governor's legal counsel and so when they went up to secure the capital, they made their way to judge willard's office, on the ground floor, and he was preparing some final paperwork and was putting it in his briefcase. ..

>> he says, no, you will not. i hope you feel the heaviness of this exchange. >> he's 6'8 and he's 5'2. >> distinguished people. >> and the rest of the conversation is by blanton says to louis, by who's authority? and he says, by the governor's authority, and he says, i am the governor, and he said, no, not anymore. >> he said you're not the governor. i'll come down there, and he said, well, i won't let you in. >> question? yes? >> when did you start the book? what inspired you to start the book, and this is a few years later, and why is it coming out now. maybe not in -- >> good question.

it took me a year and a half to write it, finished a year or so ago. the event of the university press in the back of the room, sue, thank you, and she and her colleagues took time to do their good work, and i'd like to also recognize richard mcharty who linked me up with the vanderbilt press, and it took a while for the press to do their work, but the better answer is the research, all the interviews, you know, that took me -- it was fun to do taking me back to the reporter days, and in some ways, the book is as much about journalists as it is politicians, and that took awhile. we started interviews five years ago, people were patient with me. >> i'll ask the last question. i'll ask the senator.

i know these were six tough unforgettable hours. as only you said, the worst day of our life. what about today's following? how did what happened that day impact your administration over the next four years? >> well, it's tough for the country, but if every united states senator serving today had a six hour boot camp like i had how to get along with the opposite party in the country, we'd be better off. [applause] you know, this did not occur to me until we talked about it, but i didn't know ned and john wilder and bill leech. i mean, i knew them, you know, we met, but we had never work

together, and i was this new, young republican governor in the democrat establishment that had grown up over a half century. i mean everything was democratic. the newspaper, the lobbyists, the spring courts, everything was, and so how was this going to work the next four years, hopefully eight, from my point of view, but in that four or five hours, we found a way to work together on a way that was more difficult than we'd ever deal with in four the eight years, and developed a level of trust and respect for one another, and that carried on the whole time, and so when we got into how we going to, you know, pay for the road program? are we going to borrow money? raise taxes? talked about how to deal with the national education association, rewarding teaching, and we got a way to do it, a result, and so i was lucky.

we survived the four or five hours, and it gave me a boot camp of how to get along with some really very, very good people, and who i was privileged to work with in the eight years, and, well, how is one in the state government i worked in -- well, i never -- admired his courage and making the call that day. >> you know, this afternoon, hal and i and others here were in the supreme court room, listened to john hooker and deputy attorney general arguing the case, and i will tell you from my part the ghost of 34 years was still there. it was a stunning moment in the

history of this state. i think you, lamar, and you, hal, for your leadership navigating us across that stormy sea in the six hours. thank you for recording it all in a wonderful book. i'll ask you to join me in thanking these three panelists for -- [applause] [applause]

>> peter slen interviews writers from london. this kicks off with brandon spufford. >> host: his most recent book called "unapologetic: why despite everything christianity makes surprising emotional sense," and he joins us as booktv is in london. francis spufford, why do you use the word "emotional" in the subtitle there? >> because there's lots of books whether christianity makes historical sense, cultural sense, theological sense, but the emotions of the most obvious part and part that's hardest to describe that if you're on the inside already, there's not much explanation. if you're on the outside, it's

mysterious enough to be something you'd never quite get, and this is a book that makes no sense in the british con cement, coming out in the united states in 2013, but it was written to address a british situation in which religion is really pretty remote for most people's daily experience. this is not a country where most people go to church sunday or arrive in a new town and think, which church should we join? they bet on sunday mornings doing off sensible human things. medical you got to make a stab

at talking people what it feels like. one way that's a considerable challenge because pouring one handful of experience into the head of a reader is tricky. on the other hand, that's what books excel out, fiction as well as nonfiction. they are great at creating sympathy for positions you don't share yourself. books are virtually the only medium that tell you what it's like being somebody else, and what i wanted to do is to draw on myself with my sample, kind of demonstrate what the inside of my head feels like. it's the kind of memoir, more argumentative. it's a kind of explanation by demonstration of the way the bits slop together assuming

absolutely nothing in the way of knowledge and kind of assumptions, so everything has to get defined from scratch. >> host: are you a practicing christian? >> guest: i am a practicing christian. i'm surprised to hear myself say that. >> host: why? >> guest: because i was not for a very, very long time, and it's something i came back to after 20 years as atheism as an adult. >> host: atheism? >> guest: atheism. not vague, but, you know, full on, set med, comfortable ate yip -- settled, comfortable, atheism, and i came back surprising myself as i did. it's useful in a way because that means i don't have to imagine what it is like to be an atheist. in terms of building a bridge from over there to over here, i've been over there, and now i seem to be over here so i ought to manage the bridge >> host: how did you go across the bridge? >> guest: oh, i must be careful with the language here

because i'm on television. i messed up to put it no mori strongly than that, making a classic adult mess of my life, and i found that i needed forgiving, and i went looking at the address where once upon a time long ago i was told as a child you went looking for such thing, and to my considerable surprise, there it seemed to be, so -- >> host: was that the church? >> guest: it was the church. >> host: why that was surprise considerable? >> guest: because, like a lot of people who left religion behind in childhood, i thought religion as a childish. it's a classic mistake. it's a classic mistake where because you last saw something at a particular address you think that address defines the thing. in fact, it is only childish if you're a child. it's adult with adult needs and

dilemmas, but i get the impression this thing is less surprising in the american context, and for sure it's less embarrassing. embarrassing is an enormously powerful british emotion. i hope that the contents of north america is not paralyzed by embarrassment like we are. >> host: do you detail the experience in "unapologetic," what happened to you? >> i do, but it's not a straight, down the line, abc, linier book. the experiences are in there, but it's not the story of my life as a believer. it's an attempt to find a piece of string to run all through the experiences of guilt, forgiveness, questioning about the pain and how the world works, and leading on over here in a way which makes for one kind of believing life story, not every kind.

there's lots of other places that people can and do begin, but in my experience the way to be universal is to be really, really specific. you start off with the human stuff, namely yourself, and you say do you recognize it? on the whole, people do, even if it's nothing like they experience, but they recognize the way it's in human terms, something about how it is close to the self-and the brain and heart and the soul of another human being, and people are quite curious about humans and willing to cross bridges to experiences they have not necessarily had themselves so long as you describe them right and help them imaginatively along the way. >> host: francis spufford, is atheism a belief system?

>> guest: oh, dear. it really annoys atheists when you say so, and it is not always. there are quantities of atheists out there who have the lack of a belief. there are other atheists out there who are gripped by something all together more emotional than that, all together more passionate on their part, and in that case, it really, really makes no sense to say "lack of belief," but it is a positive belief in the lack of a god, and people like that very often have a charged emotional relationship with religion, as much anti-faith as they are atheists. it's not that there's no god, but wish there was no religion as well. >> over here, over here there's been hits, but differently than in the united states. it's not like it's bringing the good news of free thinking to

some poor kid in the middle of incredible bible belt kansas or somewhere that you're not alone, you're not alone, there's other atiests out there. over here, almost everyone is without a brief, and people are interested in it because it seems to be news from a scientist about how the world works. this is misleading because they are great as a popularizer, a tremendous writer, but when it comes to religion, i think he's whistling in the dark. i don't think he has an enormous amount to offer, and i've been, yeah, annoyed by how successful the book's been with lots of attempts to answer it here, but all of them seem, to me, to kind of buy into the essential mistake he's making, which is to treat religion as if it was defective second grade style of science, manager something that basically consistents of the

bunch of yes-no propositions about the universe, and you can go, hey, there's propositions of the universe are better than that because they are testable correctly, and then good-bye religion whereas it seems to me what religion deals with is those areas of human experience where proof is not available. we believe when we don't know, and that's not a con cementble thing to do. the test of belief is whether it's done with generosity of heart and fullness of spirit. it seems to me it would be helpful if the nonbelieving, which are in europe, got a little reminder about what the world looks like from within belief and recognize we're actually not that weird. >> frap sis, there's been a whole genera of books on atheism. richard, christopher hitchens, two. guests we've done on the series in london.

justin web of the bbc described america religious thought in many wayings as stone age beliefs, and laci, a committed atheist, why is it that europe has gone this way, especially when there's so many historical churches and so much history of the church? >> guest: oh, i have 50 answers to that. i'll give you two of them. one is sociological, really. there's the united states religion that is voluntary, part of the way the people organize themselves in towns and cities. you arrive somewhere and go, where's our church, and you expect to support your own church when you got one. you write a check to pay the minister's salary. in europe, the historic churches have been kind of part of the infrastructure of society, and like the drains and electric

light, that is somebody else's responsibility to provide. once the kind of big cultural and social changes of the 60s were on us, the church was wrong footed about, well, sex basically, and people fell out of the habit of going, they also lost any sense this was part of the fabric they might have to do anything about maintaining. people expect the church to be there. people in britain, for example, absolutely expect the church to be there when you need marrying or burying. they just don't see that it's got anything to do with those in between times. that's one of my answers. another one would be to do with just how disillusioning and disenchanting the 20th century was in europe. i mean, america had a really good 20th century. you got, you know, you got your

kind of self-belief confirmed by what happened in the 20th century, and even though there was a mini version of that in britain, we liken ourselves to the story of the second world war. all the same. on the whole, it was a story of retreat and rather chasing self-realization, looking at you're and go, oh, i wasn't what i thought i was, a smaller more modest sense, and as americans have a tendency to believe positively, europeans substituted irony for a lot of that stuff, and we do irony instead of religion as well. irony things like the realists approach to the universe if you had the european 20th century. >> host: francis spufford, is there an evangelical movement in england, and is it a political

movement at all? >> there is an evangelical movement, but it doesn't do politics the way that the american one does. we don't have christian conservatives, and i'm speaking for myself, we vote centerrish or leftish on the whole. one of the problems as christians in britain is that the less people know about church locally, the more they get impressions of religion from tv, often from american movies so there's quite a lot of people in britain who are now so far away from going to church here, they think we must all be spiritually from somewhere around wichita, i think, and no offense to people in kansas, if you're watching this in wichita, please, buy the book, and i'd love to visit someday, but i think people here think that

it's the only kind there is. i had to sign up for the redeeming level that god did not mean you instantly -- it just don't go like that between the christian ethics and what you vote, there's a huge area of open and free choice. i argue for what i suppose an american calls liberal christianity, politically liberal christianity, that's where i am as a voter and as a christian. it's not a problem we have. part of me is a little bit regretful we don't have enough christians to have this problem. if we had a few more, i would, you know, settle for negotiating political difficulties as a kind of reasonable compensation for that, but, no, we don't, not at the moment. >> host: christians in america are often not shy about their

allegiance or faith. what about christians in britain? >> i refer you back to what i said about before on embarrassment, an extremely powerful emotion in british culture. if you look at kind of perm ads in britain, the thing they ask for over and over and over again is in good sense of humor because in everything we do here is kind of oiled by irony, we joke all the time. we don't -- direct expression of emotion strikes us like it's problematic, and if you say, i believe, then immediately, you've kind of dropped off the edge of the good ship irony into the ocean of the embarrassing earnestness, and that's what i did on purpose in the book, a strange experience, but you can swim in the ocean, and it's okay.

>> what's the reaction? >> guest: positive on the whole, even those who disagree with it enjoyed the experience like you enjoy getting a brisk head massage or something. within the churches, even though i'm sweary and disrespectful by some standards, they look kind to us across the spectrum. there's listeners from catholics to the quakers. it's gone down well. i've annoyed people, and i'm surprised if i was not annoyeded some people, and it's the kind of people i wanted to annoy, so job done. >> host: to paraphrase an earlier guest we had in london, freedom from organizedded religion is a basic human right. >> guest: we know it isn't. freedom from organized religion is a strange cultural deficit that makes it impossible for you to understand your own past

successfully. freedom from organized religion leaves you wondering who the bloke on the cross is in the oil paintings. freedom from organized religion means huge areas of human thought are from morality, culture, are blank and silent. freedom from organized religion means you do silly things like trying to rewrite the bible yourself. i refer personally to the own for good book. come on. you don't rewrite the bible yourself. what kind of -- i better not go on before i become disrespectful to a fellow guest. >> host: what's your career track been? >> guest:er deer none of the books have anything common with the other one. i'm a slow writer, and as far as i'm concerned, one of the prizes and joys of the writing life, i find out about something new

every few years, so i look like a sailboat in heavy weather, attack wildly in our directions, wrote a book about polar explorers, the way engineers mine work, and a book about children's books, and a book about religion, a book about soviet union, and now working on a book in new york in the 1740s with a new connection between any of the projects. >> host: notary public fiction writing throughout? >> guest: creeping up on fiction. i'm a strong believer in the richness and versatility of nonfiction. it seems weird in a way to me we just put the one label on it notary public fiction when it can be so many things. you have so many colors in the lenses through which you see the world, so many techniques you can use, and i defie nip to say that nonfiction is not as powerful literature as the novel, but i find myself interested in the novel too, and

i'm here -- my next to last book was a strange kind of historical novel with footnotes, and, yeah, the next one's going to be a novel all the way because i'm greedy, and i want to know how to do that too. >> host: before we discuss, where did you begin the career in the publishing world? >> guest: i was a publisher's reader. >> host: what is that? >> guest: it doesn't exist anymore. it depends on publishing not rationalized yet, and long ago, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, way, way back in the 1980s when i graduated from college, english publishing was still so uncommercial they kept people on hand full-time to read the books they got submitted, and since i am a reader and an inseasessive reader and continuous reader, this was a dream job, like becoming a taster in a chocolate factory

would be. they put me up in the attic of a big old 18th century building with a big old manual typewriter and it was like being a really nice prison sentence passing me two or three novels every day, and i just read and read and read and read some more and occasionally typed out comments on them on the manual typewriter, and while i was there, i discovered i didn't want a career in publishing. i wanted to stick closer to the product than that, so i also realized i was really well placed to persuade the people down stairs they wanted to publish a book by me. i fired off a series of memos explaning why the book they should print was the one i was thinking of, and they went for it, and then, since i was insane at 24, 25, something like that, i quit my job with a glory bank

balance, and we're talking about, oh, i guess about a thousand dollars in 1989. i thought, i'm rich, i'm rich, i'm rich. i don't need a job. i went away, became very poor indeed, and made ends meet for the six years it took to write my actual first book. >> host: and you won an award for that, did you not? >> guest: i did. when i finally finished it, i got a nice little drum solo of prizes, which was completely misleading because i thought, oh, so this is what it's like publishing a book, and it's never been again, but it was a really nice beginning. i got, obviously, the sunday times of london young writer of the year. i -- the writer's guild price of nonfiction and one more -- oh, no, yes, the festival mountain

book of the year award, a beautiful stap glassed post that was crushed in the post and arrived as a mosaic of london. since then, i never won any other prize. it was front loaded in the beginning of the career. >> host: what's "red plenty" about that came out in 2012ing? >> "red plenty," how can i describe it to make it sound as unappetizing as possible? >> host: a soviet science fiction book? >> guest: it is. it's far worse than that. it's about soviet economics, the dismal science in the most dismal country on the planet, and part of me was, i agree, being perverse. i wanted to take the most boring subject anyone could possibly imagine, wrestle it to the ground, and force it to give up its hidden jewel of interesting message. i also