In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. In The Alienation Effect (Allen Lane) acclaimed architectural historian Owen Hatherley draws on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, to argue that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better.

Owen Hatherley was joined in conversation about his book by poet and translator Michael Hofmann.

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Ken Worpole, ‘a literary original, a social and architectural historian whose books combine the Orwellian ideal of common decency with understated erudition’ (New Statesman), has written on many subjects during his long career, from cemeteries to hospices to the novels of Alexander Baron, but has often returned to the subject of his beloved Essex. His latest essay collection Brightening from the East (Little Toller) focuses on the natural and built landscapes of the ‘region of the mind’ that is the estuarine marshlands of the Thames and the East Anglian coast, bringing us stories of radical communities and arcadian dreams of new ways of living.

Worpole is in conversation with writer and journalist Melissa Benn; the evening will be hosted by writer and producer Gareth Evans.

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With Testo Junkie, Pornotopia, An Apartment in Uranus and Can the Monster Speak, Paul B. Preciado became established as one of the most exciting and challenging social thinkers of our time. His latest book Dysphoria Mundi (Fitzcarraldo), a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry and autofiction, draws on the experience of the Covid pandemic and the social convulsions that accompanied and followed from it to argue that dysphoria, far from being a form of mental illness, is the defining condition of our age. In what is his most accessible and significant work to date he seeks to make sense of a world in ruins around us, at the same time mapping a joyous, radical way forward.

Preciado was joined by Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste and Steal as Much as You Can.

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Gender, race and identity collide on the open seas in Xiaolu Guo’s Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto), a powerful, feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. She was in conversation with Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan: Or the Whale, who has described Guo’s latest novel as being ‘as animal and visceral and shape-shifting and subversive as the broad back of the mythic whale themselves.’

In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Allen Lane), sociologist Didier Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with his classic memoir Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother’s rapid physical and cognitive decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault among others, Eribon transmutes his rage, sadness and the shame over her death into a nuanced portrait of the woman who raised him. How does our society treat the elderly, Eribon asks? Can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them?

Eribon was in conversation about his work with the essayist and novelist Mendez.

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Seventy years after the publication of Samuel Beckett’s first novel in English, Faber have reissued Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable with ritzy new covers and fresh introductions. To celebrate, Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light, and Jennifer Hodgson, whose biography of Ann Quin is forthcoming, deliver their own tribute to Beckett's fiction, and discuss his life and work. ‘Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy,’ as Beckett wrote, ‘What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds.’

In Enemy Feminisms (Haymarket Books), described by Judith Butler as ‘honest, brutal, historically comprehensive, and brilliant’, Sophie Lewis provides a field guide to the reactionary stereotypes that have affected and distorted feminisms past and present, and propounds a paradigm for a feminism that is inclusive, anticolonial and truly liberational.

Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now and Abolish the Family, was joined in conversation about her work by Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

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Women in Dark Times (Fitzcarraldo) begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Extending her argument into the present, Rose turns her focus to ‘honour’ killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world. Jacqueline Rose was in conversation about her work with Yasmin El-Rifae, co-producer of The Palestine Festival of Literature and author of Radius.

Art historian T.J. Clark began his academic career with two groundbreaking works on the art of mid-nineteenth century France, expounding materialist theory of art that has remained his watchword for five decades, with books on Poussin, Cézanne, Picasso and modernism. 

Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames and Hudson) distils a lifetime’s work through a series of case studies, from Hieronymus Bosch to Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution, from Walter Benjamin to Pier Paolo Pasolini, exploring how art has always responded to the often chaotic and dangerous circumstances of its creation.

Clark was joined in conversation about his life and work by Caroline Arscott, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute.

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‘With his electric Soho, Richard Scott has arrived like a lightning bolt in our midst’ said T.S. Eliot Prize judge Sinéad Morrissey on the publication of his first collection in 2018. To celebrate publication of his second, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber), Richard will be reading alongside fellow poets Emily Berry (Dear Boy, Stranger Baby and Unexhausted Time) and Jane Yeh (Discipline, Marabou and Ninjas).

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