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British writer Martin Amis died on the 19th of May, 2023. In this interview with Phillip Adams from 2020 they discuss the last book Martin ever wrote: Inside Story, which takes the death of his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, as it's starting point. Ultimately he covers the hardest questions, such as how to live, how to grieve and how to die.

Interview first broadcast 8th of October 2020.

George Orwell dismissed them as ‘tripe’, T.S. Eliot found them arduous to write and Jeanette Winterson once burnt all her books because of one… Literary copywriter Louise Willder explores the haunting, luminous, unputdownable history of the book blurb.

The writers behind popular television shows like Saturday Night Live and Stranger Things have put their pens down and stepped away from their keyboards. It's not only a battle for better wages and working conditions, but against the threat of artificial intelligence taking their jobs. 

Guest:

Kate Fortmueller - assistant professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia.

New players such as South Korea, India and the UK are joining China, the US and Australia in jostling for influence in the Pacific. Tess Newton Cain and Sean Jacobs discuss.

Haunted by his misguided support of the Iraq War, foreign correspondent Robert D. Kaplan turned to tragic literature to understand the delusions of the West and how they can be avoided in the future. 

Guest:

Robert D. Kaplan - the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His latest book is The Tragic Mind: Fear, fate and the burden of power published by Yale University Press 

We rarely hear how technology is impacting most of the world's population, in the global south. Anup Kaphle and Itika Sharma Punit, both from the online publication Rest of World, are now bringing us those stories.