BooksPodcast

Mar 05 2025 99 ep. 24 mins 1k

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An authoritative look at recent books that may or may not have shown up on your radar screen. Fiction and non-fiction. Biographies and comic books. Politics and the arts. And quite certainly, no gardening or cookery books. All presented with Tim Haigh’s passion for books and writing. Tim is a widely respected critic, reviewer and broadcaster. Expert without being stuffy, he is noted for the lively intelligence and irreverence he brings to the field.

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Simon Hart – Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip

Mar 05 2025 36 mins

Strap in, this is going to be quite a ride! 31 October 2023. “Amongst today’s HR joys is the report from Emma that a departmental SpAd (Special Adviser) went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with

Joanne Harris – Moonlight Market

Jan 17 2025 25 mins

If you can’t see it … is it real? “What does real mean? Is love real? Or magic, or hope, or joy, or the quest for enlightenment? Are any of those things less real just because they’re woven in words?… Fairy stories matter. They’re how we understand what’s true.” Joanne Harris is serenely unconcerned with the subdivisions of literary genre. Her

Jerry Brotton – Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction

Dec 18 2024 36 mins

Where are we?!? Why deep South but far North? Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West? When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going? Is the North Pole a real place? Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it’s always Charlemagne.) How do we know which way

Robin Choudhury – The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ

What lies within? Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature so widely in our visual imagery and iconography. The human heart, Robin Choudhury tells us, has been “…the dwelling place of the soul, the source of life,

Evie Wyld – The Echoes

The sins of the mother are visited upon the children The Echoes is many things in Evie Wyld’s new novel. It is the rural backwater in Australia where Hannah grew up, and it is also the shape of the book, as the past reverberates down the generations. Philip Larkin said that man hands on misery to man, but for Evie it is mothers who seem to do this. Among the achievements o

Marcus Chown – A Crack In Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage

Jun 06 2024 37 mins

Black holes aren’t black! If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can’t escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in space. So they’re not holes. And they’re not black. But they are among the most fascinating and counter-intuit

Scarlett Thomas – The Sleepwalkers

Apr 19 2024 28 mins

You tell yourself “It’s OK, it’s OK … ” but it’s really not! Scarlett Thomas is a tricky novelist to categorise. She has a playful, restless, sleeves-rolled-up approach to writing, in which she seldom ducks the dark turn and the big idea. And you can’t doubt her commitment. She once earned an MSc in Ethnobotany by way of research for a b

Adrian Mackinder – Death and the Victorians

The origins of modern death Let’s face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance. The advent of ind

Alwyn Turner – Little Englanders – Britain in the Edwardian Era

Mar 03 2024 39 mins

End of Empire History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn’t really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era. There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxiou

Howard Jacobson – What Will Survive of Us

Feb 11 2024 32 mins

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. It’s risk! Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobson’s new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is rightly celebrated for his dialogue and, as so often before, it is rich with allusion and steeped in his passion for English literature. The novel is explicitly and unaba