Vikram Seth talks to Matthew Sweet about Two Lives, his portrait of the 60-year relationship between his great uncle Shanti and great aunt Henny.
Programme Details:
The Indian novelist, Vikram Seth, author of A Suitable Boy, discusses his new book about a one-armed Indian dentist and his wife, a German Jewish exile from Nazism. These characters spring not from Seth's imagination but from his family - Two Lives, his first foray into biography, tells the story of his great uncle Shanti and his great aunt Henny, from the meeting in Thirties Berlin to their retirement in Hendon fifty years later.
Variety theatre critic Matt Wolf joins Matthew to explore the phenomenon of theatre audience members ending up on stage, actors chatting to - or insulting - the audience - and the strange routes this idea has taken through theatrical history - prompted by the revival of perhaps the first play that does this - Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle , in which a keen young grocer's apprentice invades a play called The London Merchant to create his own entirely different adventure...
Drawing out a thread that runs through Vikram Seth's novel, Toby Dodge, author of Invading Iraq , and Jeffrey Olick, author of the forthcoming In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 explore how the denazification process in post-war Germany has inspired the 'de-Ba'athification' process in Iraq - and how strong a precedent the German case really provides.
And Lyn Nead reviews a new exhibition of the work of the pioneering Victorian photographer, Roger Fenton - one of the first war photographers, and a campaigner to elevate photography into an Art Form.
Presenter: Matthew Sweet
Producer: Phil Tinline
Additional Information:
Vikram Seth's Two Lives is out now, published by Little Brown.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle opens at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester tonight (Monday 19 September) and transfers to the Barbican in London on 29 September.
Jeffrey Olick's In the In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 is published next month by the University of Chicago Press.
The Roger Fenton exhibition opens at Tate Britain in London on Wednesday 21 September, and runs until 2 January 2006
