Robert Winder and Vanessa Taylor

Writer and critic Robert Winder and historian of rivers Vanessa Taylor discuss the great rivers of the world, how they are closely intertwined with humanity and history and how they face greater threats than ever before.

In Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways that Made Europe, Winder, a former literary editor of the Independent, describes how he journeyed down three of Europe’s great rivers – the Rhine, the Rhone and the Po – and explains how they inextricably shaped European history. The three rivers find their source in the same Alpine ice of central Switzerland, and they have shaped and given life to three separate cultures of Germany, France and Italy.  They shaped the pattern of towns and cities, created a network for transport and trade, fed agriculture and influenced language, religion, philosophy, art and culture.

Taylor is a historian of rivers, water and environmental history at the University of Greenwich and an expert on the Thames. In Seven Rivers: A Journey through the Currents of Human History she tells the stories of the Nile, Danube, Niger, Mississippi, Ganges, Yangtze and the Thames. It is a story of Chinese dynasties, Romans, Hindus and their river gods, the Habsburgs and Ottomans, the people of the Niger and life and death struggles on the Mississippi. Taylor says that as some of our major river systems are dying, it has never been clearer that they are intertwined with humanity at our best and worst.