Emily Maitlis was born in Canada and raised in Sheffield. After graduating from Cambridge she worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, then returned to the UK for a stint at Sky News before joining the BBC in 2001. She started on Newsnight in 2006, became lead anchor in 2018 and the now-infamous Prince Andrew interview the following year. In February Maitlis announced she’s leaving the BBC to co-host a daily podcast for Global. Her eight-part documentary series The People Vs J Edgar Hoover starts on BBC Radio 4 on 13 June.
1. Theatre
Prima Facie (Harold Pinter theatre, London)
This is an extraordinarily powerful play about a successful barrister, played by Jodie Comer, who defends sexual abusers and gets them off, but then finds herself a victim of sexual abuse and realises that the law can’t help her. I spoke to Comer and the playwright Suzie Miller for a Guardian roundtable before the production. Being a barrister is quite close to the adversarial nature of journalism, so it was fascinating and challenging to think about the way we operate within that context. Comer’s performance was incredible.
2. Non-fiction
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland
This book, just published, is about two men’s escape from Auschwitz during the second world war. Even though it’s brutal and unflinching in its description of the camp, the really extraordinary bit comes after the escape. It shows how little the world wanted to believe what the men were trying to say. For me, that resonates so much with our age and people’s resistance to seeing what’s right in front of them. It was very stark to read this and think, my God, the number of lives that could have been saved if people had only listened.
3. Novel
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
I just finished rereading The House of Mirth. It’s my son’s A-level text, and my way of getting through the parental nerves was to embrace his work and chat about it. It’s the story of Lily Bart, who has charm and beauty but not quite enough money for the society in which she lives – gilded age New York. It’s a story of economics, of female vulnerability, of a society that only allows women to be certain things in certain ways. It was a real joy to read it again and realise what an amazingly good novel it is.
4. Music
Dinu Lipatti plays Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1
My dad died last month. One of the things that brought him great joy in hospital was listening to the music he loved. One day I thought he was asleep and he started mouthing this name, Dinu Lipatti. I couldn’t understand at first. Then I typed it into Google and up came this extraordinary Romanian pianist whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 33. So I played my dad his version of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. Even as he was dying, my dad was still introducing me to great music.
5. Film
Olga (Dir: Elie Grappe, 2021)
The last thing I saw in the cinema was Olga, about a young Ukrainian gymnast (Anastasiia Budiashkina) who leaves home for Switzerland to compete for the Swiss team. Her mother’s a television journalist in the middle of the 2014 standoff and – spoiler alert – Olga eventually decides that her homeland is more important than her career. I went to see it after I’d taken part in a flash-mob in Victoria Station with a bunch of friends to raise money for Ukraine – a very out-of-character thing for me to do. It’s a quietly powerful film and beautifully told.
6. TV
Ingobernable (Netflix)
My slightly odd thing is that I love watching anything in Spanish. I studied Spanish and spent a lot of time working in Spain and Venezuela. I’ve just watched the first season of this Mexican series, which I love. It’s about a woman, played by Kate del Castillo, who is accused of killing her husband (Erik Hayser), who happens to be the president of Mexico, and then goes on the run. Honestly, it’s a bit of a telenovela – big hair, flashy makeup and people being terribly melodramatic – but it transports me to a totally different world.
• The People Vs J Edgar Hoover is on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds
