Daisy Dunn

Barack Obama has launched a books podcast. Three years ago, this would have been an automatic cause for celebration in the book world. Now, however, the tide has turned. Publishers have started to realise that touting their authors on podcasts may actually do more harm than good; that having a writer discuss their new release for an hour may give the listener all they want and deter them from actually purchasing a copy. The surest way the producer of a podcast can mitigate against the risk is to exclude books by living authors. Obama’s team mostly do just that. The former President has authors as guests, but the books they talk about are in most cases decades old.

Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high. Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle.

The late Victoria Wood described Beryl Cook as ‘Rubens with jokes’. This was flattering for an artist whose fat, eye-shadowed ladies were more at home in the bingo hall than the boudoir. Fleshy, but utterly unsexy, Cook’s buxom babes have long been objects of veneration as well as ridicule. The question being posed in this, the centenary year of her birth, is whether they ought to be taken more seriously.  Listening to the documentary on Radio 4 this week, I was inclined to think this a fatuous question, over which Cook, had she still been alive, would have rasped. An untrained painter, who worked out of the ironing room of the B&B that she ran in Plymouth, she seems to have set out simply to please – herself as much as others.

Perhaps the greatest honour ever paid to Queen Victoria was to have a sewage-pumping engine named after her. Both she and Albert – and the future Edward VII, plus Alexandra – had the delight of becoming bywords for the mighty machines constructed by Joseph Bazalgette to lift waste from the depths of his (literally) ground-breaking London sewer system.  Listening to Thames Unfiltered, a new six-part podcast from the Evening Standard, I was amused to learn that the trend now favours the Greek gods. Among the eight barges constructed to serve the Tideway Tunnel sewer, completed last year, are a Zeus, a Poseidon, an Apollo, a Phoebe and, er, a Churchill. What else to give those who have everything?

When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in New York in 1831, he found a city a quarter of the size of Paris, perched on the lower tip of Manhattan, roamed by pigs. Speaking to everyone he met, high and low, he was struck by how many of the rich used to be poor. There was, he observed, an ‘equality of conditions’ that filtered down to the way parents treated their children. The 25-year-old ‘wiry aristocrat’ filled 14 notebooks during his nine-month road trip across America to 17 of the 24 established states. It formed the basis of Democracy in America. ‘The American inhabits a land where everything is constantly moving, and each movement seems to be progress,’ he wrote.

It takes some gumption to name a podcast History’s Greatest Dishes and proceed to offer episodes on pizza, blancmange, balti, gooseberry fool and Victoria sponge. Where’s the rarebit, the pottage, the pigeon pie? But the boldness of the podcast is one of its charms, and the choice of topics isn’t terribly important. Food historian Annie Gray and podcast host Emily Briffett chew over some fascinating material on each of the dishes they have selected and provoke surprisingly heated debates. Pineapple on pizza ought to be accompanied by Spam instead of ham It was suggested, for example, that pineapple on pizza ought to be accompanied by Spam instead of ham.

The dark side of the Moon, a broken loo and a floating jar of Nutella: such was Artemis II. When Helen Sharman joined the Mir space station in 1991, becoming the first Briton to visit space, the appetite was rather for oranges. Not only were they ‘rare in the Soviet Union then’, Sharman recalls on a new podcast, but they lent the cramped space a reassuringly fresh aroma. The Art of Adventure hosts an interview about a different exploration each week, from George Mallory’s expedition to Everest in 1924, to Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance, and Sharman’s space flight. It has been steadily climbing the charts, which is a feat in itself, given that it’s hosted by a shop, rather than the likes of Goalhanger.

An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the heat is on – but so, it is said, is a new cold war. On Radio 4 last week, Misha Glenny was exploring how the rapid evolution of technology is shaping the rivalry between the US and China. It turns out that the race for pre-eminence – in AI, at least – is as close as the 1973 Grand National. Red Rum (China) has the current lead, but that lead is ‘razor-thin’ and is thought to owe something to the nature of American tactics.

The Rest Is History has a new spin-off podcast called The Book Club. If you listen to the former, you’ll know Dominic Sandbrook but perhaps not his producer Tabby Syrett, who has joined him as co-host for the new venture. Tom Holland had presumably nipped off early to feed the cats. The release follows, slightly unfortunately, on the heels of a Sunday Times article in which the current crisis in sales of non-fiction is attributed in part to the boom in factual podcasts. If people are no longer buying history books because they’re ‘getting their history’ from Spotify for free, then ought we to be wary of a podcast about novels, lest we stop buying those as well?

The idea for Poems on the Underground was thought up by a New Yorker 40 years ago this month. This may surprise you, given that the posters are synonymous with London. But then again, the creative possibilities of a transport system tend to be lost on its native commuters. Judith Chernaik, a lecturer in English literature, had recently relocated to the capital when she fell in love with the Tube: ‘Compared to New York it’s bliss – clean, safe and fast, too… if things are working of course.’ Ozymandias was soon riding the lines from Aldwych with Robert Burns In As You Like It, Orlando goes around the Forest of Arden dangling sonnets for Rosalind from trees.

Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited the madness of her grandfather, George III, Prince Albert summoned her doctor. Robert Ferguson was not the obvious man for this scenario – he was an obstetrician – but the doughty queen had heard that he ‘paid much attention to mental disease’, and willingly consulted him. It wasn’t until 2009 that the precise nature of Victoria’s ‘mental disease’ came to light. Dr Ferguson’s diaries, formerly kept in private hands, came up for auction that year and entered the collection of the Royal College of Physicians. Their contents made for sad and startling reading.

Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they could not stop – but they did have a jolly good try’. What happened? It isn’t clear; there are teases that it revealed too much, which is anyway a good ploy for attracting listeners. ‘Subversive’ is not the first word that springs to mind when tuning in to the two unlikely chums. Their regular feature, ‘Shocking News from the Artworld’, is more Apollo than Nigel Dempster. For example: Christie’s has closed the digital art department that dealt in NFTs, the crypto tokens going the way of the dodo.

Love’s Moment is one of those quiet radio programmes you’re unlikely to have read about. It aired without fanfare at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, an understated yet engrossing one-off, half-hour documentary. It can now be found in the recesses of BBC iPlayer. It opened with a compelling question: ‘What happens when two artists fall in love and marry, and as one’s reputation soars, the other’s is slowly forgotten?’ Narrator Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales, might have been alluding to any artistic couple in history, but her subjects were R.S. Thomas and Mildred Eldridge. Thomas was one of the most popular poets in Wales in the last century. He was an Anglican priest, a fervent Welsh nationalist and something of a misanthrope.

At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age. While Britpop, New Labour and acid house do not immediately evoke the same spirit as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Augustan Rome, compared with what followed they were certainly characteristic of something. Appetites for what the energetic Sawyer calls ‘the last nutty pre-internet age’ have never been greater Members of Gen Z who have known only the colourless, anodyne first years of the new millennium speak of the Nineties in mystical tones. At a party last week, I found myself holding court over some twentysomethings who’d discovered that I am a millennial. ‘What was it really like?’ they asked, as if coming face-to-face with Shackleton or Francis Drake.

The cover painting for The Specialist, a new podcast from Sotheby’s, looks like a scene from Mad Men. The people are so good-looking and so well dressed that you barely notice how odd they are. One chap’s walking along with a porcelain bowl as if it were a macchiato; a lady holds a plant in her palms in the manner of receiving communion; someone else walks the street with a gavel. The admen have done their job: intrigued, I press play. It becomes apparent that the people who work at Sotheby’s have no interest in persuading anyone that they are normal. I listen to Ottilie, Julian and Gregory, and to mouths that volunteer, with ease, such phrases as ‘the visceral power is undimmed by the passage of time’.

‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary on Mrs Dalloway. A century has passed since Clarissa bought flowers for her midsummer party, and Radio 4 has commissioned a three-parter, with actress Fiona Shaw presenting. ‘What a plunge!’ The first programme had been playing for all of two minutes before my hopes began to wilt like a delphinium. ‘Her face adorns tote bags and internet memes,’ says Shaw of Woolf in the preamble, which sounds as though it has been lifted directly from the series pitch to the BBC. ‘I’ll be asking what… Virginia Woolf has to say to us today.