This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Life and Arts with Dominic Green for Spectator USA.

Hello, I'm Dominic Green, I'm Life and Arts editor of Spectator USA and I'd like to welcome you to our weekly podcast.

My guest this week is the writer David Price-Jones,

known across the Atlantic and all over the English-speaking world as a novelist,

foreign correspondent, historian, and most recently autobiographer. David, welcome to Spectator USA.

Well, thank you very much. Now, you have a history with the spectator going back to the early 1960s.

Yes, I was its literary editor and I was also its theatre critic. They had a man called Malcolm Rutherford, who was the dog's body, and he gave me the job of theatre critic. He was very keen on Bertolt Brecht, so we had to

write about him most of the time. One of the first people you reviewed for them, I believe,

was V.S. Naples, who died recently. June, I tried to get him to review, but he never would. He was working for Carl Miller,

and Carl Miller and I were deadly rivals, and I tried to poach him off the new statesman,

and I failed. Vidya said he would, but he was always too preoccupied or too busy or too

something to actually deliver.

I thought I had him with a review of J.P. Don Levy, but I didn't.

When you mentioned Burtold Brecht just then, I remembered, it is true, of course,

the past is a different country.

And did you find when you were writing your autobiography, a family memoir in a way, fault lines, which it came out in 2015, did you find it difficult to explain to people, the modern reader, if there is a singular person like that,

did you find it difficult to explain to them how the past was?

Well, my past seems unbelievable, so I can't explain it to myself,

let alone to anybody else, which is why it's called fault lines,

because my family inhabit a lot of fault lines. I think I'm anti-deluvian. I doesn't approach the modern world at all, does it? You were born in Vienna in 1936. Yes, I'm

definitely an escape central European, cafe intellectual. That's what I am. And your parents, tell us about them.

Well, my mother was, she was also like me, born in Vienna.

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