Producer: Edwina Pitman

Archive used: Extract from T S Eliot, Preludes 1, read by Jeremy Irons, BBC Radio 4, 25 December 2021 Extract from T S Eliot, The Waste Land, read by Jeremy Irons, BBC Radio 4, 2 January 2022 Clip from trailer of Downhill Racer, Michael Ritchie, 1969 Clip from trailer of Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976 Extract from David Szalay, Flesh, read by David Szalay Clip from Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick, 1975 Clip from 2025 Booker Prize ceremony

George Saunders,

George Saunders is the highly acclaimed author of several short story collections, including “Tenth of December,”  and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” and others, along with political commentary that has appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. He won the 2017 Booker Prize for his earlier novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo.”

This latest novel, Vigil, takes place in the in-between time before death, when an elderly oil oligarch lies dying, and an angel of mercy, a ghost, named Jill, is on hand to comfort him. The question at hand concerns forgiveness, accountability, grace and several other issues that become involved when someone whose actions were deleterious to humankind and the planet is forced to examine their actions on earth. Justification, remorse, sin? What does it mean, and how do we, the living, deal with these issues when there are so many bad actors doing damage these days on the world and national stages. Recorded by computer on April 15, 2026.

The post George Saunders, “Vigil,” 2026 appeared first on KPFA.

Quantum mechanics has long unsettled our understanding of matter and measurement. But what if its implications reach further — into history, politics, and the very structure of reality itself? If the present can retroactively reshape the past it emerged from, what does that mean for how we act, how we remember, and how we govern?

These are not merely theoretical puzzles. In a world where liberal democracy appears to be fracturing, where AI and climate change defy traditional political categories, and where new authoritarian currents are emerging from thinkers like Curtis Yarvin in the West and Wang Huning in the East, the question of whether reality offers any coherent ground for political action has never felt more urgent.

Few thinkers are willing to hold all of this together at once — to move from Niels Bohr to Stalinism, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to the collapse of the political centre, without flinching. Slavoj Žižek does precisely that. In his new book Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2025), Žižek argues that incompleteness is not a failure of knowledge but a feature of existence itself — and that this demands an entirely new way of thinking about history and politics.

Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Hosted by Omari Edwards.

Read the full transcript of this conversation at IAI News: https://iai.tv/articles/slavoj-zizek-on-quantum-history-and-the-end-of-the-past-auid-3437

Don't hesitate to email us at podcast@iai.tv with your thoughts or questions on the episode!

To witness such debates live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/

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*** Thank you for listening. Help power On Point by making a donation here: wbur.org/giveonpoint

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Get in touch: podcast@gretchenrubin.com

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Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

… the “underhand” selling of Geese

… Morrissey’s absurd whinge about the Salford Lads Club photo

… Jay Leno’s $50 ruse to get comedy gigs

… when bands “didn’t even know what a hotel was”

… radio sessions in Andy Kershaw’s flat

… what’s the point of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

… when has any aspect of the entertainment business EVER been “fair”?

… “Four eyes, one vision!” Elvis Costello busking in Park Lane

… the great Supremes records after Diana Ross

… Focus, 10cc, Devo, Zappa, the Shadows and other musical dead-ends

... Ronnie Wood and … Beverley Knight?

…. “Shove off, Phil Collins! And have you got your Barley Sugars?”

… and birthday guest Stephen Lambe about why Focus are largely forgotten.

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Resources & links related to this episode:

Get in touch: podcast@gretchenrubin.com

Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.

Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt about what that argument got right, what it missed, and why the real problem might not be any one politician but the structure of the system itself. They get into presidential power, partisan loyalty, why Congress keeps folding, and how the two-party system might be quietly making everything worse. They also discuss what it would actually take to fix it — or whether things have to completely break first.

Host: Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp)

Guest: Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias)

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at thegrayarea@vox.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. 
And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. New episodes drop every Monday and Friday.

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With the latest volume to be translated into English, Book IV, out this week, Gilbert Cruz sat down with A.O. Scott, a critic at large, and Joumana Khatib, a Book Review editor, to talk boredom, stuckness and time loops. Plus, the books in translation you should read next.

Books discussed on this episode:

“On the Calculation of Volume,” by Solvej Balle

“The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“Tyll,” by Daniel Kehlmann

“Breasts and Eggs,” by Mieko Kawakami

“Heaven,” by Mieko Kawakami

“Sisters in Yellow,” by Mieko Kawakami

“King Kong Theory,” by Virginie Despentes

The “Vernon Subutex” trilogy, by Virginie Despentes

“Time Shelter,” by Georgi Gospodinov

“Territory of Light,” by Yuko Tsushima

“The Betrothed,” by Alessandro Manzoni

“Kairos,” by Jenny Erpenbeck

“Go, Went, Gone,” by Jenny Erpenbeck

“In Search of Lost Time,” by Marcel Proust

“Ulysses,” by James Joyce

“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Host Meg Wolitzer presents two works with unusual family dynamics. In Zadie Smith’s “Grand Union,” the mother-daughter bond transcends death and brings with it a whole family history. The reader is Kaneza Schaal. And Richard Bausch’s “What Feels Like the World,” read by James Naughton, explores the bond between a grandparent and a grandchild.

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Many thanks to Richard for this fascinating conversation.

Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube here. Join The Rosebud Family here. And visit our website here.

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Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.

The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.

Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/transcription-4

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three other internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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With Dawn Ades Emeritus Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex

Ruth Hemus Professor of French and Visual Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London

And

Stephen Forcer Professor of French at the University of Glasgow

Produced by Martha Owen

Reading list:

Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)

Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)

Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)

Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)

David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Works Discussed:

Joan E. Durrant and Ashley Stewart-Tufescu. “What is “Discipline” in the Age of Children’s Rights?.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

Adekunle A. Ibrahim and Philomena A. Ojomo. “Discipline and Punishment in Schools: A Philosophical Appraisal.”

Enjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v

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The story of his political career is entwined with the story of Hungarian democracy; at the end of the Cold War, a young Orbán emerged as both canny operator and gifted orator in the anti-Communist youth movement, Fidesz, steering it through splits and ideological shifts into government, first between 1998 and 2002, and then again from 2010 to today.

As a pursuer of self-described ‘illiberal democracy’ who casts the EU as his constant adversary, Orbán has become an icon for the global hard right and, to his critics, a borderline autocrat and populist.

Presenter Stephen Smith speaks to those who know him well to understand the personal side of this very political beast.

Guests: Esther Pataki - former Press Secretary to Viktor Orban David Campanale - Liberal Democrat activist, journalist and fellow of the Danube Institute Zsuzsanna Szelényi - founding Fidesz member and author of Tainted Democracy:Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary Nick Thorpe - BBC Budapest correspondent

Presenter: Stephen Smith Producers: Ben Crighton, Nathan Gower Editor: Richard Vadon Programme Coordinator: Janet Staples Sound Engineer: Neil Churchill

Join us this Friday 17th April at the Regent Street Cinema in London for the second film in our new season: a screening of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut followed by a live podcast recording with David and director and campaigner Beeban Kidron. Tickets available now ⁠https://bit.ly/3O5rSEY⁠

And find details of all our upcoming film events here ⁠https://www.ppfideas.com/events⁠

You can find out everything you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus merch, events and full lists of all episodes and PPF+ bonus episodes on our website ⁠https://www.ppfideas.com⁠

Next Time on Orwell’s War: False Dawn (1940-41)

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Resources & links related to this episode:

Get in touch: podcast@gretchenrubin.com

Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.

Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

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* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.

*There is a bonus episode on Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize winning novel Offshore for our Patreon subscribers, along with book chat, no adverts, and extra fortnightly episodes and original writing. ⁠www.patreon.com/backlisted⁠

* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm

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Roddy tells Ben Henderson about his inspiration for Paddy Clarke, how he balanced writing with becoming a father and teaching, and the emotions of the night he won the award.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.

For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.

We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.

You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.

(Photo: Roddy Doyle. Credit: Dominic Ledwidge O'Reilly/Getty Images)

For more than a century there has been a divide in Western philosophy between two distinct approaches, often described as analytic and continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy is predominantly based in the English-speaking world taking its name from Bertrand Russell’s philosophy of logical analysis that overthrew the grand Hegelian metaphysics of the 19th century. It did so in favour of a focus on logic and linguistic precision, with the assumption that science would do the serious work of uncovering the nature of reality. Continental philosophy, based primarily in France and Germany, has offered a broad range of outlooks on the nature of the human condition and the world. It has been defined by its critics simply in opposition to analytic philosophy.

Few thinkers have bridged the divide to be taken seriously by both camps. Yet both traditions now have deep challenges. The original focus of analytic philosophy has become increasingly blurred while in France English speaking philosophy is now in vogue.  

What is the future of European thought? Are we seeing the end of the analytic and continental divide? Or is the Enlightenment tradition itself under threat and with it the influence and identity of European philosophy?

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London, Christoph Schuringa is known for his works on German philosophy and is Editor of the Hegel Bulletin. Genia Schönbaumsfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and the author of several books – most recently, Wittgenstein on Religious Belief. Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and the editor of the journal New Nietzsche Studies. Hosted by Danielle Sands.

Don't hesitate to email us at podcast@iai.tv with your thoughts or questions on the episode!

To witness such debates live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/

And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/

You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John Kampfner has travelled the world to find examples of places and people bravely and imaginatively confronting some of our most pressing problems – from climate change to health, housing and education. His book is called Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t.

But Nicolas Niarchos questions how we live sustainably when the hidden costs of the green transition can be so devastating. In The Elements of Power he investigates the global supply of rare earth metals, essential for decarbonisation, and the terrible, bloody human cost for those involved in their extraction.

Natasha Walter explores how activism is being reshaped in the era of climate emergency. In Feminism for a World on Fire, she reflects on the movements fighting for justice, and asks what forms of solidarity and resistance are needed when the planet itself is under threat.

Together, the panel consider the innovations, compromises and moral dilemmas that come with trying to live well on a warming planet.

Producer: Katy Hickman Assistant Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of “Age of Revolutions” and other books. In this conversation, we discuss whether Trump’s threats on Truth Social worked as a negotiating tactic, the significance of crossing this kind of moral line and how the decline of American leadership is already reshaping the world.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria

“The Predatory Hegemon” by Stephen M. Walt

“Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.” by Fareed Zakaria

Book Recommendations:

A World Safe for Democracy by G. John Ikenberry

The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Jack McCordick, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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The spy craft he used was possibly the first known example of deploying surveillance, espionage and propaganda to achieve political outcomes. 

• Guest: Marc Mierowsky, author of 'A spy amongst us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the plot to end Scottish Independence' (Yale University Press)   

             Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne, where he researches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history.  

• Producer: Ann Arnold

Works Discussed:

Emmanuel Levinas, “On Escape”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Enjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v

Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/

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Carroll Janis's parents were friends of Duchamp.

Louise Hidalgo spoke to him in October 2016 about the exhibition, the man and his art, including his famous urinal, Fountain.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.

For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.

We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.

You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.

(Photo: Duchamp’s famous urinal. Credit: Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Jessie won an Olivier Award for her portrayal of Sally Bowles in a 2021 West End revival of Cabaret. Her breakout film role came in 2018 when she played an aspiring country music singer in the musical Wild Rose.

Jessie was born in Killarney in County Kerry to creative parents. Her mother trained as a singer and harpist and her father, who ran a guest house when she was growing up, writes poetry. As a child Jessie and her siblings put on Irish dancing performances for people who stayed in the guest house.

In 2008 she appeared in the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything – the televised search to find a Nancy for a West End production of Oliver! Jessie came second in the competition and afterwards Sir Cameron Mackintosh, one of the judges, sent her on a Shakespeare workshop at RADA which she says changed her life.

She made her professional stage debut as Anne Egerman in the 2008/2009 revival of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at London's Menier Chocolate Factory. In 2010 she stepped away from professional work and enrolled at RADA where she studied for three years.

After graduating she performed on stage, screen and television. She received her first Oscar nomination playing opposite Olivia Colman in the 2021 film the Lost Daughter.

Jessie lives in Norfolk with her husband and their baby daughter.

DISC ONE: Samhradh Samhradh - The Gloaming DISC TWO: O Holy Night. Composed by Adolph Adam and performed by Marina Cassidy DISC THREE: Who Knows Where the Time Goes (Live at Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY - October 1969) - Nina Simone DISC FOUR: Troy - Sinéad O'Connor DISC FIVE: Send In the Clowns – Judi Dench DISC SIX: Shobis Galoba (Christmas Song) - Basiani Ensemble DISC SEVEN: The Red Shoes - Kate Bush DISC EIGHT: Old Note - Lisa O'Neill

BOOK CHOICE: The Complete Poems of Tim Buckley LUXURY ITEM: Jessie’s own bathtub and bath salts CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Samhradh Samhradh - The Gloaming

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Paula McGinley

Join us on Friday 17th April at the Regent Street Cinema in London for the second film in our new season: a screening of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut followed by a live podcast recording with David and director and campaigner Beeban Kidron. Tickets available now https://bit.ly/3O5rSEY

You can find out everything you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus merch, events and full lists of all episodes and PPF+ bonus episodes on our website https://www.ppfideas.com

Next Time on Political Conversions: Switching Sides in the 21st Century

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In Hegel's ongoing semi-mythical story about the development of the modern self and society, we're now at a point where people are "bare persons," legally recognized but not distinguished from each other. We thicken these thin selves using cultural contents: your profession, your group memberships, your style, etc. But this way of individuating is fundamentally self-alienating: these ways that we identify ourselves are foreign to our souls!

Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.

Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the category of emotions that are supposed to shame us. The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Boredom, Smith argues, is the price we pay for meaning. Our darkest emotions aren’t quite as dark as we fear.

Five Takeaways

•       Boredom Is the Price of Meaning: The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, eating breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Repetition is boring. But that’s where the connection, the love, and the main event reside. Boredom is a sign that meaning is nearby.

•       Perfection Is the Devil: Growth means greater capaciousness, not narrowing and optimisation. Smith sees patients who want to perfect themselves out of their own emotions. The feelings that trouble them make perfect sense given the conditions of their lives. Real psychotherapy isn’t a quick fix. It’s about deep change, and deep change is uncomfortable.

•       Social Media Is an Envy Engine: The leaders of early consumer capitalism discovered that stoking envy drives economic growth. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, was the architect. Social media put it on steroids. The result: people constantly questioning whether their own lives are alright. Smith is far more worried about Mark Zuckerberg than about psychotherapists who write books.

•       His Father Heard Voices for Decades and Kept It Secret: He met none of the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. But the culture thought hearing voices was prototypically insane. Smith’s first book argued the border between sanity and insanity is far more porous than we think. Rilke said it best: it’s so often in the way we name things that we go wrong.

•       AI Chatbots Are Inherently Sycophantic: You go to AI for clinical services and what you get is straight validation. These systems have been built to please. There are documented cases of AI psychosis — where sycophantic validation led people into actual delusion. AI can give the illusion of empathy. It cannot deliver the real thing.

About the Guest

Daniel Smith is a psychotherapist and writer based in Brooklyn. He is the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets, and Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions.

References:

•       Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions by Daniel Smith.

•       Episode 2850: Bring the Friction Back — Stephen Balkam on social media addiction. Smith’s envy engine meets Balkam’s friction argument.

•       Episode 2849: How Stories Can Save Us — Colum McCann on narrative and empathy. The real thing AI cannot deliver.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance.

Laura, welcome.

LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know.

OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.

THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like.

Christie’s Favorite Writers

OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?

THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—

OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript?

THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to.

OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book?

THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.

OLIVER: Yeah.

THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.

OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?

THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

OLIVER: Yes. Yes.

THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.

Christie and Shakespeare

OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.

THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?

OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.

THOMPSON: That’s so interesting.

OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?

THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.

OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don’t like and I do—

THOMPSON: Go on.

OLIVER: It’s called Murder Most Foul, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And there’s something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can’t walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?

THOMPSON: That’s really interesting.

OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She’s not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?

THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.

OLIVER: Much more rational.

THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she’s not mad, Margaret, is she? But she’s upset.

OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?

THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—

OLIVER: Waspish.

THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that’s obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.

OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.

THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they’re structured. That’s not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.

OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that’s obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?

THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.

She’s very—I hope I’m right in saying this—she’s very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn’t regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What’s wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.

And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I’ll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that’s sort of the last thing they are. And they’re very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they’re full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.

Christie on Shakespeare?

OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn’t. Why?

THOMPSON: No. I don’t think she ever liked being told what to do.

OLIVER: [laughs]

THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren’t they?

OLIVER: Yes, yes. I’ve only read what’s in your book, but yes, I didn’t warm to him.

THOMPSON: I’m glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they’re just thoughts for you.” I don’t think she would’ve felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.

OLIVER: Save it for the novels.

THOMPSON: Yes, she’s a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would’ve preferred to do that and use it to her ends.

And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.

OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?

THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you’ve killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.

I mean, Miss Marple was. She’s quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”

OLIVER: It’s one of her most striking lines.

THOMPSON: It is, isn’t it?

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she’s very modern, she’s very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.

Dickens and Christie’s Family

OLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It’s obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?

THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I’m going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.

OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It’s the first time there’s a police detective in a major English novel.

THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don’t actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.

So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don’t know. She had a lot of go in her.

And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would’ve made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you’re that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I’ve never quite got the habit.

OLIVER: But if she’s born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she’s got a somewhat direct—

THOMPSON: Yes, she was.

OLIVER: You know, it’s sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.

THOMPSON: Yes. Isn’t that extraordinary?

OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It’s crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?

THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It’s like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.

OLIVER: But worse, yes.

THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would’ve been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I’d never, ever thought of that before. Isn’t that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I’m leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it’s awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.

I don’t mean to make extravagant claims, but there’s a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won’t let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.

Art and Music

OLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?

THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It’s very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.

And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it’s still there.

And they used to do this thing—I think it’s a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would’ve dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.

OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.

THOMPSON: And there’s a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn’t strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would’ve been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.

And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant’s Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it’s all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don’t, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.

And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.

Christie’s Uniqueness

OLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn’t, to me, feel—she’s obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn’t feel the same as them somehow.

THOMPSON: No.

OLIVER: What is that?

THOMPSON: Do you think it’s her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn’t write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.

OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.

THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that’s in that book. It’s a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There’s a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she’s also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.

I don’t think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she’d dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn’t bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they’re a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.

She doesn’t do that with Poirot. He’s just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it’s that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don’t quite do. And at the same time, she’s redefining it from within.

OLIVER: There’s something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don’t know, two or three novels, that’s gone, and he’s Poirot as we know him, as it were.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes.

OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.

Christie and the Theater

THOMPSON: Yes. She’s sort of conceptual and the others aren’t quite, I think. She doesn’t do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn’t—it’s not Cluedo, is it? It’s not, there’s six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it’s: it’s nobody, or it’s everybody, or it’s the policeman, or it’s a child, or there’s something bigger and bolder going on.

And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she’s incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl’s a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there’s 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It’s all in there.

OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan’t reveal, but—

THOMPSON: That’s Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she’s given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can’t resist—

OLIVER: Yes, but that’s what I’m saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.

THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.

OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.

THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: No, no. We’re crossed wires.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.

OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.

THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That’s a reenactment.

OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—

THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.

OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?

THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—

OLIVER: I’ve seen it once. I’ve seen it—you know, I don’t know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it’s you.” It’s very dramatic moments. You don’t like it?

THOMPSON: No, I think you’re right. I wouldn’t mind seeing it done really, really well. There’s something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It’s in Ordeal by Innocence. It’s in Mrs. McGinty. That’s, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it’s not abandonment, but I think—

OLIVER: Well, yes.

THOMPSON: — it’s not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we’ve said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.

And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I’ve always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.

And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.

The TV Adaptations

OLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don’t.

THOMPSON: Yes, that’s true.

OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?

THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that’s really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn’t really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don’t know. I don’t know because I think they’re mostly not very good. I don’t know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that’s deliberate, that they’re less—if they drove you back to the books, you’d probably get quite a pleasant surprise.

OLIVER: It’s hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I’d finished reading her.

THOMPSON: What did you think?

OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what’s she called?

THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.

OLIVER: Hickson. I think she’s just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It’s all so cleanly done.

THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.

OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that’s very good. It’s very funny, you know, he gets it.

THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn’t he? It had gone very, very—

OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn’t watch them all, no, no.

THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.

OLIVER: Yes, you did.

THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don’t think I’ve ever got—

OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.

THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they’d hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don’t think I’ve ever got to the end of one of those.

But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they’re really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren’t for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn’t happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.

Resurgence and Popularity

OLIVER: No, they don’t have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That’s why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.

THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don’t think—she’s always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn’t she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.

But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she’s terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.

I’m not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade’s called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”

There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she’s survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she’s not real, she’s true. I think she’s incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.

You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there’s a femme fatale who’s murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can’t resist men. She’s prey; she’s not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They’re not predators. They’re very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you’re very—there’s so much easy wisdom in there somehow.

And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it’s very, “I am wise and you’re going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It’s all very, “I’m very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything’s so easy with Agatha. It’s so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there’s so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don’t think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.

Self-Adaptations

OLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?

THOMPSON: Yes. That’s such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That’s not what my audiences are going to want from me. They’re just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They’re not distilled at all; they’re quite the opposite.

I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn’t have to constantly—they’re unresolved; they ask questions that don’t have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I’m sure, but I think she would’ve thought people aren’t coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.

OLIVER: Hmm.

THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn’t take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I’ve just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn’t emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.

And I think it’s extraordinary to me how—it’s so difficult for us today, isn’t it? We’re so at the mercy of “That won’t sell, don’t do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .

You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she’s doing, an instinctive sort of—there’s a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she’s doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don’t know that she would be, really. What do you think?

OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.

THOMPSON: You might know he’d say it right.

OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there’s a—I think there must have been something about—I think it’s in Poirot’s Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would’ve thought the old man had so much blood in him?”

And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there’s quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she’s good enough to run on instinct at times.

THOMPSON: That’s right. That’s it. Exactly. That’s absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it’s terribly timely—whether it’s better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that’s when she quotes from the Book of Saul.

And it’s just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she’s really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she’ll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It’s the whole—it’s not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she’s got this gift of knowing what flowers we’re going to need.

I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don’t want be like one of those people who’s writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It’s not—I do think that’s a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she’s an interplay. And that’s why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there’s nothing more interesting. There’s nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.

And she does that—that’s at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she’s so all the things we’ve been talking about. She’s so distilled, she’s so simple, she’s so smooth, she’s so instinctive. And she’s doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—

Quick Opinions on Christie

OLIVER: Should we have—

THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.

OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?

THOMPSON: Please.

OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—

THOMPSON: Oh, god.

OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.

THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.

OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.

THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]

OLIVER: Hallowe’en Party.

THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?

OLIVER: I think it’s a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.

THOMPSON: I can’t keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it’s better to have experienced it. It’s quite a mournful novel.

OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—

THOMPSON: Oh.

OLIVER: Oh, sorry.

THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don’t you think? Such a clever character.

OLIVER: Why didn’t she do more of him?

THOMPSON: Yes, that would’ve been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell’arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who’s also a moral force, isn’t he really? Or—yes, I wish she’d done more. They’re marvelous.

OLIVER: Towards Zero.

THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don’t you think?

OLIVER: One of the best.

THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.

OLIVER: It’s very distinct in her. I haven’t read all of her novels, but it’s very distinct.

THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She’s very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there’s a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it’s so—it just drives along that book, doesn’t it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.

OLIVER: Death on the Nile.

THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it’s one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.

And I feel that a little bit in that book. There’s a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.

OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.

THOMPSON: It’s a great film, yes. Wonderful film.

Other Mystery Writers

OLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.

THOMPSON: You’ve got me. I haven’t read him. Should I?

OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.

OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.

THOMPSON: Can’t get into her.

OLIVER: No.

THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?

OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.

THOMPSON: No, somebody told—

OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that’s great.

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn’t—I read it in a book that she really hadn’t liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I’m going to read one, try that, yes?

OLIVER: Yes, that’s a great book. Margery Allingham.

THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I’m in a bit of a fog, but she’s quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?

OLIVER: She’s good at the fog. She’s good at that sort of whirligig sense that there’s a lot going on—

THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.

OLIVER: —and you’ve got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.

THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.

OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.

THOMPSON: You’ve got me again, Henry.

OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You’ll like this.

THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.

OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you’ll like that a lot.

THOMPSON: Okay.

OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.

THOMPSON: Didn’t get on with him.

OLIVER: Why not?

THOMPSON: Don’t know. Don’t know. It sounds like I don’t read the men, doesn’t it? Which is not the truth at all.

OLIVER: I think that’s fair enough, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don’t know. Why didn’t I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don’t know. I just didn’t get on with it.

OLIVER: Too glib?

THOMPSON: Possibly.

OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?

THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn’t quite get hold of it in some way. I don’t know.

OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he’s got a bit of a “he’s a very clever boy” about him.

THOMPSON: Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that.

OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.

THOMPSON: I haven’t read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn’t it? I’m starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.

OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that’s what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]

THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don’t know why I haven’t read him.

Christie and Nostalgia

OLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?

THOMPSON: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would’ve written At Bertram’s Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that’s such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”

I’ve written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she’s—well, she’s an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they’re much more underlined about it. Again, I’m intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?

OLIVER: I think there’s definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that’s disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.

THOMPSON: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. That’s The Mirror Crack’d. And it’s—

OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.

THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry’s house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn’t think hard enough before I answered your question.

OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can’t sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it’s just useful material for her, you know?

THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it’s a bit sub–Brave New World, but it’s very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.

She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who’s completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it’s so true. There’s quite a lot of that going on.

She’s very clear-eyed. So if she—I’m a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can’t help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack’d. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—

OLIVER: And the adaptations don’t help with that.

THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it’s that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there’s no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that’s nostalgic in a way.

Christie’s Poshness

OLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?

THOMPSON: Good question. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.

I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.

I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn’t—and that there wasn’t much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn’t matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it’s lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there’s a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.

It’s amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that’s how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.

Inspirations for Miss Marple

OLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?

THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—

OLIVER: Drawn from life?

THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We’re occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn’t suitable or whatever, but she’s almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She’s an observer. She’s not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.

But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she’s the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that’s in At Bertram’s Hotel. She was—there’s a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she’d seen her up in Harrogate, she would’ve known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.

And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she’s a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I’m reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it’s really astounding to me how there’s a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who’s kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there’s not—it’s not only nonjudgmental; there’s literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It’s really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that’s maybe not recognized about her that much.

Nursery Rhymes

OLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?

THOMPSON: Yes, that’s interesting. They’re part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There’s books where she—I don’t think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.

But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that’s right? Or do you think it’s something more than that?

OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it’s part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]

THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I’ve—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that’s the heart of her. And I also feel it’s the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.

Wartime Productivity

OLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.

THOMPSON: Yes.

OLIVER: And as you say, they’re some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?

THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there’s a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn’t completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.

But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that’s like, “You think I’m chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there’s something about being in that adorable little flat—they’re so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.

And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it’s absolutely insane how productive she is.

And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she’s got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there’s a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]

The Mary Westmacott Novels

OLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I’ve never read them, but you seem very—

THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?

OLIVER: You’re very up on them. You like them?

THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they’re very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.

OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it’s just so dull.

THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.

OLIVER: I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn’t really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn’t.

THOMPSON: Well, I think that’s probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?

OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?

THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you’ve ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I’m going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.

Poirot vs. Marple

OLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?

THOMPSON: Yes, I’ve wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don’t really think she did. It’s just something people say, isn’t it?

OLIVER: Well, it’s a common thing about artists. They’re supposed to hate their most successful work, but—

THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it’s certainly—

OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.

THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn’t he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—

OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn’t it?

THOMPSON: And very kind to her.

OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn’t do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that’s it?

THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he’s a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.

And he is—I don’t mean to denigrate David Suchet because he’s a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they’ve got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can’t analyze, really. I don’t—well, I can’t. And that’s how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.

And she’s incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there’s no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—

OLIVER: [laughs] That’s great.

THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that’s right about Poirot? Do you think there’s something more . . .

Reader Preferences and Sales

OLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader’s prejudice involved.

THOMPSON: Oh.

OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he’s a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he’s always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple’s just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don’t know.

THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don’t know that she would’ve been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I’m overdoing her—

OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn’t she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?

THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn’t—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it’s terrible.

But I don’t know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they’re just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn’t write anything at all because I think she thought, “What’s the point?” But then, that wasn’t her way. But I don’t know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—

OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?

THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.

Rereading Christie

OLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?

THOMPSON: No.

OLIVER: Really?

THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don’t—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who’s my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there’s bits of—there is this kind of—there’s bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.

But there’s something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I’ve said it on Substack—that they’re fairy tales for adults. There’s something about that. There’s an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I’m not going to say she’s quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.

But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there’s something in it because the resolution is so—because it’s character based, and at her best, she’s character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.

Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There’s something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I’m experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn’t matter if you know who did it. There’s so much pleasure in them.

Thompson’s Career

OLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.

THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.

OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.

THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.

OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?

THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I’m still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.

And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn’t very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she’s a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.

But it’s a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I’ve written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.

And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don’t you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don’t you think? Did you not find that with your book?

OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don’t think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it’s sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that’s fine.

THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.

OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.

THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you’ve—well, you’re in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.

And it was about—I can’t bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That’s a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn’t do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.

Secretly Reading Christie

OLIVER: And you’ve said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.

THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.

OLIVER: That can’t be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?

THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.

OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it’s intense.

THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I’ve tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we’ve been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I’ve ever read—the best thing I’ve ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.

OLIVER: Oh, thank you.

THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]

And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it’s been a good thing.

OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?

THOMPSON: It’s only a short book—

OLIVER: Yes.

THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn’t—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.

But mainly it’s such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can’t write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I’m intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.

Henry on Agatha Christie

OLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura’s always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I’m going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I’ve lost the taste, in a way.

THOMPSON: Okay.

OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don’t know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I’ve always thought she’s really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I’ve read this one. I know. Yes. It’s the same as the other one, isn’t it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it’s not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don’t think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she’s great, but it’s enough. [laughs]

THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.

OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she’d written as many books as Agatha, you can’t imagine it would’ve sustained the level of quality.

THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn’t have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.

She has style—I don’t know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there’s something so fathomless about her, and that’s what continues to compel me. But I think it’s very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you’ve let me sort of—

OLIVER: Well, it’s not that I’m not an admirer. It’s just that I don’t—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don’t know, somehow I’ve reached a point where it’s—I sort of get it, but it’s just not that funny anymore. I don’t know, just need some time away.

THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I’m a bit—she’s part of my life now. It’s like if somebody said, “You can’t read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can’t listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it’d be like a kind of death. She’s part of my life the same way they’re part of my life. She’s now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you’ll be reassured to know. [laughter]

OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.

THOMPSON: Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it’s been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.

OLIVER: Oh, it’s been delightful.

THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.

OLIVER: Thank you.

Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?

Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded March 19th, 2026.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness
00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth
00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People
00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice
00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness
00:20:22 - Self-Deception
00:22:04 - Facing Death
00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion
00:28:41 - Immigration
00:30:27 - The American Right Wing
00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness
00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity
00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views
00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires
00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players
00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers
00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks
00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music
00:51:27 - Living in Spain
00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance
00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next
00:59:14 - Outro

Image Credit: Jenny Sherman

How do you tell a great story? How do you nail an ending? How do you use details to bring a character to life? That's what this episode is all about, and it's a heck of a lot of fun, too. About the host Hey! I’m David Perell and I’m a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible.

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