Tag Archives: Podcast

Tom Doyle – Ringo: A Fab Life

In the 70’s, he was a happy drunk … by the 80’s, he was just miserable! It is 1962. Ritchie Starkey – better known by his stage name of Ringo Starr – is widely acknowledged as the best drummer in … Continue reading

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Mike Jay – Free Radicals – How A Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science

I mean, you’ve got’a laugh, aintcha! Nitrous Oxide made “a picaresque journey from laboratory to lecture hall, variety palace to dentist’s chair.” A substance that does not exist in nature, it fairly blew the minds of the radical scientific community … Continue reading

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Eleni Kyriacou – A Beautiful Way To Die

Would you kill to be famous? If we want impossible glamour and corruption we could do worse then 1950’s Hollywood. A Beautiful Way To Die is a romp of ambition and decadence in which everyone has an agenda and dark … Continue reading

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John Higgs – Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who

Wot, no Daleks?!? If you had a time machine and could return to 1963 you would be surprised at the haphazard genesis of Dr Who. We think of it today as the eternal jewel in the BBC crown, but the … Continue reading

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Jerry Brotton – Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction

Where are we?!? Why deep South but far North? Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West? When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going? Is the North Pole a … Continue reading

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Robin Choudhury – The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ

What lies within? Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature … Continue reading

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Marcus Chown – A Crack In Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage

Black holes aren’t black! If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can’t escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously … Continue reading

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Nick Wallis – The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25 It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, … Continue reading

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Toby Litt – Lifelike

If your taste runs to the dead-pan, you could do worse than read Toby Litt. By turns funny, scabrous, touching, serious, playful and obsessive, his twelfth book, Life-like is presented with an absolutely straight face. How are you supposed to … Continue reading

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Alwyn W turner – The Last Post

No Man’s Land is already littered with books on the Great War, and there will be many more hurled into the fray, but not many of them will be as original as this thoughtful and engaging treatment by the historian … Continue reading

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