The Book Club

Who is John Galt? This week's Book Club podcast looks at the life, work and personality of Ayn Rand, probably the most influential writer you've never read. A favourite of our new Health Secretary, the author of Atlas Shrugged -- and the most strident advocate of the idea that "greed is good" -- continues to be revered and reviled four decades after her death. What was it that made her work speak...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Anne Sebba - whose Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy tells the story of the first woman in US history to be executed for a crime other than murder. She tells me how attitudes to this notorious espionage case changed over the years; and why, while not wanting to relitigate the case, she thinks it’s important to get to a sense of who Ethel really was. B...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the chief librarian of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden. In  Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, he explores the long history and vital importance of libraries and archives -- and the equally long history of their destruction in acts of war, vandalism or censorship and their loss through attrition and neglect. He tells me a...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Charles Spencer, whose book The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream is new out in paperback. He tells me why his story is like " Game of Thrones meets Titanic ", about the piety and the startling cruelty of medieval kings, the tantalising suggestion that the wreck of the White Ship may have been found off Barfleur -- and ho...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is one of America's foremost magazine journalists, the New Yorker 's Lawrence Wright. His new book is The Plague Year: America In The Time of Covid . He tells me what a book brings to recent history that week-to-week journalism can't, about the extraordinary happenstance that put him in contact with one of the unsung heroes of the vaccine race, and the th...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Lauren Hough - author of an outstanding new collection of autobiographical essays called Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing which describe a life that took her from growing up in the Children Of God cult via being discharged from the US Air Force and jobs as a bouncer in a gay bar and a “cable guy” on the road to being a writer. She tells me about not writ...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Julian Sancton, whose new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, documents the crew of men who were the first to experience an Antarctic winter trapped in the ice, in an attempt to reach the South Pole. Sancton tells me about the background of some of the eccentric characters that made up the Belgica...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells me why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation wasn’t really interested in sex at all - and reveals that after his death Lawrence may...

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're celebrating the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan. My guests are the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, and Clinton Heylin, the Dylanologist's Dylanologist and author most recently of The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless Hungry Feeling 1941-66. I ask what makes Dylan special, whether what he does - even if we admire it - can be called literature, how Dante and...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer and critic Ruth Scurr, whose new book marks today's 200th anniversary of Napoleon's death to cast a fresh light on this most written-about of characters. In Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows , she finds an unexpected thread running through the life of this man of war - his relationship with nature and with gardens, from the plot he tend...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Richard Dawkins to talk about his new book Books Do Furnish A Life: Reading and Writing Science . Richard tells me - among much else - what makes science writing (and science fiction) exciting; the questions science can (and can't) answer; why he felt it necessary to invest so much of his time arguing against religion; and why the left recurrent lary...

Hwaet! My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Maria Dahvana Headley, whose new book is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf . She talks to me about how she has produced what she bills as a 'feminist translation' of this most macho of poems; about the poem’s braided history and complex language; and about what it tells us of the Anglo-Saxon worldview. Become a Spectator subscriber...

In this week's Book club podcast my guest is Roland Philipps - whose new book Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal tells the morally murky and humanly fascinating story of Mathilde Carre - a vital figure of the early days of resistance in occupied France. Roland's story describes her heroic early work; and its undoing when she was captured and turned collaborator......

My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: Hitler's Greatest Mistake , Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and its still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It's a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality - and in it he makes the...

My guest this week is crime queen Lynda La Plante - talking about her new novel Judas Horse , and three decades of her most famous creation, Prime Suspect 's Jane Tennison. She tells me how she wrote her way out of acting, why so much crime drama now turns her off, why she thinks it's so important to get police work right and let baddies be baddies - and why she's haunted by Rentaghost .  Become a...

This week on the Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the veteran foreign correspondent Michela Wrong to talk about her new book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad . While Rwanda's president Paul Kagame has basked in the approval of Western donors, Michela argues, his burnished image conceals a history of sadism, repression and violent tyranny. She tells me...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the former editor of the Today Programme, Sarah Sands. Sarah tells me how an addiction to the buzz of news and gossip gave way in her to a fascination for the opposite, as described in her new book The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons From Monastic Life . Come for the revelations about grifting nuns and what happened to Boris Johnson’s dongle; stay for her...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Horatio Clare - whose superb latest book is about going mad. Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing, tells the story of Horatio's recent breakdown and forcible hospitalisation - what he experienced, how he recovered, how it pushed him to investigate the unquestioned assumptions about 'chemical imbalances' causing mental illness, and t...

The public conversation - especially on social media - is widely agreed to be of a dismally low quality. In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by two people who have ideas about how we can make it better. Andrew Doyle’s new book is Free Speech: And Why It Matters ; Ian Leslie’s is Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart And How They Can Bring Us Together . We talk free speech, tribali...

My guest on this week’s Book Club is the bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman, whose fascinating new book River Kings spins a global history of the Vikings out of a single carnelian bead found in a grave in Repton. Cat tells me how much more there was to the Viking culture than our traditional image of arson, rape and pillage in Northumbria - showing how 21st century techniques have helped to expose a cult...

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular worldview, and made possible the modern administrative state. And...

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the philosopher Toby Ord to talk about the cheering subject of planetary catastrophe. In his book The Precipice , new in paperback, Toby argues that we’re at a crucial point in human history - and that if we don’t start thinking seriously about extinction risks our species may not make it through the next few centuries. Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear...

In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by one of the funniest writers working today. Shalom Auslander’s new novel is Mother For Dinner , which is set in perhaps the most oppressed minority community in the world. He talks to me about cannibalism, identity politics, his beef with tragedy... and an extremely high-risk prayer at the Wailing Wall. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access th...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Winchester, whose new book takes on one of the biggest subjects on earth: earth. Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Made The Modern World starts from the author's own little corner of New England - what he proudly calculates at a bit more than three billionths of the earth's surface that he can call his own - and roams worldwide and thr...

My guests on this week's Book Club podcast are the writer and Women's Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter -- but a year ago they became 'sister widows', as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new book is called Good Grief: Embracing life at a time of death , and they join me to tal...