From the archive: Trotsky in Mexico; Angela Carter on the maternity ward

01/07/23 • 18 min

Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

In a second archive edition of the audio long read, we bring you two classic magazine articles. In the first, the then editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, visits Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, where the Russian communist revolutionary was the guest of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (here referred to only as “Rivera’s wife”, though she was also Trotsky’s lover, or about to be). Martin wanted to ask the exile about the show trials then being held in Moscow, in which Stalin extracted confessions of sedition from Trotskyists. Why, he asked, had his supporters not been bolder and stood their ground? He came away from the encounter, beside a “bright blue patio where the bougainvillea blazes in the sunshine”, with more questions than he brought.

In the second article, the ground-breaking novelist Angela Carter writes about her experiences on a London maternity ward in 1983, shortly after becoming a mother for the first time at the age of 42. As in her fiction, she captures a strange mix of emotions and characters – the insulting doctor, the bossy nurse, the struggling NHS hospital, the bliss of breastfeeding her son, “who is doomed to love us, because we are his parents”, she writes. “The same goes for us. That is life. That’s the hell of it.”

Read by Adrian Bradley and Melissa Denes. You can read text versions of Martin’s article here, and of Carter’s here.

For more about Carter’s life and work, read A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (her friend and literary executor) and The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon.

If you enjoyed this episode, listen to From the New Statesman archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin.

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Read by Adrian Bradley and Melissa Denes. You can read text versions of Martin’s article here, and of Carter’s here.

For more about Carter’s life and work, read A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (her friend and literary executor) and The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon.

If you enjoyed this episode, listen to From the New Statesman archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin.

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

From the archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin

HG Wells’s interview with Stalin in 1934, and the debate that followed, was one of the most striking episodes in the history of the New Statesman. Wells – the novelist and socialist famous for science fiction such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – used the interview to try to coax Stalin into a more conciliatory position, challenging (too gently for some) his views on international relations, the rhetoric of class war and freedom of expression for writers.

The interview took place in Moscow at a time when many British socialists and fellow travellers were journeying to the Soviet Union seeking inspiration in the communist project. Wells was on the lookout for signs that his socialist world state was coming into being, and the interview with Stalin was conceived as a foil to his meeting with Roosevelt the previous year. The intention was to make a comparison between Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Soviet Five Year Plan, and to harness the progressive potential of both. Wells thought they were similar projects and hoped that they might somehow meet in the middle. As he put it to Stalin, “Is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas and needs, between Washington and Moscow?” But Stalin’s insistence on the antagonism between the two worlds more accurately prefigured the Cold War to come.

The interview, which was criticised from both sides as either too indulgent or too critical of Stalin, showed the dying ideals of Edwardian liberalism chastened by an encounter with modern totalitarianism. It provoked strong reactions in the letters pages of the New Statesman from George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes (the co-founder and the then chairman of the magazine), resulting in a clash between three intellectual giants that revealed a great deal about the tensions within the left in the 1930s. Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, thought the interview and the letters interesting enough to be republished as a pamphlet. Today, it remains a fascinating reminder of the role the literary intelligentsia played in political debate during what WH Auden called, perhaps unfairly, a “low dishonest decade”.

Read by Adrian Bradley, Chris Stone and May Robson.

Read the text version here. It was first published in the New Statesman in 1934 and re-published on the website on 18 April 2014.

If you enjoyed this listen to Stalin and Putin: a tale of two dictators

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

The good social network: what Twitter could learn from the coffeehouse

As Twitter and Facebook stumble through Elon Musk’s takeover and Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on the metaverse, questions abound about the future of social media. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be its attitude to participation, networking, user rights and free speech? What should be its business model? What societal role should it seek to play? What, ultimately, is it for?

In this essay for the New Statesman’s special Christmas issue of 2022, Jeremy Cliffe imagines the improved, restored social network of the future by drawing on the heritage of the coffeehouse, “the original social network”. It was here, as the German theorist Jürgen Habermas has argued, that the concept of the public sphere arose: a space for news and discussion dominated neither by the state nor the market. Cliffe explores the history and literature of the coffeehouse tradition to find lessons for the troubled social media platforms of today – and those who would seek to challenge them.

Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe.

This article appears in the 07 Dec 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas Special. You can read text version here.

If you enjoyed this episode, listen to Are ‘Substackademics’ the new public intellectuals?

Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.