Released every other Saturday, Radio Sohemia offers a combination of recordings of our live events and interviews that weren't recorded in front of a live audience. Though the presenters will vary, the podcast's regular continuity announcer will be Mr Miles Cholmondley-Warner.
Details of each podcast and links to it can be found below.
The Sohemian Society would like to thank its President-in-Life, Virginia Ironside, for making a generous contribution towards the cost of buying equipment to record our live events.
From 1935 onwards, Mr Miles Cholmondley-Warner (who sometimes uses the stage-name, Jon Glover) was a familiar voice on the BBC Home Service. Almost four years after making his debut on the station, he volunteered for military service. He was subsequently appointed Liaison Officer to the French Army’s Catering Corps. When France fell, he became a prisoner of war in Germany, where he spent almost five years presenting Stalag Luft III’s radio programme, The Hut Parade. After the end of hostilities, Mr Cholmondley-Warner was co-presenter on a series of short films for the Ministry of Information. These include the ever-popular, “Diseases of the Mind”.
Photo: Paul Willetts
Episode 12: Early Victorian A.I.
The Warburg Institute science historian Professor John Tresch chats with former Wellcome Institute archivist Ross MacFarlane about the Eureka Machine and other early nineteenth-century forerunners of the programmable electronic computer. They also discuss the many links between these and the American writer Edgar Allan Poe.
Episode 11: London at War, 1939-1945
Jerry White and Travis Elborough in conversation about Jerry’s most recent book, The Battle of London, 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire.
Episode 10: The Summer of 1976
John L. Williams and Travis Elborough discuss John’s new book, Heatwave, which chronicles the famously hot and eventful British summer of 1976, a summer remembered bot just for its intense heat but also for riots, inter-racial violence, and the emergence of punk music.
Episode 9: The Scandalous History of Dolphin Square
Join former M.P.-turned-author Simon Danczuk for an amusing conversation with the Sohemian Society co-founder Marc Glendening about the long and often downright weird history of Dolphin Square, an exclusive 1930s London housing development. Among the featured residents are the eccentric spymaster Maxwell Knight, the gay spy John Vassall, and the Labour Party politician/British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley.
Episode 8: Soho's Golden Age of Glamour
Publisher Yak El-Droubie talks to the lively and charming eighty-nine-year-old former nude model Jean Sporle about her life. Their conversation focuses on late 1950s and early 1960s Soho when she worked for Pamela Green and George Harrison Marks, creators of the groundbreaking magazine, Kamera, which brought artistic flair to so-called glamour photography.
Episode 7: Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country
Edward Parnell is in conversation with Paul Willetts about ghost stories and bereavement, the twin preoccupations of Edward’s hit nonfiction debut. Published in 2019, Ghostland was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography and received unanimously enthusiastic reviews.
Episode 6: Gay Men’s Lives in Postwar London
Peter Parker talks to Travis Elborough about Some Men in London, Peter’s recent, acclaimed and often witty two-volume collage of letters, diaries, and newspaper stories, chronicling gay male life between 1945 and 1968, the year when sex between adult men was decriminalised. The discussion is punctuated by the actor Jon Glover’s readings from the diaries of Noël Coward and others.
Episode 5: David Litvinoff and the 1960s Rock ’n’ Roll Underground
A conversation between the nonfiction writers Keiron Pim and Paul Willetts. They focus on Keiron’s debut biography, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a portrait of David Litvinoff, the East End rebel who formed an improbable link between the Rolling Stones, Lucian Freud, and the Krays. Litvinoff is perhaps best-remembered as the inspiration for the cult 1970 movie, Performance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox.
Episode 4: Bohemian Women of Soho and Fitzrovia
A recording of a recent Sohemian Society event at which the painter/writer Darren Coffield and the art dealer/critic Clive Jennings discuss Darren’s most recent book, Queens of Bohemia. It charts the rackety lives of Nina Hamnett, Henrietta Moraes and other women who inhabited the mid-twentieth-century bohemian world that thrived in Soho and Fitzrovia/North Soho.
Photo: Nancy Cunard, c.1925.
Episode 3: The Liberation of Paris
Nonfiction writer Paul Willetts talks to the historian and former foreign correspondent Patrick Bishop about his latest book, Paris ’44. Through the entwined stories of soldiers, war correspondents, and French citizens on both sides of the resistance/collaboration divide, it tells the story of the Nazi occupation and the subsequent liberation of the French capital.
Episode 2: The Life and Work of Nick Drake
A recording of a recent Sohemian Society event at which Drake's biographer Richard Morton Jack discussed the singer-songwriter's life and work with the writers James Wilson and Cathi Unsworth. Last year Wilson published a novel called The Pieces, which features a Drake-like late 1960s English folk singer.
Episode 1: Jonathan Meades
Jonathan Meades is in conversation with his longstanding editor and friend, John Mitchinson. They’ll not only be looking back on Jonathan’s career as a journalist, documentary film-maker, and fiction writer but also talking about his new novel, the wonderfully titled Empty Wigs. Writing in The Times, Tim Teeman declared, “Meades is brainy, scabrous, mischievous and a bugger to pigeonhole: a fizzing anomaly…”