Podularity Books Podcast

This month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique features an interview with Eric Alterman, author of the bestselling What Liberal Media?: The Truth about Bias and the News and most recently Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America. In the podcast I talk to Alterman about his article in this month’s edition of LMD: “Support Israel through Criticism”, which looks at the rise of J Street, an American Jewish lobby that supports a sane and reasonable peace with the Palestinians. Listen to the podcast by clicking here.

Amanda Vickery on the impression of Georgian life given by National Trust properties today: “They’re absolutely empty of life. They’re neat and tidy and they don’t smell and there’s no noise of the household. All of those things are absolutely central to what it was like to live in even quite grand eighteenth-century houses. “Women’s letters are full of complaints about how awful it is, how freezing, the stiff-backed ceremony, people coming in, a lack of privacy…” This week’s podcast, sponsored by Blackwell Online, features an in-depth interview with Amanda Vickery, whose Behind Closed Doors has just been published by Yale University Press. In the interview we talk about what home meant to the Georgians, both physically and psychologically. Amanda is fascinating on what a detail of domestic interiors as apparently insignificant as wallpaper can tell you about the taste, status and outlook of a household. For those with money, it was a period which saw the dawning of the age of  the commercialization of home and simultaneously the feminization of it. While for those …

“I’m trying to use laughter as a kind of prism, I suppose, through which to examine certain features of the broader culture… “Greeks talk a lot about laughter and so there are a lot of perceptions and representations of laughter in prose texts and poetic texts… It’s used all over the place, it’s referred to, it’s discussed by philosophers and others. “So I really wanted to use it as a prism through which to look at a wider range of Greek values and tensions with in the culture and ways in which Greeks think about many different aspects of life.” My guest this week is Stephen Halliwell, Professor of Greek at St Andrews University and winner of this year’s Criticos Prize for the best book published on the subject of Greece, ancient or modern. Stephen’s book, Greek Laughter, is a vast compendium of information of what made the Greeks laugh and how laughter functioned in ancient Greek society. As the book makes abundantly clear, laughter was far from unproblematic –  to be laughed down in …

“What’s so wonderful about Carter’s illustrations [for Gray’s Anatomy] is that they are not abject people, they are not shown as lumps of meat, they’re not shown as undignified, they’re not shown in pain. In fact, many of the illustrations are quite noble… “It’s the first real anatomy book for students to be published since the development of chloroform, anaesthesia in general, and I think these bodies are chloroformed bodies. They are not being treated as though they are social outcasts; they’re being treated as human beings.” My guest on this week’s programme is medical historian, Ruth Richardson. Ruth has written a fascinating history of how the most famous medical textbook of all time came to be written – Gray’s Anatomy, which is still going strong after more than 150 years and 40 editions. She shows that its success was down to not just Henry Gray, who wrote the text, but also to Henry Carter, who provided the illustrations. In the interview we talk about the very different fates of these two men and also …

To see the video using QuickTime, click here. For RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, click here.

“It’s increasingly evident that narration is built in to the human floor-plan as it were. Little kids take to story-telling very, very early… The fact is that we will tell stories; it’s part of being human. “What effects those stories may have are often quite unforeseen by the people telling them, but if they are listened to, if they have an audience, they are doing something… “This kind of novel is like a detour sign on a road: if you don’t want to fall into the big hole that looms ahead, you should probably turn right here. Or left.” (laughs) I interviewed Margaret Atwood about her new novel The Year of the Flood when she visited Bristol earlier this month as part of her international book tour, which has been dubbed the greenest book tour ever – Atwood travelled to the UK by ship rather than plane, forswore meat and insisted that all coffee served came from organic, Fairtrade, shade-grown plantations. Her event at the Bristol Festival of Ideas was unusual in other ways too …

Philosopher Julian Baggini has taken to film-making to promote his latest book entitled Should You Judge This Book by its Cover? In the book, he subjects one hundred proverbs and other examples of homespun wisdom to philosophical scrutiny. And in the film – well, click below and see for yourself. You can also listen to an audio interview about the book which I recorded with Julian last week for Blackwell Online by clicking here.

“The Huns are a blank canvas. That’s what makes them so interesting. We know only one word of Hunnic, the word strava, the Hunnic word for funeral. We have no Hunnic poetry, we have no Hunnic literature.” My guest on this edition of Podularity is Cambridge classicist, Christopher Kelly. His book on Attila the Hun and the part he played in the downfall of the Roman empire has just come out in paperback. In the interview, we talk about the difficulty of writing about someone whose civilization is only preserved in the annals of his enemies, in which the Huns were portrayed as “the scourge of God”. Kelly sets that against the opinion of one Roman commentator who came to know Attila and was impressed by the civilization of his court and the Hun leader’s command of Latin. And we tackle the key question – to what extent did the Huns bring about the fall of the Roman empire? The end result may not be a “Hun’s eye view” – that may well be impossible …

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz several centuries ago. It’s one of the main questions animating Christopher Potter‘s first book, You Are Here. And given that there is something, how did it come into being? And how for that matter did we come into being, several billions of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher’s investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This “portable history of the universe” ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away – distances measured in billions of light years – to the infinitely small (which he calls “the realm of tininess”), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works. The book also has fascinating things to say about the origins of life, the scientific mindset and the way in which human consciousness is “woven into the fabric of the universe”, as Freeman Dyson put it. (Potter cites Schrödinger’s memorable observation that without any …

How easy is it to get an insight into the life of the ancient Romans from a visit to the remains of Pompeii today? How much of what we see is even Roman, and how much is recent reconstruction? What did the Romans really think about sex? And what did they believe in a world on the cusp of embracing Christianity? And did they really eat dormice? Click on the link above to hear writer, broadcaster, blogger extraordinaire and Cambridge professor of Classics, Mary Beard tackle all these questions and more. You can also hear Mary talking about the Roman triumph in podcast 15: The Big Parade.