Best of the Moment
britain
FiveBooks Interviews
Writer, comedian and football fan David Baddiel says football writing changed in the 1990s, as men became more openly emotional about the game and about life in general – a sea change epitomised by Paul Gascoigne’s tears at Italia 90 and captured in two iconic British books – Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Pete Davies’s All Played Out. Baddiel and Skinner are doing a series of 2010 World Cup podcasts for Absolute Radio.
Mark Girouard is an architectural writer, a leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling, as well as an authority on the country house. He was previously architectural editor of Country Life magazine, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. His book Elizabethan Architecture was published in 2009. Elizabethan theatre, he says, wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the classical world and Europe. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. ‘Elizabethan theatre was a conscious re-creation of Roman theatres,’ he says.
Pete Winner, codenamed Soldier ‘I’, spent 18 years in the SAS and survived the savage battle of Mirbat, parachuted into the icy depths of the South Atlantic at the height of the Falklands War, and stormed the Iranian Embassy in London during the hostage crisis 30 years ago. He says MI6 is for the public school boys, and the SAS is for men with an ordinary education who have the strength and determination to seek adventure, survive and come back smiling. He describes his work as involving no publicity, no media. ‘We move in silently, do our job, and melt away into the background.’
Peter Kellner has been a political analyst, commentator and columnist for the past 30 years, and is now president of the internet panel polling company YouGov, which floated for £18 million in 2005 and has profit margins far higher than most of the market research industry. He is a long-term member of the Labour Party, but YouGov polls, which electronically survey invited participants, have been criticised by Labour politicians – possibly because the findings are thought to have broken a pattern in which traditional polls in the UK tend to overstate Labour support.
Man’s man Matt Lynn has spent the last few years ghost-writing military thrillers that ‘sell by the truckload’. He has now created his own series of books using that experience as a background. ‘Every SAS guy you meet these days is off fighting in Iraq for one of the Private Military Corporations. And it struck me that a small PMC unit would make a great theme for a series of books tracking a group of hardened fighters as they make their way around the world.’
Simon Young is the author of four books and his writing has appeared in History Today, the Spectator, and the Guardian. He combines a commitment to serious history, especially that of the medieval Celts, with a desire to communicate Dark Age history to the general public. He lives in Florence.
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.
Philip Cowley is Professor of Parliamentary Government at the University of Nottingham. He is the author/editor of seven books and more than 50 articles, including articles for the British Journal of Political Science, Party Politics and the British Journal of Politics & International Relations. He runs revolts.co.uk, an academic research project looking at the way MPs and peers vote. We know quite a lot about how MPs behave in the House, he says. ‘We know almost nothing about how they behave in their constituencies – what they do with their time and then whether it matters. We think it matters but maybe not electorally or at least as much as they think. But in terms of generating good will amongst the constituents – does any of this matter or is it a big waste of time?’
Steve Darlow is the grandson of a bomber command pilot and the author of nine books on military aviation. During 12 years of research, he has interviewed more than a hundred RAF aircrew. He talks to FiveBooks about his recent book Flight Path to Murder, plus five of his favourite books about pilots during the Second World War.
Peter Lilley was Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1990-1992 and was Secretary of State for Social Security 1992-1997. He was Member of Parliament for St Albans from 1983-1997 and, following boundary changes in 1997, he became MP for Hitchin & Harpenden. He chaired the Globalisation and Global Poverty Policy Group, advising Bob Geldof, which reported in July 2007. He tells FiveBooks that Samuel Johnson, man of letters and author of the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, was not a hard-hearted Tory caricature, but a champion of the poor and enslaved.