When award-winning Canadian author Joseph Boyden flounced  off Litopia After Dark, we were dismayed. It's the only time in our history that  a guest has done that. Yes, we do pose very direct questions – it  wouldn’t be Litopia After Dark if we didn’t. Still, we couldn't understand what  had upset him so much.

So we asked Dr. Leo  Killsback, professor of American Indian Studies and citizen of the Northern  Cheyenne Nation, to help us.  And unlike Boyden's immature temper-tantrum - this  is a show worth listening to!

It's been a summer of high weirdness!  Featuring all our favorite topics...  Harry Potter, Tolkien, and... let's hear it for the Singing Dentist!  Welcome  back, Debriefists... we've missed you!

Presented by leading lawyer Donna Ballman  with literary agent Peter Cox

Making a welcome return tonight is journalist-turned-investigative-historian,  Tim Butcher.  Tim specialises in covering awkward places at difficult moments:  Kurdistan under attack in 1991 by Saddam Hussein, Sarajevo during the Bosnian  War of the 1990s, the Allied attack on Iraq in 2003, Israel's 2006 clash with  Hizbollah in southern Lebanon among other crises. All good preparation, then for  tonight’s skirmish with Ian...

But it’s not all fol-de-rol and bon mots  ce soir. Tim’s  new, widely-praised book is a quest to find history's most famous terrorist  before Osama bin Laden... Gavrilo Princip, the teenage assassin who triggered  the catastrophic series of events that led to the First World War.

You may think that everything that could possibly be told about this  particular Bosnian Serb has already been written. Not so. Listen to tonight’s  show – and read Tim’s excellent book, The  Trigger – and you will appreciate why reviewers have been showering  it, and him, with praise. We’re indeed proud to host him tonight.

She does her job with typically understated bravery. To meet her, you might  think (for a moment) that this headscarved and very English lady is, perhaps, a  headmistress, a rose grower or possibly something a bit nebulous in the  arts.

But this is Lindsey  Hilsum. The woman for whom the expression sang-froid might  have been invented. Specialising in remaining imperturbable under fire, and  always meeting her deadline.

As International Editor for Britain’s Channel 4 News, she reported from  Belgrade in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia, from Baghdad during the 2003 US  invasion, and covered the Fallujah assault in November 2004. Her reports from  Africa, the Middle East and Russia have earned her many awards. In 1994, she was  the only English-speaking journalist in Rwanda when the genocide started.

It’s an obvious question, but we still want to know – what’s it like being a  woman in the front line? How do you cope when your friend and colleague, Marie  Colvin, dies covering the siege of Homs in Syria? And – when you come back from  the world’s most perilous places, having seen things that no normal person  should ever see – how do you sleep at night?

Tonight, fresh from Damascus, Lindsey joins us in London to help us make  sense of Crimea, Syria – and the genesis of Isis.

On this day in 1918 – the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the  11th hour – the hostilities of the First World war formally  ended.

This is Remembrance Day, aka Poppy Day. But why poppies? Well, contrary to  popular belief, poppies have been associated with war since at least Napoleonic  times, when a writer first noted how poppies grew over the graves of soldiers.  It is theorized that the damage done to the landscape in Flanders during WW1  greatly increased the lime content in the soil, leaving the poppy as one of the  few plants able to survive.

At the war’s conclusion, it was an American professor who first suggested  that wearing a red poppy year-round would fittingly honour the war’s fallen.  Soon, the red silk poppy had been adopted as an official symbol of remembrance  by the American Legion.

And then the idea spread to Britain, where Field Marshal Douglas Haig – the  "Butcher of the Somme” – used the motif to promote The Royal British Legion,  which he co-founded.

And yet, the poppy symbol remains an enigma. What we are actually  celebrating, or remembering, when we buy one? Is it the glory of war? Or its  poignancy? Are we remembering selfless heroism? Or the futility of human  conflict?

Our guest tonight, Ben  Griffin, has clear views on this. Ben is no ordinary foot soldier.  As a member of Britain’s elite special forces, the SAS, Ben has served his  country in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Afghanistan and Baghdad. Ben is  eloquent, lucid and deeply moving. If you want to know what it is actually like  to fight a war in the 21st century, listen to this show.

Ben’s organisation, Veterans for Peace, can be contacted here.

Seventy thousand dead.  Twenty thousand disappeared.  Severed  heads with threatening messages dumped by the side of the highway. A  terrorist insurgency on the verge of toppling governments. Iraq?  Syria?  The Congo?   Ukraine?

No. This is Northern Mexico— one  of the most violent places on earth.  Why?  Because Western culture likes  to take drugs.  Tons of them.  Drugs we brand illegal and on which we’re  waging war.

To walk us through the kill zone— from the peasants picking coca in the hills  behind Bogota to the contract killers of Ciudad Juarez— tonight we’re joined by  the amazingly-still-alive Ioan Grillo,  acclaimed journalist and author of El  Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency.

Intimately familiar with the deadly cartels, Ioan breaks down Mexico’s bloody  “trampolines”, the  reality of Breaking Bad— in the form of Mexican crystal meth  “super-labs”— the  splashy death of Pablo Escobar, and the largest cash seizure in modern  history.

We also discuss confirmed  CIA complicity in importing cocaine into America and the character  assassination and suspicious death of reporter Gary  Webb— whose star-studded biopic Kill the  Messenger was recently released in theaters.

Meet Susan Blackmore,  the world’s foremost expert on memes. The intro to her seminal work The  Meme Machine was written by none other than genius biologist and  fundamentalist atheist blowhard Richard Dawkins. Her lectures  on TED receives millions of views— even despite TED's dishwater-dull format  when compared to Litopia After Dark (rowr!)

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world,” said Marshal McLuhan.  Never has this been more true.

(Full quote: Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine  world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve  ever new forms.)

But  do memes actually exist?  Or are they simply metaphors to observe our  shifting culture? And who is Susan Blackmore anyway?

After an out of body experience she studied  the paranormal for 24 years, only to arrive at the conclusion it  was bollocks— all of it.  So who’s to say she won’t soon say the same about  memes?

But wait, there’s more! Now she’d like for us to consider what she calls  temes— technology assisted memes. Replicators so powerful they may yet  turn our computers against us— and sooner than you think. Just ask Stephen  Hawking.

Because your Macbook Pro is spreading words, tunes, images and ideas much  faster than your feeble human mind can imagine.

Check everything  you think you know about memes at the door. Because this show is no lecture.  This show is virus inside of your mind.

The BBC – the world’s oldest and biggest public service broadcaster – appears  to have a serious ethics problem. That’s the devastating conclusion from this  edition of The DEBRIEFER. How else could you explain the plight of bestselling  author and screenwriter M.R.  Hall, whose THE  CORONER series of books bears a striking similarity to the BBC’s a new  television series entitled – somewhat unimaginatively – THE CORONER.

Listeners to THE DEBRIEFER will be familiar with horrific accounts of  rapacious Hollywood studios “borrowing” ideas from defenceless authors. The  twist, this time, is that the allegations concern a public service  broadcaster… not a commercial entity, but an organisation that is supposed  to serve the public good. Service, not profit, is the motivator… or is supposed  to be.

Troublingly, this case is not  unique. One of our guests on Litopia After Dark, former  British ambassador Craig Murray,  believes his autobiography Murder in Samarkand was plagiarized for the  BBC comedy The Ambassador. “The production company had actually invited  me to their offices”, says Craig, “for a meeting to ask me to sell them the  rights to Murder in Samarkand. I attended the meeting but I refused to  sell them the rights. They went ahead and made the series anyway.”

This isn’t fair, it’s not cricket, and it isn’t in the spirit of public  service broadcasting. Come on, BBC – show some leadership and get your house in  order – while you still have a chance.

Traitor? Spy? Loyal American or self-serving amoralist?  Howard W Campbell Jr  tries to write his own get out of jail free card in in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Mother  Night'. Vintage.

The Messiah is coming! His arrival is imminent! That’s the bad news... The  good news is his arrival and social schedule are narrated with a combination of  enthralled immediacy and distrustful distance by a Nobel Laureate, Isaac  Bashevis Singer. And yet, is it ‘all that’? Some readers will be super-pumped,  others might not catch messiah fever. All the colours of the rainbow.