In our latest piece of bonus content, writer Max Wolfson talks with cultural critic and historian and Stuart Walton about the differing characters of spirits, the effectiveness of legislating vice, and our need to get obliterated.

Stuart Walton has written about drink and drug cultures since the early 1990s, and is the author of “In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling,” “A Natural History of Human Emotions” and “Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication” as well as a number of consumer guides to wine, spirits and liqueurs, and cocktails. He’s written for the Guardian, the London Magazine, the LA Review of Books and Review 31, and is a Royal Literary Fund Tutorial Fellow at Plymouth University. In his early career, he wrote on food and wine, co-edited the Hachette Wine Guide and has been a senior writer and inspector on the Good Food Guide for thirty years.

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