Acclaimed historian Giles Milton (Checkmate in Berlin, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Paradise Lost) talks to Johnny about his new book on the US and Britain's diplomatic mission to brace Stalin against the Germans and bring him into WW2 as an ally. 

Edited by Magnus Rena

Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked with Complicité, Florence + the Machine, Beyoncé, U2; designed installations at Tate Modern, the Serpentine, the V&A, Trafalgar Square, the Imperial War Museum and the UN General Assembly; sets for the ROH, the Met and La Scala. Etc. Etc. 

She spoke to Magnus about her recent book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, published by Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. It is a miracle of book design and making, exceptional for its production values, careful artistry and sheer technical whizz and exuberance. Thames & Hudson’s commissioning editor called it “the most complex book production” he’s seen in his 28 years with the publishing house. 

Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena 

Music: 

U2, Beautiful Day, performed live in 2001 at the Fleet Center, Boston, MA, USA 

Stormzy, Blinded By Your Grace, Pt.2, performed live in 2018 at the BRIT Awards, London 

Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian rubber industry. In 1911 he was knighted; five years later he would be executed in Pentonville Prison for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a closeted queer man and an Irish Nationalist — is the subject of Roland Philipps' fantastic new biography, Broken Archangel. We are delighted that he has returned to the podcast for a second time (after Victoire in 2021) to speak to Johnny about the book.

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe

Edited by Magnus Rena

Music: Damien Dempsey, Banna Strand

A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland, a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and often witty account of the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewhere.

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe

Edited by Magnus Rena

Music: The Song of the Stakhanovite Unit

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. It's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper, but the story of the publisher's life through twelve books, including his mother's diary and Lolita. 

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe 

Edited by Magnus Rena 

Music: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik: II. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer

Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul. It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as the process of ‘catching souls’. 

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe 

Edited by Magnus Rena 

Music: Nick Drake, When the Day Is Done

Marina spoke with Laura Freeman about her new book, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Remarkably, this is the first biography of Jim Ede ever to appear. It’s a marvellous book — already a shop favourite this summer — studded with anecdotes: Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth arguing over who first put a hole in their sculpture; studio visits to Brancusi and Picasso; a hypochondriac David Jones; the Tate flood; etc. 

Interviewed by Marina Scholtz 

Edited by Magnus Rena 

Music: César Franck, Prélude, FWV 21 

Photo credit: Paul Allitt

Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians, his first book, was an eye-watering collection of houses and gardens from Tangier to Milan and the Dolomites… each scene a private space: tasteful, indulgent, never grandiose. Now the great aesthete has turned his eye to the Aegean with Haute Bohemians: Greece: Interiors, Architecture, and Landscapes. It is, of course, sumptuous. 

We are delighted that Miguel has recorded a podcast with us to mark the book’s publication and - another delight - that his interviewer is Sofka Zinovieff. Both are great friends of the shop, and we are immensely grateful to them. 

Interviewed by Sofka Zinovieff 

Edited by Magnus Rena 

Music: 

It’s a few months since we’ve given a new podcast but we’re delighted to break the silence with a conversation with Margaret Jull Costa, the distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese, about the Spanish writer Javier Marías.

Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to the UK, we continued to send him books in Madrid regularly until his death last year. His work is deeply engaged with England, MI6, Oxford, detective stories, and the mysteries of interpretation and translation. His last work to be published (in March this year) is Tomás Nevinson, which is a sequel to Berta Isla. These two extraordinary books have many of the same preoccupations as his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow – which I described in the Spectator as a work of genius when I reviewed it. But the best place to start reading him is probably his first novel to be published in the UK, All Souls.

Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe 

Edited by Magnus Rena

Cover photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly

Music: Chubby Checker, Hucklebuck

The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a discursive and extraordinarily erudite book on an abstruse but delightful subject: those who collect, hoard, deal or care for astonishing manuscripts and illuminated books. His cast includes a Greek forger, a French priest, a rabbi, and indeed a prince… De Hamel is tremendously engaging and often funny.

Edited by Magnus Rena

Music: Joachim Held, Das Ander Buch. Ein New Künstlich Lautten Buch, 1549: Nach Willen Dein