Spectator Books

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the food historian Pen Vogler, author of the new Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. Pen tells me how crises have affected British food culture from the age of enclosures onwards, how rows over free school meals are nothing new, and why the Christmas pudding tells the story of Empire.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Arthur Conan Doyle's biographer (and historical consultant to the new BBC TV programme Killing Sherlock) Andrew Lycett. Introducing his new book The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes: The Inspiration Behind the World's Greatest Detective, Andrew tells me about the vexed relation between the great consulting detective and his creator, and the extraordinary afterlife of this apparently ephemeral creation.  

On this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Guy Kennaway, whose new novel Good Scammer sprinkles a protective dusting of fiction over the true story of the real-life king of Jamaica's phone scammers. Guy tells me why telephone fraud might be considered ad-hoc reparations for slavery, why James Bond is a Jamaican, and why the island on which he has lived for 35 years is in no danger of turning into Switzerland-in-the-Caribbean.  

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the art critic Jonathan Jones. The term 'renaissance' is out of fashion among scholars these days, but in his new book Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance Jonathan argues that it points to something momentous in human history. On the podcast, Jonathan makes the case for what that something is – which is perhaps more heretical, and less Italian, than we might have remembered.

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is Terry Hayes, author of the squillion-selling thriller I Am Pilgrim. He tells me about invisible submarines, taking advice on crucifixion from Mel Gibson, and why it took him ten years to follow up that first novel with his new book The Year of the Locust.

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. Two decades after his breakthrough book The Fortress of Solitude crowned Lethem the literary laureate of Brooklyn, he returns to the borough's never-quite-gentrified streets with the new Brooklyn Crime Novel. He tells me why he felt the need to go back, and talks about race, intimacy, realism, the 'non-fiction novel' – and why he regrets his beef with the critic James Wood.

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Nicholas Shakespeare, author of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man. He tells me about the astonishing secret life of a writer whose adventures in espionage were more than the equal of his creation's; and about the damaged childhood and serially broken heart of a man far kinder and more sympathetic than his biographer had ever suspected.  

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the film writer Peter Biskind. In his new book Pandora’s Box, he tells the story of what’s sometimes called “Peak TV” – and how a change in business model (from network to cable to streaming) unlocked an extraordinary era of artistic innovation, and uncovered an unexpected darkness in the public appetite to be entertained.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Sandra Newman, whose new book Julia retells George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia’s point of view. We discuss the spaces Orwell’s classic left for her own novelistic imagination, what we do and don’t know about the world of Big Brother, and whether the misogyny in Orwell’s original belongs to the author or the dystopia he depicts.

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're celebrating 50 years of a unique classic – Richard Adams's Watership Down – and its forthcoming adaptation in graphic novel form. I'm joined by Richard Adams's two daughters Juliet and Rosamund, who tell me how a story that their dad started telling them to beguile a long car journey became one of the best selling children's books of all time, how that changed their father's life, and how Fiver's prophesy, alas, is finally coming true. 

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Caspar Henderson, whose new book A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous really is a journey into sound. He tells me why the music of the spheres – at least in this solar system – is a terrible racket, what we can learn from whale earwax, and why bat-squeaks are, in fact, very very loud indeed. 

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, broadcaster and academic Mary Beard. In her new book, Emperor of Rome, she explores what we can and can’t know about the men who ruled the Roman Empire, and what the lurid stories about so many of them tell us about the anxieties and fantasies of Rome’s ordinary citizens and the remarkable resilience of the regime. We also discuss, among other things: decapitated ostriches, fatal rose petals, and Mary’s robust reappraisal of Marcus Aurelius’s 'sub-Stoic' maundering.

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Sarah Ogilvie about the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told in her new The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. She tells me why the OED was different in kind from any previous English dictionary, how crowdsourcing made it 'the Wikipedia of its day', and how – as she discovered – quite so many cranks, murderers, perverts and foreigners took such an interest in it.

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Francesca Peacock to talk about the remarkable life and extraordinary work of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle. Famous in her own day for her bizarre public appearances and nicknamed 'Mad Madge', the author of The Blazing World has been marginalised by posterity as an eccentric dilettante. But in her new book Pure Wit, Francesca sets out to reclaim her as a serious feminist writer before feminism was generally thought of, and as a radical thinker in natural philosophy. She tells me about the contradictions of 'Lady Bashful' who lived to be famous, this happy wife who wrote scaldingly about marriage, and this autodidact who nevertheless wasn't afraid to take on Hobbes, Descartes and the dusty fellows of the Royal Society. 

The Book Club podcast returns next week. In the meantime, here's another from the archives, and one which looks more timely now even than it was when we recorded it in 2017. Here's perhaps Russia's most prominent dissident writer, Masha Gessen, talking about their book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.  

As Sam is still away, we've dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and an account of the myriad ways – many of them invisible to us – that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It’s a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects? 

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the journalist and author Celia Brayfield whose new book Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the story of animal rights, takes us back to the 19th century. Celia describes how Anna Sewell's writing of the Black Beauty book ultimately led to the kinder treatment of horses, and we both recall fondly the popular TV adaptation with its soaringly emotive theme tune.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, whose gripping new book The Wolf Hunt tells the story of an Israeli-American mother who finds herself wondering whether her teenage son Adam could have been responsible for the death of a classmate. She tells me about using the thriller form as a Trojan horse, about fear and what we do with it, and whether, as an Israeli writer, you can ever escape from politics.   

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative and tech writer James Ball, to talk about his new book The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. In it, James traces the rise and disturbing metastasis of what he calls 'the conspiracy theory that ate all the other conspiracy theories', and argues that what looks from the outside as an extreme set of fringe beliefs about Satanic paedophile rings running the Deep State is something we need to take very seriously indeed.  

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ferdinand Mount who in his long career has been literary and political editor of this very magazine, as well as editor of the TLS and head of Margaret Thatcher's Number Ten policy unit. We discuss his new book Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How they Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson. He tells me why he thinks it's fair to compare our recent former prime minister with a cast of despots and autocrats from Indira Gandhi and Oliver Cromwell to Louis Napoleon and even Adolf Hitler, and why he sees the impulse to autocracy as an ineradicable thread in human history.