大象传媒

Phillip Dodd interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist aqnd editor of the New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, about his much anticipated new biography of Barack Obama.

It's been 16 months since Barack Obama became the first African American President in US History but this month sees another Obama related first - the first biography to fully chart his rise to power and his early presidency. It's been written by David Remnick, a major figure in American Journalism who succeeded Tina Brown as the editor of the New Yorker and won a Pulitzer Prize for his depiction of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Remnick's account is based on the extensive interviews and testimony available to a writer with such impeccable liberal credentials but it tells the lesser known side of Obama's success. It incorporates Obama's difficult relations with his brilliant father and his bare knuckle political coming of age in Chicago where he negotiated the tensions of the city's racial politics. It involves failure, misjudgement and luck as well as the great oratory skill and political confidence that brought him to the oval office. It places Obama in the continuum of African American politics alongside figures like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery.

Remnick excavates Obama's life and times to argue that it is Obama's extraordinary background that is precisely why - counter-intuitively - he was able to appeal to ordinary Americans. And as he finds himself increasingly at the forefront of international headlines as the BP crisis continues and relations with Iran take a new turn, Remnick examines Obama's unique political style.

Philip will also be considering the puzzle of E.M.Forster with his latest biographer, Wendy Moffat and the novelist, Philip Hensher. Their examination of one our most eminent Edwardians will focus on the central question of Forster's homosexuality -- how far did it shape his sensibility and can it really explain his decision to publish no more novels in his lifetime after A Passage to India in 1924.

Plus, David Goldblatt's final reflection on football and its metaphors on the eve of the World Cup. The geometric beauty of Dutch 'total football' is much celebrated but rarely imitated. This style of playing without distinct roles on the pitch is linked to modernist painting and the spatial ingenuity of a country reclaimed from the sea but it is also a political idea. It is no coincidence that a system of playing football without hierarchy emerged when Dutch art and aesthetics was a way to challenge the country's political masters.

Producer: Kirsty Pope.