The Green Room

Daniel Pipes, Dominic's guest in The Green Room this week, is an historian, the president of the Middle East Forum, and an analyst of Islam in Europe. They talk about how Europe got to where it is, what’s going on now among the new nationalist parties in Europe, and what might happen next.

Presented by Dominic Green.

In this fascinating podcast, Dominic Green talks to author and foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan. They look back at ‘The Coming Anarchy’ after a quarter of a century, and trace the ambitions and disasters of the last three decades of American empire, from the early Nineties to the War on Terror and the retreat of the Obama and Trump years. If you listen carefully, you can hear the clink of coffee cups on saucer. If you listen even more carefully, you’ll hear a reminder of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, with its warning that all empires must dissolve: ‘Lest we forget.’ Listen and learn.

Dominic talks to the team of crack art critics from The New Criterion: James Panero, Benjamin Riley and Andrew Shea in this review of the best art exhibitions of the year. In between high brow chats on Michelangelo and Sir Alfred Munnings, the panel brings the energy of the New Criterion Christmas party, raging next door, with them. Is Panero coughing because he has TB, or was it induced by the prospect of the Boston MFA’s Toulouse-Lautrec show? Who was in and who was out in the major museums this year? And is Andy Shea really caught using his cellphone in the middle of a podcast?

As the old year dies, our thoughts turn to what happens next. What better time, then, to cast a seasonally morbid, deeply philosophical, and curiously uplifting pod about what happens in the Ancient Greek afterlife? The Getty Villa’s new exhibition, Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife is all about this and Dominic Green talks to David Saunders, Associate Curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.

This week on the Green Room, Dominic talks the blues, the blacks and the whites with Grammy-winning blues artist Chris Thomas King. Earlier this week, King wrote for Spectator USA a scathing criticism of the policies of the Grammys’ Blues category. King is an African American from Louisiana. He is the son of a blues musician, and grew up in his father’s juke joint. He was one of the last blues musicians to be ‘discovered’ by anthropologists from the North. He has won two Grammy awards, in 2001 for the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which he starred as a blues singer who has sold his soul to the devil, and in 2002 in the category of Best Historical Album, for his tribute to Charley Patton, Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues. Yet he now finds his latest album, Hotel Voodoo, ineligible for Grammy nomination as a blues artist. So why won't the Blues Grammy recognise African American artists?

Presented by Dominic Green.

Dominic Green talks to Pete Shelley about experimenting with punk, performing live, and the power of music.

Dominic Green talks to cinema historian Jay Glennie, author of a definitive account of the legendary and still alarming making of Performance, a legendary 1970 release starring Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and James Fox.

Is nationalism, in Emmanuel Macron’s words, an ancient and modern cause of the ‘old demons’ of history? Or, as Yoram Hazony argues in his latest book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is the nation state the best way to preserve law and liberty?

Presented by Dominic Green.

In this episode, Dominic Green talks to Heather Mac Donald, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute. She is the author of The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, a scathing and accurate critique of just about everything that’s gone wrong with American higher education.

When she was invited to speak at Claremont McKenna College in California, student groups organised on Facebook to “shut down” the “notorious white supremacist racist Heather Mac Donald.” When she got to campus, she was moved directly to what would otherwise be called a “safe space” for her own protection. With a police escort, and more than two hundred black-clad protestors banging on the windows, she had to livestream her speech from a vacant room.