Terry Gross

George Shearing, the jazz pianist who wrote the standard "Lullaby of Birdland" and amused audiences for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, died Monday. Fresh Air remembers Shearing with excerpts from a 1986 interview.

British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey watched hours of war footage before writing the songs for her eighth album, Let England Shake. Here, she describes how she translated what she saw into a mournful elegy about the bitter brutality of combat.

Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym for the author, was a military interrogator in Iraq who rejected previously used harsh techniques. He writes about how his team hunted down two key al-Qaida operatives in Kill or Capture.