February 20, 2009 – 6:58 pm
Phillip Blond is sitting in his London office. “I think mine is a genuinely radical project,” he says. “Lots of people on the left have said to me that if the Tories do what I’m telling them to, they’ll vote for them.”
My profile of Phillip Blond, proponent of the “Red Tory” thesis and David Cameron’s [...]
November 19, 2008 – 11:32 am
I have a piece in the December issue of Prospect about the reaction of African-American intellectuals to Barack Obama’s recent election victory. The article was based on conversations I had with a number of black academics and intellectuals shortly before and immediately after the election. You can read transcripts of three of those conversations - [...]
February 6, 2008 – 9:10 am
This interview with Martin Amis appears this week in Time Out.
Martin Amis’s study, which occupies part of a converted garage behind his house in Primrose Hill, shows the signs of work in progress: his laptop sails on a tide of paper and there are books everywhere, in teetering piles or splayed in medias res [...]
September 11, 2007 – 8:13 pm
This interview with the novelist Tom McCarthy appears in the current issue of Time Out London.
Tom McCarthy’s first novel ‘Remainder’ was an unlikely bestseller. The chilly, highly formalised anatomy of an obsession (that of an unnamed narrator who has suffered an unspecified trauma), ‘Remainder’ was passed over by several mainstream publishers before being rescued from [...]
January 23, 2007 – 1:40 pm
This interview with Nick Cohen, in which he and I discuss his forthcoming book What’s Left?, appears in the new issue of Time Out (January 24-30; the piece isn’t up on their website yet).
In Ian McEwan’s novel ‘Saturday’, the protagonist Henry Perowne watches as demonstrators gather for the massive anti-war march of February 2003. He [...]
January 9, 2007 – 4:43 pm
This piece about The Paris Review Interviews, edited by Philip Gourevitch, appears this week in Time Out.
The first issue of The Paris Review, a literary magazine founded by a group of young American exiles in France in 1953, opened with a ‘Letter to an editor’ written by the novelist William Styron. He disdained the usual [...]
Time Out London recently revamped its website, making much more of its content freely available online—including my interview with Salman Rushdie, which took place at the end of August last year.
Two years ago, I interviewed John Gray for The Philosophers’ Magazine just after the publication of his short book, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Our conversation was wide-ranging and, since some of it touches on the distinctive nature of Islamist ideology, it seemed a good idea to post the transcript [...]
January 10, 2005 – 10:34 pm
This is the transcript of a conversation I had last May with Jonathan Coe, just before the publication of his splendid biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant. The transcript was the basis for a much shorter feature that appeared in Time Out London (not available online).
JD: I have two lines of questioning. One [...]