John Sandoe Books

Jan 15 2025 83 ep. 34 mins 158

John Sandoe Books Podcast artwork

'Quite simply the best bookshop anyone could wish for' - Edna O'Brien. Independent bookshop (est. in 1957) Chelsea, London.

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Chloe Dalton: Raising Hare

Jan 15 2025 54 mins

Dalton, who has worked for over a decade as a parliamentary and Foreign Office policy advisor and speech-writer, found herself raising a leveret in lockdown. Her approach was to intervene as little as possible and allow the animal to remain wild – yet it still comes to snooze in her house, and has now raised leverets that treat Dalton’s small converted barn as their own. She sp

Lucy Hughes-Hallett: The Scapegoat

Nov 20 2024 58 mins

The scapegoat in question is the Duke of Buckingham: favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman… The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria would have paid the mercenary army for four months. He was hated so fiercely by the time of his stabbing in a Portsmouth inn that his murder

Mother State: Helen Charman in Conversation with Kate Briggs

Nov 20 2024 55 mins

'motherhood is frequently politicised, but rarely acknowledged in all its fullness to be political' We were delighted that Helen Charman, a Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, whose writing has been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze and The Stinging Fly, came to the shop to speak about her new book, Mother State. The impetus behind the book — a history of

William Dalrymple: The Golden Road

Sep 10 2024 58 mins

Five years - almost to the day - since the first episode of the Sandoe's podcast, we welcome back the very first author to have graced our airwaves: William Dalrymple. In September 2019 he came to discuss The Anarchy; he returns, on our 80th episode, for The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. He traces the rise and spread of Buddhism from its roots, showing the d

Rupert Thomson: How to Make a Bomb

Aug 23 2024 35 mins

Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. He's been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; and his first novel, Dreams of Leaving - one of the earliest books to be published by Bloomsbury soon after it was established in 1986

Giles Milton: The Stalin Affair

Jul 15 2024 33 mins

Acclaimed historian Giles Milton (Checkmate in Berlin, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Paradise Lost) talks to Johnny about his new book on the US and Britain's diplomatic mission to brace Stalin against the Germans and bring him into WW2 as an ally. Edited by Magnus Rena

Es Devlin on the Art of Set Design

Apr 29 2024 50 mins

Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked w

Roland Philipps on Roger Casement

Apr 12 2024 52 mins

Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian rubber industry. In 1911 he was knighted; five years later he would be executed in Pentonville Prison for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a closeted queer man and an Irish Nationalist — is the subject of Roland Philip

Anna Reid: A Nasty Little War

Feb 16 2024 52 mins

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 often witty account of the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archange

Thomas Harding on George Weidenfeld

Sep 20 2023 64 mins

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. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik: II. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer