Blackwell Online Podcasts

In this programme, we hear the summer reading choices of two of Heffers' most experienced and knowledgeable booksellers, Richard Osborne and Richard Reynolds. Whether you're after the best of this season's crop of new crime fiction or food for thought in the shape of some outstanding recent non-fiction, listen to this programme and you're bound to find something you'll want to take with you on holiday.

In this programme we are delighted to have as our guest Elaine Fox, who is professor of cognitive psychology at the university of Essex. Elaine has just published Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: The New Science of Optimism and Pessimism, which explores such fascinating questions as: how does having an optimistic or a pessimistic outlook affect the successes and failures in our lives? How do small biases to look on the bright or the dark side become confirmed, even ingrained? What part do genes play in all this?

Diego Marani's novel, New Finnish Grammar in a prizewinning translation by Judith Landry, was one of the surprise bestsellers of the past year. Blackwell's has been an enthusiastic promoter of the novel from the start, so we were delighted to get the chance to record an extended interview with Diego on a recent trip to England. In part 1 of the interview, he explains how his own experience of learning Finnish shaped his desire to write the book and how he evoked the atmosphere of wartime Helsinki.

In part 2 of the podcast Diego introduces us to his latest book to appear in English, The Last of the Vostyachs, and talks about his interest in questions of language and identity which form a common thread between both works. He also reflects more widely on the fate of so-called minority languages and dialects in the modern world.

We are delighted to welcome to the programme one of America's greatest living novelists and essayists, Marilynne Robinson. In 2009 Elaine Showalter wrote of her: 'Marilynne Robinson has published only three novels, but each is a stunningly original exploration of the classic forms and formulas of American writing.'

Our guest in this week's podcast is novelist and historian, Rebecca Stott. Rebecca's previous non-fiction books include Darwin and the Barnacle, about the great naturalist's fascination with the tiny sea creatures. Her interest in all things Darwinian continues in her new book, Darwin's Ghosts, which investigates the life and work of some of "the shadowy figures behind Darwin, his predecessors, the less well-known rebels".

Hilary Mantel joins us for an exclusive in-depth interview, in which she discusses her much anticipated new book, Bring Up the Bodies

We caught up with Jonah Lehrer just after he arrived for the UK leg of his book tour to ask him what he had discovered in his attempt to 'break open the black box of the imagination' for his latest book.

Tom Holland is one of the most popular and successful historians of the ancient world at work today, probably best known for his books on the Roman Republic, Rubicon, and on the Graeco-Persian war, Persian Fire. George Miller was lucky enough to speak to Tom recently about his latest book, a meticulously researched, beautifully written and inevitably controversial examination of the origins of Islam and the rise of the global Arab empire.

Susan Cain in her book, Quiet, speaks up for quiet people in a loudmouth world, or to put it differently, she puts the case for the approximately one-third of the population who are towards the introvert end of the extrovert-intovert spectrum.

In this programme, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz makes a return visit to the Blackwell Online podcast to talk about the new book he has co-authored with fellow Leicester-University geologist Mark Williams, entitled The Goldilocks Planet.

Emily Cockayne tells George Miller about some of the perennial nuisances that bad neighbours have caused for centuries and some - like slaughtering a hundred sheep or locating a dunghill by your neighbour's property - that are mercifully rare today.

Our guest in this programme is historian - and time-traveller - Ian Mortimer. Following on from his very successful Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, Ian now whisks us off to the England of Elizabeth I, a land where witchcraft was still a crime, bear-baiting a pastime, and medical knowledge and sanitation rudimentary.

In this podcast archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Faulkner takes us back to 388BC to reveal what the ancient Olympics were really like.

In this podcast, George Miller talks to historian Robert Holland about his action-packed new history of the British involvement in the Mediterranean world since 1800.