The Booking Club

Andy Clarke , Sky Sports' lead boxing commentator and one of the nation's most respected boxing pundits, goes in search of the knockout: the most dramatic and devastating moment in sport. How does it feel to land that ultimate blow? How does it feel to suffer it?  The Knockout  assesses the impact it has on the fighters and the people close to it and asks what it takes mentally, physical...

The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures. In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon,  The Haunted Wood  reveals the magic of childhood...

Technology has delivered a world that we expect to revolve around us, our needs and preferences, and our unique personalities. We willingly hand over intimate information about ourselves in return for a world that’s easier to navigate. We live in the Personalised Century, where we view ourselves in terms of what rather than who we are – the objects of others’ recognition, rather than the subjects...

On the surface, David Baddiel ’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair...

Rory Sutherland is the vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK and the co-founder of its Behavioural Science Practice. He is the author of Alchemy : The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, writes The Spectator’s Wiki Man column, presents several series for Radio 4, serves on the advisory board of the Evolution Institute and is former president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. His...

What does it mean to live a good, whole and fulfilling life? And if the world really is ending, or at least expecting turbulent change, what kind of people will we need when it happens? In Fully Alive , Elizabeth Oldfield explores how we can build spiritual core strength for an unstable age. Drawing on the ancient wisdom of faith and stories from her own life, Oldfield writes about her quest to li...

For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. In  The Status Game , bestselling author Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for  status  that ultimately defines who we are. From the era of the hunter-gatherer to today, when we exist as workers in the globalised...

In times of plenty, we stuff ourselves. When the food runs out, we're stuffed too. How have people in the British Isles shared the riches from our fields, dairies, kitchens and seas, as well as those from around the world? And when the cupboard is bare, who steps up to the plate to feed the nation's hungry children, soldiers at war or families in crisis? Stuffed tells the stories of the food and d...

Pax  is the third in a trilogy of books narrating the history of the Roman Empire. The series that began with  Rubicon , and continued with  Dynasty , now arrives at the period which marks the apogee of the  pax Romana . It provides a portrait of the ancient world's ultimate superpower at war and at peace; from the gilded capital to the barbarous realms beyond the frontier; fro...

It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth , Remi Adekoya What  really  matters when it comes to race? Western conversations on race and racism revolve around familiar themes; colonialism, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ideology of white supremacism form the holy trinity of the race debate. But what if we are neglecting a key piece of the puzzle? Something that explains why a ra...

Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he's died many times. Not just on stage - though he'll tell you about that - but in other ways, too. There's been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all... Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and al...

What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population of some 750 million, sprawled from Ireland to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home, and who has newly arrived from elsewhere? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries, steward our criss-crossing planes, lovingly craft our legacy wines, fish our depleted waters, and risk life itself...

Depp v Heard: the unreal story is the definitive account of the gruelling court battles between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, by the reporter who was there. Using witness testimony and contemporaneous evidence, Nick Wallis has created a gripping reconstruction of the allegations of violence, drug-taking and wild extravagance which dominated two epic trials and made headlines around the world. Nick...

In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women’s liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology...

Has any war in history gone according to plan? Monarchs, dictators and elected leaders alike have a dismal record on military decision-making, from over-ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain, or enemy capabilities. This not only wastes the lives of civilians, the enemy and one’s own soldiers, but also fails to achieve geopolitical objectives, and usually lays the seeds for more war...

“I am not Nicholas Rossi!” gasps Arthur Knight through an oxygen mask in March 2022. Recently discharged from a Covid ward in Glasgow, he's in a wheelchair. The police say he’s Nicholas Rossi, suspected of faking his death and wanted for rape in Utah. The story makes headlines globally. When journalist Jane MacSorley meets Arthur Knight and his wife Miranda, she thinks the police have made a mista...

Everywhere you look on the internet, people are giving - and receiving - advice. Advice that promises to transform our lives. How to eat. How to think. How to get rich. How to manage our time. Across 8 episodes on BBC Radio 4 programme The New Gurus, journalist and author Helen Lewis travels through the strange, powerful and sometimes hidden digital spaces created by these new gurus. Where did the...

She is the woman who clinched the 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, described as 'a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion'. She is many things beside: the first in her family to go to university; a trained barrister; a single mum; a master of persuasion. In her former BBC colleagues' words, she was the 'booker extraordinaire', responsible for many of...

On 20 November 2022, The Booking Club podcast and Unbound teamed up to promote Rogues’ Gallery , a collection of the best satirical portraits from Martin Rowson’s Twitter #Draw Challenges.  At Stoke Newington’s legendary Thai restaurant Yum Yum , voice of The Booking Club Jack Aldane hosted a live conversation with Martin about the book’s origins, and why the joys of political caricature are...

As a society we have never been less connected. The internet and globalisation fuel ignorance and anger, while the disconnect between people’s reality and perceived identities has never been greater. Karl Marx outlined the idea of a material ‘base’ and politico-cultural ‘superstructure’. According to this formula, a material reality – wealth, income, occupation – determined your politics, leisure...

Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being de...

From the Satanic Panic to the anti-vaxx movement, the moon landing to Pizzagate, it's always been human nature to believe we're being lied to by the powers that be (and sometimes, to be fair, we absolutely are). But while it can be fun to indulge in a bit of Deep State banter on the group chat, recent times have shown us that some of these theories have taken on a life of their own - and in our do...

In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites readers to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently. Discussing the nat...

Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation. When Andy goes behind bars, he also confronts his inherited trauma: his father, uncle and brother all spent time in prison. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still f...

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century  is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories - one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies - and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems gene...