Book Club

How many of us have thought about being a filmmaker, even tried it, or wondered how an award-winning, box-office documentary is put together. Meet Antony Thomas on Goldster Inside Story whose book In the Line of Fire takes us far behind the scenes in the world of film. In a career, spanning half a century, Antony’s body of work includes exposing the pernicious effects of racism, the 'seamless border' between intelligence and crime, the last colonial wars in Africa, conflicts in the Middle East, the rise of Islamic extremism, the politicisation of Evangelical Christians in the United States and the origins of fake news. In conversation with Humphrey Hawksley, Antony will tell amazing stories of his adventures, together with the moral problems and dangers that he and his colleagues sometimes faced, including the moment when the entire team was condemned to death in a military camp in Zambia. His docudrama  Death of a Princess was based on the true story of Princess Mishaal, a young Saudi Arabian princess and her lover who had been publicly executed for adultery earned one of the highest ever ratings of the American PBS network. His 2007 The Tank Man, about China recalling the lone figure standing in front of a tank in 1989 had special screenings for the United States Congress.  Meet Anthony and ask him anything you want at 12.00 Thursday July 7th 2022.

Robert Sutter is the author of more than twenty books about Asia and will take Goldster Inside Story behind the headlines on the rise of China, explaining its ever-changing role from the Ukraine and Afghan crises to its efforts to expand its influence into Britain and Europe. Robert, who has a doctorate from Harvard University, has worked in key American government and congressional roles which includes National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and the Pacific at the US Government’s National Intelligence Council, the China division director at the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. China’s expansion and its style of government is the most pressing global political issue, made more so by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and its threat to Europe. What is China’s role?  How should our politicians handle its authoritarian government? What moral lines should they not cross in order to preserve peace and their economies. Never before have the values of two powerful systems of government been so opposed yet so entwined in trade and their economies. Can China and America close the gap, or will they fight? Robert’s skill is knowing the intricate details and being able to explain them in a way that is accessible to us all. That is why Humphrey Hawksley has invited Robert Sutter to be his guest for an hour-long illuminating and important conversation. Join them on Goldster Inside Story 12.00 Friday July 8th 2022.

Janice Hallett studied English at UCL and worked for 15 years as a magazine editor, during which time she won two awards for journalism. After gaining an MA in Screenwriting at Royal Holloway, she co-wrote the feature film Retreat, which starred Cillian Murphy, Thandie Newton and Jamie Bell. She has also written stage plays and has had her sitcom, Two Ladies, performed at the Museum of Comedy.

The Appeal, Janice’s debut novel, was a Sunday Times bestseller, the Sunday Times crime book of the year, and shortlisted for Waterstones book of the year. In The Appeal, Janice crafted a murder-mystery story told entirely via emails, legal documents and text messages. It is currently shortlisted for the Debut Crime Novel Award at CrimeFest and Book of the Year, Fiction: Crime & Thriller at the British Book Awards and the TV rights have been optioned. The Appeal was also our Goldster Book of the Month in March. 

Janice’s second novel, The Twyford Code, is a Times and Sunday Times bestseller. It was described by The Guardian as “a mind-bending, heartwarming mystery … a complex thriller that includes brilliant pastiches of Enid Blyton”. Join Janice on the 14the of July at midday, as she chats to Lucinda Hawksley for the Goldster Inside Story, about her writing career, and discusses The Appeal and The Twyford Code.

Throughout almost thirty years of study, Kirsty Stonell Walker has championed the lives of 19th-century women, whom history has otherwise overlooked. In 2006, she published the only biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most notorious model and muse, Fanny Cornforth. This was followed by a novel based on the life of another Pre-Raphaelite muse, Alexa Wilding, entitled A Curl of Copper and Purple. In 2015 she published her second novel, We Are Villains All, a murder mystery set around the lives of a Victorian poet and his best friend, a photographer. Since 2011, Kirsty has also been the writer of ‘The Kissed Mouth’ (www.fannycornforth.blogspot.com) a blog which airs Victorian dirty linen in a humorous and thought-provoking way.

In 2018, Kirsty published a non-fiction book, Pre-Raphaelite Girl Gang, revealing the lives of Pre-Raphaelite models, muses and artists, lushly illustrated by portraits by renowned illustrator and artist, Kingsley Nebechi, alongside the wonderful original paintings. In 2020, Kirsty published a dual biography of the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and her model Mary Hillier, entitled Light and Love. Returning to her roots, this year Kirsty has released a new edition of Stunner: The Fall and Rise of Fanny Cornforth, in a colourful, deluxe edition. 

On the 15th of July, at midday, join Kirsty as she chats to Lucinda Hawksley about her writing career, for the Goldster Inside Story.

Rosie Wilby is an award-winning comedian, author, podcaster and former singer-songwriter who has appeared many times on BBC Radio 4 programmes including Woman's Hour, Saturday Live and Four Thought, as well as at major festivals including Glastonbury and Latitude. Her first book Is Monogamy Dead? was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and followed a trilogy of live solo shows investigating the psychology of love and relationships. This trilogy began with subversive spoof lecture ‘The Science of Sex’, which toured to New York’s Fresh Fruit Festival, Edinburgh Fringe and more, and ended with ‘The Conscious Uncoupling’, which was programmed by London Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love and shortlisted for Funny Women Best Show. 

Her latest book The Breakup Monologues was described by Red magazine as a ‘gem of a book’ and by The Observer as ‘witty’ and ‘wonderful’. It is based on her acclaimed podcast of the same name, which was a British Podcast Award nominee 2020 and recommended by Chortle, The Observer, Psychologies and Metro. You can check out the book at https://linktr.ee/breakupmonologues. Rosie writes regularly on sexuality, dating and love for publications including Stylist, Cosmo, New Statesman and The i and has interviewed authors including Armistead Maupin, Sarah Waters and Stella Duffy on her award-winning Resonance FM radio show.

Join Rosie Wilby on 21 July, as she talks to Lucinda Hawksley about her writing career for the Goldster Inside Story. 

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings.  Bryan Appleyard’s book, simply called The Car celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car, of the genius embodied in the Ford Model T, of the glory of the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz S-Class made by workers for Nelson Mandela on his release from prison, of Kanye West’s ‘chopped’ Maybach, of the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst, of Elvis Presley’s 100 Cadillacs, of the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and the BMC Mini and even of that harbinger of the end – the Tesla Model S and its creator Elon Musk.  Our Goldster Inside Story guest was appointed CBE in Her Majesty’s 2019 Birthday Honours and has been selected Feature Writer of the Year three times as well as Interviewer of the Year in the British Press Awards. Join Humphrey Hawksley and Bryan for a roller-coaster conversation about the car and anything else that might spring to mind. 12.00 Thursday July 28th 2022 .

What does ‘Bondmaid’ mean? Why was it missing from the Oxford English Dictionary? Discover the story of the little girl who stole it, in this bestselling debut novel.

Deprived of her mother in infancy, Esme grows up surrounded by a world of words. Much of her childhood is spent in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford, inside which her father and a team of lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. While her father works, Esme plays beneath the table, watching as discarded words flutter to the floor. Soon, Esme begins to collect words of her own – words that are considered of too little importance by the men above her.

As she grows up, Esme comes to realise that some words are considered more important than others. As she – and the reader – ponder that realisation, it becomes apparent that it is words relating to women’s experiences which tend to go unrecorded. Secretly, Esme begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Pip Williams grew up in England and now lives in Australia. Her debut novel – which has received critical acclaim on both sides of the world – evokes beautifully a time when women’s suffrage movement was dominating the news and World War One was waiting in the wings. Read or listen to The Dictionary of Lost Words – a novel rich with themes to discuss – then join the Book of the Month zoom on Friday 29 July and chat about it with Lucinda and the rest of the Goldster Book Club community.

Stephen Keeler’s book, Fifty Words for Love in Swedish, is a memoir in fragments of a foreign language, a love-letter to a country, a literary token of gratitude. Highly acclaimed by A L Kennedy and the best-selling British-Swedish novelist Marika Cobbold, among many others, his book reveals life stories through the Swedish words Stephen learned, while living and working in Sweden for almost half a century.

Originally from the north-east of England, and with degrees from the universities of Durham, Leeds and London, Stephen worked in international education, teaching, writing, publishing, lecturing, designing syllabuses and as a consultant for, among others, The British Council, the UN and the BBC World Service before retiring to the Scottish highlands to write and teach creative writing. 

Fifty Words for Love in Swedish is Stephen’s first volume of prose memoir. Prior to that, he won the first Highland Literary Salon Poetry Competition and has received a prestigious Scottish Book Trust New Writing Award. His poetry is widely-published in pamphlets and anthologies and has won numerous awards and been short-listed for a number of festival and competition prizes. Join Stephen on 4 August, as he talks to Lucinda Hawksley on the Goldster Inside Story.

Legendary television news correspondent, Jim Laurie, was a 22-year-old adventurer when he arrived in Cambodia in 1970.  Five years later in April 1975 he reported on the catastrophic collapse of first Cambodia and then Vietnam. 

And he was in love. 

His stunning and highly-acclaimed memoir, The Last Helicopter: Two Lives in Indochina, is a story of a young woman left behind and a reporter coming of age in a world of war; a gripping memoir of Indo China in the 1970s. 

Jim was helicoptered out of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, by the U.S. Military. In the chaos and fog of war,  his love, Soc Sinan, was left behind.  As the genocidal Khmer Rouge swept through the country, Sinan ended up in one of their brutal concentration camps. 

Jim vowed to get her out. Join this very moving Goldster Inside Story to find out what happened. 

Drawn from recorded interviews with Sinan and Jim’s own experiences, The Last Helicopter captures the tensions, fears, and extremes of the early 1970s. It also recalls life in places of grace and exotic beauty that have disappeared forever. 

Jim went on to become an award-winning reporter interviewing key global figures such as China’s Deng Xiaoping, India’s Indira Gandhi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.   Join Jim Laurie in conversation with Humphrey Hawksley, 12.00 Friday August 5th 2022 on Goldster Inside Story. 

In this cliff-hanging Inside Story, Goldster brings you a double-header. On one side we will talk about a satirical novel Victor in Trouble. When case officer Victor Caro arrives in Rome for his retirement tour, he and his family anticipate a three-year joy ride filled with good food, even better wine, and all the cultural wonders the Eternal City has to offer. But when Russia’s intelligence services help install a new American president, Victor finds himself in a national security nightmare. And can Victor protect America from a president who shares his intelligence briefings with a Russian matryoshka doll? Victor realizes there will be no coasting to the retirement finish line. This tour is going to be trouble.
And then….give it a beat….and we have the other side. Victor in Trouble’s author is a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations. Alex Finley has worked in West Africa and Europe and received an award for her outstanding contributions to the counterterrorism mission. Since leaving her day job, Alex has appeared as an expert on a range of American media outlets, commenting widely in Russia and Ukraine. She also runs a Twitter handle that tracks the movements of Russian oligarch’s yachts. Victor in Trouble is the third in her fantastic series and join Alex in conversation with Humphrey on Goldster Inside Story, 12.00 Thursday August 11th 2022

On the morning of 11 October 1921, Michael Collins, leader of the ‘Irish murder gang’, bounded through the door of 10 Downing Street and shook hands with the British Prime Minister. So began the first day of the most important political negotiations in modern Anglo-Irish history. Nearly two months later, in the early hours of 6 December 1921, the talks culminated in the signing of what in Ireland is known simply as ‘the Treaty’ – a document that had been designed to end one violent conflict, but which soon gave rise to another. 

A year later, four months before the treaty was implemented Michael Collins was assassinated by extremist Irish republicans.  

A century on, in The Treaty, award-winning journalist Gretchen Friemann has produced a gripping account of the tense and protracted negotiations between the Irish and British delegations, shining a fresh light on the complex politics and high-stakes bargaining that produced the agreement. 

This stunning Goldster Inside Story will mark the centenary of the Michael Collins’ murder and,  in their hour long conversation, Gretchen and Humphrey will explore a vivid arc of narrative history that resonates across the intervening century to the age of Brexit.  Gretchen will also bring to life the key players including Lloyd George, Churchill and Chamberlain of the British team, and Collins, Griffith, Gavan Duffy and Erskine Childers of the Irish delegation.

Join Humphrey Hawksley and Gretchen Friemann at 12.00 August 25th to explore the tumult of Anglo-Irish history and how what unfolded then is still impacting all our lives today.

A Room with a View was published in 1908 and has become a well-deserved classic. This comic novel follows the adventures of Lucy Honeychurch, a young woman coming of age at the beginning of a new century, before anyone (including the author) knew that WW1 was looming. At the start of the book, Lucy and her older cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, have recently arrived in Florence. For the rest of the novel, the people they meet at their pensione in Florence, as well the two women’s shared experiences of Italy in general, start to have an impact on their wider lives and on that of their circle of friends and family back in Surrey. 

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was a rather shy member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a keen observer of human nature and used his writing as a way to poke fun at hypocrisy and double standards – something he suffered from as a gay man in a homophobic society. He wrote six novels, leaving a seventh unfinished at his death. Five were published during his lifetime: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howard’s End and A Passage to India. His sixth book, Maurice, a gay love story, was published posthumously, in 1971.

Many of us will know A Room with a View from the Merchant-Ivory film, but if you’ve never read the book, or haven’t read it for a long time, you are in for a treat as you discover Forster’s gorgeous writing. Read it and come along to the Book of the Month on Friday 28 August to chat about the novel with Lucinda and the rest of the Book Club community.

James Rosone and Miranda Watson are one of the most successful self-published husband-wife writing teams on Amazon. James began his writing career as a form of therapy after his experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. He has turned a hobby into a career. In her spare time as a nurse, Miranda helped him. Both James and Miranda have now given up their day jobs to write best-sellers, often bringing in other co-authors. The series includes Falling Empires about cyber-attacks and the threat to America from within, Red Storm which includes a volume called Battlefield Ukraine, and The Monroe Doctrine, which in its range of issues includes Artificial Intelligence and China. In conversation with James, Humphrey Hawksley will explore the crime-thriller genre asking what issues and types of characters attract. He will also ask James and Miranda to share their incredible experience of self-publishing from their first book to their successful formula now. James will also tell how he encourages other military veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars to find a new purpose as authors. We all read stories about the millionaire self-published authors, but rarely do we get to know how it actually works. From writing to technical social media wizardry, from world turmoil to casting the compelling lead character, join Humphrey with James Rosone Thursday, June 30th 2022 on Goldster Inside Story. Hopefully, Miranda will break free from her schedule to join them. 

The Mercenary River tells the story of the River Thames and London’s struggle to supply its citizens with water from the Middle Ages to the present day.  Humphrey Hawksley is with author and journalist Nick Higham to discuss his page-turning narrative that uncovers a series of incredible stories about Britain’s most famous river: 

How the most powerful steam engine in the world was first brought to London; how one Victorian London water company deliberately cut off 2,000 households, even though it knew they had no alternative source of supply; a financial scandal which brought two of the water companies close to collapse in the 1870s; and the Chelsea Waterworks which was the first in the world to filter the water it supplied its customers, the same technique still used to purify two-thirds of London’s drinking water..  The final question Humphrey will put to Nick – are today’s 21st century water companies any improvement on their Victorian predecessors?   Mercenary River is a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs. It is also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. Nick Higham is a Londoner, who spent thirty years with the BBC, fifteen as their arts and media correspondent and also hosting ‘Meet the Author’ on the BBC News Channel. So he may have some tips for Goldster’s Inside Story presenters. Join Nick and Humphrey 12.00 Friday September 2nd  on a historical trip down the river on Goldster Inside Story.