The Goldster Inside Story Podcast The Goldster Podcast

Join us, either in person or online, for what promises to be one of our most exciting Goldster Conversations so far. On 16 November, the legendary Bonnie Greer OBE FRSL will be joining Lucinda Hawksley for a Goldster Live event at Riverstone Kensington, London!

Bonnie is an author, playwright, journalist, critic and former Deputy Chair of the British Museum. An advocate of free speech and higher education, Greer is passionate about both the arts and sciences and is determined to see that the voices of women and minorities are heard in both realms.

Greer has been awarded the Verity Bargate Award for Best New Play and is a columnist for The New European and Byline Times. Greer has appeared as a panellist and guest on a number of television and radio shows, including Question Time. Her podcast In Search of Black History is available on Audible. She has just completed a two-year conversation series at the British Museum, 'The Era Of Reclamation', with former British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer, in which they engaged with artists, scholars, and activists of colour on a range of issues of the day.

To watch the recording of this episode please click here. 

John R. Seeger is a retired Senior Intelligence Service officer who was with the CIA for more than twenty years, leading small teams on many dangerous operations. In 2001, he went in Afghanistan after the Nine Eleven attacks on the United States in an operation captured in the Netflix documentary Spy Ops. On his final 3-year assignment at CIA headquarters, he worked as a chief of operations for a geographic division in the Directorate of Operations and then as a deputy director and deputy chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Centre. Since retirement, J. R. Seeger, as he is known, has set up training courses and given lectures on counter terrorism and other issues involving intelligence work.

He is also the author of the highly acclaimed Mike 4 thriller series about a family who have been part of the special operations and intelligence community from World War II to the present and of his Steampunk Raj historical fiction series with the latest A School for the Great Game. “If you like good tales of the shadowy, often hard-edged world of counter-terrorism, read Mike 4! Written by a veteran of ‘the community,’ it will teach while it entertains.” praises General Stanley McChrystal, while former CIA officer John Sipher says, “Seeger has developed enduring characters who allow him to explore issues related to war, family and betrayal.” Join J.R. Seeger with Humphrey Hawksley for a revealing Goldster Inside Story on spying and war at 12.00 Thursday November 9th 2023.


to watch the original recording of this episode please click here. 

Join the Goldster conversation with Lucinda Hawksley as she chats to the author Francesca Wade about her fascinating debut book, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars. It looks at the lives of five extraordinary women, including Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers, all of whom lived in the same square in London. Square Haunting was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Francesca is now working on her second book, about Gertrude Stein. Her work proposes a form of biography centered on women’s lives, on collectivity and community, on recovering hidden histories, and on challenging the scripts by which lives are lived and stories are told.
Francesca is a former editor of the literary quarterly the White Review, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the Paris Review. She will be talking to Lucinda on 26 October, as 12pm. Come along and discover more about the intriguing lives of the women whom Francesca has brought back to life in the pages of her book.


To watch the recording of this episode please click here.

Would you like to know how to take greater control of your brain, to become more efficient, effective and successful?  The brain often overcomplicates matters, leading us to feel overwhelmed and lacking in confidence. Yet we can take control. Are you interested? Then, come meet neuroscientist Dr Lynda Shaw who knows which bits of our brains do what and how to control them – at least as best we can. Once we understand, the impact on our lives can be profound as Dr Shaw lays out in her book Your Brain is the Boss: Using mind power to develop influence, creativity and work satisfaction. How we think effects everything, our work, our family, all corners of our lives. In conversation with Humphrey Hawksley, Lynda Shaw will explain all, showing ways to banish toxicity, create empathy, motivate those around us and come up with new ideas and ways of making a better world by thinking and working together.

Whether an event in your local community or a project in the boardrooms of multi-national companies, Lynda Shaw has a rare talent of turning the complex into the accessible and is passionate about teaching how our brains effect our behavior and, of course, vice-versa. Humphrey will quiz Lynda Shaw on how we can be happier, healthier, more confident, more friendly in a way that sets us on the path to achieving our goals. He might also ask about today’s politicians!

Why is Italy called Italy? How old is curry? Which people from history would best pull off a casino heist? Who was the richest person of all time? When was the first Monday? What were history's weirdest medical procedures that actually worked? How much horse manure was splattered on the streets of Tudor London? How fast was the medieval Chinese postal system? What did the Flintstones get right about the Stone Age? Who gets to name historical eras, and what will ours be called in 100 years' time? How do we know how people sounded in the past? How old is sign language?

These are the kind of questions that Lucinda Hawksley will be asking Greg Jenner, author, BBC podcaster, and public historian – you may well recognise his name from Horrible Histories on TV and his podcast You’re Dead to Me. Greg has made it his mission to provide answers to things you always wondered about, but didn't know who to ask. In his new book, Ask a Historian, Greg whisks us off on an entertaining tour through the ages, revealing the best and most surprising stories, facts, and historical characters from the past. 

Bouncing through a wide range of subjects – from ancient jokebooks, African empires, and bizarre tales of medicinal cannibalism – Ask a Historian spans the Stone Age to the Swinging Sixties, and offers up a deliciously amusing and informative smorgasbord of historical curiosities, devoured one morsel at a time. Join Lucinda and Greg at 12pm on Thursday, 13th January – and don’t forget to bring your own questions to ask in the chat.

To purchase the book, click here.


To watch the recording of this episode click here.

Thriller writer Kenneth Dekleva is a psychiatrist in Dallas, Texas and, for many years, worked for the American State Department as a physician-diplomat. His postings included Russia, India, Mexico and the United Kingdom. He went on to become director of the State Department’s worldwide diplomatic mental health program and is currently a senior fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. When not working or practising martial arts, Ken writes fiction.

His latest, The Last Violinist, takes the reader to North Korea, the most secretive and closed-off country from where Jong-un, a talented violinist travels the world and is drawn into betrayal, espionage and battles between competing governments. The novel explores the psychological intricacies of human relationships, betrayals, passions, friendships and religious conversion. Ken’s earlier work, The Negotiator’s Cross, delivers a compelling story, also woven with themes of faith and religion. It is told through the eyes of a Father Ismael, a seemingly ordinary Catholic priest in Mexico City. That is until one of his parishioners vanishes. Ken is a familiar face and voice on American new media and gives presentations on leadership analysis which includes profiles on the Russian and Chinese leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

To watch the recording of this episode please click here.