You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

There can be few successful novelists who so divide critical opinion.

John Updike was one of the 20th century's most read of serious American writers. Across nearly

30 novels, hundreds of short stories and eight poetry collections, he turned the lives of

very ordinary, often inarticulate Americans into literature.

Sex, death, religion and the decline of America were his core themes from the Rabbit novels that made his reputation through to the

witches of Eastwick that made him famous. He wrote beautiful sentences that dazzled

readers and most critics but led some to ask if Updyke was a master of style over substance.

One sceptical critic called him a minor novelist with a major style.

Who was that? Who was that man? He said that terrible thing.

I think his name was Bloom.

Arguing forcefully here you see against that judgment is my guest today David Badele.

David began writing and performing comedy sketches at Cambridge University

...