The Author Archive Podcast

Twenty five years ago Julian Hoffman and his wife Julia decided to leave their life in London and make a dramatic change. They would leave the city life with it's commuting hassles and move somewhere and live very different life On nothing more than a chance encounter with a book about it they moved to Prespa in northe

  The appalling inhumanity still happening in the world makes this conversation distressingly relevant. There is the thought that some people are less human then others. This has to be challenged. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on December 10th 1948. We now live in a world where the rights agreed

The effect of the Trump win reverberates around the globe. There seems to be perceived electoral advantage in fanning hate and intolerance and spreading intolerance the idea around the world. The Middle East is on a knife edge and the Ukraine war continues. Why is this? Is there any cause for optimism? Where do non rat

Colin Dexter was a splendid writer. His creation Inspector Morse is superb on the page and just as gripping on television. I used to meet Colin in the pub on Banbury Road in Oxford, The Dew Drop. He was great company and almost completely unaware of his success and star quality. I recorded this conversation in his hous

Joe Boyd is a man about music, record producer, a film producer and author. He arrived in London in 1964 with Muddy Waters and a host of blues musicians who played to sold out UK audiences when they were unappreciated in their US homeland. In this conversation he talks about Nick Drake, Paul Simon, The Incredible Strin

Billie Holiday, Eleanora Fagan  was born on April 7th 1915. Bitter Crop is a superb biography of Billie Holiday who was probably the very best jazz singer there has ever been. The book title is takes from one of Billie's signature songs, 'Strange Fruit'. There have been films and many books about Billie's career but no