Justine Waddell

Justine Waddell is a writer, producer and actor. Through her production company, Asterisk Films, she has just picked up the 2021 Golden Prague Czech Television Award for her documentary feature film Janine Jansen: Falling for Stradivari. She has also produced Force of Nature Natalia, directed by BAFTA and Grierson-winning filmmaker, Gerry Fox, about prima ballerina, Natalia Osipova.

Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, which Justine has developed with the British Film Institute and Piccadilly Pictures, is Justine’s debut screenplay.

After graduating from Cambridge University, Justine’s film work as an actress includes lead roles in Alexander Zeldovich’s Target (Telluride Film Festival, 2011), where she learnt from Russian from scratch. She has also played leading roles in period dramas Wives and Daughters, Great Expectations and Tess of the D’urbevilles.

Justine is also the founder and CEO of Klassiki.online. Launched in 2021, Klassiki is the world’s first streaming platform to deliver classic and contemporary film content from Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

1. Naoshima Art Island https://boutiquejapan.com/naoshima/

2. Abbotsford https://www.scottsabbotsford.com/

3. Russian language female filmmaking tradition https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/11768/women-directors-soviet-unions-silent-movie-era

4. Cecilia Payne Gaspochkin https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00509-3

5. African craft www.madwa.com

6. Constance Spry https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n17/rosemary-hill/at-the-garden-museum

Roisin Kiberd

Roisin Kiberd discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Roisin Kiberd’s essays have been published in the Dublin Review, the White Review, the Stinging Fly and Winter Papers. She has written features on technology and culture for publications including the New York Times, the Guardian, Vice and Motherboard, where she wrote a column about internet subcultures. Having spent some time in London as the online voice of a cheese brand, she now lives between Dublin and Berlin. Her first book is The Disconnect.

1. Ologies www.alieward.com/ologies

2. The Surgeon’s Hall Museums, Edinburgh https://museum.rcsed.ac.uk/

3. VALIS by Philip K Dick http://www.conceptualfiction.com/valis.html

4. The OA https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/oa-review-1196307/

5. This tweet: https://ifunny.co/picture/donald-j-trump-o-the-coca-cola-company-is-not-z7uZLjBg4 (also as a bizarre, unintentional riff on this even more iconic tweet).

6. The Conservatism of Emoji https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305115604853

Angela Saini

Science journalist Angela Saini discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. She presents science programmes on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in New Scientist, The Sunday Times, National Geographic and Wired. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and named a book of the year by The Telegraph, Nature and Financial Times. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into fourteen languages. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2020 she was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.

1. GenderSci Lab at Harvard University https://www.genderscilab.org/

2. Lux Magazine https://lux-magazine.com

3. Retraction Watch website https://retractionwatch.com/

4. Nirmal Purja https://www.nimsdai.com/

5. How to repair things https://www.ifixit.com/

6. Too Good to Go app https://toogoodtogo.co.uk/en-gb

Jesse Norman

Jesse Norman discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Jesse Norman has been Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010. He was Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2021. Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays, researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe. His book Edmund Burke: politician, philosopher, prophet was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Political Book Awards and the George Orwell Prize. His book Adam Smith: What he thought, and why it matters was published in 2018.

1. My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-satchmo-my-life-in-new-orleans-by-louis-armstrong-8609967.html

2. Wild swimming https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/wild-swim-wye-river-a8499001.html

3. Heroes https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/18451446.heroes-now-jesse-norman/

4. “I don’t understand” https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/how-to-say-i-dont-know

5. The Burgers of Hereford https://aruleoftum.com/burgershophfd

6. The perils of diminishing marginal utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

Vladimir Alexandrov

Vladimir Alexandrov discusses with Ivan two things which should be better known: both men who lived in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.

Vladimir Alexandrov taught courses in Yale’s Slavic Department on nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture from 1986 to 2018.

While preparing to teach a graduate seminar on Russian émigré culture, he discovered Frederick Bruce Thomas, which resulted in the 2013 biography The Black Russian, which is now being developed into a dramatic TV series. In 2021, he published To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks, which is the biography of a remarkable revolutionary terrorist, political activist, government minister, and writer who has been described as “James Bond as written by Kafka.” Vladimir’s current project is a book about Russia’s little-known support for the Union during the American Civil War.

1. Frederick Bruce Thomas https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/10/10/vladimir-alexandrov-black-russian/

Gaia Vince

Gaia Vince discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at University College London in the Anthropocene Institute. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. She is author of TRANSCENDENCE: how humans evolved through fire, language, beauty & time and ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: a journey to the heart of the planet we made. Her next book Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval is published in August 2022.

1. Hungarian sour cherry soup https://www.thespruceeats.com/hungarian-sour-cherry-soup-meggy-leves-recipe-1136687

2. Mangosteen https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/mangosteen

3. Friedensreich Hundertwasser https://hundertwasser.com/en

4. The Secret History of Writing https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/the-secret-history-of-writing-bbc4-documentary-review-lydia-wilson-655347

5. Heath Robinson https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/robinson_william_heath.shtml

6. Cassawary https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/fall-2021/articles/meet-the-cassowary-a-bird-with-claws-rivaling-freddy-krueger-s

Travis Elborough

Travis Elborough discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Described by The Guardian as “one of Britain’s finest pop culture historians”, Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for two decades now. Elborough’s books include Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, in which he also appeared, and A Walk in the Park, a loving exploration of public parks and green space. His latest, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, was published in July 2021 to immediate acclaim, saluted as ‘fascinating’ by The Observer, while New Statesman stated, ‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes.’

He has also collaborated on the popular and award-winning series of ‘Unexpected’ Atlases with the cartographers Alan Horsfield and Martin Brown, the most recent of which, Atlas of Vanishing Places, appeared in November 2021.

1. The American Friend https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3866-the-american-friend-little-lies-and-big-disasters

2. The Colonnade Bar http://thecolonnadebrighton.co.uk/

3. The New York Novels of Dawn Powell https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/03/21/queen-of-the-golden-age/

4. A Secret Wish by Propaganda https://www.classicpopmag.com/2018/03/propaganda-a-secret-wish-review/

5. Waiting by Fun Boy Three https://www.allmusic.com/album/waiting-mw0000057846

6. Birkenhead Park https://birkenhead-park.org.uk/birkenhead-parks-conception-and-opening/

Peter Oborne

Journalist Peter Oborne discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Peter Oborne is a former political commentator of the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. He now writes about politics for Open Democracy and Middle East Eye. He is the author of The Assault on Truth, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Rise of Political Lying as well as a biography of the cricketer Basil D’Oliveira. He was voted Columnist of the Year at the Press Awards in 2013. His website is The lies, falsehoods and misrepresentations of Boris Johnson and his government.

The episode features a clip from The Death of Liberalism with Lord Paddy Ashdown by the Legatum Institute (22/6/15) and A Marriage of Convenience by Somerset Maugham, read by Daniel Weyman (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b093pfrf).

1. Benefits of an afternoon nap https://www.forbes.com/sites/nomanazish/2021/06/23/should-you-be-taking-afternoon-naps-heres-what-the-sleep-experts-say/

2. Mohenjo Daro https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mohenjo-daro

3. Paddy Ashdown https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/22/paddy-lord-ashdown-obituary

4. The virtue of listening https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/the-virtue-of-listening.31549

5. Fixers https://en.ejo.ch/ethics-quality/fixers-the-unsung-heroes-of-international-news-reporting

6. Somerset Maugham https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/02/01/maughams-half-half/

Rob Doyle

Rob Doyle discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This Is the Ritual and Here Are the Young Men, which has been adapted for film. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, TLS and Dublin Review among other publications, and he edited the anthologies The Other Irish Tradition and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep. His work has been translated into several languages.

1. Coriolanus (2011) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/22/coriolanus-film-review-ralph-fiennes

2. Four Tet’s Spotify playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2uzbATYxs9V8YQi5lf89WG?si=27dff54c2f194322&nd=1

3. The train journey from Dublin to Rosslare Harbour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin%E2%80%93Rosslare_railway_line

4. Last Evenings on Earth, the story collection by Roberto Bolaño https://roughghosts.com/2016/07/25/poets-artists-and-other-lost-souls-last-evenings-on-earth-by-roberto-bolano/

5. Anthropoid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r136kTbmOTw

6. Super Hot video game https://superhotgame.com

Catharine Arnold

Catharine Arnold discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Catharine Arnold is a popular historian and television presenter specialising in dark themes. Her most recent book is Pandemic 1918, the Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History. Her other books include the acclaimed London Quartet. These include: Necropolis: London and its Dead, ‘entertainment of the most garish and exquisite kind,’ Peter Ackroyd, The Times. The Independent also rated Necropolis one of its Top Ten History Books in 2010. Her first novel, Lost Time, won a Betty Trask award.

1. Daisies https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/may/30/new-dvd-releases-daisies-czech

2. Masha by Mara Kay https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/the-youngest-lady-in-waiting-by-mara-kay

3. Bilgewater by Jane Gardam https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jane-gardam/bilgewater/

4. George Barker’s poetry https://mypoeticside.com/poets/george-barker-poems

5. Ronald Frame https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_style/arts_ents/13078532.Ronald_Frame_blows_the_dust_off_a_Dickens_heroine/

6. It’s Never Too Late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Never_Too_Late_(1956_film)