Christopher De Bellaigue on Private Passions with Michael Berkeley 17th July 2022

The international journalist and author Christopher de Bellaigue shares his passion for the music that reflects the decades he has spent as a journalist immersed in the politics and daily life of Turkey, the Middle East and South Asia. He has written five award-winning books on these regions, and numerous articles for The Economist, The Guardian and The London Review of Books on subjects as varied as technology, mental health and the environment.

He chooses a setting of the poetry of the great Sufi mystic Rumi; music from Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi; and a Venetian madrigal that relates to his new book, about the Ottoman Emperor Suleyman the Magnificent, the most powerful man in the world in the 16th century. As emperor it was routine practice to murder all your male relatives, and anyone else who even slightly displeased you, but Christopher explains that Suleyman was also a law maker and, after a colourful early love life, eventually settled down with one woman for the rest of his life.
Christopher tells Michael about the joy he has found becoming part of his wife’s family in Tehran and about the way Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto helped him to engage with his grief and start to come to terms with his mother’s depression, thirty years after her death.

Producer: Jane Greenwood

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3