This week Andrew Marr is joined by Robert Kagan, Andrew O'Hagan, Neil LaBute and Helen Rappaport.
ROBERT KAGAN, currently advisor to presidential candidate Senator John McCain, warns of a division between the world’s democracies and autocracies, with the United States and Europe lining up against countries like China and Russia. Hopes that the fall of Communism marked a final victory for liberal democracy are misguided, he says, and calls on democratic countries to form a new ‘league of democracies’ to counter the threat from autocracies and Islamist radicalism. He also voices cautious optimism about the war in Iraq. The Return of History and the End of Dreams is published by Atlantic Books.
The novelist and writer ANDREW O’HAGAN charts a changing society in Britain and America in his new collection of essays. He explores the great tradition of essay writing from Hazlitt to Orwell and asks what the essay can do to make sense of contemporary society, from the child killers of James Bulger to our revelling in the celebrity that has fallen from grace. Both are evidence, he argues, of an idea of community that has changed forever. The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America is published by Faber and Faber.
Known for his often cruel amorality plays, playwright, director and filmmaker NEIL LABUTE is back with Fat Pig, his provocatively titled play which has opened in London’s West End. It describes a man who can’t handle the jibes of his work colleagues when he falls in love with an overweight woman. Fat Pig is on at Trafalgar Studios, London.
In the early hours of 17 July 1918, the Imperial Family of Russia were gunned down in the cellar of a house in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg by their Bolshevik guards. In her latest book, historian HELEN RAPPAPORT counts down the last days of the Romanov family’s lives, drawing on new sources to focus on the dynamic within their closely guarded house. Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs is published by Hutchinson.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites
