The Booking Club

The Booking Club

By Jack AldaneNews
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The Booking Club episodes

  • How Britain Learned to Consume Austerity, with Owen Hatherley

    In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.


    The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.


    In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.


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    29 min
  • National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, with Matt Goodwin

    Matthew Goodwin is a Professor of Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. His latest book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, is co-authored with Roger Eatwell. The book is a guide to the movement which has pushed Western democracies to the brink ever since the EU referendum in the UK and the US election of Donald Trump. Misdiagnosed, mis-characterised and still very much underestimated, the book is an attempt to reset the panic button and allow readers to come to terms with what has happened and look towards the future of liberal democracy in which a more diverse range of voices will inevitably constitute the people's will.


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    31 min
  • Brexit at the Eleventh Hour, with Claire Fox

    Claire Fox is a British writer and politician. She is the director and founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank. She is also a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and is now a registered supporter of the Brexit Party who won a seat for the party in the North West England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election. In this episode, Claire defends her convictions about the vote to leave the European Union, and considers whether modern Western societies have lost a sense in which a person's moral failure should been understood through a process of redemption rather than retribution.


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    26 min
  • Lion and Lamb: Britain's Moral Duality, with Mihir Bose

    Mihir Bose arrived in the UK in 1969 with the equivalent of more than £12,500 smuggled in his underwear. Enoch Powell had delivered his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech only a year before. This set a precedent for Mihir's earliest impressions of Britain's attitude towards immigrants,and would later culminate in several life-threatening moments as a jobbing sport journalist. These and other memories are retold in Mihir's latest book Lion and Lamb, a slim volume documenting his most stark encounters with Britain's split personality: the 'king of the jungle' with claws and teeth bared towards all who dare enter its path, and the softer countenance of the lamb with which the country has built a legacy of decency and fairness.



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    21 min
  • The Future of Capitalism and the Ethics of Reciprocity, with Sir Paul Collier
    Sir Paul Collier is the author of eight polemical works including The Bottom Billion (2007), The Plundered Planet (2012) and Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013). His eighth book The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties was published in 2018. It addresses the split across Western societies between a middle class of highly mobile professionals and a working class rooted in provincial cities that have been left behind. The only thing that can save us from deepening this divide, he believes, is a return to pragmatism that places a premium on belonging, obligation and reciprocity from the private firm to the nuclear family. Paul is professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

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    25 min
  • Phone: War and Memory in the Bi-directional Era, with Will Self
    Will Self is an English novelist and journalist whose 12th novel Phone explores the impact of late 20th century communication technology on the individual and collective conscience through the interpenetrating lives of its characters...and their phones. Phone completes a modernist trilogy preceded by the novels Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014). The book was first published in 2017. Jack Aldane met Will at his home to discuss the novel's themes over tea.

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    22 min
  • Tribalism and Immunity to Counter-Evidence, with Stephen Law
    Stephen Law is an English philosopher and former lecturer at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the editor of Think, a philosophy journal sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His books include The Philosophy Gym, The War For Children's Minds and Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Law has chosen to meet at Quod, part of The Old Bank Hotel in Oxford, to discuss reasons why human beings easily succumb to tribalism and become immune to counter-evidence.

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    18 min
  • Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism, with Ella Whelan

    Ella Whelan is the assistant editor at Spiked whose first book What Women Want rejects contemporary feminism in favour of a new women's liberation movement. Her "no ifs, no buts" defence of free speech regularly takes her on TV and radio, where she can be seen and heard battling on the subjects of identity politics, social media censorship and social inequality. Ella chose Perilla to discuss her book and what the European-themed restaurant on Green Lanes, where she grew up, means to her.


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    23 min
  • PILOT EPISODE: What happened to the financial crisis? with Vicky Pryce at Echo, Clapham Junction

    On September 15th 2008, an investment banking firm named Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the beginning of the worst global financial crisis since The Great Depression. The crisis is not yet over, yet the story of how the system failed has been overwritten by its social and political consequences of the last decade. Leading economist and author Vicky Pryce recounts the moment Lehman Bros fell, and explains the painful journey that western economies have been on since the crash of 2008, and where it leaves them today.


    Vicky meets Jack at Echo Clapham, London

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    11 min

About The Booking Club

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Today’s best authors and commentators discuss their latest books and breakthroughs at their favourite restaurants | Hosted by Jack Aldane

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