Alexei Sayle discusses with Ivan both things which he thinks should be better known and a number of things which he thinks are terrible.

Alexei Sayle is a comedian and writer. He was the original MC of the Comedy Store in London when it opened in 1979 and was a central part of the alternative comedy circuit in the early 1980s. He is best known for his performances in the BBC TV programmes The Young Ones, The Comic Strip and Alexei Sayle’s Stuff. He has written three novels and two volumes of autobiography: Stalin Ate My Homework and Thatcher Stole My Trousers. He presents The Alexei Sayle Podcast.

The Bride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_(1985_film)

The Supergrass https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090102/

Whoops Apocalypse https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083502/

Lenin of the Rovers https://archive.org/details/leninoftherovers1-2

Socialism https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2020/01/30/socialism-understanding

Derry Girls https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jan/19/derry-girls-channel-4-the-funniest-thing-on-tv-lisa-mcgee

Motherland https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/motherland-review-bbc-b1844797.html

Louis CK https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/10/can-louis-ck-spin-his-troubles-into-art

Predator 2 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/21/hear-me-out-why-predator-2-isnt-a-bad-movie

Movie sequels better than the original https://time.com/5353143/sequels-better-than-original/

Charles Spencer https://charles-spencer.com/about/

Carry On Columbus https://www.filmstories.co.uk/features/carry-on-columbus-and-the-failed-attempt-to-revive-a-comedy-series/

Author Francis Spufford discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

Francis Spufford’s novel Light Perpetual has been longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. His first novel Golden Hill was published in 2016 and won the Costa First Novel Award. He is the author of five celebrated books of non-fiction. The most recent, Unapologetic, has been translated into three languages; the one before, Red Plenty, into nine. In 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

1. The leafy hills of South London https://www.southlondonclub.co.uk/blog/2016/10/14/8-secret-leafy-getaways-to-visit-this-autumn-in-south-london
2. The Pilot G-Tec C4 fine-line pen https://www.penandpaper.co.uk/product/pilot-microtip-rollerball-g-tec-c4/
3. Crisp Green Williams pears sliced thin, and eaten with Italian blue cheese https://www.bertolli.co.uk/recipes/warm-pearblue-cheese-crostini-180506
4. The works of Elizabeth Knox https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/the-absolute-book-by-elizabeth-knox-review-an-instant-classic
5. The Church of England https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-defence-of-the-church-of-england
6. The entire genre of science fiction https://www.salon.com/1999/05/25/sfdefense/

Virginia Ironside discusses with Ivan six things which she thinks should be better known.

Virginia Ironside started off as a temporary secretary to Shirley Williams at the Fabian Society and then worked at Vogue, followed by the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Mail (as a rock columnist), Woman magazine, the Sunday Mirror, Today (as an agony columnist) and now with a weekly column in the Independent and a monthly one in the Oldie.

1. Anna Kavan https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/the-curious-creation-of-anna-kavan
2. Isle of Sheppey http://www.sdpt.org.uk
3. Hippodrome Circus, Yarmouth hippodromecircus.co.uk
4. A House in Bayswater http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFZlBYJ0_uY&t=43s
5. Anne Acheson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Acheson
6. Motherhood https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2003/sep/03/familyandrelationships.features10

Sam Gilbert discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

Sam Gilbert is an affiliated researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. An expert in data-driven marketing, he was employee number one and chief marketing officer at Bought By Many, an award-winning fintech start-up named as one of Wired’s hottest start-ups in Europe and ranked in the Sunday Times TechTrack100 list of the UK’s fastest growing companies. Previously, he was head of strategy and development at the data company Experian and head of consumer finance at Santander. He lives in Copenhagen.

1.  West Highland Line: https://www.scotrail.co.uk/scotland-by-rail/great-scenic-rail-journeys/west-highland-line-glasgow-oban-and-fort-williammallaig

2.  AnswerThePublic.com: https://answerthepublic.com/ 

3.  Danish Summerhouses: https://www.howtoliveindenmark.com/podcasts/danish-summerhouse-dollhouse-expect-youre-invited-danish-summer-home/

4.  The Zuckerberg Files: https://zuckerbergfiles.org/

5.  Judith Shklar’s Liberalism of Fear: https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf

6.  Novels of Magnus Mills: https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/magnus-mills

Michael Wood discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

Michael Wood is Professor in Public History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of several highly praised books on English history including In Search of the Dark Ages, Domesday, and In Search of England. He has made well over one hundred documentary films, among them Art of the Western World, In Search of the Trojan War, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Conquistadors and The Story of India – all of which were accompanied by bestselling books.

1. Du Fu https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/du-fu-li-bai-poems/
2. Tamil Nadu landscape and culture https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/tamil-nadus-landscapes-and-ancient-poetry/
3. Debate on Universal Human Rights in Valladolid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valladolid_debate
4. Hadrian the African https://www.historyextra.com/period/anglo-saxon/hadrian-clerk-libya-african-who-anglo-saxon-england/
5. Sven Lindqvist https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/22/sven-lindqvist-life-in-writing
6. Ethos https://www.duvarenglish.com/ethos-has-put-us-all-in-the-therapists-office-and-asked-us-to-speak-article-55126

Helen Thompson discusses with Ivan six things which she thinks should be better known.

Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. She is a columnist for the New Statesman and a regular contributor to the podcast Talking Politics.

1. Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger https://reading19001950.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/clayhanger-by-arnold-bennett-1910-2/
2. The Hoo Peninsula https://www.greatbritishlife.co.uk/things-to-do/discover-the-hoo-peninsula-7181064
3. Battlestar Galactica  (the Ronald Moore version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series))
4. Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG2kL4ojylk
5. St Vitale, Ravenna https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europe-and-colonial-americas/medieval-europe-islamic-world/v/justinian-and-his-attendants-6th-century-ravenna
6. Gregor von Rezzori’s The snows of yesteryear https://notevenpast.org/snows-yesteryear-2008/

Dominic Sandbrook discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

Dominic Sandbrook is the author of eight books of modern history, and is best known for his books on Britain since the 1950s.

The first volume, Never Had It So Good, covers the late 1950s and early 1960s. The second book, White Heat, looks at Britain in the heyday of the 1960s, and was later used as the background for a BBC drama. The third and fourth volumes, State of Emergency and Seasons in the Sun, cover the 1970s, and were adapted for television as the BBC documentary series The 70s. The fifth volume, Who Dares Wins, covers the early 1980s, including the first Thatcher administration, the Falklands War, the New Romantics, the birth of home computers and the tragic decline of Wolverhampton Wanderers.

His new book series Adventures in Time, aimed at young readers, focuses on the Six wives of Henry VIII and the Second World War.

He has a weekly podcast, The Rest is History, with his fellow historian Tom Holland.

1. The Weather Islands of Sweden https://www.vastsverige.com/en/tanum/produkter/the-weather-islands/

2. The Good Soldier https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/07/fiction.julianbarnes

3. The Byzantine Empire https://www.livescience.com/42158-history-of-the-byzantine-empire.html

4. Stan Cullis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Cullis

5. Bridgnorth https://www.mccartneys.co.uk/pages/bridgnorth-area-guide

6. The Dark is Rising sequence https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/08/season-s-readings-the-dark-is-rising

John Kampfner discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

John Kampfner is an award-winning author, broadcaster, commentator and cultural leader. He began his journalistic career as a foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph, first in East Berlin where he reported on the fall of the Wall and unification of Germany, and then in Moscow at the time of the collapse of Soviet Communism. He went on to become Chief Political Correspondent at the FT and political commentator for the BBC’s Today programme and Newsnight. As Editor of the New Statesman from 2005 to 2008, he took the magazine to 30-year circulation highs. He was Society of Magazine Editors Current Affairs Editor of the Year in 2006. 

His new book, Why the Germans Do It Better, published by Atlantic, is his sixth. His previous books include the best-selling Blair’s Wars (2003), now a standard text in schools; Freedom For Sale (2009), which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2010 and in 2014 The Rich, from Slaves to Superyachts, A 2000-Year History.

1. People playing cricket in Chicago www.iplcc.com

2. Cornwall’s links with Mexico https://www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk/travel-inspiration/other/mexico-the-cornish-connection/

3. Insect-based cuisine https://www.tasteatlas.com/most-popular-insect-dishes-in-the-world

4. The impact of climate change in the Russian Arctic https://www.ft.com/content/d855d522-cefc-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f

5. Marine le Pen’s gay acolytes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-39641822

6. German football fans drinking and smoking on the terraces https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/dec/11/sport.worldcup20061

Oliver Sears discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known.

Oliver Sears is a London-born Dublin-based art dealer & gallery owner. He is son of a Holocaust survivor & founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland. Formerly a trustee of Holocaust Education Trust Ireland, he is a frequent contributor to radio and newspapers including RTÉ and The Irish Times. He tells his family story ‘The Objects of Love’ through a collection of precious objects, documents and photographs, powerful mementoes that survived the war and describe individual lives under Nazi occupation. This was presented for the 2019 annual Kristallnacht lecture at Trinity College Dublin. In collaboration with Trinity College Dublin and Holocaust Awareness Ireland, Oliver was in conversation with both Lenny Abrahamson and Daniel Mendelsohn in two separate events in the series Why Talk About the Holocaust?

1. Derek Mahon https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000nz1m/derek-mahon-the-poetry-nonsense 
2. The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEorqJCQ2k
3. The piece written just before the really famous one’. Three extraordinary pieces of music: Mozart Piano Concerto 20, the first aria of the Queen of the Night in the Magic Flute and Beethoven Piano Concerto 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71AgofmDSjs
4. Krowki https://ifood.tv/european/krowki/about
5. Giorgio Perlasca https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-giorgio-perlasca-1541233.html
6. Helen Frankenthaler https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-frankenthaler-1114

Novelist Meg Rosoff discusses with Ivan six things which she thinks should be better known.

Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, educated at Harvard and St Martin’s College of Art, and has lived in London since 1989. Her first novel, How I Live Now, sold more than a million copies worldwide and was made into a feature film starring Saoirse Ronan. She has won or been shortlisted for 24 international book prizes, including the Orange Prize, the Whitbread and the National Book Award in America, and is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge University. She was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2016. Her most recent novel is The Great Godden. Meg lives in London with her husband, the artist Paul Hamlyn.

1. Rembrandt’s House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_House_Museum

2. Woody Allen’s The Moose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmnLRVWgnXU

3. Lurchers https://www.pets4homes.co.uk/pet-advice/is-a-lurcher-a-good-choice-of-pet.html

4. Galle to Kandy train, Sri Lanka https://thefamilyfreestylers.com/kandy-to-galle-train-sri-lanka/

5. Blue Red and Grey by The Who https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCycKHeNnBQ

6. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes https://www.npr.org/2009/07/07/103930835/a-delightfully-evil-tale-of-pirates-and-children