The Book Club

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt - whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa - and along the way explains what's so good about mammoths, how cutting-edge cognitive science explains Paleolithic art, why cavemen didn't live in caves... and why you can draw a line from prehistoric Lascaux to Tony the Tiger.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Matthew Hollis, author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. In the tail end of this centenary year of the great monument of modernist poetry, Matthew tells me about the private agonies that went into the making of the poem. We discuss how not just Ezra Pound but Vivien Eliot had a hand in editing it, and why we misunderstand Eliot’s famous claim about the impersonality of poetry.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Rupert Shortt, whose stimulating new book The Hardest Problem addresses one of the oldest difficulties in theology: "the problem of evil". Is this something the religious and the secular can even talk meaningfully about? What's the great challenge Dostoevsky throws up? And what did Augustine get right that Richard Dawkins gets wrong? Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to two of the brave souls who turn recent political dramas into the sort of quickly written books we might call the second draft of history. I’m joined by the FT’s Sebastian Payne, author of The Fall of Boris Johnson, and our own James Heale, co-author of a Liz Truss biography, Out Of The Blue, which notoriously was so rapidly overtaken by events that she was out before it was. They tell me how they disentangle their duties in their day jobs as political reporters from what they owe their book readers, how differently sources will speak to authors than journalists, what the day to day press got wrong – and whether they think history will look more kindly on their subjects than the front pages.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Edward Mendelson, who with the publication of the Complete Poems of W H Auden in two volumes now sets the crown on more than half a century of scholarship on the poet. There’s nobody on the planet who knows more about this towering figure in twentieth-century poetry. He tells me what he finds so inexhaustibly rewarding about Auden’s work, talks about the shape of the poet’s career, the personal encounters that set him on this path… and about sex, religion and semicolons.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week's Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case – forged them. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s Book Club podcast is a live special, recorded at this year’s inaugural Braemar Literary Festival. I’m talking to Sir Ian Rankin, in an exclusive pre-publication event, about his new Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. You can see images from the event and more details of the festival at https://www.braemarliteraryfestival.co.ukBecome a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov – who has this year become one of the most articulate ambassadors to the West for the situation in his homeland. As a book of his recent writings, Diary of an Invasion, is published in English, he tells me about the experience of trading fiction for the "duty" of a public intellectual in wartime. As an ethnic Russian Ukrainian, he talks about what the West fails to understand about the profound differences between Russian and Ukrainian people, how their national literatures nourish and reflect these differences, how language itself has become one of the battlegrounds, and what Zelensky looked like to Ukrainians before he became a heroic war leader.      Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art historian Dr Matt Lodder, whose new book is Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos. He tells me how much more there is to the history of painting on the body than we commonly suppose; and how over the years the history of tattooing (and public attitudes to it) have been shaped by religion, imperialism, class and fashion. Plus, we discover the one thing on which Boomers and Gen Z can agree…Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week's podcast is best known as a stand-up comic, and co-host of the hit second world war podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Now Al Murray has produced a book – Command: How The Allies Learned To Win the Second World War – in which he looks at the progress of the war through case studies of the men who, one way and another, made a difference to it. He tells me how we turned round a war we spent three years losing so badly, and along the way provides some sharp reassessments of (among other eminences) Orde Wingate, George Patton and the two-pound gun. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.