Emma Smith discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford: her most recent book is Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers. The plays of Thomas Middleton https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n23/michael-neill/old-dad-dead New Lanark https://www.newlanark.org/ Abel Gance’s film Napoleon https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/10/napoleon-review-silent-era-epic-more-thrilling-than-ever French 75s...
Jul 17, 2022•30 min
Elisabeth Kendall discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Elisabeth Kendall is Mistress-elect of Girton College, Cambridge, and Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her current work examines how militant jihad groups exploit cultural traditions and local dynamics. Previously, she was at the Universities of Edinburgh and Harvard, and served as Director of a UK government-sponsored Centre focused on building Arabic-based research ex...
Jul 10, 2022•31 min
In a change to the usual format, Ivan Wise discusses one thing which is Extremely Well-Known. In April 1912, the world's largest ocean liner, the Titanic, sank on the fourth day of its maiden voyage. Over 1500 of its passengers and crew drowned. For 110 years, this story has dominated our consciousness. Its mix of innovative engineering, New York high society and tragedy on the high seas has been adapted for film and television numerous times, is a text book case in the study of hubris and has b...
Jul 03, 2022•27 min
Andrew Martin discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Andrew Martin is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction books, some of which have a railway theme. His 'Jim Stringer' thrillers are set on the British railways of the early 20th Century, and the latest of these is Powder Smoke https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/andrew-martin/powder-smoke/9781472154842/ His latest stand-alone novel is The Winker, about a 70s pop musician who winks at people, then kills them. https:...
Jun 26, 2022•30 min
Rupal Patel discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Rupal Patel’s high-octane career has taken her from jungles and war zones to corporate boardrooms and international stages. After a thrilling career at the CIA, she earned her MBA and started her first award-winning business over ten years ago. Called a ‘Power Woman’ by Harper's Bazaar Magazine, Rupal is a sought-after international speaker and business consultant who has spoken in front of thousands. As a sitting CEO, auth...
Jun 19, 2022•30 min
Tori Herridge discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Dr Tori Herridge is an evolutionary biologist and Daphne Jackson Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London. Her research addresses big evolutionary and environmental questions using a broad range of lab and field methods, all underpinned by the rich fossil record from the Quaternary Period (aka “The Ice Age”). She is an expert on fossil elephants, particularly those species which lived in Europe during the I...
Jun 12, 2022•30 min
Novelist Benjamin Myers discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. His latest novel is The Perfect Golden Circle. His novel The Gallows Pole received a Roger Deakin Award and won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Beastings won the Portico Prize for Literature and Pig Iron won the Gordon Burn Prize, while Richard was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. He has also published poetry, crime novels and short fiction, while his jou...
Jun 05, 2022•30 min
Catriona Seth discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Catriona Seth FBA is the Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She was brought up in the UK, in Switzerland, in Venezuela and in Belgium. Before becoming a university academic, she worked as a translator and interpreter, as a management consultant and as a schoolteacher. She has published widely, mainly in French, on 18th-century literature and culture. Her objects of resea...
May 29, 2022•30 min
Neil Brand discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for over 30 years, regularly in London at the Barbican and BFI National Film Theatres, throughout the UK and at film festivals and special events around the world, including Australia, New Zealand (three times), America, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and, in Italy, the Bologna, Aosta, Bergamo and Pordenone festivals where he has inaugurated the Sc...
May 22, 2022•30 min
Historian JD Dickey discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. J.D. Dickey has for more than 20 years been observing and writing about American history, society and culture. Of his book, Rising in Flames, Harold Holzer in the Wall Street Journal wrote, "No one interested in Sherman’s March should be deprived of his lively narrative. Absolutely spellbinding." His earlier book, Empire of Mud, was a New York Times bestseller and described the troubled landscape of Washington, D.C....
May 15, 2022•30 min
Rory Sutherland discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Rory is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, an attractively vague job title which has allowed him to co-found a behavioural science practice within the agency. Before founding Ogilvy’s Behavioural Practice, Rory was a copywriter and creative director at Ogilvy for over 20 years, having joined as a graduate trainee in 1988. He has variously been President of the IPA, Chair of the Judges for the Direct Jury at Cannes, ...
May 08, 2022•30 min
Philosopher Andy West discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Andy West is philosopher in residence at HMP Pentonville, London. His writing has been published in The Guardian, Aeon, The Big Issue, 3AM Magazine and Lito. He is the author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy (Picador 2022). For more information, go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Inside-Memoir-Prison-Philosophy/dp/1529032016/ Rectify https://www.vulture.com/2016/12/rectify-review-ther...
May 01, 2022•29 min
Katja Hoyer discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Katja Hoyer is an Anglo-German historian and journalist. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She writes about German politics as a Washington Post columnist as well as for several British newspapers like The Spectator and The Telegraph. Katja's debut book Blood and Iron - The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1971-1918 became a bestseller in the UK. She i...
Apr 24, 2022•30 min
Jenny Kleeman discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, broadcaster and documentary-maker. She hosts the weekend Breakfast show on Times Radio and writes for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New Statesman. She has reported for BBC One's Panorama, Channel 4's Dispatches and VICE News Tonight on HBO, as well as making 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4's Unreported World. Her first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, was published in...
Apr 17, 2022•30 min
Nicola Horlick discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Nicola Horlick is CEO of Money&Co. She has been a leading fund manager in the City of London for over thirty years. During that time, she has set up and managed several investment businesses. She now chairs a private equity business, is CEO of a film development company, and is a director of an NHS Foundation Trust. Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer https://chicagocritic.com/black-comedy/ Joseph II of Austria https://www...
Apr 10, 2022•27 min
James Runcie discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. James Runcie is an award-winning film-maker, playwright and literary curator. He is the author of twelve novels that have been translated into twelve languages, including the seven books in the Grantchester Mysteries series. He has been Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival, Head of Literature and Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre, London, and Commissioning Editor for Arts on BBC Radio 4. He is a Fellow of th...
Apr 03, 2022•30 min
Musician Lias Saoudi discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Lias Kaci Saoudi is a writer, artist and musician, and the front man of genre-bending iconoclasts Fat White Family. Born to a British mother and Algerian father, he grew up in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Northern Ireland, before moving to London and gaining a Fine Art degree from Slade School of Art. During the first UK lockdown, Lias began contributing a series of unflinching autobiographical pieces enti...
Mar 27, 2022•28 min
Justine Waddell is a writer, producer and actor. Through her production company, Asterisk Films, she has just picked up the 2021 Golden Prague Czech Television Award for her documentary feature film Janine Jansen: Falling for Stradivari. She has also produced Force of Nature Natalia, directed by BAFTA and Grierson-winning filmmaker, Gerry Fox, about prima ballerina, Natalia Osipova. Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, which Justine has developed with the British Film Institute and Piccadilly Pictu...
Mar 20, 2022•30 min
Roisin Kiberd discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Roisin Kiberd's essays have been published in the Dublin Review, the White Review, the Stinging Fly and Winter Papers. She has written features on technology and culture for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, Vice and Motherboard, where she wrote a column about internet subcultures. Having spent some time in London as the online voice of a cheese brand, she now lives between Dublin and Berlin. Her fi...
Mar 13, 2022•30 min
Science journalist Angela Saini discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. She presents science programmes on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in New Scientist, The Sunday Times, National Geographic and Wired. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and named a book of the year by The Telegraph, Nature and Financial Times. Her previous book...
Mar 06, 2022•30 min
Jesse Norman discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Jesse Norman has been Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010. He was Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2021. Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays, researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe. His book Edmund Burke: politician, philosopher, prophet was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, ...
Feb 27, 2022•30 min
Vladimir Alexandrov discusses with Ivan two things which should be better known: both men who lived in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century. Vladimir Alexandrov taught courses in Yale's Slavic Department on nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture from 1986 to 2018. While preparing to teach a graduate seminar on Russian émigré culture, he discovered Frederick Bruce Thomas, which resulted in the 2013 biography The Black Russian, which is now being developed int...
Feb 20, 2022•30 min
Gaia Vince discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at University College London in the Anthropocene Institute. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and prese...
Feb 13, 2022•29 min
Travis Elborough discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Described by The Guardian as “one of Britain’s finest pop culture historians”, Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for two decades now. Elborough’s books include Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, in which he also appeared, and A Walk in the Park, a lov...
Feb 06, 2022•28 min
Journalist Peter Oborne discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Peter Oborne is a former political commentator of the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. He now writes about politics for Open Democracy and Middle East Eye. He is the author of The Assault on Truth, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Rise of Political Lying as well as a biography of the cricketer Basil D’Oliveira. He was voted Columnist of the Year at the Press Awards in 2013. His website i...
Jan 30, 2022•28 min
Rob Doyle discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This Is the Ritual and Here Are the Young Men, which has been adapted for film. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, TLS and Dublin Review among other publications, and he edited the anthologies The Other Irish Tradition and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep. His work has been translated into several langua...
Jan 23, 2022•29 min
Historian Catharine Arnold discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Catharine Arnold is a popular historian and television presenter specialising in dark themes. Her most recent book is Pandemic 1918, the Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History. Her other books include the acclaimed London Quartet. These include: Necropolis, London and its Dead, ‘entertainment of the most garish and exquisite kind,’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times. The Independent also rated Necropolis one of it...
Jan 16, 2022•28 min
Robin Baker discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Robin is head curator of the BFI National Archive - one of the world’s largest and most important collections of film and television – where he leads the team responsible for developing and interpreting the national collection. He has written and directed two short films and wrote the play Elephant and Castle for BBC Radio 4, starring Rory Kinnear and Olivia Colman. Robin has been attacked by cobras on two occasions. Follow...
Jan 09, 2022•29 min
Jessica Nordell discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Republic and many other publications. A former writer for public radio and producer for American Public Media, she graduated from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The End of Bias: A Beginning is her first book. Notes on a Foreign Coun...
Jan 02, 2022•30 min
Edafe Onerhime discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known. Edafe Onerhime is a specialist in making an impact with data. Her motto: Data + Design + Culture. She lives in Glasgow with her wife and cat. She works as an Executive Director - Data Architecture Governance Lead at JP Morgan Chase. She believes in opening doors and building longer tables, not walls. She can be found asking questions like: How does data shape and is shaped by our culture and beliefs? How does this affect...
Dec 26, 2021•29 min
