The Chiswick Calendar

Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School and cultural commentator Peter York argue that the BBC is in peril as never before.Journalist Bridget Osborne discusses 'The War Against the BBC' with the two authors in a podcast for the Chiswick Book Festival in association with The Chiswick Calendar. 'The BBC is our most important cultural institution, our best-value entertainment provider, and the global face of Britain. It's our most trusted ne...

Christopher Tugendhat is an active member of the House of Lords, who in his long career has been a journalist, a Conservative MP, a European Commissioner and a Vice-President of the Commission, as well as a hugely successful businessman, holding board and advisory positions at a number of major companies. He has been chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and Chancellor of the University of Bath.Throughout his life he has always enjoyed reading and collecting...

James Rodgers was the BBC’s correspondent in Moscow from 2006 – 2009 but first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study the language. As he went from student to working journalist, he reported on the transition of the Soviet Union in to a free market Russia, an exciting time to be based in Moscow.Now he teaches international journalism to students at City University, but took a sabbatical to go back to Russia to research Assignment Moscow – Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin. In i...

Polly Toynbee has been a columnist for The Guardian for more than 20 years. She was the BBC’s Social Affairs editor in the late eighties and early nineties and made a brief sally into politics as a Social Democrat candidate in the 1983 general election. Her husband David Walker, also a Guardian journalist, is contributing editor to the Public Leaders Network and a former Director of Public Reporting at the Audit Commission.Their previous books together include: The Verdict: Did Labour Change ...

The English composer Michael Tippett was described by the philosopher Isiah Berlin as “a major asset to our age, morally as well as aesthetically” and when he died in 1998 he was lauded in obituaries as ‘one of the greatest English composers since Elgar’.Tippett, whose music includes the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas and four symphonies, is considered to be among the most ‘visionary’ of the twentieth century, and yet, says author Oliver Soden, since his death he has been under app...

Tim Richardson is a garden writer, historian and critic, with regular columns in the Daily Telegraph and The Garden Design Journal. He is also the Director of The Chelsea Fringe Festival, an extremely successful alternative garden event held in and around London, and he is an advisor to the National Trust on gardens.Sissinghurst, the dream garden is a beautiful coffee table book, illustrated with photographs by Jason Ingram, in which Tim tells the story of Sissinghurst: how Vita Sackvil...

Mihir Bose, author of over 30 books and the BBC’s first sports news editor, has analysed and reported global sport incisively for nearly 50 years. He has followed Indian cricket since his school days and in The Nine Waves he writes with special authority about the history of the game in India, tracing its journey from colonial dependency to superpower.Peter Oborne and Richard Heller, journalists and cricket fanatics who have toured south Asia with Mihir as their captain, talk to him about The...