Anna Leszkiewicz
New Statesman
United Kingdom
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Past articles by Anna:
The UK’s rubbish-dump mafia
Radio 4’s Buried tells the story of “the astonishing crime you likely haven’t heard of”. → Read More
The last bell foundry in Britain
This peek inside the John Taylor bell foundry is a ringing endorsement for BBC radio storytelling. → Read More
Emily Ratajkowski’s new podcast is a painful listen
High Low with EmRata is both grandiose and trivial, self-absorbed and unrevealing. → Read More
Abolish true crime
The marketing for Netflix’s Jeffrey Dahmer series proves it: the genre is morally indefensible. → Read More
28ish Days Later review: the inside story on periods
28ish Days Later, Radio 4’s day-by-day journey through the menstrual cycle, is lively and wildly informative. → Read More
What the history of the vacuum cleaner tells us about our attitudes to work
Nice Try! Interior looks at a number of contemporary gadgets, asking how their development and popularity through time can help us understand society. → Read More
Why is Taylor Swift re-recording her old albums?
The singer’s decision to release new recordings of her old albums reflects a bitter struggle over music rights. → Read More
Paula Hawkins’s very British murders
The author of The Girl on The Train writes voyeuristic thrillers that situate crime among the comforts of English middle-class life. → Read More
To dissect a good joke, do you have to kill it?
What is it that makes a truly transcendent piece of art? The impossibility of ever finding an answer to this question is the twin horror and lure of all criticism. Only the creator knows, I suppose. Except hearing writers, painters and musicians analyse their own work can have a strangely deadening effect – how stultifying to find that a writer doesn’t share your understanding of their work.… → Read More
BBC Radio 4’s My Teenage Diary is as delightful – and embarrassing – as ever
For most of us, the thought of revisiting our teenage diaries is too embarrassing to contemplate, never mind reading them aloud to a captive audience. But Rufus Hound never runs out of willing volunteers: My Teenage Diary is now in its tenth series on Radio 4, and has been going for more than a decade. This series opens, delightfully, with Jane Horrocks, who, with her squeaky voice, 5ft 2in… → Read More
The Kindness Experiment is a portrait of a close-knit community
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of the idea of “random acts of kindness”. There’s a tweeness and toothlessness to it: I immediately picture a man standing on a street corner holding a sign saying “free hugs”, or someone filming themselves giving unsolicited compliments to strangers. Is anything lasting or meaningful really achieved with such “kindness”? Aren’t they fleeting, → Read More
BBC Radio 4 series Guide Books questions how literature can help us understand the human experience
How might books help us to navigate everyday life? This is the question posed by Damian Barr’s Guide Books (15 June, 11.30am), which looks to authors and the literary world to try to understand different aspects of human experience – starting with our relationships with our bodies. Barr’s guests are the novelist Sarah Perry, the author of The Essex Serpent who has written → Read More
Armando Iannucci's Why Time Flies is a delightful radio documentary
Does it move more slowly when we experience pain? Do we really see things “in slow motion” during a sudden accident? → Read More
The Apology Line is a curious, compelling listen
Confessional voicemails recorded by strangers in Eighties New York are at the centre of this strange story. → Read More
BBC Radio 4’s Conspiracies is a deep, broad consideration of conspiratorial thinking
Phil Tinline digs through history, journalism, fiction and film to try to understand why the idea of being “in on” secret information is so compelling. → Read More
Between Ourselves With Marian Keyes: breezy, mischievous radio
This four-episode series mixes winking chats between Keyes and Tara Flynn, with readings from Keyes’s non-fiction work. → Read More
The limits of “consent culture”
Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again argues popular feminism’s focus on consent is dangerously inadequate. → Read More
Matthew Syed’s Sideways takes a second look at Stockholm Syndrome
I’m wary of media promising to have “nuanced” conversations, or aiming to “unpack” our assumptions about a particular topic – especially on informal, conversational podcasts, which often come to conclusions that are deeply obvious, yet remain full of self-congratulating asides (“And that’s why it’s so important we’re talking about this…”). The journalist Matthew Syed’s new BBC Radio 4 series… → Read More
BBC Radio 4’s One to One turns to creativity and failure
In this sensitive three-episode series, journalist Rosie Millard speaks to creatives who are yet to have "made it". → Read More
The best of Christmas radio
As someone with a superhuman appetite for Christmas cheer, the first day of December marks the date when I switch over to Classic FM – when the station starts blasting wall-to-wall carols and doesn’t stop until January. Over on BBC Radio 4, the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge (24 December, 3pm) takes on new significance in a year where traditional local… → Read More