The Book Club

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Caspar Henderson, whose new book A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous really is a journey into sound. He tells me why the music of the spheres – at least in this solar system – is a terrible racket, what we can learn from whale earwax, and why bat-squeaks are, in fact, very very loud indeed.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podca...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, broadcaster and academic Mary Beard. In her new book, Emperor of Rome , she explores what we can and can’t know about the men who ruled the Roman Empire, and what the lurid stories about so many of them tell us about the anxieties and fantasies of Rome’s ordinary citizens and the remarkable resilience of the regime. We also discuss, among ot...

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Sarah Ogilvie about the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told in her new The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary . She tells me why the OED was different in kind from any previous English dictionary, how crowdsourcing made it 'the Wikipedia of its day', and how – as she...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Francesca Peacock to talk about the remarkable life and extraordinary work of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle. Famous in her own day for her bizarre public appearances and nicknamed 'Mad Madge', the author of The Blazing World has been marginalised by posterity as an eccentric dilettante. But in her new book Pure Wit , Franc...

The Book Club podcast returns next week. In the meantime, here's another from the archives, and one which looks more timely now even than it was when we recorded it in 2017. Here's perhaps Russia's most prominent dissident writer, Masha Gessen, talking about their book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia .   Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without...

As Sam is still away, we've dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind . The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and an account of the myriad ways – many of them invisible to us – that it has shaped and conti...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the journalist and author Celia Brayfield whose new book Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the story of animal rights, takes us back to the 19th century. Celia describes how Anna Sewell's writing of the Black Beauty book ultimately led to the kinder treatment of horses, and we both recall fondly the popular TV adaptation with its soaringly emotive t...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, whose gripping new book The Wolf Hunt tells the story of an Israeli-American mother who finds herself wondering whether her teenage son Adam could have been responsible for the death of a classmate. She tells me about using the thriller form as a Trojan horse, about fear and what we do with it, and whe...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative and tech writer James Ball, to talk about his new book The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. In it, James traces the rise and disturbing metastasis of what he calls 'the conspiracy theory that ate all the other conspiracy theories', and argues that what looks from the outside as an extreme set of fringe beliefs about Sa...

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ferdinand Mount who in his long career has been literary and political editor of this very magazine, as well as editor of the TLS and head of Margaret Thatcher's Number Ten policy unit. We discuss his new book Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How they Fall, from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson . He tells me why he thinks it's fair to c...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Caitlin Moran. Having written one of the bestselling works of popular feminism of the last 20 years – How To Be A Woman –  she has turned her attention to the other half of the population with her new book What About Men? I asked Caitlin why she felt she needed to write such a book, and what qualifies her to do so. She tells me why she thinks young men...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Tom Whipple, science editor of the  Times and author of the gripping new book The Battle of the Beams: The secret science of radar that turned the tide of the Second World War . He describes the ingenious technological, psychological and espionage battles that made electromagnetic warfare a decisive – if under-appreciated – contributor to Britain's vict...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art critic Laura Cumming. Her new book Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death talks about her fascination for the paintings of the Dutch 17th-century Golden Age, and in particular the entrancing work of the enigmatic Carel Fabritius. She tells me how her preoccupation links to the story of her artist father, why she thinks academic a...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the cosmologist Andrew Pontzen. His The Universe In A Box: A New Cosmic History describes how we have learned to simulate first the weather, and then the universe itself – and how we discovered that those simulations don't just mimic reality but allow us to learn new things about it. Dark matter, the Big Bang and the scientific importance of suboptimal...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the former FBI director James Comey, who is making his debut as a thriller writer with an engrossing police procedural, Central Park West . Jim tells me how he mined his own early career as a prosecutor in the southern district of New York to produce this world of hard-bitten investigators and murderous mafiosi (and how he was able to bring it up to dat...

In this week's Book Club podcast I talk to Peter Turchin about his new book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. He proposes a scientific theory of history, mapping the underlying forces that have led to the collapse of states from the ancient world to the present day, and warns of very turbulent times ahead indeed.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to acc...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the writer and critic Laura Freeman to talk about her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists . Laura's book is the portrait of one of those figures who, without ever quite taking the spotlight themselves, was nevertheless hugely influential in kindling the love and appreciation of art in others – a man who knew everyone from Picasso...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, we celebrate the life and weigh the literary reputation of Martin Amis, who died at the end of last week. I’m joined by the critic Alex Clark, the novelist John Niven, and our chief reviewer Philip Hensher – all of whom bring decades of close engagement with Amis’s work to the discussion. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts....

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're talking about a very new version of a very old book. Leo Africanus's The Cosmography and Geography of Africa was the first book to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe. Part Baedeker, part-natural history, part-memoir, part-history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of years. Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Ri...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the writer Madeleine Bunting, whose new book is The Seaside: England's Love Affair. She tells me how the great seaside resorts came into their 19th century pomp, how abrupt was their mid-century decline, and of the terrible desolation that has succeeded the idyll of donkey rides, ices and fish and chips. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access thi...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Shehan Karunatilaka, author of last year's Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida . Shehan tells me about writing a novel whose protagonist is dead on page one, about putting the chaos of Sri Lanka's long civil war on the page, and about the importance of Shakin' Stevens to a teenager in 1980s Colombo. Become a Spectator subscriber today t...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. In his new book Quantum Supremacy, Prof Kaku explains how – as he sees it – the advent of quantum computers is going to turn the world as we know it on its head. He explains the extraordinary possibilities and perils of the quantum revolution, tells me how Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon set him on his path, and a...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve . As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells me how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve , where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge... and why he's never going to write a novel...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the poet and artist Frieda Hughes, whose new book George: A Magpie Memoir tells the story of what caring for a foundling baby magpie taught her about life. She tells me about chaos, head-bouncing, magpie-poop, and how she managed to write about corvids without imagining her father Ted Hughes looking over her shoulder.    Become a Spectator subscriber to...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Katja Hoyer, whose new book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 tells the story of four decades which are vital to understand modern Germany, but which tend to be quietly relegated to a footnote in history. Born in the GDR herself, Katja tells me how much more there is to the East German state than the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, and the...