The Book Club

On this week's Book Club podcast my guests are the former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby and his wife and co-author Jemima Lewis, to talk about their new book Ravenous: How To Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape . They tell me about the perils and pleasures of working with your spouse, why exercise doesn't make you lose weight, what we don't understand about nutrition, when the state need...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Victoria Smith, whose new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women explains why one of the oldest forms of misogyny is seeing a vicious resurgence in our own age. She says some of the worst of it now comes from young women. She tells me why she thinks feminists of each new generation seem destined to forget or reject the lessons learn...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and editor Ian Buruma, to talk about his new book Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War Two . A Chinese princess who climbed into bed with Japanese nationalist gangsters; an observant Jew who sold his co-religionists to the Nazis; and Himmler’s personal masseur. Ian describes how their stories link and resonate,...

On this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Sara Wheeler, who looks back on her travelling life in Glowing Still: A Woman's Life on the Road. She tells me why it's 'a book about tits and toilets', as well as a meditation on the past and future of travel writing and a lament for the books – in one case thanks to having children and the other to the modern fatwa on 'cultural appropriation' – she d...

On this week’s Book Club, I’m joined by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli to talk about his new book Anaximander and the Nature of Science , in which he explains how a radical thinker two and a half millennia ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells me how Anaximander’s way of thinking still informs the work scientists do everywhere, how politics shapes...

My guest on this week’s Book Club is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. In his new book Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces , Robert describes how being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis plunged him from his comfortable life as an English literature professor at Oxford into a frightening and disorienting new world; and how literature itself helped him learn to navigate around it. Become a Spectator subscriber...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the scholar and biographer Richard Bradford, whose new book Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer looks at the rackety life and uneven oeuvre of one of the big beasts of 20th-century American letters. Mailer, as Richard argues, thought his self-identified genius as a writer licensed any amount of personal bad behaviour – up to and including stabbing one...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it's in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush admin...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution , she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to fo...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn't eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be a good time to do it, and gives a jaw-dropping sense of what the night...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses , which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle's notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting their wives pick out the curtains, why we call ginger-haired people "redheads" and,...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to be both Orpheus and Eurydice. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt - whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa - and along the way explains what's so good about mammoths, how cutting-edge cognitive science explains Pale...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Matthew Hollis, author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem . In the tail end of this centenary year of the great monument of modernist poetry, Matthew tells me about the private agonies that went into the making of the poem. We discuss how not just Ezra Pound but Vivien Eliot had a hand in editing it, and why we misunderstand Eliot’s famous claim a...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Rupert Shortt, whose stimulating new book The Hardest Problem addresses one of the oldest difficulties in theology: "the problem of evil". Is this something the religious and the secular can even talk meaningfully about? What's the great challenge Dostoevsky throws up? And what did Augustine get right that Richard Dawkins gets wrong?  Become a Spectator...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to two of the brave souls who turn recent political dramas into the sort of quickly written books we might call the second draft of history. I’m joined by the FT ’s Sebastian Payne, author of The Fall of Boris Johnson , and our own James Heale, co-author of a Liz Truss biography, Out Of The Blue , which notoriously was so rapidly overtaken by events th...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Edward Mendelson, who with the publication of the Complete Poems of W H Auden in two volumes now sets the crown on more than half a century of scholarship on the poet. There’s nobody on the planet who knows more about this towering figure in twentieth-century poetry. He tells me what he finds so inexhaustibly rewarding about Auden’s work, talks about th...

My guest in this week's Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club . He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case – forged them.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this p...

This week’s Book Club podcast is a live special, recorded at this year’s inaugural Braemar Literary Festival. I’m talking to Sir Ian Rankin, in an exclusive pre-publication event, about his new Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. You can see images from the event and more details of the festival at https://www.braemarliteraryfestival.co.uk Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this pod...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov – who has this year become one of the most articulate ambassadors to the West for the situation in his homeland. As a book of his recent writings, Diary of an Invasion, is published in English, he tells me about the experience of trading fiction for the "duty" of a public intellectual in wartime. As an ethnic Russian...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art historian Dr Matt Lodder, whose new book is Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos. He tells me how much more there is to the history of painting on the body than we commonly suppose; and how over the years the history of tattooing (and public attitudes to it) have been shaped by religion, imperialism, class and fashion. Plus, we discover the on...

My guest on this week's podcast is best known as a stand-up comic, and co-host of the hit second world war podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Now Al Murray has produced a book –  Command: How The Allies Learned To Win the Second World War  – in which he looks at the progress of the war through case studies of the men who, one way and another, made a difference to it. He tells me how we turne...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Peter Stothard, whose new book Crassus: The First Tycoon tells the story of the third man in Rome’s great triumvirate: landlord, power-broker, Spartacus’s nemesis and leader of a hubristic expedition to the east that was to see his glorious career end in bitter failure. Image © Teri Pengilley Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast wi...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the doyen of war studies, Lawrence Freedman. His new book Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine takes a fascinating look at the interplay between politics and conflict in the post-war era. He tells me why dictators make bad generals, how soldiers are always playing politics, how the nuclear age has changed the calculus of co...

On this week’s Book Club podcast we’re talking about the best crime writer you’ve (probably) never heard of. As Penguin reissues three of Josephine Tey’s classic Golden Age novels, I’m joined by Nicola Upson, whose own detective stories (most recently Dear Little Corpses ) feature Tey as a central character. She tells me about the unique character of Tey’s writing, her discreet private life, and a...