The LRB podcast is sponsored by Art and Ideas, a podcast series featuring J. Paul Getty Trust President Jim Cuno in conversation with artists, writers, curators and scholars.

In the latest episode, Ankar Moolstein, author of The Pen and the Brush, how Passion for Art shaped 19th century French novels, discusses the symbiotic relationship between authors

and artists in 19th century France. Search Getty Art and Ideas on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or other

podcast sources. Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor

at the London Review, and I'm

very pleased and rather excited to be talking to Carmen Khalil.

Carmen was born in Melbourne. She was educated at a convent school as she came to England in

1960 at a moment when British culture was about to get a shot in the arm from several

remarkable Australians.

Carmen was followed two years later by Clive James and then by Jermaine Greer.

She worked in publishing for a while and then founded her own house, Varago, in 1973,

for books which she said celebrated women and women's lives.

Varago brought back into print writers who should never have gone out of print, including Stevie Smith and Vera Britton, and most memorably for me because she was such a

complete revelation, Elizabeth Taylor. And it also brought out new writers, notably Angela Carter and

Margaret Atwood. After Varago, Carmen worked at Chateau.

In 2007, she published the much-aclaimed Bad Faith,

a biographical study of a couple who were Nazi sympathizers in Vichy France,

which she was prompted to embark on by the suicide of their daughter,

who had been Carmen's therapist.

She has described herself as not a good feminist, but she has

waged constant war on poltroonish men, as a result of which her term as a judge of the

International Booker Prize did not go smoothly. She's a keen anti-Brexit campaigner, a founder

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