Podularity Books Podcast

Over the last few months I’ve been producing a new podcast for Faber and Faber, which you can find on their recently relaunched website here. In the first four podcasts,… Read More

“I see this in a sense as a cautionary tale. What my narrator is is a white tiger – he’s unusual for his time. Very few servants in India actually… Read More

“The chemistry of this is more than a century old… The basic physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been known for a very long time. In fact… Read More

I recently interviewed Stephen Armstrong for Faber about his new book, War plc. The book takes the reader into the world of the private security companies, which have mushroomed in… Read More

“I’m interested in saying, look, how can you challenge the Asterix-and-the-Romans kind of image that we tend to have of Rome? We are determined to turn a blind eye to… Read More

“It’s a very surreal place… children have grown up with bomb scrap around them. So when they see bomb scrap, they don’t perceive any danger. It’s all around you.The houses… Read More

“In Russian music you have a very different portrayal of Russia [from the one you find in literature], which has very strong rhythms, very festive images. It’s very bright, very… Read More

“It’s almost as though my poetry is an extended passport application… It’s an attempt to be naturalized. I think I’ve failed to be naturalized and therefore there is this German… Read More

“I think the burning question is: we think of printing as having revolutionized intellectual life in Europe, how come it doesn’t appear to have revolutionized intellectual life in China? There’s… Read More

‘You always suppose you’re the heroine in the story of your life; the day you discover you’re the monster, it’s apt to come as a surprise’ Dol McQueen, ‘flash-girl’, 1862… Read More

That’s how the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel reckons he should entitle his life story. Adiga’s narrator, Balram Halwai, believes he is half-baked because, like so many in India,… Read More

On 14 June 1940 German tanks swept into Paris. That the city would fall to the Nazis was by then a foregone conclusion; it had been declared an ‘open city’… Read More

‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin… Read More

Philosophy can seem the most cerebral and abstract of disciplines. So what would happen if a philosopher stepped out of his study and ’embedded’ himself in an ordinary (but unfamiliar)… Read More

This week’s Podularity podcast features an interview with Catriona Kelly, who has just published a monumental new history of childhood in twentieth-century Russia. The book, Children’s World: Growing Up in… Read More