A special episode with historian, academic, documentary maker, journalist, cultural polymath and keen fiction reader Simon Schama. Listen in to find out what sends him to sleep happy, how his reading informs his writing, his favourite bookstores, his views on the pleasure of imperfect books, and best of all a ton of book suggestions and a brilliant book club recommendation just for us.

Books by Simon Schama include:

• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
• Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
• The Embarrassment Of Riches: An Interpretation Of Dutch Culture In The Golden Age
• Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900

Books mentioned on this episode:

• War and Peace, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
• A Sentimental Education Flaubert
• In the First Circle by  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
• Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
• The General and His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
• Memoirs of Hadrian and That Mighty Sculptor, Time by Marguerite Yourcenar
• 'Don't Look Now' and  'The Birds' Daphne du Maurier
• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
• The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books by Edward Wilson-Lee