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Brains, idea, lightbulbs and tattoos

2014-11-17T17:06:45+00:00

Editor's note: To accompany the series A History of Ideas you can find 48 animations exploring the philosophical ideas from the programmes. Produced in partnership with The Open University and animated by Cogni+ive the short films are narrated by Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson. Here, Visual Thinker, Andrew Park writes further about his creative process and invites listeners and viewers of the animations to contact him about his work.

I am attempting to write this blog in retrospect. Retrospect isn’t a beleaguered ex-Soviet outpost near the Siberian border where I have decided upon a self-imposed exile until I manage to wrestle the entire History of Ideas series from my aching arm (apparently Golfer’s elbow – although I have never knowingly picked up a golf club) and my increasingly flabby brain. No…Retrospect is some place, even grimmer! It is a place of muffled coughs, squinted glimpses, half digested memories and ‘dirty terminals.’

‘Dirty terminals’ is an expression I picked up the other day when having to change both headlamp bulbs in my Smart car a rather convenient name when talking about light bulbs! A cheery wipe with a cloth was all it took to restore the car to it less-dangerous glory of being able to drive after 5p.m. in November. No such luck for me then in attempting to piece together the shattered fragments of my memory over the last few months to see if I can tell an interesting story about how we got to where we are with the ‘History of Ideas’ project.

In writing this blog about the first 12 animations, I feel a bit like ‘Leonard Shelby’ character from ‘Momento’, who has anterograde amnesia, without the ability to store recent memories and has taken to adorning his body with tattoos of fragments of information in order to solve the mystery of a murdered wife. Although permanent body adornment hasn’t taken place with me just yet, as I can’t quite see how having an indelible image etched into my flesh will work for me personally, as I tend to contradict myself within the same sentence, let alone be happy with an image that I would be happy wearing on my skin forever.

Going back to memory. I often wonder how people write their memoirs when I have trouble remembering yesterday. I find it hard to believe that people have such clarity about what happened on, say, a Sunday afternoon in 1948. Perhaps Paul Broks will be able to tell me!

I went through a phase of keeping a diary in order to try and keep tabs on my movements, both cerebral and physical, but when I read back what I had written some months later, it depressed me. Such squalid and non-eventful happenings! I also started to tend make things up in it to make it seem less tedious. I suppose if you were to look back on it in 30 years time you would conclude that this man went to the shops a lot.

Anyway. This Blog is an attempt to engage my brain with the more creative end of my existence. Something that might be of interest to somebody else other than my mundane trips to Wilkos to buy the wrong lightbulbs. Hang on….What is it with lightbulbs? I have got lightbulbs on the brain. I suppose it is inevitable when we are talking about ideas that we have to include this symbol.

Even Melvyn Bragg is sporting a lightbulb in the Radio Times spread about the broadcast. It’s now entered our visual lexicon and because it is so well used it is now a cliché. I don’t think there is a person on the planet that wouldn’t understand what the lightbulb represents. Is it wrong of me to want another symbol to represent ‘ideas’ or creativity other than this invention of the industrial age, invented in 1800? I think because the lightbulb has been around so long that ironically it stands for the opposite when it comes to talking about ideas – We have no idea. What was there before the lightbulb? Maybe people didn’t represent ideas in that way – I often use candles when drawing people post industrial age having ideas.

Maybe ‘ideas’ as we know it, as collateral are the preserve of industry. Everyone else was too busy threshing hay and being mammals before that. Hopefully I will not have to resort to relying on this cliché too much over the course of this series of translating ideas into pictures. I give you all permission to let me know when I have been lazy!

It’s now a few days after the first batch of ‘The History of ideas’ animations have gone live. Seeing them online, in one solid lump, has been a thrill. What is hopefully even more exciting is the prospect of creating some kind of dialogue with the audience too. I am all for discussion about the films that we make and the ideas contained within. Please do leave a comment or email or tweet me @wearecognitive. I would like to engage with you!

Andrew Park is the Director of Cogni+ive

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Philosophy Animated

2014-11-14T10:23:14+00:00

Editor's note: To accompany the series A History of Ideas you can find 48 animations exploring some of the philosophical ideas and big questions from the programmes including Simone de Beauvoir on Feminine Beauty and Thomas Hobbes on Freedom vs Security. Produced in partnership with The Open University and animated by Cogni+ive the short films are narrated by Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson. Here, Visual Thinker, Andrew Park talks about his creative process.

Andrew Park self portrait

I thought I’d write a blog to accompany the animations in this series. By way of keeping track of my thought processes as we make the series, and also to flag up and alert viewers to some content that might not be as obvious at first glance, giving some pointers to my creative decisions, and where they meander, connect with each other and sometimes cul-de-sac along the way.

The primary ambition is that the work is a cogent carrier for the ‘important’ philosophical message or idea. I am also a firm believer that information will only sink in when it’s engaging and emotional. For me humour is a way of cementing that information into the memory. So it’s important to have some fun on the way.

Memory is a crucial first step to knowledge and knowledge can be transferable across time and space. The ideas and theories that we are privileged to be working with in this series, and being broadcast to you right now are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old. We can only access them because some clever people in the past remembered stuff and developed systems for transference of that knowledge. This is good news, because we all could benefit from what Plato or John Locke thought about. The brilliant thing for us, now, is we can use pictures and animation combined with the huge reach of Internet to really make some of those ideas come alive and resonate with a new audience in far off places. Potentially this could spark new thinkers and young philosophers to engage with these ideas and with any luck change the world in the process! Yes. Why not aim high?

We were originally commissioned to do the project because we were known for our work on the RSA Animate series. These 10 minute representations of lectures delivered at the RSA garnered quite a bit of success, and proved a new and exciting delivery mechanism for smart thinking online. Hence Mohit Bakaya, the commissioning editor for Radio 4 coming to see us. He was very keen on humour and the slight irreverence I have when translating information into these films.

I often reach for the closest thing to hand when I am trying to translate. I am a bit of a cultural magpie. I like to explore juxtapositions. Create new meaning. This is something I think Monty Python did exceptionally well when they crafted their sketches. They combined low culture and high-brow exceptionally well. Managing to slide concepts and ideas into the cultural mix with an innovative ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. The notion that things could just end or transition to something ‘completely different’ has a big influence on me.

So keep tuned and I will endeavour to explore my visual thinking. Part diary, part explanation, part excuse…. Let’s see what comes out. It might be fun!

Andrew Park is the Director of Cogni+ive

Watch animations by theme

Listen to A History of Ideas

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Social Darwinism

2014-02-21T13:14:59+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Social Darwinism. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

Hello,

It’s a pity we didn’t have time to go into the application of eugenics in Communist countries. Adam Kuper at least flagged up China, but there’s an awful lot to be said about Russia. Perhaps another programme? And perhaps in that next programme we can talk about the submerged but persistent hints of eugenic solutions around the “civilised” world today. I have a feeling that some people still are of the opinion that the best route for the weak is to send them to the wall. But there is no theory of any conviction or dignity whatsoever to support it.

Been doing as much walking as possible on Hampstead Heath. Once in a high storm which really did have a go to topple me, which was what I deserved for being so stupid as to go out on a day like that. But often surprisingly balmy and stunningly lovely. I do like the Hampstead Heath vigilantes – those who make it half their lifetime’s study and activity to keep it at its best and make sure that any changes are for the better. There is a mighty controversy going on about the idea of banking up the sides of the men’s swimming pool.

Went to see an old film by my friend Christopher Miles the other day – The Clandestine Marriage by George Colman. 18th century farce. It’s curious how those silly, artificial plots drag you in. Will this nobleman marry the penniless, beautiful daughter or the not-so-beautiful, grasping daughter? And who is going to tell the nouveau riche landowner that his prize sale (i.e. daughter) is pregnant by a mere person who works inside the Big House? But it was real fun.

Now off to lunch on St Pancras station with a friend of mine whom I met in my first week at university, and he’s now resident in Africa so I will get all the gossip from Togo. Then hopping on a train to Leicester to talk to Rob Coles, whose recent book on Orwell got deservedly first-rate reviews. I think I finally get back to London at 11.10pm.

But St Pancras is now such an extraordinary place from the sad, even seedy, almost deserted, about to be demolished, once-it-was-so-wonderful-and-Betjeman-loved-it station I remember from about forty years ago, when I used to train up to Derby to see the late Phillip Whitehead. London is being transformed in a quite extraordinary way. Where will it end?

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Chivalry

2014-02-14T12:45:49+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Chivalry. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

Hello,

I was walking down to the House of Lords a couple of days ago and above that grand building – officially the Palace of Westminster – there curved a double rainbow. I can’t think when last I saw a double rainbow, if ever. And, of course, up pops Wordsworth: “My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life began;/So is it now I am a man;/So be it when I shall grow old,/Or let me die!” And so into a very powerful debate across the spectrum on immigration.

London ought to be a washout but it isn’t. People stoically bend their heads into the howling winds. Water sluices everywhere, but people still make every effort to get into work, despite rather powerful obstacles – only one of them, the Tube strike – being put in their way. The sky is playing peculiar tricks which would have driven Constable mad. Heavy, very laden rain clouds outpouring their matter, and then, literally a few minutes later, as blue as a Provencal summer day and quite warm with it.

After the programme one of the contributors listened intently to her mobile and announced: “My Pilates teacher thought it was very good”.

Laura Ashe pointed out that the constant injunctions to the chivalric knights not to rape women meant, in her view, that raping women was what they got up to too often, which is why the injunction was repeated so often.

I was keen to bring in the idea that these great codes might be taken notice of more in the breach than the observance. It was not only the Black Prince who killed prisoners, and Henry V, but the great warrior of them all in the 13th century, King Edward III, who raised the dragon’s flag which signalled that all prisoners should be killed.

I think it was Matthew Strickland who pointed out that although courtly love tended to be extramarital, and the general pattern seems to have been that you loved somebody who was already married (see Arthurian legends), nevertheless an adulterous relationship in the 11th century could lead to quite a nasty conclusion. Philip of Flanders, for instance, caught a man who was at his wife, and after the man was beaten he was suspended over a privy until the smell drugged him to death. Another adulterer was impaled rather nastily, even beyond the dreams of The Wolf of Wall Street.

By the way, the word ‘chivalry’ comes from the French word ‘chevalier’ (meaning knight) and ‘chevalerie’ (knightly behaviour) and ‘cheval’, of course, means a horse. Which brings us to the hackney cab. In another of my rare outings with the hackney, I this time came across a man who had relatives in the Thames Valley, and he put forward the proposition that instead of giving 13 billion pounds to persons overseas, we should give it to persons in the Thames Valley, the Somerset Levels and everywhere else beaten by storms – as the good ship Britain is rocked with a fury which would have led the Old Testament prophets to accuse the whole nation of having committed terrible sins, to have such retribution visited on them.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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The Phoenicians

2014-02-07T17:42:12+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed The Phoenicians. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

Hello

Here are some notes from the talk after the programme. One of our contributors said that he should have been giving a lecture in his university. Instead he’d asked his students to listen to In Our Time and to discuss it with him as soon as he got back.

While on air we had a message from Damascus. From Damascus!

In Tudor and Renaissance times, when people in this country did not want to think they were French in origin (unlike the colonising force which came across in 1066 and steadily for a couple of centuries afterwards), they decided that they would be Phoenicians instead. The Cornish were particularly keen to be Phoenicians. They said the Phoenicians had come up to the Scilly Isles and then into Cornwall itself, and they had been responsible for Stonehenge and cinnamon in fruit buns, among much else.

The Welsh also wanted to be Phoenicians. The evidence they put forward was the Welsh moustache. They said that living in Wales the Phoenicians had lost their red or ruddy skins, and gone Welsh white. But to maintain their distinction they grew a particular sort of moustache. Later on, to retrieve some colour, they painted themselves blue. This was called woad. But there were certain Welsh persons convinced that this was a return to the Phoenician.

The Irish, too, decided to be Phoenician because they didn’t want to be British. We find it in several Irish writers, Friel and Heaney included, that they sympathised with the Carthaginians, because the Carthaginians were anti-Roman which stood for being anti-British.

The Phoenicians have had a high old time since they slipped out of history. A very early film made in Spain in 1914, Cabiria, concerned a little blonde girl who was stolen by Phoenician pirates and taken to Carthage to be sacrificed. She was rescued by a Roman soldier and his black slave/servant and huge adventures ensued.

In fact, it seems that because we know so little, if anything, about the Phoenicians since about the 2nd century BC, we can make up whatever we want.

It is significant that Aeneas, on his way from burning Troy to founding Rome, stopped at Carthage, which as a result was the subject of the best book in Virgil’s epic. The story of Dido and Aeneas, and her sacrifice as he sails off to found a new empire, still resonates.

End of notes.

I found it impossible to go for a walk, partly because it was sluicing down and I was not dressed for such a downpour. In Cumberland it would have been bracing. As the sage said, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing”. And I had back-to-back-to-back meetings. I try to pack them into one day so that the rest of the time can be free to get on with work.

Met with Tom Morris, the producer, to talk about the next batch of programmes. We have three in prospect and need another half-dozen. Tom is so well-prepared that meetings like this are the quickest and most decisive I think I’ve ever had in my career. Joined by Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who was very pleased to tell us (and we were very pleased to hear) that our audience figures – as measured by an organisation called RAJAR – went up by a quarter of a million in the last three months. These things go up and down, but up is always good. We talked a little about the five programmes that we’re going to do on Magna Carta at the beginning of next year. Gwyneth departed with the RAJAR cake she’d bought for her office. Tom and I had a biscuit with our coffee.

I walked from building to building to those meetings and there was a general sense of trudge everywhere. The Tube strike bit in. Masses of people were heads into the rain up the pavements. Umbrellas threatened to poke out all eyes. There was almost a sense of refugees. Nothing of course like the Somerset Levels. I can’t think of those two words without remembering that that was where Alfred the Great retreated when England was threatened by the Danes to become Danish, and would have been, had Alfred not gathered his strength and a force in the Somerset Levels where he evaded all attempts to capture him, and came back and defeated the Danes and Christianised them and that is why we’re English today.

Then crawled back home through traffic which probably set new standards for congestion.
Nevertheless … a message from Damascus! Think about that.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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In Our Time - Catastrophism

2014-01-31T17:50:37+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Catastrophism. As always the programme is available to listen online or to download and keep.

Hello

What was most fascinating for me was to see in action the development of the modern world through thought. Geology – although it only got that name in the early 19th century – was a subject of surface observation and often fruitless theorising. The Bible had such a grip on the imagination of Western intellectuals that they went to it for verification as well as for support. But in that programme I think we saw something mighty that happened in Western thought and then swept around the world; that is, the change from systems based on belief to systems based on observation and enquiry. From Aquinas, if you like, to Newton.

It’s wonderful to see the way in which scholars found reasons to include Noah’s Flood, or reasons to rely on it, when in other parts of their minds they were undermining all the authority that that stemmed from. Even Lyell, who made such remarkable progress and, as we know, influenced Darwin, who himself both validated and popularised the idea of gradualism, were held back, or rather held on to, Christianity and the belief system which had sunk such deep wells into the knowledge base and imagination of the Western world. But then, eventually, it broke through.

But it isn’t over yet.

Andrew Scott was telling me after the programme that in America there is a most ferocious argument going on in the area of geology. North America lost all its megafauna about 12,900 years ago and this same supposed disaster wiped out the Clovis culture. There are those American scholars who also suggest a massive fire accompanied this event, and wish to ascribe this to some catastrophe of the Noah’s Flood proportions. But Andrew examined the data relating to the theoretical fire across America and he said it simply does not hold up. There was no such thing. He called it “a zombie hypothesis” and they have hit back. He’s received hate mail and he surmises that this is partly because the idea of a catastrophe is extremely persuasive, as it explains a lot of different things simply, and pleases those who want to see the world as obeying laws outside the slow grind of uniformitarianism. So the wheels go round.

Outside to a filthy London day. That sort of penetrating drizzle which is miserable. Haven’t been able to get out on to Hampstead Heath for a few days for a big walk. Put to shame by my friend Piers Plowright – a former producer on Radio 3 who won multiple prizes and did wonderful documentaries – he’s a neighbour and a little older than I am, and in his mid-seventies he still strides across the Heath of a morning and plunges into the Men’s Pond and has a swim and comes back to an unheated hut with other men – Lord Chief Justices, lawyers, scholars, a rag-and-bone man (the detail is all his) – and strides back across the Heath to arrive to his home shivering and longing for a big mug of sizzling black coffee. Now there’s a life.

A bit busy today with meetings and this evening a gathering of the Chancellors of UK universities at the Royal Society. We did the South Bank Show Awards earlier this week which is an extraordinary event, where people like Kiri Te Kanawa and Simon Russell Beale and Paul Abbott and Dame Antonia Fraser and Darcey Bussell and Frank Skinner cheerfully turn up to present the awards. Lots of awards for young people and new people as well, and Tracey Emin got the Outstanding Achievement and made a speech about the arts which in itself was quite outstanding.

So, off we trundle into the ancient world of the fascinating Phoenicians.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Ever Increasing Wonder - Remembering Richard Briers

2013-12-24T10:30:24+00:00

Editor's Note: Radio 4 Extra pays tribute to Richard Briers on Christmas Day from 8am to 4pm and 5pm to 10pm. All programmes will be available on BBC iPlayer for 7 days.

From 'Brothers in Law', March 1962

‘National treasure’ is more than overused. It should be retired. But when news of Richard Briers death was announced in February this year, it really did feel like someone we all knew had gone forever. Stephen Fry, paying tribute to Richard for his radio portrayal of Bertie Wooster, told 4 Extra that when he heard the news he felt personally “diminished”. That it was a personal loss for Richard’s family and friends, but also a real loss to the nation. We mourned Richard because everyone felt that they knew him, and that is “rare” indeed.

Richard Briers

Radio 4 Extra’s original idea was to mark Richard’s passing by airing his appearance on Desert Island Discs, together with the other stars of The Good Life. We might combine them with one or two of the great radio comedies that Richard had made for the BBC, like Doctor in the House and Brothers in Law. But when I started to explore in the archive something quickly became very apparent. Richard Briers had a quite brilliant, distinctive radio legacy. That’s where the title for our Christmas Day radio celebration came from. Listening to Richard’s radio performances really did give you a sense of Ever Increasing Wonder through its breadth and range.

Christmas Briers

In 1978, at the height of Good Life fever, Radio 4 handed over its Christmas Day morning to Richard. 4 Extra will broadcast the result, Christmas Briers, for the first time in 35 years this Christmas Day morning. Our Christmas afternoon treat is Richard starring as Rat in The Wind in the Willows. This will be gift wrapped with the one and only Alan Bennett, talking to 4 Extra about working with Richard on the original National Theatre production in 1990. His is a very personal and affectionate tribute.

From Marriage Lines, 1963.

There are two great, revealing radio interviews with Aled Jones (BBC Radio Wales) and Michael Ball (BBC Radio 2). There’s poignant contemporary Radio 4 drama, like 2009’s The Moment You Feel It. Its writer Ed Harris tells us about the thrill of working with Richard as a young radio writer. Also gathering dust in the archives was the only surviving radio version of the newlywed 1960s comedy Marriage Lines. Co-star Prunella Scales immediately said she would talk to 4 Extra about working with Richard on the series. He was her co-star and a life-long friend.

Hancock's Last Half Hour

Another revelation was his love and admiration of comedy legend Tony Hancock. For the first time since 1984, Radio 4 Extra will air a radio documentary Richard made about him: Briers on Hancock. And you’ll also be able to hear a truely tour de force performance, as Richard becomes his comedy hero in the radio version of Heathcote Williams play, Hancock’s Last Half Hour.

Richard Briers' widow Ann Davies and daughters Kate and Lucy Briers.

Most importantly, though, is that I had the help and support of Richard Briers' family, his widow Ann Davies and daughters Kate and Lucy Briers. They had a list of favourite radio performances, and very bravely and graciously agreed to talk to 4 Extra about Richard’s life and work. It was a moving and - as Ann Davies herself says whenever they think of Richard - a very happy recording experience.

It was very touching to hear Ann - an actress herself - talking about starring in a radio drama with her real life husband, Richard. We get to hear both of them together in the wonderfully moving Mr Jones Goes Driving (Radio 4, 2010) at noon.

So whether it’s comedy or drama, literary performance (Richard taking the helm of Radio 4’s With Great Pleasure), radio documentary, or truly tour de force performances, tears, sadness, happiness and laughter are all guaranteed this Christmas Day in the company of the late, great, Richard Briers.

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In Our Time - Pocahontas

2013-11-21T18:34:20+00:00

Editors note. In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and guests discussed Pocahontas. As always the programme is available to listen to online or download to keep.

Hello

So Disney, it seems, didn’t get Pocahontas quite right. They pursued the line that she had had an affair with John Smith. When they were aware of each other, she was about ten and he was about thirty, and there’s no evidence for this whatsoever, but she was already becoming a myth. What a short life and what an immense one. Jacqueline Fear-Segal recalled (after the programme) a delegation which came to Gravesend recently. A delegation, that is, of American Indians who were part of the Algonquin-speaking grouping when the English arrived. They came to get recognition because none of these Virginia tribes have recognition; that is to say, they are not seen to be included in Bills for medical rights, educational rights or land rights. Only two tribes have got anything approaching land rights. They have federal but not national recognition. On it goes.

When Pocahontas came (this is all post-programme chat) to London, John Chamberlain saw her at the great masque of Ben Jonson’s, which was attended by James I and his wife, and said that she was “no fair lady … but tricked up to be somebody”. Emeritus Professor Susan Castillo’s comment on that was “supercilious git” (I have her permission to say this). When she came to London she was first of all put up in a tavern called La Belle Sauvage. Typical English bureaucratic tact, of course. Soon she moved to Syon Park, a home of the Duke of Northumberland.

The Native Indian thing persists quite strongly. Susan’s grandmother, who into her late eighties had straight, thick, black hair, was believed to have a Choctaw element in her genetic makeup. But it was never talked about.

Curiously, and without Tom Morris and myself giving it any calculation whatsoever, this week’s programme linked up with last week’s on The Tempest. Rolfe was in the ship, The Sea Venture, which was wrecked and landed its people on the Bermudas and this was one of the starting points for Shakespeare’s play. Other notions about English settlers landing on foreign islands swirled in from this Virginia experience, which was the first time that the English bit into the North American continent.

Over 100,000 people claim descent from Pocahontas through the child she had with Rolfe. One of these is Nancy Reagan. In Rolfe’s village in England, in Heacham, there is a village sign depicting Pocahontas. As there is a statue of her in St George’s Church in Gravesend. It’s difficult to imagine what an amazing coup it must have seemed. This young princess, as the English thought she was (hence the invitation to be in the presence of James I and his wife, etc), accounted by others than the supercilious John Chamberlain to be beautiful and certainly strange, was the first recorded Native Indian to turn to Christianity, and one of only three people who went into an interracial marriage in Virginia in the whole of the seventeenth century. In Latin America there were many, many more interracial marriages, but the English held off.

John Rolfe, who went back to America without his bride, was most likely killed in the 1622 uprising. His son went on to produce what became the 100,000 descendants.

I was going to write about the cowboys and Indians on Saturday matinees in Wigton, but there’s no more space. You’ll be relieved to hear that!

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS: By a deeply mysterious coincidence, yesterday we received our first review from a paper in Virginia!

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In Our Time - The Tempest

2013-11-15T12:03:59+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed The Tempest. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

The Tempest

Hello

I am dictating this on the train to Bridport. I am just being told that I am about to stop in Poole and to mind the gap at the platform edge. Bridport will be my last literary festival stop this year. There are over 350 now in the British Isles and I feel I've been to a very great number. And it's no less than the truth to say that I've enjoyed every one of them. Usually I try to compound the experience by doing something else as well as the festival. Something else this time was to see an old friend who was a colleague in the first year – 1977 – when we prepared The South Bank Show, and to see one of my best friends and his wife who was also at LWT at that time.

The great thing about literary festivals for novelists is that they meet readers. Not necessarily readers of their books (although that's part of it) but readers. That is to say, people in their own tribe. I'm now anticipating the Bridport tribe and trying to eradicate from my head the announcement that I am in Poole. Having arrived at Poole, I will soon be told that I am leaving Poole. Poole looks lovely in the twilight.

This morning after the programme I wandered down Regent Street and saw what I think will be the best decorations for years. They've done up huge deers' antlers in silver and en masse, right down this curving masterpiece of retail. They look wonderful.

The programme this morning was just a joy. The three of them know so much and are so full of it, and there's so much to say and there would have been so much more to say. The masque at the end of The Tempest which I found quite dull to read was, I was firmly told, a highlight of the play, when performed with music and dance in the proper fashion.

In 1960 I was part of a touring group from the university which took The Tempest to Germany. We were there several weeks, travelled in a coach which contained the whole cast, the stage manager, all the props and all the costumes. We lodged sometimes in hostels, sometimes in people's houses, sometimes in schools, and chugged down the Rhine and drank overlarge glasses of beer in Heidelberg. It was a most strange experience. It seemed such a short time since we as children, or at least I as a child, had been identifying Germans with devils incarnate and fearing them and wanting to destroy them, and now here I was meeting charming people, good-mannered, appreciative, generous. Where was the real world in all this? Which were the dreams and which were the nightmares?

This is my second port stop in the last six days. Last weekend I was in Maryport on the coast of Cumbria. A small mining town, once a hub in the Industrial Revolution in that area. A great port since Roman times and in the small museum, beginning to build an amazing collection of Roman artefacts dug up from what now appears to have been a major Roman depot for goods brought in from all over the Roman Empire to serve the Roman world. Already in this small museum there are more altars than there are anywhere else outside Italy. There is also a unique and fantastic and large phallus with a serpent realistically wound around it. Worth the visit for that alone.

Maryport was where my father was born. I wandered around it very early in the morning and found, as he always said, that the real Cumbrians began in West Cumbria! That is to say, people on the streets doing their early shopping were friendly and cheerful, despite the fact, as part of a post-industrial society, in many ways they had not much to be cheerful about.

One thing about having had little money spent on the town is that there are no chain stores; there are individual shops in all the hilly streets. In short, it is a gem, although to be realistic, for many it might seem a trap. On the other hand, I didn't meet "those" many. Those I did meet were delighted to be in such a place, with the long promenade beside the Irish Sea and the pubs, Middle Tap, Lower Tap, Top Tap. And there was a church for sale. A big church with a little sign on saying 'For Sale'. It had a splendid spire.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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On Publishing Lives

2013-09-27T14:22:37+00:00

Editor's note: Writer and former publisher Robert McCrum explores the stories of five great British publishers in Publishing Lives, starting on Monday 20th August at 1.45pm.

John Murray II

These are confusing times for publishers and writers. And disturbing, too. Only the other day, I had an email from a friend, a well-known and successful contemporary writer, who confided as follows:

“I feel rather as if I chose to invest my last ounce of energy in the leather tyre – just before the rubber tyre came out. I have a young family to support on books and freelance writing. This was possible, just, until a decade ago, but now I am part of the impoverished middle class.”

My friend went on, drawing a bleak picture: “I have no pension, no inherited money, and feel a little bit glum about the future. I am sure something will evolve, but right now I am not sure what….”

People in the book world will certainly know what he’s talking about. This disorientation has been my experience, too. Before I came to the Observer as Literary Editor in 1996, I was editorial director of Faber & Faber for almost twenty years, and was fully at home in an apparently secure literary ecosystem. And yet...

Toby and Geoffrey Faber.

In my lifetime, the publishing business has changed beyond recognition. Hot metal has gone electronic. Bookshops now survive on-line. A whole world has been turned upside down.

Digital giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now poaching in publishers’ traditional markets as never before. In response, this year alone, Penguin has merged with Random House, and HarperCollins is now run from America.

In brief, publishers are living through the biggest paradigm shift since William Caxton set up shop in Westminster some 500 years ago. Writers, like my friend, must follow helplessly in their slipstream, adapting as best they can to changing conditions.

No one really knows what the future holds but I, for one, always thought I knew the publishing business - its opportunism, its serendipity, even its cynicism and vulgarity. I thought I had seen it all.

The seventh and last John Murray.

And then I made this Radio 4 series, Publishing Lives. In this, my producer Melissa Fitzgerald and I took the story of five great imprints - Murray, Macmillan, Penguin, Weidenfeld and Faber - to explore where the business might be heading.

It has been a revelation. Nothing that’s happening today has not already been anticipated, usually on a smaller scale, in the past. No crisis we face today has not recurred, several times over, during the 19th or 20th centuries.

Robert McCrum meets Lord Weidenfeld to talk about his extraordinary publishing life.

Moreover, not one of these publishing giants, from John Murray the second to the great George Weidenfeld, to Allen Lane of Penguin, would have been fazed by the state of play in 2013. On the contrary, I suspect they would have reveled in the opportunities available through the digital revolution.

Christine Teale and Clare Morpurgo - Allen Lane's daughters - with Robert McCrum.

These great publishers are all great characters - mavericks, hustlers, passionate about books - who, variously, walked from Scotland to London to make their fortune; fled the Nazis; left school at sixteen; had blazing rows with their authors, gambled their houses on apparently crazy publishing ideas, and (in the case of Harold Macmillan) actually used the office of Prime Minister to promote the family firm’s business.

‘Publishing Lives’ contains dozens of surprising, even scandalous, nuggets. The series has changed my ideas about the book world. Maybe it will do the same for you...

Listen to Publishing Lives from Monday 30th September

See publishers, writers and locations from Robert McCrum's exploration of British publishing in our online gallery.

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In Our Time: The Mamluks

2013-09-26T10:23:11+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed The Mamluks. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

The Mamluks

Hello

It's quite difficult for me to remember anything that we said about the Mamluks after the recording. Partly because it WAS a recording. We'd finished Pascal, taken a deep breath and another cup of tea, gone to another studio, set up again and in came the experts on the Mamluks. Afterwards I had to whip off to get to Paddington station, eat a chicken sandwich, get on a train to Exeter St Davids, get in a car which wound round Devon's smallest lanes to Budleigh Salterton and give a talk, and then return to the fray of London later that night, and bags to do over the weekend. Including seeing an amazing Italian film, La bellissima – "the great beauty".

I like the idea of the Mamluks. Wonderfully romantic. Slaves who became sultans. A better story, in a way – if you could find the man – than Spartacus. These people took over for 250 years. I love the idea that you had to be a slave to be a sultan. I also have always enjoyed stories of archers on horseback (in some restaurants this would be a starter). But the idea of these warriors from Turkey or from the Caucasus training from boyhood to ride at speed, with their bows which could shoot longer than the great English longbow and scything through the opposition, even up to and including the Mongols, is a wonder for someone brought up on cowboy films. Okay, partly brought up on cowboy films.

Leading from the front, which the Mamluks did, has always struck me as not only romantic but fair enough. Perhaps wars grew more cruel when people stopped leading from the front. Correction. It's difficult to imagine crueller wars than those waged by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane the Great who led from the front. Anyway, there's romance in the air somewhere or other, although how there can be romance in the air when there's so much carnage on the ground there is not time to disentangle in this mere newsletter.

The contributors made Cairo – which I've visited only fleetingly – sound like an architectural place of wonder which I'd like to go to. I think it might be better if I hurried up. My wife and I wanted to go to Damascus for years and put it off and put it off until we were ready to go and then war started. I suppose cramming in places while they are peaceful would not be a bad policy.

It's been a sad summer of scything, to repeat that word. Two very close friends of mine have died. And people I knew well and admired who were precisely Seamus Heaney and David Frost, both in concentric circles of friendships and acquaintances, whom I can describe as close acquaintances, died within a couple of weeks of each other. Each eminent in his own field, as I am told Freddie Ayer said to Tyson, when the philosopher met the heavyweight boxer at a party in New York in rather dodgy circumstances.

I went to see a good friend of mine the other night and we had a learned discussion about porridge. We are both porridge eaters for breakfast. Each makes it in his own way. My friend is very, very serious. He seems to get special pellets from some fortress in Scotland and practises arcane arts on them the night before the morning he attacks the porridge. I'm a buy-them-in-a-bag-at-the-local-supermarket man myself. Water, a pinch of salt and honey. You'd be surprised how long that sort of conversation can go on for. Or perhaps, depending your age, you aren't. Dr Johnson, in his dictionary as I remember, said that in England oats were given to horses and in Scotland they sustained the people.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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In Our Time: Pascal

2013-09-20T14:32:32+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Pascal. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

Pascal

Hello

After the programme Michela Massimi – whose accent beguiled almost as many listeners as did her erudition – pulled out her copy of Pascal's 'Pensées' in Italian, which she had read at the age of 18 and which made her decide to study philosophy. She said that she had made marginal notes. When I flicked through it I saw that almost EVERY line had been marked in a firmly wielded pencil. David Wootton heaved in to talk about what we write in a book when you violently disagree with the author (it all revolves around exclamation marks). As he'd already said that Voltaire hated Pascal but read him obsessively, we wondered whether there's a copy of the 'Pensées' somewhere, containing Voltaire's marginalia. In fact, for a few minutes, we went marginalia mad. Tom offered examples of his father's method when reviewing books about music. I remembered seeing a copy of 'Lyrical Ballads' with De Quincey's marginalia. (I owned that copy. It was stolen about fifteen years ago. I'm sure I know who did it. Alas he's dead.) There just may be, marginally, a programme in it.

I'm sitting on a bench at the station of Exeter St Davids, looking at a sign which says Hello Exeter. I never saw it. I've just been to the literary festival at Budleigh Salterton. I never saw that either. It's all the fault of In Our Time. This morning we did the live programme on Pascal, followed by a rare event, a recorded programme for next week on the Mamluks, because I'll be in Russia next week. The train was late. The drive was difficult. I arrived five or ten minutes late to an extremely patient audience. The literary tribes of the literary festivals are not only patient, they are sophisticated, intelligent and they give the lie to dumbing down, a cliché which haunts some of the pages of our newspapers. But the original intention was so much richer. I was going to leave at my leisure after the live programme. I was going to see Exeter Cathedral and its extraordinary nave. I was going to look at the sea in Budleigh Salterton and walk in the footsteps of Hilary Mantel, who we recently filmed there. I was going to get sea breeze and ozone. All that was not to be.

Summer was so long and crowded and difficult that I'm going to draw the blinds. Back in London and around Broadcasting House seems every bit as lively as ever. I walked through Regent's Park on the way to work and there were many tricycles specially designed for disabled children. They were whizzing up and down the promenades, each one with a carer beside them, whooping and spinning and turning, and filled with joy at this marvellous machine which gave them speed and fresh air. How nice to live in a country where such a thing is possible.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari

2013-08-30T09:34:22+00:00

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available on Sunday 1st Septmber and will be available to listen online or for download.

Paul Theroux

I imagine many of you have the same feeling as I do, that I can’t remember whether I first encountered Paul Theroux on The Old Patagonian Express or in The Great Railway Bazaar. It hardly matters. These books, which made him a star by the seventies, were not only a compendium of rattling good stories of life on the road, with the freshness of a writer who was obsessed by new experiences, but a contribution to one of the great traditions. Like Jan Morris – one of my own favourite writers - his evocation of place, and the adventure of getting there, has the diamond sparkle of the fresh-faced explorer determined to find new sounds and colours round every corner, and to encounter different people.

When we met with this month’s readers in Broadcasting House it was no surprise to me to find that one of his cherished writers is Robert Louis Stevenson, and not only because Stevenson ended his life in the South Pacific, where he’d gone to alleviate his chronic ill-health, and where Paul has had a home for many years. In my excitement I even managed to misquote the epitaph of Tusitala – the local word for ‘a teller of tales’, with which they anointed him on the island where he died – and got the last lines the wrong way round. For the record, they are – “home is the sailor, home from sea/and the hunter home from the hill”. That makes me feel a little better. Paul is an enthusiast for Stevenson not only because of the superb crispness and economy of his writing (often undervalued because of his brilliant ability to write for children), but because of that feeling for the traveller’s life and the satisfaction of eventual rest. Whether in Edinburgh, the Pyrenees, the South Seas, or in the wilderness of his imagination, Stevenson was always infected by the excitement of a journey, and the business of getting there. It was appropriate, therefore, that in talking about Paul’s Dark Star Safari we were able to look back on his own writing life from its beginning.

Paul Theroux responds to a reader who suggests he can come across as grumpy.

The book is his account of a return to Africa, beginning just before 9/11, nearly forty years after he first arrived on the continent as a young American inspired by Kennedy’s volunteer Peace Corps (JFK had been murdered a month before Paul travelled to the African school where he’d teach). His reaction, second time around, was quite different. In his journey from Cairo to Cape Town, replete with the kinds of encounters that have enlivened all his books, he experience feelings of anxiety, even despair, about aspects of the “new” Africa – worries about the “wrong” kind of aid, corruption and the sort of westernisation that destroys some valuable social customs in the name of progress. Some of his reflections are indeed dark.

But they’re lifted by the experience of encountering a new kind of Africa, the sheer exhilaration of coming across townships where everyone carries a mobile phone but has a traditional knife, perhaps a machete, in the other hand. He describes the difference of Africa with the same freshness as he brought to his earliest travels in India and South America, and his journey is peopled by characters who never seem contrived or put together from predetermined caricatures. The discussion with our readers, who included quite a number who were either born in Africa or had long experience of the continent, therefore turned – as it had to – to the nature of the writer who enjoys the business of travel.

Paul, of course, has become a distinguished novelist, but it is about his character as a traveller that we talked most. He made two striking points. Writing about travel, he said, meant being gregarious – enjoying the unexpected encounter, and throwing yourself into every community that you discover along the way – but it also helped to be a solitary individual, even sometimes a lonely one. The two go together – a joy in being alone, and a relish for the new friend or the strange passer-by.

Our conversation was sometimes serious, but never gloomy. One reader confessed that she had expected him to be a rather downbeat person, even dour. She was pleased to find that she was wrong. For myself, I had my expectations confirmed. Paul Theroux is funny, wise and sometimes sad. And I thought of him, at the end of a day on the road, writing his reflections in longhand and filling his notebooks – an uplifting thought.

I hope you enjoy the programme.

Our next book is the great Bring Up the Bodies the Man Booker-winning second part of Hilary Mantel’s account of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. And you may be interested in upcoming recordings, for which you can apply for (free!) places as a reader, via the programme website – Matthew Hollis and his Costa-winning life of Edward Thomas (All Roads Lead to France) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, both in October, and in November Donna Tartt on her extraordinary best-selling and cult novel, The Secret History.

Happy reading

Jim

Listen to Paul Theroux discussing Dark Star Safari on Bookclub

Book of the Week - Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

2013-08-22T08:59:03+00:00

Editor's note: Alyn Shipton's biography of American musician Harry Nilsson is Radio 4's Book of the Week. Listen to episode 1 of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter from Monday 26 August.

Harry Nilsson is one of those names that most of us vaguely know, but can’t quite think why. Yet each of us can probably name one of his songs, or some of the facts about his life. We might remember his two most successful records, “Without You” and “Everybody’s Talkin’”, which were both chart successes as the sixties faded into the seventies. The first was a number one hit, the second also made the charts, but is more famous from the opening titles of “Midnight Cowboy”. Or we might know Nilsson as the crafty songwriter who created ”Cuddly Toy” and ”Daddy’s Song” for the Monkees, “The Puppy Song” for Mary Hopkin, and “One” for the cult American rock band Three Dog Night.

Fans of children’s films might hum along to “Me and My Arrow” from Nilsson’s fantasy cartoon “The Point”, or his music for the Christmas special “Ziggy’s Gift”. And Beatles fans might remember him as the man whom both Lennon and McCartney once described as their “favourite group”.

All of which goes to show that although Nilsson sits somewhere in our knowledge of the 1960s and 70s pop world, he’s not particularly well-known or remembered today. Ironically, he is most often mentioned in terms of the rock and roll lifestyle: a roller coaster of drink, drugs and sex, which he shared with John Lennon, Marc Bolan and Keith Moon. “Raising hell with Harry” became a tabloid catch-phrase, helped along by the mysterious deaths of both Mama Cass and Keith Moon in his London apartment — stories that were splashed all over the red-top press.

To some extent Nilsson’s relative obscurity was something he created along with the hits and a string of albums. In the era of stadium rock, he refused to appear live. He also wilfully altered his appearance from one album cover to the next. The clean-cut, suited, former bank clerk of “Pandemonium Shadow Show” morphed into a barely recognisable drawing on “Aerial Ballet”, and reverted to a school photograph on “Harry”. The shambolic, bath-robed figure on “Nilsson Schmilsson” gave way to a Dracula costume on “Son of Schmilsson”, and the angelic-voiced album of standard songs “A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night” features Nilsson in the cap and overcoat of a tramp. Nobody was going to recognise a star who disguised himself on record sleeves and was seldom in front of the cameras. And that way, Nilsson could walk the street of London or Los Angeles anonymously, without the paparazzi or jostle of attention that constantly surrounded his friends - The Beatles and The Monkees.

I have long been intrigued by Nilsson, and his creative urge. He produced over fourteen albums at the height of his career, all of which pushed the boundaries of studio craft and invention. Having the chance to delve into his family papers and write his biography was a wonderful experience for any writer. It is a privilege to tell the story of this remarkable singer and songwriter for the first time, and to share it with BBC Radio 4 listeners.

Image of Nilsson sitting reproduced courtesy of the estate of Harry Nilsson and RCA Records.

Image of Nilsson and Lennon reproduced by permission of the estate of Harry Nilsson.

Hear Alyn Shipton discussing Book of the Week on Front Row.

Listen to Alyn on Radio 3, Jazz Record Requests.

Listen to Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter from Monday 19 August.

Feminine Mystiques: Theatre Six

2013-08-14T09:32:22+00:00

Editor's Note: Listen to Sarah Hall's Theatre Six, one of the Feminine Mystiques series, from Friday 16th August at 3:45pm.

Fiction is one of the most powerful tools we have to discuss feminism. It is a way of presenting scenarios, possible outcomes of concepts hitherto only imagined or debated. It is a way of presenting life as it might be, not in a propagandist or gratuitous sense, nor for the sake of simple drama, but with complexity, humanity and nuance, and sometimes with darkness, in order that the reader imagine and experience those scenarios, in order that the reader might be sympathetic but also challenged; charged, at least, to think.

The feminist debate has become refracted and global - a wide-ranging forum that covers employment, politics, sexuality, religion, crime and law, science, and the economy. But much of the discussion still revolves around body. What women look like, or don’t. What they wear, or don’t. Their physiology: the purpose and meaning of their anatomy. At the steeper end of this subject is procreation – how and when children are brought into being, mothers’ rights and children’s rights. Countries like America are where attention often focuses on passionate and vocal pro-life/pro-choice battles, but these are disputes pertinent to the rest of the world.

Last year, in Galway, Ireland, Savita Halappanavar was denied an abortion while miscarrying, and died of septicaemia. She was refused medical intervention because there was a foetal heartbeat. The case is tragic on so many levels - none more so than the preventable loss of a woman’s life. The medical practitioners involved were not in an enviable position, and the case, in relation to the legal system, was reviewed. In retrospect, such an event seems astonishing, and in some ways is a worst-case scenario. How was this woman, in dangerous medical distress, penalized at the highest level?

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan understood the sensitive nature of issues surrounding reproduction, control of the body and fertility, women’s liberation and happiness. She founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, but recognized a deep ambivalence towards the topic. Those fierce civil rights arguments raging in the 1960s still echo today, with moral, scientific and humanitarian aspects of the discussion continuing to be unreconciled. Society remains conflicted and abortion remains problematic. At the end of my story, set in a hospital, one anesthetist describes the event that has just taken place as a ‘hot potato’. It is, especially given the frightening new governmental policies in place in the story. Perhaps here in the UK, we might as women feel safe, liberated and protected, even as certain factions move to redact our rights. But in this age of global feminist discussion, where all women do not enjoy rights to equality, safety, or priority, we must hold that hot potato in our hands, uncomfortable as it is. It’s surely the obligation of women, and men, who are already afforded improved status, to consider those less benefitting, as well as working to continually better their own society?

I wanted to save the very sick patient in my story. And so I did, though she does suffer first. Fiction allows authors such godly decisions within the worlds they create. I wish Savita Halapannavar had been more fortunate, but wishing cannot make it so. Nor can speculation about the types of system that allowed her death. Perhaps my story is a protest story; almost certainly it is. Delicate, difficult, hot as the issue is, with respect, I felt obliged to tackle it.

Download Sarah Hall's short story - Theatre Six - from 16 September

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Image of Sarah Hall courtesy of Richard Thwaites

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