Howard Jacobson interview
While Howard Jacobson’s prose works are renowned for their wit, energy, and self-deprecating, priapic jokes, his latest book, Zoo Time, is perhaps his most light-hearted to date. The protagonist is a...
View ArticleInterview: John R. MacArthur on the US election
When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, millions of citizens across the United States believed it was a new dawn for the American political system. Obama promised a presidency that...
View ArticleInterview: Mary Robinson
In 1990 Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president. As a progressive liberal, Robinson seemed a very unlikely candidate for the job, in what was then, a deeply conservative country....
View ArticleInterview: James Lasdun’s art
James Lasdun published his first book of short stories The Silver Age in 1985. The debut won him The Dylan Thomas Award, and was followed by Three Evenings another book of stories. In 1998, Italian...
View ArticleCult status: an interview with Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the...
View ArticleInterview: Ciaran Carson on translating Rimbaud
Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which...
View ArticleSharon Olds’ fear and self-loathing
Since the publication of her debut collection, Satan Says in 1980, which was awarded the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, Sharon Olds has become a prominent – and controversial – voice in...
View ArticleWole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed
Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for...
View ArticleMeeting J.G. Ballard
In the programme Frost on Interviews that was recently rebroadcasted by BBC Four, the distinguished journalist, David Frost, attempted to understand what makes a compelling interview. Frost’s programme...
View ArticleSecrecy and the State in Modern Britain
In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state’s long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent...
View ArticleSean O’ Brien: Poetry is political, all writing is political
Sean O’ Brien was born in London in 1952. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Hull, where he grew up, thus firmly cementing an allegiance to the North of England: a subject he explores in much of his...
View ArticleYoram Kaniuk, reluctant soldier in 1948
Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After his experience in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Kaniuk moved to New York where he became a painter in Greenwich Village. Ten years later he...
View ArticleInterview: Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan is discussing his extraordinary career with William Shawcross this evening, but for those Spectator readers who weren’t able to get tickets, he has also spoken to JP O’Malley about about...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: John Burnside
It’s Friday at 10am in a remote field in Fife. John Burnside is taking his morning walk, whilst simultaneously attempting to conduct a conversation with me down a dodgy telephone line. Within seconds...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: John Ashbery
John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of poems Some...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: Professor Neil Shubin
Following in the footsteps of the great tradition of paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, and evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin, professor in the Department of Organismal...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: John Gray
In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material of writers such as J.G....
View ArticleInterview with a writer: Jared Diamond
In his latest book The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond analyses the behavioral differences between human beings in tribal stateless-societies and those living in bureaucratic nation states....
View ArticleInterview with a writer: Jaron Lanier
In his new book, Who Owns The Future?, computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, argues that as technology has become more advanced, so too has our dependency on information tools. Lanier believes that if we...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: John Banville
The salubrious surroundings of the Waldorf Hotel seem like a very apt setting to interview a master of style and sophistication. When I arrive in the lobby, John Banville is nowhere to be seen. Peeping...
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