Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

Philip Boobbyer, Reader in History and a specialist on Russia, is my guest this week. Philip has been at the University of Kent since 1995, and we begin the interview by discussing the changes he has witnessed over the years. Philip grew up in Oxford to a sports-loving family and whose parents worked for a Christian charity. Philip talks about how faith has changed the way he looks at the world, and we move on to talk about how we tend to find later in life the same characteristics in ourselves that we recognized in our earlier selves. Philip talks about the popular music he heard when he was growing up and how he felt ambivalent about it, and how he came to prefer more folk-based music. We learn about how he studied Modern Languages at Cambridge and how he hadn’t planned to go into academia, and Philip reveals how the ‘academic door’ opened for him. We learn about the trips Philip made to Russia just before Gorbachev came to power and why it was both scary and fascinating at the same time, and how the