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FiveBooks Interviews
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her PhD in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. As well as her teaching work she is also a writer whose novels and short stories dramatise the concerns of philosophy. Goldstein’s writings emerge as arguments for the belief that in our time fiction may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence. She says imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth.
Journalist and author Kate Figes has written seven books, all of them concerned in some way with exposing the inner workings of family life. Her latest book, Couples, deals with sex within marriage.
Keith Slotter has been an FBI Agent for the past 23 years and currently serves as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s San Diego Division. He deals with everything from white-collar crime to problems with drugs and human trafficking at the world’s busiest border crossing, San Ysidro.
Meg Rosoff studied at Harvard University and at Central St Martins in London. She started writing novels after a career in advertising. Her first book, How I Live Now, won The Guardian Award (2004), Michael L Printz Award (2005), Branford Boase Award (2005) and was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Awards in the children’s book category. She has written a further three novels for young adults, as well as two books for children.
Barrister Andrew Cayley has recently been appointed as international prosecutor for the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal in Cambodia where his role is to investigate crimes committed under Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s. At the Srebrenica trial, he says, the Serbs refused to admit that anybody had been killed. ‘And we proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that over 8,000 people had been murdered in the space of ten days. After that nobody could deny these events had taken place, and that was important.’
David Downes is Emeritus Professor at the Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the London School of Economics. He specialises in theories of crime and delinquency, comparative sentencing and penal policy, and crime and the labour market.
Alex McBride is a criminal barrister. He is author of the ‘Common Law’ column in Prospect magazine and has contributed to the New Statesman and From Our Own Correspondent.
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.
Dr Stephen Lucas is a partner in the banking group of an international law firm, Linklaters LLP. A student of Soviet law, he wrote his PhD thesis on “The Foundations of the Law on Industrial Organisations in Russia and the Former Republics of the USSR”. For more than 15 years, he has advised companies and financial institutions on matters relating to Russian law and investment. In his view, the demise of the Soviet Union left the West somehow bereft of a mainstream political ideological alternative – and so, while the battle for liberty was won in 1991, it seems that the nature of that liberty somehow now misses an important element of radical choice and debate that was posed by the Soviets.
Moving to Scotland into a solitary house on the remote moors of Galloway, Sara Maitland now lives the life of quiet she celebrates in her latest book, A Book of Silence. The book is an examination of the importance of silence, its cultural history, and the aversion contemporary society has to it. Although she is now a nonfiction writer, she also has a large bibliography of novels and short stories. Today she talks about some of the books which have influenced her relationship with, and understanding of, silence.