The Author Archive Podcast

Helen Fry - Spymaster : the man who saved MI6

Dr. Helen Fry has written the biography of a man who is hardly known ..... yet!

Thomas Kendrick was a major architect of intelligence services, as well as being a saviour of hundreds of Jews in wartime Vienna. Oskar Schindler is known, so far Kendrick is not.

Spymaster is the meticulously researched biography of a man who deserves to be the subject of a major movie.

Listen to Dr Fry and you will be swept along by her knowledge and enthusiasm.

 

 

Richard Fortey - Trilobite

Richard Fortey is a paleontologist with a passion.

As a boy he went on a search for fossil trilobites. He found one and turned his interest into a career. His enthusiasm is hugely engaging.

Ruth Werner - the Oxfordshire life of a remarkable Soviet spy.

Ruth Werner was born Ursula Kuczynski in Berlin.

She was appalled by Hitler and became a lifelong communist and a spy.  During the 1940s she lived around Oxford and radioed secrets to Russia.

Her spy codename was Sonja and her memoir was published as Sonja's Report. Ben MacIntyre wrote a best-selling biography of her ...Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy.

David Freeman spoke to her in Oxford.

Philip Hensher - The Mulberry Empire : a fictional look at the British involvement in 19th century Afghanistan

Philip Hensher is an author, academic, critic and a past Booker Prize judge.

I spoke to him when his novel The Mulberry Empire was first published. It's a huge wide-screen historical novel about an attempted British invasion of Afghanistan. 

Although it is fiction the novel puts the plight of the country in an unhappy perspective.

Mark Steel - Reasons to be Cheerful : from punk to New Labour through the eyes of a dedicated trouble maker.

This conversation took place 20  years ago when Tony Blair was still a force in UK politics.

Listening to the chat now it still sounds relevant although all the names have changed and the overriding national mood has veered to the right.

We are warned that we are going back to the 70s - Mark Steel grew up in the 70s and has some refreshing views!

Rose Collis - Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment : A tale of female husbandry.

On April 15th 1929  Colonel Victor Barker was sentenced at the Old Bailey to  nine months imprisonment

Colonel Barker was in fact a woman who earlier in life had married and given birth to two children.

She then adopted several male aliases and married again.

The unbelievable story, that is begging to be made into a film, is told by Rose Collis.

 

Martin Jarvis - Acting Strangely : A memoir

Martin Jarvis is known as the mellifluous reader of many audiobooks, but he has had a very successful career as an actor as well.

Giles Milton - Big Chief Elizabeth : How England’s adventurers gambled and won the New World.

In 1586 Queen Elizabeth became the big chief of a tribe of North American Indians.

The story behind this event is a tale of almost unimaginable vision and courage led by the man who was to become Sir Walter Raleigh

Mark Lawson - Bloody Margaret : Thatcher that is!

The ghost of Mrs Thatcher walks through the Tory party despite the fact she left office in 1990 and died in 2013.

Her spirit is evoked and some emulate her style of dress ..... but when David Freeman interviewed Mark Lawson about his collection of stories, attitudes were very different.

At the time of the recording John Major was Prime Minister and Mark had written a book called Bloody Margaret. It's a satire. 

Paul Britton - Picking up the Pieces : memoir of a criminal psychologist.

Paul Britton advises police forces on some of their most difficult and upsetting cases. A few years ago he found himself in hot water is a situation that was dramatised for a Channel 4 series 'Deceit. As a result of Paul Britton's involvement Colin Stagg was wrongly accused of Rachel Nickell's murder.

David Freeman spoke to Paul Britton long before these things happened  about his book 'Picking up the Pieces. The book is full of horrifying cases, and starts with an occurrence that sounds straight from The Exorcist.