The Book Club

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen. With anger seemingly the default condition of our time, Josh’s new book All The Rage: Why Anger Drives the World seeks to unpick where anger comes from, what it does to us, and how it might function in the human psyche as a dark twin of the impulses we think of as love.

Photo credit: Charlotte Speechley

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a 'new wave' of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he's determined never to lose his vulgarity.   

On this week's Book Club podcast we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children's publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne's snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin... and how Pooh became Pooh. 

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is John Suchet whose new book In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey describes his lifelong passion for the composer. He tells me how the ‘Eroica’ was his soundtrack to the Lebanese Civil War, about the mysteries of Beethoven’s love-life and deafness, why he had reluctantly to accept that Beethoven was ‘ugly and half-mad’; and how even in the course of writing the book, new scholarship upended his assumptions about events in the composer’s life (from his meeting with Mozart to the circumstances of his death).

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Rachel Clarke, author of the Baillie Gifford longlisted new book The Story of a Heart. Rachel tells me how she came so intimately to tell the story of 9-year-old Keira, whose death in a car accident and donation of her heart gave a chance at life to a dying stranger, Max. She describes the medical and conceptual changes that led up to that extraordinary possibility and explains how, as a medic, you have to be able to combine technical professionalism with a sense of the sanctity of the human beings you work with. And she catches us up on how Max is doing eight years on.

This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith’s guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man's unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth.

This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson’s rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what really went on with Marcia.

This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time.

This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Alan Garner whose new book of essays and poems is called Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life. Alan tells me about landscape and writing, science and magic, the unbearably spooky story behind his novel Thursbitch – and why, three weeks short of 90, he has no plans to retire.

This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Channel 4's international editor Lindsey Hilsum. In her new book I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line Lindsey intersperses her account of the many conflicts she has covered as a war reporter with the poems that have given her consolation and a wider sense of meaning as she travels through the dark places of the earth. She tells me what poets can do that reporters can't, how you put a human face on statistics, how new technology has changed her trade, and why she goes back and back into danger to bear witness.