Books podcast

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Clare Mulley about The Woman Who Saved The Children, her biography of Eglantyne Jebb reissued to coincide with next week’s centenary of Save The Children, the charity that Jebb founded. Eglantyne was a fascinating and deeply unconventional figure — a nice young gel from the Shropshire squirearchy who refused to fit into the social, sexual or professional pigeonholes her background seemed to destine her for. Instead she found herself investigating war crimes in Macedonia, campaigning against the postwar economic blockade of Germany, revolutionising charity fundraising, clashing with the law and pioneering the concepts that would go on to become the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by one of the doyennes of crime writing, the brilliant Donna Leon. She talks about her latest Commissario Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given, about what Venice gives her as a setting, why she welcomes snobbery towards crime writers, and why she never lets her books be published in Italian.

In this week’s Spectator Books I’m talking to Peter Stanford, author of Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. Why is it that, according to some polls, more people believe in angels than believe in God? Peter takes us on a tour through history, theology and literature to find how the winged cherubs on our Christmas cards got there, and why they look as they do. Along the way he addresses some of the vital questions. Do angels have wings — and if so, how many? What are they made of — light, or compressed air? Are they above or below humans in the hierarchy of creation? Which is the friendliest

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Deborah Lipstadt — the historian who herself made a piece of history when she defeated the Holocaust denier David Irving in court. In her new book Antisemitism: Here and Now, Professor Lipstadt returns to the fray to look at the worldwide uptick of anti-Semitism in our own day and age. I ask her why she felt the need to write this book and frame it in the way she did, how anti-Semitism differs from other forms of prejudice, and what you can and can’t say about Israel.

In this week’s books podcast, my guest is Robert Alter – who has just published the fruits of decades of labour in the form of his complete new translation of the Hebrew Bible into English. Acclaimed for his Bible translations by Seamus Heaney, John Updike and Peter Ackroyd, Prof Alter tells me how Biblical Hebrew really works, what can and cannot be preserved in translation – and why, as he sees it, nearly every modern translation of the Bible gets it catastrophically wrong.

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Chris Kraus — author of the semi-autobiographical cult novel I Love Dick and the new essay collection Social Practices — about her strange and interesting life in the New York and LA art worlds, about taking Baudrillard to a “happening” in the desert, about ambition and fame, about how art and literature feed into one another — and about why we English should stop sneering at “theory” and learn to love its strangeness and beauty.

In this week’s books podcast I talk to the great trivia expert Mark Mason about his new The Book of Seconds: The Incredible Stories of the Ones Who Didn’t (Quite) Win. Here’s the Christmas present for all the Tory frontbenchers in your life. Who remembers the Christmas number two in the pop charts? Who got silver at the Olympics? Who was the second man to walk on the moon? Mark — my second choice of guest for this week’s podcast — masterfully pulls together the psychological and social implications of not quite cutting the mustard.

“I wondered what would happen if you made Goliath the hero…” In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the thriller writer Lee Child about the latest in his phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, Past Tense. Lee tells me why you can’t have a knight-errant in Europe any more, about writing without knowing what happens next, Reacher’s trouble with women, why he can never remember his own titles — and why liberals love reading about bad guys getting punched in the face. Plus: how he rumbled Robert Galbraith as woman.

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Ben Schott. The author of Schott’s Miscellany, Ben’s literary productions have taken an unexpected turn with the publication this week of his first novel. Jeeves and the King of Clubs is a tribute or companion piece to P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels, published with the authorisation of the Wodehouse estate. What the hell was he thinking? Ben tells me — and also talks about the joys of nerdiness, the difficulty of living up to Plum, and the Spectator’s role in the whole story.