Life Sentences
Podcast

Start Here: Three Conversations to Begin With

If you are new to Life Sentences, these episodes offer a good way in.

Errol Flynn

Was Australia’s most successful ever Hollywood star a loveable rogue or a racist and a rapist? This is a conversation about Errol Flynn that moves beyond myth into questions of charisma, sexuality and self-invention.

Pamela Harriman

How Churchill’s glamorous and seductive daughter-in-law used her charms to gain crucial intelligence at the highest levels during the war and lived a life of scandal and intrigue on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a biography shaped by intelligence, politics and the subtle power of influence.

Nick Cave

How did a shy, sensitive, gawky teen growing up in a conservative regional backwater become a subversive icon of punk and beyond? This is a discussion of Nick Cave that explores punk, performance and the evolution of artistic identity.

Recent Episodes

Why You Should Listen to Life Sentences

Listeners often tell me they enjoy the podcast because it reveals the hidden detective work behind biography — the archival discoveries, moral dilemmas and surprising revelations that shape how a life is ultimately understood.

The conversations are often unexpected, occasionally mischievous and always curious about what really happens when someone sets out to tell the story of another human life.

Why Biography?

Biography sits somewhere between storytelling, detective work and psychology.

To write about a life is to follow a trail of letters, memories, contradictions and half‑truths. You begin with a set of facts and end up confronting something much larger: the complexity of being human.

The biographers who appear on Life Sentences have spent years following these trails. When we talk, they often reveal the AHA moments that changed their understanding of their subject — the document that shifted the narrative, the conversation that opened a door, the discovery that complicated everything.

Those moments are what make biography irresistible.

I believe my interest in biography enhances my work as a moderator, broadening my understanding of human nature and the challenges that individuals face.