The Hedgehog and the Fox

In this episode, we delve deep into clutter with Jennifer Howard, author of a recent book entitled Clutter: An Untidy History. This book is for you if you have a closet that will no longer close because it is so crammed with clothes, or a garage piled with boxes you keep meaning to sort, or a storage unit that you pay for every month without having an exit strategy. Maybe it’s especially for you if you have an older relative with a house piled high with belongings that you know they will never get rid of and you have a growing sense of dread that one day you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and tackle it... Jennifer talks about her own experience of clearing her mother's house and, more broadly, why we seem to have an increasingly vexed relationship with our (many) possessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“From childhood,” Sonia Shah says, “we are taught that plants, animals, and people belong in certain places.” A powerful result of this, she suggests, is a dominant view of human migration as unnatural, a threat, and migrants as vectors of chaos and disorder. Her important new book, featured here, sets out to challenges this and other persistent myths. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob Tempio is Princeton University Press’s publisher for the ancient world, philosophy & political theory. He says on the Press’s website:'I believe passionately in both the inherent and enduring fascination of these subjects and in the ways in which they perpetually speak to the present.' In this interview he talks about his career and his books, including the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For all its importance to Greek history and myth, Thebes – Seven-gated Thebes whose patron god was Dionysus, birthplace of Herakles, the city of Oedipus and Antigone – tends to get bit parts in the broader story of ancient Greece. Until now. Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, has devoted a whole book to what he calls the ‘forgotten city’ of ancient Greece. I think you’re likely to find it fascinating for the fresh insights that a shift in perspective can bring, seeing the world not from ‘violet-crowned’ Athens – as Theban poet Pindar put it – but from ‘the dancing floor of Ares’, Thebes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I talk to Dean Smith, who’s been director of Duke University Press for almost a year and a half, and before that was director of Cornell University Press. Earlier in his career, Dean held posts at Chapman & Hall as director of electronic publishing and the American Chemical Society as vice president for sales and marketing. Earlier still, he was the director of Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins University Press. So a wealth of experience in the university press world. When his departure from the Cornell University Press, I read on their blog:Dean leaves us at CUP with an emboldened mentality. He has given us the spirit and desire to fly ever higher, to dream ever bigger, and to achieve ever more.So when I spoke to him during his convalescence after hip surgery, I wanted to know more about how Dean saw the role of university press director. I also wanted to find out a bit more about his hinterland. Dean was born and raised in Baltimore; that city is clearly still close to his heart, as are its sports. He wrote about the Baltimore Ravens’ 2013 against-the-odds Superbowl triumph in Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season.Dean’s also a published poet and when we spoke a few weeks back, we talked about his debut collection, American Boy, which draws on his 1960s Baltimore childhood.In this interview, you’ll also hear what Dean thinks are the lessons of the recent Jessica Krug affair, as that author was published by Duke, and why he compares his press to a spaceship in the desert. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is another in the series of Conversations with Publishers, which aims to find out more about the people who decide what gets published. Our guest is Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, a post he has held since 1998, and in the interview we talk about his career both before and after his arrival in Minneapolis.The University of Minnesota Press was established 1925. On its website, it says: ‘Minnesota is a midsize university press.’ If so, it would be fair to say it punches well above its weight in terms of reputation and impact... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this programme, we’re exploring the life and music of Francis Poulenc, in the company of writer and musicologist Roger Nichols. Yale University Press recently published Roger’s biography of Poulenc, who was the pre-eminent member of the group known as Les Six and remains probably France's best-loved and most-performed 20th-century composer. One reviewer wrote of Roger's book: ‘I don’t think anyone writes better about classical music than Nichols, his wry humour and gift for surprising connections never losing touch with scholarly erudition.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we explore the life and work of the master of the 19th-century short story, Guy de Maupassant, in the company of his recent biographer Christopher Lloyd, who’s emeritus professor of French at Durham. (The TLS called Chris's book ‘a crisp, witty, balanced and well-informed guide.’)Depending on your age and background, you might have read some Maupassant at school, or maybe encountered him on a literature survey course at university. He’s much anthologized. But that has proved to be a mixed blessing. The same pieces crop up again and again, representing just a tiny fraction of his 300 short stories. In France, by some estimates, he is the best-selling classic author, thanks to continuing educational sales. So his name is well known. Many people feel they know him, without really knowing him.As Christopher Lloyd’s book shows, most of us have barely glimpsed the full extent of Maupassant’s writing, which includes half a dozen novels as well as the short fiction, and a wide range of themes which one French edition meticulously catalogued. It included ‘devil’, ‘divorce’, ‘double’, ‘duel’, ‘strangling’, ‘fantastic’, ‘madness’, ‘drunkenness’… which maybe already gives some insight into the often dark and dangerous world Maupassant’s characters inhabit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all know the Aztecs practised human sacrifice, a fact that so predominates in popular impressions of them that almost everything else about them is cast in its shadow. Yet as my guest in this episode, Camilla Townsend, writes in her latest book, The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs: "The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made." So who were the Aztecs really? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series. A short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time. Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871.What could have been merely a pointed satire on the rigidity of a certain kind of religious life or a gentle culture-clash comedy, is, Julian suggests, something much deeper and much more thought-provoking: an example of film as philosophy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.