Ann Cleeves, a celebrated crime writer and winner of the 2006 Golden Dagger, finds inspiration in Nordic crime fiction and is gripped by the sense of loss and isolation that permeates the rural communities in the novels she has chosen. She began writing when she and her husband were the only residents on an island nature reserve in the Dee estuary.
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Lewis Wolpert is Emeritus Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College, London. His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded the CBE in 1990. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. His books include “Malignant Sadness - The Anatomy of Depression”; “The Unnatural Nature of Science”; “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast – The evolutionary origins of belief”; and most recently, “How We Live, and Why We Die - the secret life of cells”.
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Evan Zimroth is a poet, novelist and author of memoirs. Her first novel, "Gangsters", won the National Jewish Book award in 1996. She talks about the divine and the erotic, and chooses her favorite books on adultery.
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Gershon Hundert is Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal Canada. He edited the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale 2008). He talks to The Browser about recent revisions to the conventional understanding of Jewish history.
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The deputy-editor of Economist.com says the first intifada in 1987 took the Israelis completely by surprise, because the Israelis had permitted themselves this myth that the Palestinians were actually much better off under Israeli occupation than they had been under Egyptian or Jordanian occupation. Which wasn’t entirely a myth…
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As Confucianism makes a comeback in China, Daniel Bell, professor of philosophy at China’s Tsinghua University lists which books to read for an understanding of Confucianism, and outlines what the ancient texts really say about society and government.
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Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for the National Journal and contributing editor for The Atlantic, as well as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington D.C.. He is the author of Gay Marriage: Why It is Good For Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America, though most recently has been advocating a compromise solution that would stop short of wedded bliss for gays.
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Sophie Gee, professor of literature at Princeton University and author of The Scandal of the Season – a novel dramatising the events leading up to Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock – talks to FiveBooks about the Enlightenment: what it promised and what it delivered.
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Anthony Gottlieb is a writer, former Executive Editor of The Economist, and historian of ideas at the CUNY Graduate Center. Today he talks to FiveBooks about God, reason, and the enduring power of faith in the modern world.
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