As Gilbert and Sullivan have someone sing in Pinafore, “things are seldom what they seem.” A great instance in recent American history is the Cuban Missile Crisis. This refers to the causes, the weapons, the Soviet motives, the deep disagreements at the White House and how close we actually came to war. A very important and valuable book on the crisis was written by John Gresham who was our guest, together with foreign policy historian Arthur Cyr, one night in 2006. That thrilling and, frankly, scary discussion held our listeners riveted. Also heard in this program is the speech by JFK that announced the full blockade of Cuba – and that ordered the Soviets to turn back their missile-carrying ships and have the missiles already based in Cuba fully dismantled.

Lots of them have been written though sometimes in rather stiff, academic language. A swinging, delightful (but still philologically accurate) version was done back in 2007. Its author Seth Lerer, a professor of English at Stanford, was an equally swinging and delightful guest. Here is our rather richly illustrated conversation about the Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German and French origins of the language which has now become the most widely used in all the modern world. Listen carefully and you can hear the host’s audacious attempt to recite the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

During her last week in office (early 2001) U. S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright came to visit with us and here in a longish excerpt she does her “tour of the horizon” – focusing on the outstanding foreign affairs problems she was about to hand over to her successor. She was the first woman to fill that office and also the second of Jewish familial background. Like Kissinger, she is careful not to speak too favorably of the Israeli regime while managing to project an easy fluency in international politics.

…named Ed Conlon joined us one night back in 2004. Of the many beat cops who have written about “the life,”  he is the only one we have met who is also a graduate of Harvard. What he has to say about his adventures, misadventures and the eternal problem of crime-control is strikingly relevant to the current national “crisis” about violence in front of and behind the badge. One inevitably remembers the Gilbert and Sullivan lines: “a policeman’s life is not an ‘appy one.”