American CIA man, a Russian woman seeking her soldier brother, and a young Muslim fundamentalist to the home of an English doctor in the shadow of the Tora Bora mountains. This conjunction of characters enables Aslam to tell the story of Afghanistan’s recent past in a way that is by turns richly poetic and shockingly violent. There’s a longer version of the Auster interview here. And the full version of the Aslam interview is here.