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.
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 ...
4th August 2021
Craxton, that wonderful painter and funny, lovely man, could be in no better hands than those of Ian Collins, a writer and curator of distinction, a close friend of Craxton's for the last decade of his life and now involved with the Craxton Estate. This glorious ...
26th July 2021
James Marriott and his co-author Terry Macalister have spent decades researching and writing about the oil industry. Their new book explores the history and social consequences of the UK's oil business, its shifting relationship with government ...
26th July 2021
From the former head of the National Gallery, NPG and Royal Academy, an architecturally inclined assessment of how we display art.
11th June 2021
OL talks to Magnus Rena about her new book, Everybody: A Book about Freedom. It’s a sweeping, collective biography of a dozen glamorous but stifled figures: Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Nina Simone, Wilhelm Reich, Malcom X, Ana Mendieta ...
