15th January 2025

Dalton, who has worked for over a decade as a parliamentary and Foreign Office policy advisor and speech-writer, found herself raising a leveret in lockdown. Her approach was to intervene as little as possible and allow the animal to remain wild – yet it still comes to ...

20th November 2024

The scapegoat in question is the Duke of Buckingham: favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman… The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria would have paid the ...

20th November 2024

We were delighted that Helen Charman, a Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, whose writing has been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze and ...

10th September 2024

Five years – almost to the day – since the first episode of the Sandoe's podcast, we welcome back the very first author to have graced our airwaves: William Dalrymple. In September 2019 he came to discuss The Anarchy; he returns, on our 80th episode, for The Golden ...

23rd August 2024

Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. David Bowie chose The Insult as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; he’s been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; his first novel, Dreams of Leaving ...

15th July 2024

Acclaimed historian Giles Milton (Checkmate in Berlin, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, Paradise Lost) talks to Johnny about his new book on the US and Britain’s diplomatic mission to brace Stalin against the Germans and bring him into WW2 as an ally. The story is remarkable ...

29th April 2024

Winner of three Olivier awards, Es Devlin’s work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. The list of her projects and collaborators is breath-taking. Her name will be familiar to some; many will have seen ...

12th April 2024

Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo. Five years later he was knighted; five years after that, in 1916, he would be executed for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a ...

16th February 2024

A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland, a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and surprisingly witty book on on the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918 ...

20th September 2023

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. It's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper, but the story of the publisher's life through twelve books, including his mother's diary and Lolita.