The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, it was a golden age of war reporting and fiction, that period from let's say the 1920s to the 1980s

before the end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet took away some of its power and glamour.

These were days when newspapers sent correspondence into battlefields for periodic updates on what was happening.

And the correspondence, after trying to capture reality in the form of journalism, turned to fiction

to attempt to capture some larger truths.

Ernest Hemingway might stand as the ultimate example, and Frederick Forsyth and Graham Green right behind him.

James McManus stands firmly in this tradition. We talked to him about his days

reporting on the war in Rhodesia in the 1970s as foreign correspondent for the Guardian

and his new novel Love in a Lost Land today on the history of literature.

Hello, hello, hello everyone.

I'm Jack Wilson, the host of the podcast.

Welcome to all of you.

Thank you for stopping by. This is a day full of nostalgia.

Nostalgia for those bygone days of journalistic courage, typewriters and newspapers,

the world in which I grew up a lot of us did and as we were growing up

we looked to reporters like James McManus to tell us what was happening in the world and then these guys so often turn to literature. We'll ask James why he did that.

He now works for the Times Literary Supplement as its managing director. So he's very well positioned to talk about this move from

journalism to fiction and literature. And then we'll close things out with my

last book. Why don't we check in with our friend Peter K Anderson who wrote the biography of the real life fool who lived with Kings?

Peter will tell us his choice for the last book he will ever read.

But first, James McManus.

...