Talking in the Library - Series Two

Piers Paul Read
Piers Paul Read leapt to fame as the author of Alive, a book about plane-crash victims in the Andes who ate their dead. The book was so successful that it would have overshadowed the subsequent career of a less accomplished writer, but his string of novels has established him as an acute analyst of European social structures convulsively altering in the course of modern history. Informing all his work is his Catholic faith, which proves to be the central topic of a unique conversation.

Alan Jenkins
Alan Jenkins is one of the outstanding poets of his generation. Starting from a non-Establishment background, he has rapidly become, at an early age, an Establishment figure as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Knowing the field from two opposed angles, as a poet and as the editor who chooses which other poets will be printed in a key journal, he is well qualified to discuss an unusual topic: poetry as a career.

Cate Blanchett
​Cate Blanchett is the dazzling Australian stage and screen star who has gone all the way to fairyland as the princess in Lord of the Rings. In the title role of Elizabeth she was a queen, instantly establishing herself as a regal presence who speaks English as if she had helped to invent it. She makes a speciality of the haughty beauty that can strike men dumb. Relaxing in the library of a dumb admirer, she proves wonderfully down to earth.

Simon Callow
Simon Callow is an eloquent, ebullient combination of screen star, stage actor and writer. In Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love he showed how a character role could dominate the big screen. In the theatre, his achievements include one-man shows (notably his portrait of Dickens) in which he dominates the stage all on his own. His biographical writings on Orson Welles and Charles Laughton are worthy of their protean subjects. Protean himself, in this interview he unveils yet another of his careers, as a film director.

Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes became world famous as the author of Flaubert's Parrot, and has gone on to consolidate his reputation as one of the most subtle writers of his time, both as a novelist and an essayist. Although a star guest on French television, the bilingual author is seldom to be seen on small screens in Britain, because the atmosphere of a standard studio is one he would rather avoid. Talking in the library, he shows us what we have been missing, in a conversation that will fascinate his admirers all over the world.

Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan runs at the front of the grid with a generation of British novelists who are always mentioned together, and his international reputation sometimes looks like outstripping even theirs.Amsterdam actually won him the Booker prize but he has been short-listed three times and as far as countless readers are concerned he might as well be just given the trophy to take home. Since I first met him, however, I have been able to take his talent for granted without ever quite getting to the heart of his personal mystery, because he doesn't really fit in anywhere except at the top. Instead of the usual Oxbridge route through the educational system, he took the side track that led through the University of East Anglia and a school of creative writing that left the traditional Eng. lit. instruction manual looking a bit clapped out, like a used Empire.

P.J. O'Rourke
P.J. O' Rourke has been happily disagreeing with Clive James's wishy-washy liberalism for years. This meeting between the Kid from Kogarah and the Republican Party Reptile was scheduled well before the events of September 11th 2001, but soon afterwards P.J. flew the Atlantic to keep the date, and even in sombre circumstances the wit shines through the seriousness, just as the seriousness has always shone through the wit.