21st September 2022

A History of Water... It's a riddling title, complicated more wickedly by its subtitle: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History. Edward Wilson-Lee is an author and academic of English literature at Cambridge. His superb new book follows ...

24th August 2022

We are delighted to bring you a new podcast with Karina Urbach, author of Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook. It tells the remarkable story of her Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis ...

10th May 2022

Laura Beatty could turn straw into gold. In Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher, she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. She speaks to Johnny ...

29th April 2022

Vashti speaks to Magnus about her new memoir, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live. From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled – slowly – by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with ...

22nd April 2022

Dame Eileen is joined by the novelist Salley Vickers to talk about Will She Do?: Act One of a Life on Stage. It is a marvellous memoir, beginning with her youth in Tottenham and ending when her theatrical career takes off. Forthright, transparent, dry, funny... there is ...

23rd February 2022

Johnny once wrote of Robert Edric that 'his was the most significant body of work from a novelist in a generation.' He has written over twenty historical novels, all of which share the same steady, precise tone and sense of passing time. My Own Worst Enemy is his ...

19th January 2022

Salley Vickers wrote her latest novel in a Wiltshire cottage during lockdown. She talks to Johnny about the importance of gardening while writing, Shropshire's historic pagan landscapes, and the complications of family relationships.

1st December 2021

In anticipation of Christmas and the excitement of the coming weeks, we are thrilled to present a reading of one of Eva Ibbotson’s short stories. Some of our most obliging customers will already know her as an author of unparalleled charm and humour. Who ...

9th November 2021

Mazower has written extensively on Eastern European history and the Balkans; it should come as no surprise that his new book is an impressive and thorough account of this first 'romantic' European revolution. It shows that the Greeks' uprising against Ottoman ...

20th October 2021

Some may have supposed that Thubron had done his last Big Journey (he is now 82), but this is arguably his biggest yet, and most arduous. Indomitable, venerable, he follows this immense river from its source in remote Mongolian bogs to where it emerges in the Sea ...