The Booking Club

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The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.

The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.

Weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, and charting acts of civil disobedience that challenge orthodox power at its heart, The Book of Trespass will transform the way you see the land. (Bloomsbury).

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The coronavirus pandemic taught us something we ought already to have known: that care workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners are doing essential work that keeps us all alive, fed and cared for. Until recently much of this work was regarded as menial by the the same society that now lauds them as 'key workers'. Why are they so undervalued?

In Head, Hand, Heart, British journalist and author David Goodhart tells the story of the cognitive takeover that has gathered pace over the past forty years.

As recently as the 1970s most people left school without qualifications, but now 40 per cent of all jobs are graduate-only. A good society must re-imagine the meaning of skilled work, so that people who work with their hands and hearts are valued alongside workers who manipulate data. Our societies need to spread status more widely, and provide meaning and value for people who cannot, or do not want to, achieve in the classroom and the professions. This is the story of the central struggle for status and dignity in the twenty-first century. (Penguin.co.uk)

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Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book, shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize, and Winner of the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Award, is 'Chaucer: A European Life' (Princeton University Press).

This groundbreaking biography recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets. Turner is Chaucer's first female biographer.

She chose to meet Jack Aldane at Gee's Restaurant in Oxford.

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Douglas Murray is a British conservative author and political commentator. His recent bestsellers include The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017) and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, published in September 2019.

Douglas meets Jack Aldane at The Wolseley on Piccadilly, St. James's in London.

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Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy and adventure. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel. As we hurtle toward a shiny, happy ‘self-driving’ future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too?

Driving, it turns out, offers a near-perfect embodiment of the broader changes being wrought by government and technology throughout our lives. In Why We Drive, the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford shows the driver’s seat to be one of the few remaining places where we still regularly take risk, exercise skill and enjoy freedom. But it is here too that we discover what we are losing to automation and the technocrats, and who will profit from the vision of progress they press upon us.

Blending philosophy with hands-on storytelling and drawing on his own experience in the garage and behind the wheel, Crawford leads us on an irreverent but deeply considered inquiry into the power of faceless bureaucracies, the importance of questioning mindless rules and the battle for democratic self-determination against the surveillance capitalists. In turn he speaks up for rivalry and play, solidarity and dissent – and the existential value of occasionally being scared shitless.

Wry, humane and occasionally hilarious, Why We Drive takes us to the heart of one of the defining questions of our times: who is really in control?

(Penguin.co.uk)

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Vincent Bevins is an American journalist and writer. From 2011 to 2016, he worked as a foreign correspondent based in Brazil for the Los Angeles Times, having worked in London for the Financial Times. Bevins moved to Jakarta in 2017 to cover Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. His first book, published in 2020, is entitled The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.

In this shocking revision of Cold War history, Bevins uses recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to piece together events from this era that few in the developed world can claim to know. They reveal the consistent brutal exterminations of unarmed leftists by right-wing US-backed militias, the scale of which did more to seal Washington's victory in the period than any clash with the Soviet Union.

Jack Aldane speaks to the author on the UK publication date of the book, 11 June 2020.

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Hierarchy is taboo in the modern world yet attempts to do away with it have often led to new forms of tyranny. Renowned Confucian scholar and political theorist Daniel A Bell joins professor Wang Pei in the co-authored work Just Hierarchy to argue that we should neither think it possible nor desirable to achieve equality without social hierarchy. Bell and Wang draw on Confucian and Daoist thought to lay out the case for morally justified hierarchies as distinct from those history resolutely condemns.

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Patrick Deneen is an American political theorist and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

His areas of focus include ancient and American political thought, democratic theory, political theology, literature and politics, and political economy.

Deneen is the author of Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018.

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Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, associate professor at the University of Sydney, and an expert in Sino-US relations. His research is related to macro-level structure of the world economy, with a particular focus on China's global economic integration.

He is the author of several books, the latest of which is The New Authoritarianism: Trump Populism and the Tyranny of Experts. He also writes articles for several titles, including Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera English and Truthout.

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