Books podcast

Books Podcast: Jonathan Meades

In this week’s Books Podcast I’m joined by the great Jonathan Meades. A man of many hats — food critic, architectural critic, memoirist, polemicist, cultural historian, novelist etc — and one distinctive pair of sunglasses, Meades is this week talking about stealing food. His The Plagiarist In The Kitchen, new in paperback, is a sort of anti-recipe book; a collection of cookable recipes (well, except the one), an erudite disquisition on the history and theory of cookery, and a slant discussion of the whole idea of plagiarism. Also, it’s packed with good jokes. Join us to hear why Paul Bocuse doesn’t know how to make gratin dauphinois, why it’s hard to source the dried spinal

Books Podcast: The secret lives of Julian Assange, Craig Wright and Ronald Pinn

In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan about lies, paranoia, and the way that nothing, online, is quite as it seems. His new book The Secret Life (Faber) tells, in the words of its subtitle, “three true stories”: one about Andrew’s utterly bizarre time as the prospective ghostwriter for Julian Assange; another about his association with the man who claimed to have invented the digital currency Bitcoin; and the third — still darker and stranger — about Andrew’s own experiment in stealing a dead man’s identity to become someone else online. They add up  to a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus,

Books Podcast: William Empson’s legacy

In this week’s Books Podcast, we’re talking about William Empson, one of the most brilliant and captivatingly eccentric literary critics and poets of the twentieth century. Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor at Princeton and author of the new On Empson, joins me to discuss the strange life and mercurial thought of the man who first discerned Seven Types of Ambiguity. (Not to mention using rashers of bacon as bookmarks, travelling to Japan with nothing but a pair of tennis shoes and a lemon in his luggage, encouraging his wife’s infidelity, being sent down from Cambridge for owning condoms, and owning the strangest beard in the history of English letters…) You can listen to our conversation

Books Podcast: Martin Luther, Catholic dissident

In this week’s Books Podcast, we honour the five hundredth anniversary of the nailing of that business with the 95 Theses, the church door and the mad monk by discussing Martin Luther and his legacy. Was he a Protestant? Was he a monk? Was there even a church door? And what did the Reformation mean for Henry VIII and the generations of English monarchs to come? Is it, come to that, over? Answering all my dumb and ignorant questions on these subjects are two superbly intelligent and knowledgeable scholars of this vital period in European history. I’m joined by Luther’s latest biographer Peter Stanford, author of Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident; and by Peter Marshall — author of the magisterial new

Books Podcast: The art of losing control

Is Enlightenment rationalism overrated? Do we spend too much time thinking and not enough time letting our conscious thoughts scatter to the winds? My guest in this week’s Books Podcast is the philosopher Jules Evans, who argues that we human beings have a deep need to get out of our heads. We talk about his new book The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience – in which he explores everything from extreme meditation to tantric swinging parties, from the sublime in Romantic art to the latest findings in psychedelic drug use. Learn what a near-death experience feels like (Jules has had one) – and wonder, with

Books Podcast: The lost stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Following the publication of a new collection of the lost short stories of F Scott Fitzgerald (I’d Die For You and Other Lost Stories, Scribner UK, £16.99), I’m joined by two eminent Fitzgerald scholars to talk about the life, legacy and lasting greatness of the laureate of the Jazz Age. In this week’s podcast Anne Margaret Daniel (who edited the new volume) and Sarah Churchwell (author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby) talk about how Fitzgerald was trapped by his own reputation, about how different his canon looked to contemporaries than it does to posterity, about the drink and despair that attended the second

Books Podcast: Taking Hamlet around the world

This week’s Books Podcast turns to perhaps the greatest work of the greatest writer in English history. Yup: it’s Hamlet time. Specifically, I’m talking to the former artistic director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, about his scheme to perform Hamlet in every country on the face of the earth – a two-year scheme whose rackety history and ultimate success he recounts in his fascinating new book Hamlet: Globe to Globe. A touring company taking Hamlet from Botswana to North Korea and all points in between? It sounds like the sort of thing you’d come up with after a few too many beers. Well, now that you mention it… You can

Books Podcast: How freakin’ zeitgeist are you?

In this week’s Books Podcast, I meet the poet Murray Lachlan Young. In the 1990s, Murray became notorious: the first and only poet in history to get a million-pound contract with a record label. Naturally, those living in the standard-issue garrets developed some envy issues. As he promotes his collected work, How Freakin’ Zeitgeist Are You?, Murray talks in detail for the first time about the wild and eventually traumatising ride that took him from obscurity, via the main stage on Glastonbury, to obscurity again — before he picked up the pieces and returned to the stage. He also shares a somewhat disrespectful poem about a former editor of this

Books podcast: The British boarding school

“The happiest days of your life?” This week in the Books Podcast I ask the authors of two recent books about boarding schools whether the system that has formed the characters of the British ruling classes for several centuries is a blissful idyll or the Stanford Prison Experiment in cricket-whites. I’m joined by Ysenda Maxtone-Graham, whose Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979, is a shrewd history of the fluctuating jollity of hockey sticks, and by Alex Renton, who in Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class argues that British boarding schools have for many years been incubators and enablers of sexual and

Books Podcast: Rob Newman’s Neuropolis

My guest in this week’s Spectator Books Podcast is Rob Newman. Listeners of a certain age (ie mine) will remember him as a tweedy professor on the spoof History Today upbraiding David Baddiel with the line: “That’s you, that is.” But here he arrives as a real scholar: the author of a provoking (and also funny) new book called Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. With wild claims being made for the ability of brain science and magnetic imaging to locate the “language organ” or the “seat of wisdom”, and with human consciousness being reduced to a collection of chemical accidents, Rob discusses the way in which old myths have crept back in in the

Listen: Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar discusses The Return

Back in October, I spoke to Hisham Matar — who has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography — about his book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. When Hisham was 19, his Libyan dissident father was abducted from exile by the Gadaffi regime and disappeared into Tripoli’s most notorious jail. The writer spent 20 years not knowing what had really happened. He talks here about his long struggle to find out, and his first trip back after the regime had fallen…. You can listen to our conversation here: And please subscribe on iTunes to get a new episode every Thursday.

Books Podcast: The joy of indexes

On this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the scholar Dennis Duncan to talk about a subject that’s very dear to both of our hearts: that neglected few pages at the back of any book — the Index. In the wake of last week’s National Indexing Day, we talk about the ancient history of indexes and indexing, their vital importance to scholars, the surprising role they have had in the intellectual dogfighting of the Enlightenment… and where you might find an entry for “Peterhouse: shocking goings-on there, 85, 87-9, 107-8; four revolting fellows of, 109; main source of perverts, 103″… It’s a fascinating if obscure part of the book-world, and one well worth your attention.

Books Podcast: Charlotte Rampling

A few years ago, Charlotte Rampling signed a contract to write her autobiography – and then, the project not long underway, called the whole thing off. But this month she publishes something quite out of the usual run of celebrity memoirs. Who I Am, co-written with the French man of letters Christophe Bataille, is a slender, riddling approach to the actor’s inner life – not a catalogue of film anecdotes but rather a hesitant return to the child she was. She joins me to talk about why she’s done things this way, about the legacy of her Olympic medalist father, and about the terrible tragedy that defined her young womanhood.

Books Podcast: Machiavelli’s lifelong quest for freedom

In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to Erica Benner about her new Life of Machiavelli, Be Like The Fox. Professor Benner, a Yale expert in political science, offers a new and intriguing reading of the great theorist of statecraft — arguing that in the violent and unstable Florence of his time, he learned to conceal his real meanings in layers of irony and satire. We ask, in essence, just how Machiavellian Machiavelli really was…. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Books Podcast: Michael Morpurgo

In this week’s books podcast we have an interview with the former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo in which he talks for the first time about his new project. Michael, in town for the London Book Fair, announces that he’s rewriting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Toto. He also talks about why children’s books need to be more adult, the wartime childhood that fuels his work, and why the movies ruined Robin Hood. We’re not in Kansas anymore… You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Books podcast: Resisting the self-improvement craze

Think positive. Listen to your inner voice. Strive to become the best version of yourself. The only way out is through. Don’t look back. That sort of go-getting mantra underpins a multi-million-pound industry in life-coaching and self-help. And it’s all horse-manure, says the Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann. His bracing new book Stand Firm: Resisting The Self-Improvement Craze asks us to think negative, sack our life-coaches, ignore our inner voices and learn to say, politely but firmly: no. I spoke to him this week about the joys of self-non-improvement… You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

Books podcast: The story of pain

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the scholar Joanna Bourke, who’s talking about her new book on something we all have in common: suffering. In The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers she turns much of what we think we know about pain on its head. Here’s an experience that’s common to all of us, but apparently completely subjective. It is twined into the very roots of our culture — and yet the stories we tell about it have changed massively over the centuries. What was life like before anaesthesia? Why did we not use painkillers until long after we had them? How is it that until

Books podcast: Daniel Dennett and the evolution of minds

In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the philosopher Daniel Dennett — whose new book takes on one of the biggest and most intriguing problems of all: consciousness itself. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Prof Dennett makes the case that consciousness itself is a sort of illusion — and that the same evolutionary mechanisms that gave us opposable thumbs can account for our ability to do maths, compose music, wonder what would have happened had Germany won the Second World War, and think about the idea of thinking. This superbly lucid explicator tells us, too, about how “post-truth” is not just a political fad, but a threat to

Books podcast: Louise Doughty on Apple Tree Yard, Sherlock and Lionel Shriver

This week in the books podcast, I’m talking to Louise Doughty — the author of the novel behind the hit BBC thriller Apple Tree Yard. Louise talks about the slightly dizzying experience of seeing her work adapted for the screen, about being swarmed by crazed Sherlock fans, about why writers are like dancing badgers — and, in rather forthright terms — why she thinks Lionel Shriver has it all wrong about “cultural appropriation”. Listen here: And if you enjoyed that episode, please subscribe on iTunes for a fresh podcast every Thursday.

Books podcast: Rory Stewart’s The Marches

In this week’s podcast, I sit down with the Conservative MP, sometime diplomat and writer Rory Stewart to talk about his remarkable new book The Marches. Rory’s first book The Places In Between described a huge journey he took on foot across Afghanistan in the early noughties. His latest work sees him lace on his hiking boots again. This is at once an account of the meandering journey he made along the Anglo-Scottish border around the time of the Scottish independence referendum (Rory is MP for Penrith and the Borders), and a tender account of his relationship with his father Brian. Soldier, spy, adventurer and haggis-eater, Brian, then in his