Palestine in a World on Fire

A collection of interviews with some of the world's leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.

Dan Cruickshank's quest is to tell the story of civilisation through the greatest of man's achievements. It will also be the story of his travels, and who and what he meets along the way. Whether standing before the solemn heads of Easter Island, investigating the mysterious Nazca lines in Peru or the magnificent temple of Borobodur in Java, Dan is never less than fascinating about the origins, construction, mysteries and vicissitudes of each of these monuments to the great civilisations of the world.

100 years ago, just 67 words on a single sheet of paper lit a fire in the Holy Land, igniting the most intractable conflict of modern times. The Balfour Declaration was the first time the British government endorsed the establishment of 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine. While many Palestinians see it as a betrayal, many Israelis believe it was the foundation stone of modern Israel and the salvation of the Jews. The legacy of the declaration is one that BBC reporter Jane Corbin has watched unfold over the last 30 years - charting the conflict on both sides.

The lightning rod for Alabaster DePlume’s luminous follow up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 was personal. “Someone was going through a thing,” says the Mancunian poet-performer. “I said, ‘go forward in the courage of your love’. And then I thought 'yeah, that's what I need to hear as well’.”

Gene Watson emerged in the mid-'70s as the heir to the kind of straight-ahead hard Texas country pioneered in the '50s and '60s by George Jones and Ray Price. Like such peers as Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley, Watson updated the old-fashioned sound with lyrical and musical tweaks, so his hits conformed to the country airwaves of the '70s while still sounding of piece with the tried-and-true Texas tradition. Watson's first big hit arrived in 1975 when "Love in the Hot Afternoon" reached number three on Billboard's Country charts. For the next decade, he was a fixture in the Top 10, gradually coming to rely on ballads instead of two-steps. Watson's star began to fade as the '80s came to a close, but he never stopped working: He continued to record and perform into the 2010s.

The daughter of a Jewish model and troubled TV star Lauren Booth survived a house fire, lived through the excesses of the nineties as an aspiring actress, welcomed ‘our’ Tony Blair into her family, put her life as a parent at risk to report on Palestine, twice, found faith in a mosque in Iran – unsure before she entered whether they would be slaughtering goats or screaming with rage – and then as a new Muslim sobered up, started praying and became a hajji.