The Book Club Episode 2 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Cloning, Free Will, and Soulmates I read this book many years ago, and absolutely loved it, and so too did Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett in this episode. They comment on Cathy’s flat narrative voice, and her not quite understanding her own story: a feature of many of Ishiguro’s other books. I’d forgotten that it is a story in three parts: their schooling at Hailsham, their post-schooling hiatus in the Cottages, a type of half-way house, and then their adulthood where they are either Carers or Donors. Dominic and Tabitha do not divulge the central heartbreak of the book until after the first break in the podcast, and they give plenty of warning that it is coming. Nonetheless, I’d avoid listening to this podcast until you’d read the book, even though they advertise their podcast as one where you can listen and then pretend that you’ve read the book. Dominic gives it a score of 10/10, while Tabitha gives it 9.
The Rest is History Episode 408 The Nazis in Power: Hitler’s Dream (Part 5) Tom Holland takes the running on this episode (mercifully, he doesn’t introduce it with a song) where he looks at Hitler’s ideology. Were the Nazis idealists? Were they even aware that they are the baddies? They embraced the concept of ‘true law’, a song in the blood of the Nordic race, encompassing the Greeks, Romans and Aryans – including the Indians and Chinese. They framed life in biological terms, with the need to ‘preserve the race’ in the face of collapse caused by miscegenation, especially with Jews. They were not religious: they were particularly critical of St Paul, and rejected the egalitarianism of Christianity. However, Tom warns, the language of ‘race’ was everywhere at this stage in US, Britain and France. There was a fear that Germany would disappear, hence the disapproval of homosexuality which did not produce children. As part of race hygiene, there was widespread compulsory and involuntary sterilization, and then later euthanasia, all presented as part of science and health. The churches began to distance themselves from the Nazis, but doctors and the medical profession remained on-side.
The Rest is Classified Episode 124 Kim Philby: Britain’s Most Notorious Traitor (Episode 4) This is the final in this series of episodes which look at the rise of Kim Philby- they’ll deal with the fall of Kim Philby in later episodes (I hope). 1944 and the end of the war was the most dangerous time on the tightrope for Philby, especially when people began defecting because they might have implicated him. Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada in 1945 and Konstantin Volkov threatened to defect in Istanbul, offering up a huge list of names in exchange for 50,000 pounds. Philby warned the Russians that Volkov was likely to defect, and Volkov was duly ‘disappeared’, tortured and executed. Philby married his long-term mistress Aileen and they went together to Istanbul, but she was desperately lonely and began self-harming. And of course, Philby embarked on yet another affair. By now the Cold War was starting, and there was a new UK policy of sending exiled dissident agents into Soviet area. Philby got his hands dirty by killing two young men who were about to be sent into Georgia and ironically ended up getting promoted to MI6 branch in Washington where he liaised with the CIA- all this “success” at only 37 years of age.
Unholy. Unholy is a podcast hosted by Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 12 and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, so it has a strong Jewish emphasis. Why History Explains Everything Happening Right Now. You can see this as a YouTube video, but it’s actually just talking heads. He points out that Judaism as we know it today is a post-Temple concept. The Romans assumed that if you got rid of the cult temple, you’d get rid of the people- after all, it had worked with other peoples. But it didn’t work with the Jews because they had texts and so they were were able to reinvent themselves. He argues that you cannot deny a link between the Jews and Israel, but they are not ‘indigenous’ as such. However, the scriptures do link the Jews with specific lands, and there is nothing else comparable to this. In relation to Iran, in 538 BCE Cyrus saved the Jews, and Holland is impressed by the continuity that is now on the Iranian national stage which still retains its pre-Islam identity. He suggests that America is haunted by the rise/fall/decline trajectory of the Roman Empire, which they have chosen as a model. He then talks about the West and secularism, arguing that the West’s rise coincided with the withdrawal from religion by the elites e.g. the influence of Darwinism, and philosophers like Nietzsche. The notion of a secular/religious divide is a Western perspective, compared with Judaism and Islam where religion is seen as part of the polity.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 