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FiveBooks Interviews
Author Kate Figes says uninhibited married sex is more liberating than anything you’ll find in single life – it’s more about head space than clitoral stimulation. She chooses FiveBooks on sex and marriage.
Veteran FBI Agent Keith Slotter chooses FiveBooks on crime and the FBI,
including one book that says legalising abortion cuts crime – the
criminals never get to be born.
Author Meg Rosoff writes for teenagers and she chooses FiveBooks that help us understand them, be they kings, schoolboys, murderers or all three.
Andrew Cayley is about to take up his post as prosecutor at the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal. In FiveBooks he reflects on the pity of war, the power of inspirational leadership and the importance of bringing people to justice in order to create a better world.
In a shocking FiveBooks interview, Professor David Downes says mass incarceration in the US has rolled back many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement. The brute fact is that over 12 per cent of black men aged 25-29 are disenfranchised behind bars.
British trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Until then they just put a red hot poker in your hand and waited to see if it healed or not. Of course, says criminal barrister Alex McBride, if evidence against you was weak they’d cool the poker off a bit.
The Dark Age historian Simon Young gives us the archaeological evidence that Boudicca and her Celtic warriors decapitated Roman statues throughout Britain and says people are still fishing bronze heads out of British rivers even now. He chooses FiveBooks on the Celts.
Dr Stephen Lucas, an expert on the law of the Soviet Union, reminds us, in a seasonal retrospective, that idealism does not necessarily make for good law. What matters is how the law works in practice. He chooses his seminal FiveBooks on Soviet law
While campaigners are keen to upgrade noise pollution from a nuisance to a serious environmental problem, Sara Maitland says physical silence now exists only in outer space. She chooses FiveBooks glorifying silence.
Good news for Dante – Florence’s city council has revoked his exile after 700 years. Here, Nick Havely explains why and chooses his FiveBooks on the poet and his works.