The Booking Club

Feb 17 2025 74 ep. 35 mins 76
The Booking Club Podcast artwork

Leading authors and commentators discuss their latest books and breakthroughs at their favourite haunts | Hosted by Jack Aldane | Formerly The Corner Table | Music by Boogie Belgique.
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How the British Empire Has Shaped the Globe, with Sathnam Sanghera

Feb 17 2025 41 mins  
The British empire was built on slavery, but it also pioneered abolition. It spread democracy, but it also seeded geopolitical instability. It devastated nature but it also gave birth to modern notions of environmentalism.In this urgent sequel to Empireland, award-winning author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera extends his examination of British imperial legacies beyond Britain to t

Why We Need a Global Food Philosophy, with Julian Baggini

Nov 29 2024 54 mins  
How we live is shaped by how we eat.You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises.And most of us now rely on a complex global food

The Proof of My Innocence, with Jonathan Coe

Nov 18 2024 35 mins  
Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5.As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Ca

Wonderful Words That Tell A Tale, with Tom Read Wilson

Nov 15 2024 40 mins  
From famous wordsmith Tom Read Wilson comes another breathtaking adventure through the English language. Discover the fascinating origin stories behind the words we use in this delightful follow-up to Every Word Tells a Story, Wonderful Words That Tell A Tale, illustrated by Ian Morris.Unlock a whole new side to language in this abundant literary adventure. The etymological route,

LIVE from The Battle of Ideas Festival 2024, with Geoff Norcott

Nov 15 2024 35 mins  
The Battle of Ideas festival 2024, which took place at Church House in Westminster on 19 & 20 October, was a sell-out success. As part of the event, Jack Aldane hosted English comedian Geoff Norcott live for a lunchtime recording of The Booking Club in front of a packed room to discuss Geoff's latest book: The British Bloke Decoded.Laughing from beginning to end, they dissect what

A History of the World in 47 Borders, with Jonn Elledge

Nov 15 2024 28 mins  
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on.Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way.By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political iden

The Knockout: Sport's Most Decisive Moment, with Andy Clarke

Oct 11 2024 49 mins  
Andy Clarke, Sky Sports' lead boxing commentator and one of the nation's most respected boxing pundits, goes in search of the knockout: the most dramatic and devastating moment in sport.How does it feel to land that ultimate blow? How does it feel to suffer it? The Knockout assesses the impact it has on the fighters and the people close to it and asks what it takes mentally, physic

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, with Sam Leith

Sep 11 2024 45 mins  
The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures.In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of c

Technology is not the Problem, with Timandra Harkness

Sep 09 2024 59 mins  
Technology has delivered a world that we expect to revolve around us, our needs and preferences, and our unique personalities. We willingly hand over intimate information about ourselves in return for a world that’s easier to navigate.We live in the Personalised Century, where we view ourselves in terms of what rather than who we are – the objects of others’ recognition, rath

My Family: the Memoir, with David Baddiel

Jul 12 2024 52 mins  
On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all.Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, dec