Dialogue April - May 2005

Click on a date to listen to the show.

Programme 9: May 28th
Andy O'Mahony talks with Matthew Parris, former Tory politician and columnist with The Times. After Cambridge and Yale, Parris joined the Conservative central office and at roughly the same time (aged 26) he discovered he was gay. He worked for Michael Dobbs, Chris Patten, and Mrs Thatcher (who famously fired him), before entering parliament himself.
(First broadcast 2nd August 2003)

Programme 8: May 21st
Andy O'Mahony's guest today is Michael Boulter who discusses his book Extinction, Evolution and the End of Man. 65 million years ago the dinosaurs were destroyed in a mass extinction event that could not have been predicted. Out of the devastation, new life developed and the world regained its natural equilibrium - until now. Now scientists are beginning to uncover signs of similar event on the horizon - the end of man. Michael Boulter is head of the team analysing Fossil Record 2, the largest database of information on extinct animals and plants. He has also written numerous articles on how we understand evolutionary change.

Programme 7: May 14th
Andy O'Mahony's guest today is Sue McGregor. Sue MacGregor was, until 2002, the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today Programme. She was the longest serving interviewer - and the only woman on the team. Sue then took over Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 for 15 years when struggles for equal pay and equal opportunities for women were at their keenest. Her interviews with key figures were models of their kind: Margaret Thatcher, Enid Blyton and Nelson Mandela were treated to MacGregor's deceptively polite approach.
(First broadcast 11 October 2003)

Programme 6: May 7th
Sarah Bradford talks to Andy O'Mahony about her biography of Lucrezia Borgia. Sarah is the author of Lucrezia Borgia: Life, love and death in Renaissance Italy. The book asks whether Lucrezia Borgia was really an infamous murderess or simply the victim of bad press? Her name has echoed through history as a byword for evil - a poisoner who committed incest with her natural father, Pope Alexander VI, and with her brother, Cesare Borgia. Sarah Bradford gives a fascinating account of Lucrezia's life in all its colourful controversy.

Programme 5: April 30th
Andy O'Mahony's guest is Max Hastings, former editor of The Diaiy Telegraph.
(First broadcast 27th September 2003)

Programme 4: April 23rd
Andy O'Mahony meets former British Labour MP Giles Radice, who has published his diaries 1980-2001. Giles Radice's diaries are not only an account of a distinguished parliamentary and political life, they are also one of only two published Labour diaries for the period (the other, of course, being that of Tony Benn). The book gives an insider's view of the frustrating years in opposition in the 1980s, the short-lived John Smith leadership, the rise to power of Tony Blair, and of the success and failures of the Labour government from 1997-2001. It is a compelling portrait of Labour in power, including the tensions between Blair and Brown.

Programme 3: April 16th
In the second of a two-part programme, the philosopher Gillian Rose (1947 - 1995) talks to Andy O'Mahony about her autobiographical memoir Love's Work.

First broadcast on 4th November 1995

Programme 2: April 9th
In the first of a two-part programme, the philosopher Gillian Rose (1947 - 1995) talked to Andy O'Mahony about her autobiographical memoir Love's Work.

Programme 1: April 2nd
In the first programme, Andy O'Mahony is in conversation with historian David Cesarani, who has written a compelling biography of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was at the centre of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe between 1941 and 1945. He was directly responsible for transporting over 2 million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. Yet he was an obscure figure until his sensational capture by the Israeli Secret Service in Argentina in 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem. Cesarani's book is a fascinating case study of how an individual can be led to evil.