The Best of Radio Litopia

His origins were humble; a working-class boy from a small military town in  northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle. Today, he is one of the most  influential figures in the world of literature, because Peter Englund is  Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize  in Literature.
For someone who has within his power the making or breaking of  international writing careers, Peter, as you'll hear, is remarkably unassuming.  Perhaps one reason for this is that he's still a writer himself; he understands  the writing process profoundly, and his own books have been both bestsellers and  widely acclaimed. His most recent, just launched in London, is a stunning new  approach to the history of the First World War. Subtitled "an intimate history",  The  Beauty and the Sorrow explores the personal aspects of war: not the grand  strategies concocted in the cabinets of Europe, but the experiences of  "ordinary" people from around the world, all now unknown - were it not for  Peter's deeply moving book.

How appropriate, then, that the master scriptwriter of the entire Holmes  canon should join us for tonight's Litopia After Dark.  Bert Coules is  nearly as legendary as his protagonist in Holmesian circles.  He’s a man who’s  had more experience of Sherlock Holmes than almost anyone else, apart from Conan  Doyle.  Not only was he head writer on the BBC’s project to dramatise the entire  Holmes canon, but he then went on to write The Further Adventures of  Sherlock Holmes – original plots based on passing references from Conan  Doyle’s oeuvre.

Bert has also adapted several Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels,  starring Philip Madoc as Cadfael, and has dramatised works by Ian Rankin, Val  McDermid, Isaac Asimov and other best-selling genre authors.

Whether you're a Holmes fan, an aspiring scriptwriter, or simply interested  in great drama, you'll love this show - pass it on to your friends!

When we asked John Simopoulos, Founding Fellow and Dean of Degrees at St  Catherine’s College, Oxford, to read Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient  Mariner last year, we had an overwhelming response from listeners wanting to  hear more from him.

We're thrilled to welcome John back to present this  special new year's "mixed bag of prose, poetry and century" that is certain to  delight and inspire you... happy new year!

John reads and discusses:

• Meditation 17 by John Donne
• "The Little Black Boy" by William Blake
• "The Tiger" by William Blake
• Samuel Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield
• "Those Winter Sundays" By Robert Hayden
• "Heraclitus" by William Johnson Cory
• "On The Coast Of Coromandel" by Osbert Sitwell
• "The Owl And The Pussy Cat" by Edward Lear

Music in the  programme is available for purchase from magnatune.com

Tonight's show is a real-life thriller: featuring espionage, double-dealing,  murder and even a dash of Hollywood. And a British ambassador who sees things he  shouldn't - and decides to tell the world. Sounds like the plot of a movie?  Craig  Murray's amazing story has already been optioned by producers - if  you can't wait to see the big-screen version, you can hear him on Litopia After  Dark - you'll be riveted!

Garry’s guest tonight COLIN EDMONDS has  dominated British television comedy writing for four decades – and he knew them  all… the stars, the monsters, the legends and the lunatics!

If names such as Les Dawson, Lilly Savage, Paul Daniels, Julian Clary,  Barbara Windsor and – of course – Bob Monkhouse – evoke fond memories… then  you’re going to love tonight’s show!

Of course, the tradition of bawdy British comedy goes right back to the world  of the music hall… from which Colin draws his inspiration for his new novel,  Steam,  Smoke & Mirrors: with insights and extracts from the secret journals of  Professor Artemus More PhD (Cantab) FRS.  Set in a Steampunk vision  of Victorian Britain Steam, Smoke & Mirrors is “Victorian  science fiction”, says Colin: “It’s so sexy! Men in top hats and women in  thigh-length boots! Steampunk is on a roll!”

Listen to this Debriefer special as Dan tells us what happened next to him  and his team: it will shock you. If you enjoyed this show, buy Dan's new book,  Rather  Outspoken: My Life in the News, just out from Grand Central  Publishing.

That's the challenge special guest Russ Baker faced when he first  considered writing about the Bush family; one which encompasses two U.S.  Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors, two Presidents and  innumerable bankers and businessmen. The book took five years to write and is a  meticulous piece of research (there are over a thousand footnotes).

According to the late Gore Vidal, Family  of Secrets is "one of the most important books of the past ten years". Dan  Rather - who you can hear right here on Radio Litopia's Debriefer show - called  it "a tour de force. " "It's made me rethink", he says, "even those events I  witnessed with my own eyes".

You'll recognize him as one of Britain's leading thriller writers, author of  the multi-million seller A  Quiet Belief In Angels and ten other award-winner novels. But you may  not know much about the extraordinary personal story of tonight's guest  R.J. Ellory - a life that is  just as thrilling and moving as anything in his bestsellers.

Inspiring, revealing and searingly honest... we think tonight's show is quite  simply one of our best.

Our special guest tonight is Alan Cowell, senior correspondent for the  New York Times, based in London and Paris.  Few people know more about this  extraordinary subject than Alan; his book  “The  Terminal Spy” is the definitive work on the topic, and he continues  to report on the story as it unfolds for NYTimes.com.

Alan typifies old-school journalism at its best.  He was the last Reuters  correspondent to file dispatches by carrier pigeon, and has covered stories in  over 90 countries.  He won a George Polk Award for his coverage of the  broadening turmoil in South Africa that led to the end of apartheid.  He was  expelled from the country by the government of P.W. Botha in early 1987.

Since then, he has headed The New York Times’s bureaus in Greece, Egypt,  Italy, Germany and London, where he the Nathaniel Nash Award.

Alan has written three other books: an African memoir, “Killing  the Wizards”; and two novels, “A  Walking Guide” and its sequel, “The  Paris Correspondent”, which deals in part with the challenges of the new  digital era in news gathering and reporting.

Our special guest is acclaimed historian Professor Sean McMeekin,  whose radical and assiduous scholarship has shed much new light on this  much-misunderstood conflict. Sean's books include The  Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World  Power,  The  Russian Origins of the First World War,  and the forthcoming July  1914: Countdown to War.

The entirely wonderful, not to say intrepid, Kari Herbert is back with  us: her new book Polar  Wives tells the stories of the remarkable women behind the world's most  daring explorers - a great read if the Easter weather takes a turn for the  worse.  And should you accidentally over-indulge yourself with holiday treats,  don't panic - the hilarious and witty  Jane Wenham-Jones is  ready and waiting with 100  Ways to Fight the Flab – The Wannabe Guide to a Better Bottom.

Tonight's guest, Professor  L. Randall Wray, has got some very revealing answers. If you want to  know how we got in this mess - listen to this show. If you want to know  what's going to happen next - listen to this show. And if you want to  know what we might be able to do about it... you know what to do. This is one of  our very best - and most important - shows.  Please: tell all your friends about  it.

SIGINT is one of the least-known but most important aspects of battlefield  and peacetime intelligence gathering.  David's book, The  Silent Listener - Falklands 1982: The Inside Story of British Electronic  Surveillance and Intel Controversies, ignited a firestorm of controversy  when it was published... and tonight we get our teeth into his insider's  revelations about the sinking of the Belgrano and much more besides.

"Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood" quipped Oscar Levant,  lies the real  tinsel".  Maybe true, but for our guest tonight, action actress Spice Williams-Crosby,  the bruises, broken ribs and concussions are real enough.  Spice has Hollywood  in her DNA; you've seen her in motion pictures such as Star Trek, From  Dusk Till Dawn,  and A Simple Plan and on countless television  dramas, including Scrubs, Roseanne and Buffy the Vampire  Slayer.  Spice has crashed cars, dove through glass windows, taken stair  falls, executed 30-foot ratchets, 50-foot high falls, and hung from helicopters  350 feet above the ground.  Oh, and wrestled Jim Carrey, too.

This is the first time we've had a genuine Klingon on the show -  Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!

So we asked Dr. Leo  Killsback, professor of American Indian Studies and citizen of the Northern  Cheyenne Nation, to help us.  And unlike Boyden's immature temper-tantrum - this  is a show worth listening to!

Presented by leading lawyer Donna Ballman  with literary agent Peter Cox

Making a welcome return tonight is journalist-turned-investigative-historian,  Tim Butcher.  Tim specialises in covering awkward places at difficult moments:  Kurdistan under attack in 1991 by Saddam Hussein, Sarajevo during the Bosnian  War of the 1990s, the Allied attack on Iraq in 2003, Israel's 2006 clash with  Hizbollah in southern Lebanon among other crises. All good preparation, then for  tonight’s skirmish with Ian...

But it’s not all fol-de-rol and bon mots  ce soir. Tim’s  new, widely-praised book is a quest to find history's most famous terrorist  before Osama bin Laden... Gavrilo Princip, the teenage assassin who triggered  the catastrophic series of events that led to the First World War.

You may think that everything that could possibly be told about this  particular Bosnian Serb has already been written. Not so. Listen to tonight’s  show – and read Tim’s excellent book, The  Trigger – and you will appreciate why reviewers have been showering  it, and him, with praise. We’re indeed proud to host him tonight.

But this is Lindsey  Hilsum. The woman for whom the expression sang-froid might  have been invented. Specialising in remaining imperturbable under fire, and  always meeting her deadline.

As International Editor for Britain’s Channel 4 News, she reported from  Belgrade in 1999 when NATO bombed Serbia, from Baghdad during the 2003 US  invasion, and covered the Fallujah assault in November 2004. Her reports from  Africa, the Middle East and Russia have earned her many awards. In 1994, she was  the only English-speaking journalist in Rwanda when the genocide started.

It’s an obvious question, but we still want to know – what’s it like being a  woman in the front line? How do you cope when your friend and colleague, Marie  Colvin, dies covering the siege of Homs in Syria? And – when you come back from  the world’s most perilous places, having seen things that no normal person  should ever see – how do you sleep at night?

Tonight, fresh from Damascus, Lindsey joins us in London to help us make  sense of Crimea, Syria – and the genesis of Isis.

Our guest tonight, Ben  Griffin, has clear views on this. Ben is no ordinary foot soldier.  As a member of Britain’s elite special forces, the SAS, Ben has served his  country in Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Afghanistan and Baghdad. Ben is  eloquent, lucid and deeply moving. If you want to know what it is actually like  to fight a war in the 21st century, listen to this show.

Ben’s organisation, Veterans for Peace, can be contacted here.

Seventy thousand dead.  Twenty thousand disappeared.  Severed  heads with threatening messages dumped by the side of the highway. A  terrorist insurgency on the verge of toppling governments. Iraq?  Syria?  The Congo?   Ukraine?

No. This is Northern Mexico— one  of the most violent places on earth.  Why?  Because Western culture likes  to take drugs.  Tons of them.  Drugs we brand illegal and on which we’re  waging war.

To walk us through the kill zone— from the peasants picking coca in the hills  behind Bogota to the contract killers of Ciudad Juarez— tonight we’re joined by  the amazingly-still-alive Ioan Grillo,  acclaimed journalist and author of El  Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency.

Intimately familiar with the deadly cartels, Ioan breaks down Mexico’s bloody  “trampolines”, the  reality of Breaking Bad— in the form of Mexican crystal meth  “super-labs”— the  splashy death of Pablo Escobar, and the largest cash seizure in modern  history.

We also discuss confirmed  CIA complicity in importing cocaine into America and the character  assassination and suspicious death of reporter Gary  Webb— whose star-studded biopic Kill the  Messenger was recently released in theaters.

Meet Susan Blackmore,  the world’s foremost expert on memes. The intro to her seminal work The  Meme Machine was written by none other than genius biologist and  fundamentalist atheist blowhard Richard Dawkins. Her lectures  on TED receives millions of views— even despite TED's dishwater-dull format  when compared to Litopia After Dark (rowr!)

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world,” said Marshal McLuhan.  Never has this been more true.

(Full quote: Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine  world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve  ever new forms.)

But  do memes actually exist?  Or are they simply metaphors to observe our  shifting culture? And who is Susan Blackmore anyway?

After an out of body experience she studied  the paranormal for 24 years, only to arrive at the conclusion it  was bollocks— all of it.  So who’s to say she won’t soon say the same about  memes?

But wait, there’s more! Now she’d like for us to consider what she calls  temes— technology assisted memes. Replicators so powerful they may yet  turn our computers against us— and sooner than you think. Just ask Stephen  Hawking.

Because your Macbook Pro is spreading words, tunes, images and ideas much  faster than your feeble human mind can imagine.

Check everything  you think you know about memes at the door. Because this show is no lecture.  This show is virus inside of your mind.

The BBC – the world’s oldest and biggest public service broadcaster – appears  to have a serious ethics problem. That’s the devastating conclusion from this  edition of The DEBRIEFER. How else could you explain the plight of bestselling  author and screenwriter M.R.  Hall, whose THE  CORONER series of books bears a striking similarity to the BBC’s a new  television series entitled – somewhat unimaginatively – THE CORONER.

Listeners to THE DEBRIEFER will be familiar with horrific accounts of  rapacious Hollywood studios “borrowing” ideas from defenceless authors. The  twist, this time, is that the allegations concern a public service  broadcaster… not a commercial entity, but an organisation that is supposed  to serve the public good. Service, not profit, is the motivator… or is supposed  to be.

Troublingly, this case is not  unique. One of our guests on Litopia After Dark, former  British ambassador Craig Murray,  believes his autobiography Murder in Samarkand was plagiarized for the  BBC comedy The Ambassador. “The production company had actually invited  me to their offices”, says Craig, “for a meeting to ask me to sell them the  rights to Murder in Samarkand. I attended the meeting but I refused to  sell them the rights. They went ahead and made the series anyway.”

This isn’t fair, it’s not cricket, and it isn’t in the spirit of public  service broadcasting. Come on, BBC – show some leadership and get your house in  order – while you still have a chance.

Scott Pack, publisher at HarperCollins imprint The Friday  Project, was so excited he decided to 'do' the show naked. Dr Brooke  Magnanti, formerly known as the blogger and call-girl Belle de Jour,  suggested playing a drinking game. Needless to say the innuendos, along with the  liquor flowed freely.

The discussion, ably assisted by regulars Sam  Missingham and Catherine Neilan  was, ahem, deep. Hopefully most of the smut will get past the censors. Maybe  some of the insight too. The big Question from the show - we don't like "mummy  porn". What shall we call it instead?

Presented by Philip  Jones, deputy editor of The  Bookseller.

He's a crime boss - but not the way you'd expect. British writer Peter James was awarded an honorary  Doctorate of Letters in recognition of his ongoing contribution to the arts,  which tells you something of his significance to writing and publishing  generally.
The Daily Mail called him a cross between Stephen King and Michael  Crichton, and with sales of his 25 titles running into the multi-millions, he's  a serious force in commercial publishing.
Crime is one of the biggest of all  publishing genres; it accounts for about a quarter of all books sold. In  tonight's extended show, we get under the surface of both the writer himself and  the whole genre - what does it take to succeed in this area?
Peter, who is  also chair of the Crime Writers  Association, is clearly the best man to ask. Peter's latest book Perfect  People has just been published in the UK, and his most recent paperback, Dead  Man's Grip, has just gone to the No. 1 position in the paperback charts  (knocking off Jamie Oliver!).

There are some people who just get what's going on: faster, more accurately, and  more cogently than the rest of us. Seth Godin is one of those people. A legend  on the 'net, Seth authored the most popular e-book ever written ("Unleashing The Idea  Virus") and commands speaker's fees that run into telephone numbers.
For  Radio Litopia, however, Seth's fee is... simply your attention.
This is one  of those shows that you'll want to listen to many times. The wisdom is intense  and the conclusions enlightening.

"I liked the idea of having a front-row seat at the making of history.  I felt myself move into another gear when I hit a war zone. And sometimes be not  a terribly nice person."
Martin Bell - "the man in the white suit" - is a  British institution. Just as Walter Cronkite was "the most trusted man in  America", so Martin Bell represents journalistic integrity and straight-talking  to several generations of Britons. In this extended show, we talk to Martin  about his life, his war experiences, the experience of being a politician,  and... his poetry! It's a treat - don't miss it.
Martin's book of light and  dark verse, For  Whom The Bell Tolls, has just been published.

With 270 million copies of his books in circulation, Jeffrey Archer can justly  claim to be one of the world's all-time bestselling novelists. From his first  book way back in 1976 - rejected by fifteen publishers - to his current  worldwide hit The  Sins Of The Father - his writer's journey has been a wild ride of  extremes. This absorbing in-depth interview, during which Jeffrey fields  questions both from our panel and from the live audience in the chat room, is  utterly unmissable. No topic is off-limits. Candid, witty and very much the  consummate pro, Jeffrey packs a lifetime of advice into sixty spellbinding  minutes. If you've ever wanted to attend a masterclass in how to become a  bestselling novelist - start listening now.

Get your jabs, people! Our guest (and fixer tonight) is none other than the  great travel writer Tim Butcher -  journalist, war-correspondent and author of the best-selling Blood River: A Journey to Africa's  Broken Heart, which describes his hair-raising attempt to retrace Henry  Morton Stanley's 19th century route up the Congo River.

For the armchair traveler in all of us, Tim will be our escort to the scene  of “the greatest human drama on the planet” – welcome to the Democratic Republic  of the Congo, home to more chaotic warfare than a drunken child can shake his  gun at – and from there, we head to Sierra Leone - arguably the world's poorest  country - in the aftermath of bloody civil war.

Tim doesn’t do tourism – he does travel – the rugged kind. The sort  that Graham Greene did. And Paul Theroux doesn’t