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The final version of this conversation with Jeremy Davies is to be published in a special issue of Memory Studies (Vol. 3, No. 3) entitled ‘Nostalgia and the Shapes of History’, edited by Nadia Atia & Jeremy Davies, and scheduled to appear in October 2010.

It’s not just admirers of John Adams’ opera, who have come to believe that western rapprochement with Communist China began with President Richard Nixon’s visit of 1972. I’ve been researching an earlier attempt to lift the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ - this one carried out by Clement Attlee and other leading members of the Labour Party in 1954. The full story of this forgotten mission, which also involved the philosopher A.J. Ayer, the physicist J.D. Bernal, the novelist and classicist Rex Warner, and the artists Paul Hogarth and Stanley Spencer, is reconstructed in my forthcoming book, Passport to Peking, to be published by OUP in October 2010.

I wrote this piece on the disappearance, or otherwise, of the Iron Curtain as a brief ‘essay’ for the BBC World Service’s arts programme, ‘The Strand’. It was broadcast to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the overcoming of the Berlin wall on 10 November 2009.

I’ve been reading a lot about China recently, which is how I came upon a characteristically rambling volume by Osbert Sitwell, entitled Escape with Me! An Oriental Sketch-Book. He opens this account of his pre-war travels in Cambodia and China by remembering how, as a child, he used to visit his paternal grandmother in her ‘large, honey-coloured’ mansion in Surrey…

Why do intelligent people sometimes go gaga on radio? And what happened to Melvyn Bragg on the morning he picked up the wrong piece of paper?

‘I know the Muse of History is a sycophantish partisan; a pretentious, often ignorant humbug. She dotes on Satan, cloaking in exemplary denunciations what psychiatry might call a sadistic taste for works of his which only dirty the memory and spread retaliative infection to the feelings…’ Vernon Lee, writing at the end of 1918.

“In 1964, three British women stepped into the role of ‘civil defence volunteers’ and entered a model shelter next to the Guildhall in York. They spent 24 hours in their miserable hollow, listening to simulated regional broadcasts beamed in from a van outside. They slept for a few hours in a specially sandbagged ‘core’ area intended to protect them against fallout, cooked a meal on a primus stove and swallowed aspirins for their headaches. After a single day they were plainly demoralised. As the Times wrote of the widely reported exercise, ‘even that basic feminine impulse to make frequent cups of tea deserted them. . .’”

Prompted by the idea of ‘rehearsal’ presented in Tracy C. Davis’ book, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke 2007), I suggest a wider account of how theatrical techniques have emerged from the playhouse to shape public life and the political sphere.