Yanis Varoufakis and Patrick McGrath

A Good Read

BBC

Books, Arts

4.2 • 847 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis chooses Margaret Atwood's treatise on debt - Payback: Debt & The Shadow Side of Wealth as his go to book for students of economics. It examines money lending throughout the ages and how it has been portrayed in classic literature. Patrick McGrath's choice is a novel by Nigel Balchin set during the London Blitz: Darkness Falls From The Air which he loves for its humour and for its stoic main character Bill Sarratt, a civil servant whose attempts to get anything done are thwarted by bureaucracy. Yanis describes Bill as a 'Sir Humphrey' from Yes Minister character and was unexpectedly delighted to discover the novel. Harriett's choice is by Kiley Reid: a smart look at race politics in the USA through the story of a young black nanny and her white employer, white boyfriend and black friends. Such A Fun Age was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020.

Producer: Maggie Ayre

Transcript

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0:00.0	Things just swirling around my head.
0:03.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:06.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:11.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:13.4	I'm Jenny Clemen and in the new series of The Gift,
0:17.5	we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:22.8	They did know that I was different.
0:25.7	You had kids together.
0:27.0	Yeah.
0:27.5	Then you met.
0:28.3	Then we met.
0:29.2	The Gift.
0:30.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:34.2	BBC Sounds, music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:38.7	Hello, I'm Harriet Gilbert.
0:40.4	Thank you for downloading a good read, the podcasts,
0:43.6	where two guests and I recommend books we love and describe why we love them.
0:47.9	We don't always see eye to eye, but I hope you'll find some great reading suggestions here.
0:55.2	Hello, with me today is the economist and politician Janis Varofakis, leader of the Greek
1:00.7	political party Merah 25, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe movement, and Greece's finance
1:07.6	minister for six turbulent months in 2015.
1:20.3	Janice's many publications include Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, and, most recently, another now, dispatches from an alternative present.
	...

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