About once a month (in the pre-pandemic world) we were lucky enough to host some of our favourite authors upstairs at the shop. A bookshelf was swung back, chairs laid out, bottles uncorked and, an hour or so later, books signed. We began recording these events in 2019 with a talk by William Dalrymple and have enjoyed many fascinating talks and interviews ever since. In the last few months our speakers and interviews have included Edmund de Waal, Helena Attlee, Hisham Matar, Horatio Clare, Olivia Laing, Tom Stoppard and Hermione Lee… and we are hugely grateful to them all. We have many more such podcasts planned for the coming months.
Listen to any episode below, or on Spotify, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
20th September 2023
Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul. It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as ...
21st June 2023
Marina spoke with Laura Freeman about her new book, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Remarkably, this is the first biography of Jim Ede ever to appear. It’s a marvellous book — already a shop favourite this summer — studded with anecdotes ...
18th May 2023
Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians, his first book, was an eye-watering ...
10th May 2023
Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to the UK, we continued to send him books in Madrid regularly until his death last year. His work ...
