The Author Archive Podcast

Nancy Campbell - Thunderstone : A true story of losing one home and discovering another.

Nancy Campbell is a poet and travel writer based in Oxford. 

This is not a travel book or a book of poems. Thunderstone is different. It's about setting up a happy home in a caravan that will probably never move again.

Nancy is put in the position of being the carer for her partner Anna who has suffered a massive stroke. With kindness and fortitude, they cope.

It's a beautiful book.

 

 

John Higgs - Love and Let Die : Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche.

On Friday 5th October 1962 the first Beatles record 'Love Me Do' and the first Bond film 'Dr No' were released.

This coincidence leads to a splendidly entertaining examination of the two hugely popular cultural phenomena.

Nessa Carey - Hacking the Code of Life : how gene editing will rewrite our futures

This is a superb book brilliantly explained by Nessa. Thought-provoking in an optimistic way.

Trevor Rees-Jones - The Bodyguards Story : Trevor was the only survivor from the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales

Trevor Rees-Jones was the sole survivor of the car crash that killed Diana and Dodi in Paris on August 31st 1997.

He was very badly injured and kept a very low profile for a long time, but such was the media interest and the search for scapegoats he wrote his story - as much as he could remember.

If things had been slightly different could it now be King Charles and Queen Diana?

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.

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.

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