My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrea Wulf, talking about her fascinating new book, The Traveller: George Forster and the Search for Humanity. Andrea tells me about the now-forgotten adventurer who sailed with Captain Cook, toured Europe as an intellectual celebrity and sparred with Kant and Rousseau over race and human civilisation – before throwing his lot in with the French Revolution.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Siri Hustvedt, talking about her new book, Ghost Stories, a memoir of her long and loving marriage to the novelist Paul Auster, and of his death from cancer. Siri tells me why this book ‘needed’ to be written, what their relationship was like, how ‘horrible things’ came to this literary golden couple, and how she explains the experience of being visited, three days after his death, by her husband’s ghost.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Edmund Richardson, author of a new biography of Alexander the Great called Alexander: God, King, Man. Edmund tells me why there is still a fresh story to tell about this most storied of historical figures, why his empire collapsed as soon as it came into being yet nevertheless changed history – and how Alexander conquered the world by mistake.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Jeffrey Winters, whose new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies makes the case that democracy as it functions now isn’t, as many of us imagine, the only thing keeping the robber barons in check – it is, in fact, the very system that has enabled them to thrive. He tells me how the wealth gap in the US is now many multiples of that in ancient Rome, how extreme wealth translates into political power, and how reforming campaign finance laws is only a tiny part of the solution we need.

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My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Sophia Smith-Galer, talking about her new book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia tells me why languages are vanishing faster than ever before, why it matters, how we can resist it and what her Italian-born nonna gave her.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Bicks, who tells me how she put her academic work on Shakespeare to one side to produce her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. She tells me why she thinks King’s work is worthy of critical attention, what we can learn from the radical way he revised his early work, what it is like dealing with the man himself – and how there are some parts of his early novels that he even scared himself with.

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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter – cartoonist Joe Sacco, talking about his most recent book The Once and Future Riot, about Hindu/Muslim violence in rural India. He tells me how he knows when he’s onto a story, what cartooning can do for reportage, and why he draws himself so differently.

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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Mason Currey, author of the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. He tells me how artists, writers and composers have wrangled through history with the challenge of scraping by, and how that has affected their art, from Baudelaire's lifelong outrage at being forced to live on an allowance and John Berryman's disastrous stint as a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman to Haydn reinventing the musical idiom of his time because he was so far in the boondocks with his day job that he didn't know what the musical idiom of his time was, exactly.

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