Simon Hall discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Simon Hall studied history at Sheffield and Cambridge, and held a Fox International Fellowship at Yale, before moving to the University of Leeds, where he is currently Professor of Modern History. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt and Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s. His new book is Three Revolutions.
Kasim Ali discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Kasim Aliwas born and raised in Alum Rock, Birmingham, where he spent the first eighteen years of his life, at which point he left to study a degree in English. Over the years, he has lived in London, Nottingham, and Newcastle, but still thinks of Birmingham as the place he’s from. He has had a short story long-listed for the B4ME story, has written fiction for BBC Radio 4, and has a column at The Bookseller. Currently, he works as an editor in publishing. Good Intentions was his first novel, Who Will Remain his second.
Sally Smith discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Sally Smith spent all her working life as a barrister and later KC in the Inner Temple. After writing a biography of the Edwardian barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, she retired from the bar to write full time. A Case of Mice and Murder, her first novel, was inspired by the historic surroundings of the Inner Temple in which she still lives and works and was the first in a series starring the reluctant sleuth Sir Gabriel Ward KC. A Case of Mice and Murder was longlisted for the 2025 CWA Whodunnit and Historical Daggers. Her new novel is A Case of Life and Limb.
Hal LaCroix discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Hal LaCroix lives outside Boston with his wife, Elahna. He has worked as a journalist at newspapers in New England, a reporter and editor at Harvard Medical School, a conservation writer for non-profits and an instructor at Boston University. Here and Beyond is his first novel. You can read a review.
1. Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner was a mid-19th century senator with laser focus on one issue: slavery. Grew up in a racially diverse neighborhood on edge of Beacon Hill. His father was an abolitionist. Sumner saw how blacks were treated decently during his time in France, then represented a child in a Boston school discrimination case (lost). He had a profound impact on Lincoln, pushing him to expand rights of African Americans after emancipation. Sumner became epic villain in Confederacy, where souvenir canes commemorated the beating were hot items.
2. Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. Fuji is sacred, a symbol of Japan. The most well-known Hokusai print is Fuji dwarfed by the Great Wave off Kanagawa. The 36 mostly long-range views, all around the compass, provide a wraparound view of Japanese life in 1831.
3. Exoplanets. More than 5,000 have been confirmed so far, out of hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Until the 1990s no one even knew if there were any planets outside our solar system!
4. Wingspan. This is a board game about birds that my wife and I are a bit obsessed with. Each player has a board with forest, grassland and water habitats. Plus, dice and cards and food and eggs and hundreds of cards, each with a beautiful drawing of a bird.
5. Boston Cream Pie and Boston Cream Donuts. My grandfather used to bring cakes and pies when he visited us on Cape Cod. He’d pull up in his Oldsmobile Cutlass with all these white boxes tied with string from Montilio’s bakery.
6. We Need a Global, Unifying Mission. We live on a planet with 8.2 billion people and the vast majority of us just know our neighborhood, our route back and forth to work. But on the spinning ark ship in Here and Beyond, the entire world is visible within the sphere. You look up and see buildings upside down, people upside down.
Peter Lamont discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Peter Lamont is Professor of History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. He has written about a variety of curious topics such as magic, belief, wonder and critical thinking. He is also a former professional magician and an Associate of the Inner Magic Circle. His new book is Radical Thinking.
Sarah Stein Lubrano discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and a Master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. Her thinking often reaches the public through the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She was previously the Head of Content at The School of Life, tutored in prisons and wrote obituaries. She regularly appears on public radio and a variety of podcasts. Her latest book is Don’t Talk About Politics.
Sarah Dunant discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Sarah Dunant studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge from where she went on to become a writer, broadcaster, teacher and critic. She has written twelve novels, four of which have been short-listed for awards, and edited two books of essays. She is an accredited lecturer with The Arts Society, lecturing on Italian history and renaissance art, has taught renaissance studies at Washington University, St Louis and creative writing at University of Oxford Brookes. Her new novel is The Marchesa.
1. The Discovery of the Laocoon, 1st century roman sculpture in Rome in 1506. One of those fluke stories history throws up that just gets richer and richer the more you dig (literally) into it.
2. Erich Maria Remarque. He was a 17-year-old soldier in World War One, who goes on to to write the most famous novel on war. He ends up in Switzerland with a Hollywood film star wife, Paulette Goddard.
3. The Last Supper by Plautilla Nelli. In the museum of Santa Maria Novella – a great church in Florence, there is a painting of the Last Supper done in the 1560s, by a nun who spent her whole life in a convent in Florence, who was entirely self-taught as a painter
4. Newark Park. It started as a Tudor hunting lodge. It was donated to the National Trust in 1949 and, in a state of decay, was then saved by an American, Bob Parsons.
5. Sailing to Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler. This is like listening to a short story by John Carver. American poet and master of realism and creating worlds within a couple of pages.
6. Machiavelli’s Farm House. This is the place where Machiavelli went after he lost his job as a diplomat in Florence and was sent into exile in 1512.
AE Gauntlett discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
AE Gauntlett completed an MA in English Literature at King’s College London in 2010. He then went on to find success as a literary agent with Peters Fraser and Dunlop, earning himself a prestigious Shooting Star nomination from The Bookseller in 2017. The Stranger at the Wedding, written secretly as he represented the work of his numerous bestselling authors, marks Gauntlett’s literary debut.
Simon Tolkien discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Simon Tolkien is the grandson of JRR Tolkien and a director of the Tolkien Estate. He is also series consultant for the Amazon series, The Rings of Power. Simon studied Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford and went on to become a barrister specializing in criminal defence. He left the law to become a writer in 2001 and has published five novels which mine the history of the first half of the last century to explore dark subjects – capital punishment, the Holocaust, the Blitz and the Battle of the Somme. The epic coming-of-age story of Theo Sterling, set in 1930s New York, England and Spain, is being published in two volumes, The Palace at the End of the Sea in June, and The Room of Lost Steps, on 16th September this year.
Daria Lavelle discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Daria Lavelle was born in Kyiv, immigrated to the US with her family as a child and now lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three children. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She writes fiction, with short stories published in a variety of US outlets. Aftertaste is her debut novel. It’s already sold into 13 territories with a major motion picture in development.
1. Putting Salt on Fruit – the easiest way to elevate and bring out the deepest flavors of your food (even out of season)! But one that most people don’t think of combining with their fruit dishes.
2. Opera for Fantasy Lovers – Opera is woefully unfashionable among younger people, and most high-fantasy and speculative fiction lovers I know have no interest in this stuffy art form, and yet, some of the most formative and epic and compelling narratives ever presented are operatic in form.
3. The Hoboken, NJ food scene – New York (and Brooklyn, and Queens) get most of the love and accolades for their restaurant offerings, but Hoboken, NJ, right across the water, is like the best kept secret of Italian-American cuisine and fabulous cocktails. (Maybe I should keep this one a secret, as the lines for Fiore’s are already too long.)
4. The film What Dreams May Come – this 1998 film is largely forgotten / unknown among anyone under the age of 30, but it’s worth revisiting as one of the most interesting and beautiful explorations of death, grief, love, and the Afterlife. It started my obsession with what happens after we pass, and absolutely led me to Aftertaste.
5. Family Recipes – this is perhaps an imperative to listeners to take the time to learn their family recipes from their older generations, and to document them in new formats (transcribe your recipe cards to digital!). So many people I know remember dishes from their childhoods, made by a grandparent, but have no way of recreating those flavors for themselves now.
6. Finding Your Tribe – I’d love to talk about several ways this has been true in my life, from writing cohorts to mom groups with my kids, to the debut groups I’m part of this year as I move toward publication. It can’t be overstated what a difference it makes to have a group of people who understand your experience, no matter where you are in life, and who can share their tips and gotchas and learnings with you. And some cohorts are talked about, like mom tribes, or professional associations, but others aren’t really, like writer’s groups or debut cohorts, because they’re so self-selective. It’s about people seeking one another out.
Better Known 