The Booking Club

Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, political demography and demography of the religious/irreligious. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities is Kaufmann's expansive yet fine-tuned analysis of the current and possible responses of white majority po...

Marie Le Conte is a French journalist and political diarist living in London. She has worked for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Evening Standard. Her first book 'Haven't You Heard? Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works' is a unique chance to look beneath the veneer of decorum among the British establishment and discover what really goes on each day inside the halls of power.  Follow...

Author David Swift's analysis of the rise of the Woke and the 'identity Left' has come at a good time. In this discussion, he and Jack Aldane meet at Swift's favourite restaurant, Toulouse Lautrec in Kennington, to discuss the 2019 UK general election and the long way back to power for The Labour Party. Follow The Booking Club: Twitter: @bookingclubpod Instagram: @bookingclubpod Facebook: @booking...

In her first book S tolen: How to Save The World from Financialisation , author and economics commentator Grace Blakeley argues that we are living through the death of an old economic order based on the failed economic policies of the 20th century. As Western countries struggle to manage the rise of right-wing extremism from within and the threat of extinction from without, it is now easier to ima...

Bestselling author and historian Tom Holland meets host Jack Aldane at his favourite restaurant Andrew Edmunds in SOHO to discuss his latest book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind Follow The Booking Club: Twitter: @bookingclubpod Instagram: @bookingclubpod Facebook: @bookingclubpod TikTok: @bookingclubpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and Deputy Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a regular voice on Talking Politics and writes a regular column for New Statesman. Follow The Booking Club: Twitter: @bookingclubpod Instagram: @bookingclubpod Facebook: @bookingclubpod TikTok: @bookingclubpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more info...

Jack Brown is a lecturer of London Studies at King's College London and No. 10's first ever Researcher in Residence. The result of his year-long study of the building is 'No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street'. The book takes the reader on a tour through space and time, into the corridors and rooms that have time and again sealed the future of the UK as a nation, and into the lives of t...

Martin Rowson is a British editorial cartoonist and writer. His genre is political satire. His style is to consistently launch a merciless assault on unchecked power using scatological humour and by reducing his subjects to animal and inanimate states. Martin's cartoons appear in The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. He is chair of the British Cartoonists' Association. Follow and subscribe to The Boo...

Michael Rosen is an English children's novelist, poet, and the author of 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from June 2007 to June 2009. He has been a TV presenter and a political columnist. On episode 10 of The Booking Club, Michael sits down to discuss his recent memoir So They Call You Pisher! and explains why he has chosen to meet in Dalston to sample what he considers London's best f...

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia  explodes the creation of a false history: a...

Matthew Goodwin is a Professor of Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. His latest book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, is co-authored with Roger Eatwell. The book is a guide to the movement which has pushed Western democracies to the brink ever since the EU referendum in the UK...

Claire Fox is a British writer and politician. She is the director and founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank. She is also a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and is now a registered supporter of the Brexit Party who won a seat for the party in the North West England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election. In this episode, Claire defends her convictions abou...

Mihir Bose arrived in the UK in 1969 with the equivalent of more than £12,500 smuggled in his underwear. Enoch Powell had delivered his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech only a year before. This set a precedent for Mihir's earliest impressions of Britain's attitude towards immigrants,and would later culminate in several life-threatening moments as a jobbing sport journalist. These and other memori...

Sir Paul Collier is the author of eight polemical works including The Bottom Billion (2007), The Plundered Planet (2012) and Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013). His eighth book The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties was published in 2018. It addresses the split across Western societies between a middle class of highly mobile professionals and a working class rooted in p...

Will Self is an English novelist and journalist whose 12th novel Phone explores the impact of late 20th century communication technology on the individual and collective conscience through the interpenetrating lives of its characters...and their phones. Phone completes a modernist trilogy preceded by the novels Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014). The book was first published in 2017. Jack Aldane met...

Stephen Law is an English philosopher and former lecturer at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the editor of Think, a philosophy journal sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His books include The Philosophy Gym, The War For Children's Minds and Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Law has chosen to meet at Quod, part of The Old Bank Hote...

Ella Whelan is the assistant editor at Spiked whose first book What Women Want rejects contemporary feminism in favour of a new women's liberation movement. Her "no ifs, no buts" defence of free speech regularly takes her on TV and radio, where she can be seen and heard battling on the subjects of identity politics, social media censorship and social inequality. Ella chose Perilla to discuss her b...

On September 15th 2008, an investment banking firm named Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the beginning of the worst global financial crisis since The Great Depression. The crisis is not yet over, yet the story of how the system failed has been overwritten by its social and political consequences of the last decade. Leading economist and author Vicky Pryce recounts the moment Lehman B...