The Booking Club

'I was amazed and intrigued by the way Leroy had stood his ground and progressed within the Metropolitan Police against so many obstacles: hostility, outright racism and being repeatedly overlooked for promotion.' Steve McQueen, from the Foreword. Discover the incredible true story behind Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed film Small Axe: Red, White and Blue in Closing Ranks. Leroy Logan's inspi...

DAD is a deeply moving and inspiring collection of stories that represent the diversity of modern fatherhood and seeks to start a conversation that challenges the traditions associated with masculinity. Including 20 powerful and defiant stories about postnatal depression, becoming a new dad during the pandemic, miscarriage, widowhood, stillbirth, co-parenting, childbirth trauma, work-life balance,...

On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. It is a scandal that has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.  This is the story of how these innocent people fought back to clear their names against a...

The Booking Club's first live, in-restaurant event brings former BBC Radio voice, philosopher and author David Edmonds to the mic with Jack Aldane to talk about his favourite restaurant Paradise, in Hampstead, and his new book The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Listen and download to the full audio here. About the book: On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz...

Listen to and download The Booking Club's first live London studio event from August 2021, in which former guest author Henry Mance met Jack Aldane for part two of their conversation about his book 'How to Love Anmials in a Human-Shaped World'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment. Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – postliberalism – that is centred around...

In this enthralling book, Julian Baggini masterfully interweaves biography with intellectual history and philosophy to give us a complete vision of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s guide to life. He follows Hume on his life’s journey, literally walking in the great philosopher’s footsteps as Baggini takes readers to the places that inspired Hume the most, from his family estate near...

With factory farms, climate change and deforestation, this might be the worst time in history to be an animal. In an age of extinction and pandemics, our relationship with the other species on our planet has become unsustainable. What if we took animals' experiences seriously - how would we eat, think and live differently? Henry Mance sets out on a personal quest to see if there is a fairer way to...

Comedian Geoff Norcott should have been Labour through and through. He grew up on a council estate, both of his parents were disabled, and his Dad was a Union man. So, how was it that he grew up to vote Tory? In this courageously honest and provocative memoir, Geoff unpicks his working-class upbringing and his political journey from left to right. Raised by a fierce matriarch and a maverick father...

This episode is lifted from The Booking Club's first live-streamed conversation. It features The Booking Club's host and producer Jack Aldane talking to Professor Chris Bail about Chris's new book: ' Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing '. In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have t...

Writer and campaigner Louise Perry will publish a book in 2022 that'll make you question everything you thought you knew about the sexual revolution and its gift to women.   In it, Perry mounts a counterfactual challenge to the story we often tell ourselves in the West about this epoch of the 20th century. We often assume that the social and cultural changes of the 1960s transformed women fro...

Remi Adekoya teaches Politics at the University of York. Half-Nigerian, half-Polish, his focus is identity in its emotional, psychological and political contexts, particularly how identity, history, psychology and politics overlap in white-majority Western and black African societies. Remi lived in Nigeria and Poland before moving to Britain. He has since written for  The Guardian ,  Spe...

Part memoir, part essay, John Connell's latest memoir The Running Book  explores what it is to be alive and what movement can do for a person. It is deeply intimate and wide-ranging, local and global: Connell is as likely to write about colonialism and the effect of British imperialism in Ireland and its former colonies as he is about life on his family farm in Ballinalee, County Longfor...

Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it. This is the story of how money, vested interests and digital skulduggery are eroding trust in democracy. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. Politicians lie g...

2021 has change in store for the series. Listen to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a   story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day. The Book...

The coronavirus pandemic taught us something we ought already to have known: that care workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners are doing essential work that keeps us all alive, fed and cared for. Until recently much of this work was regarded as menial by the the same society that now lauds them as 'key workers'. Why are they so undervalued? In Head, Hand, Heart, British...

Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book, shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize, and Winner of the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Award, is 'Chaucer: A European Life' (Princeton University Press). This groundbreaking biography recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all Eng...

Douglas Murray is a British conservative author and political commentator. His recent bestsellers include The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017) and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity , published in September 2019. Douglas meets Jack Aldane at The Wolseley on Piccadilly, St. James's in London. Follow The Booking Club: Twitter: @bookingclubpod Instagram:...

Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy and adventure. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel. As we hurtle toward a shiny, happy ‘self-driving’ future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too? Driving, it turns out, offers a near-perfect embodiment of the broader changes being wrought by government and technology throughout o...

Vincent Bevins is an American journalist and writer. From 2011 to 2016, he worked as a foreign correspondent based in Brazil for the  Los Angeles Times , having worked in London for the  Financial Times . Bevins moved to Jakarta in 2017 to cover Southeast Asia for the  Washington Post. His first book, published in 2020, is entitled The Jakarta Method: Washington's Ant...

Hierarchy is taboo in the modern world yet attempts to do away with it have often led to new forms of tyranny. Renowned Confucian scholar and political theorist Daniel A Bell joins professor Wang Pei in the co-authored work Just Hierarchy to argue that we should neither think it possible nor desirable to achieve equality without social hierarchy. Bell and Wang draw on Confucian and Daoist thought...

Patrick Deneen is an American political theorist and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His areas of focus include ancient and American political thought, democratic theory, political theology, literature and politics, and political economy. Deneen is the author of Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018 . Follow The Booking Club: Twitter: @bookingclubp...

Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, associate professor at the University of Sydney, and an expert in Sino-US relations. His research is related to macro-level structure of the world economy, with a particular focus on China's global economic integration. He is the author of several books, the latest of which is The New Authoritarianism: Trump Populism and the Tyranny of Experts . He als...

David Patrikarakos is a British journalist, author and TV producer, best known as the author of  War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. He speaks to Jack Aldane on this first of several special episodes of the podcast, recorded during the global pandemic lockdown, about the ramifications of the coronavirus in Western Europe. Hosted on Acast. See...