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FiveBooks Interviews
Tom Gauld is a cartoonist and illustrator. He draws a weekly cartoon for The Guardian newspaper and has created a number of comic books including Hunter and Painterand The Gigantic Robot. He lives and works in London.
An MP since 1987, Ann Widdecombe was Minister for Prisons under John Major from 1995 to 1997. Following the Conservative defeat she served as Shadow Health Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary under William Hague. In 2001 she retired from frontbench politics in order to express herself more freely on issues that mattered to her. Her first novel, The Clematis Tree, published in April 2000, became a bestseller. Since then she has written a further three novels. She is currently a weekly columnist for the Daily Express and is in the process of writing a prequel to An Act of Treachery.
Michael Jacobs was born in Italy and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The Hispanic world has obsessed him since childhood and his numerous books include Andalucía, Between Hopes and Memories: A Spanish Journey, Ghost Train through the Andes, and The Factory of Light: Tales from my Andalucían Village, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He is a broadcaster on Spanish National Radio and in 2002 was made the first foreign knight of ‘The Very Noble and Illustrious Order of the Wooden Spoon’. For the last two years he has been chairman of the Dolman Travel Book Award.
Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, London. He has worked at the British Film Institute as head of variously Distribution, Exhibition, Video Publishing, and, Special Projects, as well as being an art historian and curator. He talks Eisenstein and Tarkovsky and tells us about a pre-Revolutionary Siberian gold merchant's daughter who opened a cinema for the upper classes called Just Like Paris.
Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a faculty fellow and lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.
Dr Robert Goodwin lives between London and Seville. He was educated at Westminster School and King's College, and also studied at the universities of Granada and Seville and the School of Oriental and African Studies. He has a PhD in Spanish Art, Literature, and Society, is a respected historian of Spanish colonial history and is currently a Research Fellow at University College London.
Alain de Botton is an internationally renowned author and presenter. His essayistic books on love, architecture, travel and work have become bestsellers in 30 countries, and several have been adapted for television. Alain also started and helps run an educational establishment in London called The School of Life, and in 2009 he became a founding member of Living Architecture.
Jonathan Glover is a British philosopher known for his studies on bioethics. He has been a fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and currently teaches ethics at King's College, London. His published works on ethics include Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Centuryand Causing Death and Saving Lives. He is also interested in the Human Genome Project. His 2004 lecture series at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is now published as Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design
Jeffrey Archer is a novelist, playwright, actor and former Conservative politician. His 25 books are published in 63 countries and more than 32 languages, with international sales exceeding 250 million copies. He was made a life peer by the Queen in 1992 and served two years in prison for perjury in 2001.
Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler are founders of the cutting edge Handspring Puppet Company whose signature style involves puppeteers sharing the stage with their puppets, along the lines of Japanese Bunraku but adapted so that the puppeteers are not obscured but form an integral part of the action on stage. Their creations for the smash hit War Horse are stunning audiences this Christmas at the New London Theatre and will hit the Lincoln Centre in New York in 2011 after a European tour. Their production of Woyzeck on the Highveld is currently touring in Spain and France.