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FiveBooks Interviews
The lawyer who prosecuted Ariel Sharon for the Sabra and Shatila massacres discusses the brilliance of maverick political thinkers and says: ‘It takes at least a generation to establish democracy and the rulers in the Middle East are all ruthless dinosaurs. But we’d better start now!’
Brian McFarlane is a leading academic on film and the writer and editor of The Encyclopedia of British Film. He is Honorary Associate Professor at Melbourne’s Monash University and Visiting Professor at the University of Hull. He is a film critic and a regular contributor to publications such as the Australian Book Review. He is also a fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and was awarded the Australian government’s Centenary Medal for services to the arts and literature in 2003.
An Australian writer best known for his historical novels, Thomas Keneally portrays characters who are gripped by their historical and personal past, and decent individuals often at odds with systems of authority. At age 17, Keneally entered a Roman Catholic seminary, but he left before ordination. His best-known work, Schindler’s Ark, adapted into the film Schindler’s List, tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from the Nazis. It won the Booker Prize in 1982. His latest novel, The People’s Train, is partly set in Russia and here Keneally tells The Browser which books inspired him.
Kim Newman is an expert on horror and sci-fi cinema and a regular contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire magazines. He has published over 20 novels, plus many short stories and non-fiction works, and has won awards including International Horror Guild Award for Coppola’s Dracula and the British Fantasy Society Award for Where the Bodies are Buried. His work is often irreverently referential and he says that his novel Anno Dracula is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry.
Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog, A Don’s Life, which appears in The Times as a regular column. Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as “Britain’s best-known classicist”.
Robert Lloyd is an opera singer who became the principal bass at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1972. He was the first British bass to sing the title role in Boris Godunov at Covent Garden and made history when he sang the role with the Kirov Opera in St Petersburg. He has performed frequently at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He has over 70 audio and video recordings to his name, and in 1991 was created a Commander of the British Empire.
A C Grayling is Professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, and supernumerary fellow of St Anne’s College Oxford. His books are diverse in subject, ranging from Wittgenstein and logic, to religion and the Enlightenment. His belief in the public importance of philosophy leads him to write regularly for The Guardian, the New Statesman and Prospect, among others, bringing the insights of moral philosophy to the practical concerns of everyday life. He is the author of Ideas That Matter, an encyclopaedia of ideas that shape our understanding of the world. He talks to The Browser about five classic books and why they matter.
Edward Skidelsky is a philosopher at Exeter University, interested in ethics, aesthetics and German idealism. His first book, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, was published in 2009. He writes regularly on philosophy and religion for Prospect, the New Statesman and the Telegraph. He is currently working on a collection of essays on ethics.
Owen Davies is professor of social history at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written widely on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts and folk medicine. He argues that despite persecution, magic has been with us since the first recorded written word and it’s still very much part of popular culture today.
Dr Nicholson is Dean of University College, Oxford, and is Fellow and Praelector in Russian, specialising in late 20th-century Russian literature. He tells FiveBooks that writers really were important in the Soviet Union and that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was not Solzhenitsyn’s first book.