My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the poet and artist Frieda Hughes, whose new book George: A Magpie Memoir tells the story of what caring for a foundling baby magpie taught her about life. She tells me about chaos, head-bouncing, magpie-poop, and how she managed to write about corvids without imagining her father Ted Hughes looking over her shoulder.   

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Katja Hoyer, whose new book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 tells the story of four decades which are vital to understand modern Germany, but which tend to be quietly relegated to a footnote in history. Born in the GDR herself, Katja tells me how much more there is to the East German state than the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, and the grey totalitarian dystopia of popular imagination. She tells me about Erich Honecker's wild side, about the importance of coffee to East German morale, and about how inevitable or otherwise were the historical forces that saw Germany first divided, and then reunited.     

On this week's Book Club podcast my guests are the former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby and his wife and co-author Jemima Lewis, to talk about their new book Ravenous: How To Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape. They tell me about the perils and pleasures of working with your spouse, why exercise doesn't make you lose weight, what we don't understand about nutrition, when the state needs to take a hand in consumer choice – and why sending Liz Truss a picture of a sheep's mutilated backside might not have been the best idea.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Victoria Smith, whose new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women explains why one of the oldest forms of misogyny is seeing a vicious resurgence in our own age. She says some of the worst of it now comes from young women. She tells me why she thinks feminists of each new generation seem destined to forget or reject the lessons learned by the previous one, and why female bodies – and the life experiences which go with them – are something that can't be wished away by postmodern theory.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and editor Ian Buruma, to talk about his new book Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War Two. A Chinese princess who climbed into bed with Japanese nationalist gangsters; an observant Jew who sold his co-religionists to the Nazis; and Himmler’s personal masseur. Ian describes how their stories link and resonate, and how murky morality gets in a time where truth loses its meaning altogether.

On this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Sara Wheeler, who looks back on her travelling life in Glowing Still: A Woman's Life on the Road. She tells me why it's 'a book about tits and toilets', as well as a meditation on the past and future of travel writing and a lament for the books – in one case thanks to having children and the other to the modern fatwa on 'cultural appropriation' – she didn't get to write. 

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli discusses Anaximander's revolutionary cosmic view, comparing historical earth measurements in Greek and Chinese cultures, exploring the nexus of science, politics, and cultural relativism, and delving into Anaximander's philosophical and scientific insights.

My guest on this week’s Book Club is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. In his new book Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces, Robert describes how being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis plunged him from his comfortable life as an English literature professor at Oxford into a frightening and disorienting new world; and how literature itself helped him learn to navigate around it.

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the scholar and biographer Richard Bradford, whose new book Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer looks at the rackety life and uneven oeuvre of one of the big beasts of 20th-century American letters. Mailer, as Richard argues, thought his self-identified genius as a writer licensed any amount of personal bad behaviour – up to and including stabbing one of his wives. As the book makes clear Mailer was a racist, misogynist, homophobe, thug and a boor. But was he also, actually, any good? And will he last?

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it's in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush administration with his support for the Iraq War, why it still makes sense to think about 'fate' in a world without gods and why George H W Bush was a paragon of the tragic mindset while his son George W Bush was a tragic hero.