Dame Judi Dench has played everyone from the writer Iris Murdoch to M in the James Bond films. But among the roles the actress is most closely associated, are Shakespeare's heroines and some of his villians.
Amongst those roles are the star-crossed lover Juliet, the comical Titania and the tragic Lady Macbeth. Now she's reflecting on that work, and Shakespeare's work in Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent.
The book is comprised of Dench's conversations with her friend, the actor and director Brendan O'Hea.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
This week on the podcast, we're revisiting a conversation we had with Ava Chin about her book, Mott Street. Through decades of painstaking research, the fifth-generation New Yorker discovered the stories of how her ancestors bore and resisted the weight of the Chinese Exclusion laws in the U.S. – and how the legacy of that history still affects her family today.
Host Brittany Luse sits down with Arionne Nettles, author of We Are the Culture: Black Chicago's Influence on Everything. Arionne shares how Black media in Chicago influenced the way Black Americans see themselves and why the city deserves to be called 'the heart of Black America.'
Walters was the first woman to co-anchor a national news show on prime time television. "The path she cut is one that many of us have followed," says biographer Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker.
Journalist Ari Berman says the founding fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of an elite minority — and that their decisions continue to impact American democracy today.
When actor George Takei was 4 years old, he was labeled an "enemy" by the U.S. government and sent to a string of incarceration camps. His new children's book about that time is My Lost Freedom.
Salman Rushdie is probably most closely associated with his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, a book inspired by the life of the prophet Muhummad. The book was notorious not just for its contents but because of the intense backlash, and the threat it posed to his safety and wellbeing.
While Rushdie saw it as an exploration of Islamic culture, some Muslims saw it as blasphemous. The year after it published, Iran's supreme leader issued a fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.
Rushdie moved to New York in 2000, and was able to resume the public life of a popular author, but that all changed on August 12th, 2022 when a young man charged at Rushdie while he was on stage at an event, stabbing him at least a dozen times.
After two years, he has chronicled his brush with death, and the aftermath in his new memoir 'KNIFE'.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
Alua Arthur helps people plan for death. A big part of her work is helping them reconcile the lives they lived with the lives they might have wanted. Her memoir is called Briefly Perfectly Human.
Rushdie was onstage at a literary event in 2022 when he was attacked by a man in the audience: "Dying in the company of strangers — that was what was going through my mind." His new book is Knife.
Salman Rushdie is a storyteller. So when you ask him to describe the day, in 2022, when he was attacked and nearly killed by a young man with a knife, Rushdie paints a vivid picture.
Biomedical engineer Rachel Lance says British scientists submitted themselves to experiments that would be considered wildly unethical today in an effort to shore up the war effort.
Author and podcast host Amanda Montell says our brains are overloaded with a constant stream of information that stokes our innate tendency to believe conspiracy theories and mysticism.