James Naughtie

Aug 30, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie |Heather Saul

To find Europe’s contemporary pulse, take a detour into its history. Weimar is a German city of modest size, but bulging with cultural history. Home to Goethe and Schiller, it’s a place of musical pilgrimage from Bach to Liszt and beyond. It fashioned its own golden age. Then it became a byword for failed democracy as the seat of German government from defeat in the First World War to Hitler’s accession.

Jul 21, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie

It is surely the climactic irony of Joe Biden’s long political career that the feeling for a democracy in danger – which brought him out of virtual retirement to try to stop Donald Trump’s re-election as president – has now been subsumed in a street-fighter’s struggle to stay in power. Some of his dearest friends believe it could deliver Trump a chance to change America more profoundly that even Biden used to think possible.

Jul 7, 2024 | sundaypost.com | James Naughtie |Tim Knowles

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Jul 5, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie

Keir Starmer was never going to talk about a rosy new dawn in the early hours of yesterday (“is it not?” – T. Blair, 1997) because, as has been said almost hourly since the election was called, that is not his style. And, as we know with just as much certainty, he and Rachel Reeves are squeezed into an economic straitjacket. So how does he give this government texture and character as it comes to life? It may not be as difficult as we’re tempted to think.

Jan 21, 2024 | independent.co.uk | James Naughtie

It wasn’t exactly a weighty line from King Lear and there was no chance for a soliloquy. But the words had a certain ring. “We did ask the Post Office for an interview. No-one was available.”We were in a mocked-up Today programme studio in a university building in London last summer, recreating an interview from about a decade ago for the now-celebrated drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.