Category Archives: Books

Call Me Sir: Ben Kingsley, Fifty Shades of Gray and Victorian erotica

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

A tech journalist once told me that if watching tv on your mobile phone was such a great idea, loads of people would have been walking around with a primitive giant tv on their brick sized phones long ago. By … Continue reading →

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Aliens, abortion and baby machines: HG Wells & John Wyndham

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Woman’s Hour ran a fascinating interview today with novelist Kishwar Desai, about India’s burgeoning  surrogate baby industry. Her exploration of this massive business (an estimated 20,000 babies produced  each year) seems to differ from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale only … Continue reading →

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What the hell’s the Presidency for? Re-assessing LBJ

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

This is based on my interview with  author Robert Caro and fellow American writer, Michael Goldfarb for BBC Radio 3 Night Waves on June 6th. You can listen to the programme here. (last 18 minutes) Which US President won an election with the largest ever … Continue reading →

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The Curse of the Typing Pool

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

As new technology promises voice recognition typing software, and icon based texting, could the traditional QWERTY keyboard finally losing its dominance? Taken for granted, the keyboard has played a central role in the empancipation of women, but also in their … Continue reading →

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Half Blood Blues: Jazz, race and Nazis.

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

When I worked in Berlin in 1998 the trendy record store in the city’s gay-friendly Schoneberg district had a category called “schwarz”(black) music. It took up a lot of the shop and seemed a bizarrely useless generalisation, given the huge … Continue reading →

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New York Fever: Strutting with Travolta

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

This is a talk I gave at the British Film Institute last night at the launch of a new book series on World Film Locations in major cities. The books pick 1 key scene and its locations from each film … Continue reading →

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From Roots to Amina: A history of the well-meant liberal hoax

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

The liberal hoax for a “good cause” has a long tradition. Most bizarre in Tom MacMaster’s defence of his long and increasingly reported fake identity as Amina Arraf, an imprisoned lesbian Syrian blogger, was his claim that he was challenging … Continue reading →

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Whose Bible is it anyway? A discussion on the King James version

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

After all the celebrations for the poetry and power of the King James Version, I chaired a rather more revisionist public panel discussion for the Royal Shakespeare Company on March 9th. In the atmospheric setting of the Stationers’ Hall, off Ludgate … Continue reading →

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Swinging racism: Floella Benjamin’s memoir of 60s London

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Talking to Linda Grant earlier this week about her 60s/70s novel about the privileged babyboomer generation, who “had it so good”, got me thinking again about the remarkably different 60s experience of one of Britain’s best known presenters — Baroness Floella Benjamin. Her frank autobiography about her teenage years is a harrowing account of daily racist abuse, in Swinging London. I thought it worth posting the long version of my exclusive interview, which appeared in The Independent in October, and examines her journey to the House of Lords. The Age of Aquarius musical, Hair, did actually change her life, though not in the way you might think… Continue reading →

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When I Lived In Groovy Times – an interview with the Novelist Linda Grant

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

I spent a fascinating afternoon with award winning British writer, Linda Grant, this week, discussing her timely new novel, We Had It So Good, (published January 20th 2010) about the babyboomer generation and going through photos she’d dug out for my news cameras, to help analyse … Continue reading →

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