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)

Robin Baker

Robin Baker discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Robin is head curator of the BFI National Archive – one of the world’s largest and most important collections of film and television – where he leads the team responsible for developing and interpreting the national collection. He has written and directed two short films and wrote the play Elephant and Castle for BBC Radio 4, starring Rory Kinnear and Olivia Colman. Robin has been attacked by cobras on two occasions.

Follow Robin on Twitter @robinalexbaker and on Instagram @robinbakerbfi

1. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead https://dauntbookspublishing.co.uk/book/who-was-changed-and-who-was-dead/

2. Cretan pottery http://www.cretanethnologymuseum.gr/imke/html/en/104.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_pottery

3. Kanchenjungha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmpWEGM3ZI

4. Geraldene Holt’s Cakes https://prospectbooks.co.uk/products-page/current-titles/geraldene-holts-cakes/

5. Early colour films https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqpp5ipMU_s

6. Spring 1938/Easter Sunday https://oliverlewisinfo.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/spring-1938-bertolt-brecht/ and https://open.spotify.com/track/0iCZWjglUB3cr0xXX56wQ2?si=677012daa31b4a97

Jessica Nordell

Jessica Nordell discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist whose writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New Republic, and many other publications. A former writer for public radio and producer for American Public Media, she graduated from Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The End of Bias: A Beginning is her first book.