Slide Author, Daniel Kalder
Thus Spake Daniel Kalder
Thus Spake Daniel Kalder: Essays, reviews and marginalia by the author of The Infernal Library, Strange Telescopes and Lost Cosmonaut.

Essays

by Daniel Kalder

Here Be Deplorables

A few years ago I was at a wedding in Delaware when the father of the bride, on learning that I lived in Austin, asked whether Texans still wore spurs and had guns holstered at their hips. I assumed h

Death Sentences

Daniel Kalder spent almost a decade reading the books of history’s worst tyrants so that you wouldn’t have to. Here he selects some of his favorite sentences written by dictators. Colonel

Lost Territories

I  Soul It is well-known that when Lenin died in 1924 his brain was extracted from his skull and subsequently dissected by Soviet scientists who sought to reveal the source of his genius. Less well-

Voice

A selection of radio broadcasts and podcasts for the BBC and elsewhere, usually with me as a contributor or interview subject.

Immortal North

BBC Radio 3 (Daniel as Contributor)  As the clock ticks down towards midnight and a New Year looms, it’s hard to escape thoughts of the passage of time, ageing, the meaning of it all. We lose o

Lost in the Stacks

(Daniel as Contributor)  I did a ton of podcast and radio interviews when The Infernal Library came out. In the early stages I even did a radio tour, which involved answering the phone

Podcast: The Killer’s Canon

There are a lot of very good, very long books out there: Middlemarch, War and Peace, Don Quixote, the Neapolitan Novels. And then there are the very long books you probably won’t ever want to read,

Cornerstones: Siberia

Cornerstones: Siberia BBC Radio 3 (Daniel as Presenter) Daniel Kalder conjures up the vast landscapes east of the Urals, where taiga becomes tundra. Siberia is more a state of mind than a place, given

Digitising Stalin

BBC Radio 4/BBC World Service (Daniel as Presenter)  For Stalin, privacy was key. So how would he feel about his secrets being revealed? The Stalin Digital Archive is the result of a collaboratio

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