14 October 2005
Friday 14 October 2005 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Journalist Robert Fisk talks to Philip Dodd about The Great War for Civilisation: Conquest of the Middle East - his account of fighting in the region he has spent the last 25 years reporting from.
Programme details
Robert Fisk is one of this country's most respected and reviled journalists. For The Times and then The Independent, he has tirelessly covered the political turmoil of The Middle East and observed the world at war in Afghanistan, Iran, Belfast and Sarajevo, Beirut and Baghdad. Following his successful description of the Lebanon war, Pity the Nation, he has now written a thirteen hundred page account of the violent history of the Middle East and its most vicious and decisive conflicts. This massive work, ranging from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to his crusading stance on the current conflict inside Iraq and his three encounters with Osama bin Laden, stands as a detailed tribute to the millions of innocent deaths and the immovability of history in the region.
In a wide-ranging conversation on tonight's Night Waves, Robert Fisk talks honestly and movingly about his life in the Arab world and about how years of living amongst death and war has affected his character and beliefs.
Also on the programme: Susannah Clapp reports from a former abattoir in London on a reworking of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment where the audience gets pulled into the scene of the murder; and style guru Peter York offers his top ten of dictators' homes - he encounters bad taste on a massive scale as he visits the houses and lairs of some of world's most alarming men and women for his latest book, including Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Which dictators' house displays the most spectacularly bad taste?
Night Waves, this Friday night at 9.30, live with Philip Dodd here on Radio 3.
'Dictators' Homes' by Peter York is published by Atlantic Books.
DreamThinkSpeak's play 'Underground' is on at the Barbican until 29th October 2005.
