
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Andrew Marr talks to Colm Toibin about the ways writers write about families, and also the impact of their own often dysfunctional relationships - from Thomas Mann and WB Yeats, to the nightmares of John Cheever's journals. In her novel, The Children's Book, AS Byatt explored how far a writing mother can harm her children, and yet she argues that she'd prefer to know nothing about a writer's private life. The novelist Will Eaves mined his own family background for his latest book, but insists it's more a work of imagination, than memoir. And it's these relationships, and culture, that are the key to the success of our species, rather than consciousness, language and intelligence, according to the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel.
4.7
152152 ratings
Andrew Marr talks to Colm Toibin about the ways writers write about families, and also the impact of their own often dysfunctional relationships - from Thomas Mann and WB Yeats, to the nightmares of John Cheever's journals. In her novel, The Children's Book, AS Byatt explored how far a writing mother can harm her children, and yet she argues that she'd prefer to know nothing about a writer's private life. The novelist Will Eaves mined his own family background for his latest book, but insists it's more a work of imagination, than memoir. And it's these relationships, and culture, that are the key to the success of our species, rather than consciousness, language and intelligence, according to the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel.
5,389 Listeners
381 Listeners
1,839 Listeners
125 Listeners
7,886 Listeners
295 Listeners
308 Listeners
501 Listeners
1,791 Listeners
1,052 Listeners
898 Listeners
272 Listeners
153 Listeners
365 Listeners
962 Listeners
1,921 Listeners
1,078 Listeners
65 Listeners
292 Listeners
74 Listeners
736 Listeners
2,962 Listeners
99 Listeners
316 Listeners