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.
7th December 2022
The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in ...
4th December 2022
George Balanchine’s life cut the twentieth century in two. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. Mr B.: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century is more than a biography, and ...
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 ...
