Books Podcast | Fascinating author interviews

Sarah Dunant – The Marchesa

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Women, eh? Put them in charge!

“Lost in history. Is there any better place?”

This question is rhetorically asked by the spectral presence of Isabella D’Este observing yet another scholar pore over the huge treasure trove of her papers in the deconsecrated convent and church that house the State Archive of Mantua.

Isabella is one the key figures in Renaissance Italy, a wily political operator, and one of the great patrons and collectors of art. Through her we will meet Borgias, Medicis, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and encounter the glory and savagery of Fifteenth Century Italy.

This is a time and place that Sarah Dunant has made her own and she has a marvellously firm hand on the tiller. Somebody has said that she combines flawless historical scholarship with beguiling storytelling and I can’t argue with that. She brings her historical figures brilliantly to life so that they live and breathe and, well, smell as real people (the Fifteenth Century was a fragrant time).

Sarah Dunant – Ravenna Press (Paperback) – £11.99

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Posted in Fiction, History, Religion | Tagged Books, D'Este, Da Vinci, Dunant, Haigh, Isabella, Italy, Mantua, Marchesa, Sarah, Tim | Leave a comment

Carla Valentine – The Language of Bones: Lessons on Living from Stories of the Dead – For Fans of All That Remains and Unnatural Causes

Posted on September 27, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones

Are you familiar with the term ‘dark tourism’? No? Me neither. Although, if I had thought about it, I would have realised that some sort of colourful phrase would be needed for people whose morbid fascinations prompt them to visit sites of mortal commemoration and, on occasion, steal from them.

It turns out that there are lots of enthusiasts of cemeteries, crypts, charnel houses, ossuaries and the general paraphernalia of death, and perhaps chief among them is Carla Valentine, who does, however, have the platform of a professional interest to justify her interest. Carla is technical curator of a pathology museum. And she loves it. There is a good deal to learn from the remnants that we inevitably leave behind us when we expire. And of course, those human remains are, as I rather trenchantly observe, not junk. But neither are they despised. Carla has an inspiring variety of stories to tell of the human responses to the inevitable detritus of existence. The Language of Bones is about the places, and the responses, and the celebration by the living of the remnants of the dead. But most of all, it embraces the sheer fact of life that is… what’s left afterwards.

Carla Valentine – Sphere – £22.00

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Posted in Cultural History, History, Science | Tagged bones, Books, carla, Death, graveyard, Haigh, mortality, mortuary, Tim, valentine | Leave a comment

Theresa Musgrove – Charles Dickens and his Hidden Family History

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

There are skeletons in the armoire!

Charles Dickens is an industry. His books have never been out of print, there are websites dedicated to him, and societies to appreciate his work, a museum occupying the house where he wrote Oliver Twist, and another one in Portsmouth in the house where he was born. Until recently he was pictured on the ten pound note. You would think that his life had been thoroughly done. And yet curiously little attention has been paid to his family background. Everybody knows that he was sent to work in a blacking factory when his father was committed to debtor’s prison, and there are several excellent biographies of the man in print. Theresa Musgrove has taken a wider perspective to delve deep into the family and turn up fascinating details and scandals which surely found their way into Dickens’ fiction.

Theresa Musgrove – Pen And Sword – £25.00

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Madeleine Pelling – Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment

Posted on August 20, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Got’a love a good liar – might even love the lie!

We are fascinated by deception. We love magic shows, where we collude with the conjuror. We may not know what is going to happen, but we are sure that something will. As often as James Randi and Penn and Teller reveal the man behind the curtain, we willingly suspend our disbelief.

But there is a point where misdirection elides into fraud, a point where the crowd is taken in and our readiness to believe in outlandish stories takes us into dangerous territory.

Dr Madeleine Pelling takes us to the Age of Enlightenment to investigate the phenomenon, with a survey of credulity and gullibility, focussing in on three marvellous case studies: The Ghost of Cock Lane, The Witch of Yorkshire, and the remarkable story of Princess Caraboo.

Each reveals a network of interests and advantage that fed upon an expedient falsehood and turned it into tragedy. But does the larger part of culpability lie with the perpetrator or the dupe.

Madeleine Pelling – Profile – £22.00

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History, Humour, Philosophy, Science | Tagged Books, Cock, Deciet, Haigh, Hoax, Lane, Lies, Madelaine, Pelling, Tim | Leave a comment

Helen Lewis – The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers

Posted on July 30, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

He’s not a genius, he’s a very naughty boy!

Kierkegaard said, “Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.”

Schopenhauer had a different take: “Talent hits the target. Genius hits the target others can’t see.”

For the ancients, genius was a spirit that descended on favoured individuals. So when did we decide that genius was not so much an activity, but more of a qualification, a status which we bestow on certain individuals? When Helen Lewis talks about the genius ‘myth’ it is this aspect which she is quibbling with. Not the achievements, but the way in which we fetishise the individuals we choose to put up on the pedestal.

The Genius Myth pulls off the trick of opening up a genuinely fascinating enquiry and being hugely entertaining and laugh out loud funny at the same time.

We were delighted to return to the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town to record this Books Podcast in front of a live audience.

Helen Lewis – Vintage – £12.99

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History, Humour, Philosophy, Science | Tagged Books, Da Vinci, einstein, Genius, Haigh, Helen, Leonardo, Lewis, Tim | Leave a comment

Sir Ben Okri – Waking the Warriors

Posted on July 16, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

It’s NOT Magical Realism, OK?!

Sir Ben Okri doesn’t really need a lot of introduction. He won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, while Astonishing The Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Tim met him at his publisher’s offices in Clerkenwell to wrestle with the rich imagery and many layers of his marvellous new novel, Waking The Warriors, which adroitly marries his command of the magic he finds all around him with sly commentary on the quotidian world. For Sir Ben, writing is one of the primal powers, but we find it everywhere. He points to words on the sides of buses and in newspapers and signboards. and because we deploy them promiscuously, they seem to lose their power. But he can redeem them. He draws on legends and symbols from many cultures to conjure new myths and, as the novel says itself, to spin words “… used as originally intended, to change the atmosphere, to create realities, to raise the vibrations of beings and substances, to link the above and below.”

Ben Okri – Head Of Zeuss – £18:99

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Posted in Fiction | Tagged Books, Haigh, magic, Orki, power, Sir Ben, sorcery, Tim | Leave a comment

Dan Jennings – Paul Weller: Dancing Through the Fire: The Authorised Oral History

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

The oldest Angry Young Man in music

They called him The Modfather. Not quite punk himself (or was he? Nah – he dressed too well…) but with the incendiary energy of punk and a sublime gift for songwriting, Paul Weller was the hinge between the glorious ages of early and classic rock, and the fragmentation grenade of post-punk.

It was impossible to imagine, seeing him in his early days, a furious, skinny, working-class firecracker, that he would be around for fifty years. He put the kibosh on The Jam at the height of their success, invented The Style Council out of thin air, and has enjoyed a much admired solo career since. He shares the rare distinction with Lennon and McCartney of having achieved Number 1 albums in five consecutive decades. Dancing Through The Fire uses the voices of everybody involved (including Paul Weller himself) to tell the story. Culled from Dan Jennings’ exceptional podcast, it contains many never-previously-told stories and intimate insights to build the most comprehensive account of Paul Weller’s life and times possible.

Dan Jennings – Constable – £14:99

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History, Music | Tagged Books, Haigh, new wave, newwave, Paul, punk, Tim, weller | Leave a comment

Philip Norman – Mr Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of The Beatles

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

He’s no Diaghilev!

The front page of the Daily Mirror on August 28^th, 1967 had the story: “Epstein – the Beatle-making prince of pop – dies at 32.”

His death has always had a question mark over it, and Philip Norman describes the events in detail, examining inconsistencies, pursuing theories and noting the complacent inadequacies of the inquest. There is even a rather startling connection to the Kray Twins.

Brian was a one-off in pop management, insofar as he cared more about his artists than about money. He brought flair and imagination and vision to his ambitions for The Beatles, and steered them, as promised, to be bigger than Elvis. As John Lennon put it (in his song for Ringo, I’m The Greatest) “…the greatest show on Earth…”

The author, with characteristic aplomb, sifts the myths and legends, unravels all the murky dealings and twists and turns of the business side of the Beatles, as well as the triumphant leaps of imagination. And at the same time he deftly shows us Brian Epstein, a man whose whole life was constrained by the Scylla and Charybdis of homosexuality and antisemitism.

This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, on extremely creaky chairs, where we were lucky enough to be joined by Pattie Boyd, who met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day’s Night, and whose first date and subsequent wedding was stage-managed by Brian. She was kind enough to tell us the story herself.

Philip Norman – Simon & Schuster – £30:00

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History, Music | Tagged Beatles, Books, Brian, Epstein, George, Haigh, John, Paul, Ringo, Tim | Leave a comment

Gail Crowther – Marilyn and her Books – The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

The bookish Bombshell

Marilyn Monroe would have been one hundred years old on 1^st June this year. It is impossible to think of Marilyn old. She was just 36 when she died in LA in 1962. She is frozen in time as the epitome of the sex-symbol movie star, standing over the New York subway grate with her dress billowing up, driving Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon crazy, or breathily singing Happy Birthday to JFK.

Gail Crowther observes that nobody who ever interviewed her was interested in her mind, which was a bad omission, because the evidence is that she had a keen intelligence, great curiosity, and a prodigious appetite for literature and knowledge. But who knew? Well: anybody might have. One of the enduring and classic images of Marilyn is curled up on a sofa with a book. And this was not performative or posed. “When people joke about Marilyn pretending to read for a photo, the reading part is the least fake part.

Gail Crowther – Corsair – £20:00

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Jeevan Vasagar – The Surge – The Race Against the Most Destructive Force in Nature

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

The one with the comedy dog

The Surge is a trenchant analysis of the destructive power of water, a clarion call for recognising imminent dangers, and a panoramic narrative of human catastrophe and hubris. Some passages present as a cross between J G Ballard and John Wyndham. Others are sweeping and inspirational. The book is a gripping account of humanity’s battle against rising waters, from the draining of the fens in the time of King Charles the First, to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina only a few years ago.

As alarming as it all sounds, Jeevan Vasagar also describes inspiring feats of engineering, and imaginative new responses from around the world.

Jeevan Vasagar is Climate Editor of The Observer – for our international listeners, that is the left of centre Sunday broadsheet newspaper. Yes, we still have them. He was kind enough to welcome The Books Podcast to his home, and as a result, our conversation was punctuated by lively contributions from Coco, the dog. We should really have given her her own mic.

Jeevan Vasagar – Mudlark – £22

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Dr Geoff Andrews – Radicals: The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Whither the Labour movement?

Version 1.0.0

One is struck by the heroic energy and fortitude of the working classes – working long and arduous hours, they found time and resources to educate themselves, to organise trades unions, to make brass bands and male voice choirs, time for political activism, time to tend allotments, and not to mention the indispensable business of courting, marrying and raising families. No wonder, as John Lennon put it, Capitalism needed to keep them “doped with religion and sex and tv”.

But has that spirit run out of steam? What is the role of the working class in the present circumstances of fractured politics and populist bromides? And when did the rot set in? Geoff Andrews has taken a fresh and illuminating look at the contribution the working classes (plural very much intended) have made to the fabric and culture of the nation over the past hundred and fifty years. His purpose is to place the working classes squarely at the heart of its history. He presents a history of the British Left as a story of radical ideas and a passion for culture and education rather than revolutionary politics.

Geoff Andrews – Yale University Press – £25

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Anthony Gottlieb – Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Yes, but does it matter?

There is an old joke: Why is it hard to move a philosophy department into a different building? Answer: because philosophers are reluctant to abandon their premises. [This is Tim’s own joke [ED]]

And then we come to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not for him a safe berth in an ivory tower or the security of wealth. All his life he was on the move. The scion of an illustrious family – during his life he was hardly the most celebrated member – he struggled against the expectations of his parents, his teachers, his employers, his students… pretty much everybody. And yet he inspired remarkable loyalty in his friends and amongst the philosophical community in which he found a place.

He wrote ‘one of the most baffling, mysterious, brilliant and difficult works of philosophy ever written’ in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and declared that he had brought the study of philosophy to an end. Not everybody was convinced, although they were sure he was on to something. As Bertrand Russell put it: “I feel sure it’s a great book, though I do not feel sure it’s right.” Wittgenstein’s life was as confusing as his philosophy, and Anthony Gottlieb has done a wonderful job of setting him in context and following his progress, emotionally and intellectually. Tim was fascinated by the late 19^th Century Vienna into which he was born.

Anthony Gottlieb – Yale University Press – £10.99

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Tom Doyle – Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush

Posted on February 22, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Is this what a “Pop icon” is?

Kate Bush burst onto the scene in 1978 with Wuthering Heights, a wildly unlikely and ethereal single. The record industry and radio DJs were bemused, but the record-listening public were instantly smitten. I loved it, but I thought it had ‘one-hit wonder’ written all over it. I was spectacularly wrong. (I have form in that department. I also tagged Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits as a one-hit wonder.)

Kate Bush has had a remarkable career, increasingly on her own terms, and earned the highest respect of her peers and the adoration of her fans. She was anxious when she released her eight studio album, Aerial, that it had been twelve years since The Red Shoes. Might the world have forgotten her? She had nothing to worry about. It was the most eagerly anticipated album of the decade.

Tom Doyle is a distinguished music journalist with a real knack for earning the trust of notoriously private rock stars. Among many career highlights, he conducted the longest in-depth interview Kate Bush ever granted (to promote Aerial). Running Up That Hill is his superb and idiosyncratic biography of the superstar.

Tom Doyle – Nine Eight Books – £10.99

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Alwyn Turner – A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

Posted on January 27, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

Don’t mention the war!

Alwyn Turner is our finest cultural and social historian. His focus is typically on the lived experience of the people, rather than the Sunday papers’ idea of culture or the minutiae of the Westminster Village. He once argued with us that Middle of the Road were a culturally more significant band than Pink Floyd. And he can make the case.

Two years ago Alwyn published Little Englanders – a dazzling account of the Edwardian era. A Shellshocked Nation is a companion to that book. Alwyn picks up in the strange and rather sad period between the horror of the Great War and the apocalypse of the return leg twenty years later.

But while Britain was traumatised by the carnage of the Great War, and in due course came to be obsessed with Adolf Hitler, there were plenty of more immediate, home-grown events and concerns. The General Strike, the Abdication crisis, the coming of the BBC and a febrile changing of the guard in electoral politics, to name just a few. But if there is a theme to this volume it is a slightly patriotic wonder that while much of Europe was lurching into fascism, Britain never lost her head. There was never any real danger that the nation would succumb to extremism of the left or the right.

Alwyn Turner – Profile Books – £25.00

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Steve Richards – Tony Blair: The Prime Minsters Series

Posted on January 4, 2026 by Johnny Mindlin

He was not arrogant enough!

Tony Blair is one of the defining politicians of post-war Britain, but he failed to transform the country on the same scale as, say, Margaret Thatcher. For his enemies he was a warmonger and a social meddler. His admirers note that under him public services were restored after the neglect and vandalism of the Thatcherite years, and that he left Britain a better place to live.

Steve Richards is unimpressed by the caricatures. When considering Blair’s actions he always considers how much room he had on the political stage. He has written a typically elegant and thoughtful book, punchily discussing Blair as a leader, his electoral successes, his involvement in the Iraq war, and his legacy.

Steve Richards – Swift Press – £16.99

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Paul Davies – Quantum 2.0: The Past, Present and Future of Quantum Physics

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Reality doesn’t exist … probably …

“Quantum physics is, without doubt, the most disruptive technological transformation in history.”

“Really?” you say, “And what has quantum physics done for us?”

Electronics. Computers. GPS. Hi-definition television. Smartphones. Lasers. Transistors. Lists of what quantum theory has done for us are peppered through Paul Davies’ book. The theory, a hundred years old, has given you miracles and wonders. And if you think it has been impressive so far, Paul Davies tells us that a second quantum revolution is just getting underway: Quantum computers will be exponentially faster and more powerful than conventional computers. Quantum intelligence will go places human minds cannot follow. Quantum clocks can keep time to within one second in the entire age of the universe. And we’re just scratching the surface.

Professor Davies has made major contributions in the field of theoretical physics, and is one of the great popular science writers, with a gift for bringing the implausible but true fairly within the compass of those of us who are interested but baffled.

Paul Davies – Pelican – £20:00.

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Peter Doggett – Surf’s Up – Brian Wilson And The Beach Boys

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

“There are dozens of Beach Boys!”

Jack Reiley (Beach Boys manager 1970 to 1973) said: “The Beatles were focussed, strategic, professionally and well-led during the years of their mounting ascendency. During that period, the Beach Boys were divided, unprofessional and horrendously led… There was no career direction to speak of and chaos reigned.”

Transcendental meditation, Charles Manson, heroic drug abuse, tragic deaths, the piano in the sandpit, a chapter which asks the question, “Why do people hate Mike Love? Let me count the ways…”, and arguably the worst album sleeve of any major release, but at the same time, peerless vocal harmonies and, in his glory years, a pop writer and arranger of genius.

Paul McCartney has often said that God Only Knows is the greatest pop song ever written, and The Beach Boys are an institution, almost America’s national band. Pet Sounds – Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece – is generally included in the top two or three albums of all time. Peter Doggett, a huge fan of the Beach Boys, has written the most wonderful and deft account of this most dysfunctional of groups, marshalling the swirling narratives with marvellous lucidity. It is a story encompassing genius and madness, family feuds, a dizzying number of Beach Boys over the years, sublime records and dismal failures, triumphant concerts and catastrophic gigs, and from time to time a Spinal Tap capacity for hubris and self-delusion. An absolute roller-coaster, and Tim happily bought a ticket for the ride.

Peter Doggett – New Modern – £25:00.

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Nicholas Wright – Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

War. Huh! (Dum dum dum!) What’s our brain good for?

“Human brains were not built for comfortable lives”, writes Nicholas Wright. Which rather raises the question, what were they built for? Well, among other things, “Every human brain is built to win – or at least survive a fight.”

Dr Wright uses the topography and geography of the human brain as a chapter by chapter means of exploring its many functions and show how it does its job. He shows you where your basic drives such as hunger, thirst and sleep are located – the hypothalamus and the thalamous, since you ask – and navigates all the way to the prefrontal cortex where you do your strategic planning and your thinking ahead.

This is not ivory-tower reflection on his part. As well as being a medical doctor and a neuro-scientist, he is an advisor to the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence on how better understanding of the human brain can help us win, or at least not lose coming wars. We are already facing a Putin-led Russia waging an aggressive war in Europe, and who would rule out China invading Taiwan in the foreseeable future? Dr Wright warns us that we can no longer take winning such conflicts for granted.

The book elegantly uses examples from military history to illustrate its points, and delves into the psychology of human volition to explore its arguments. It also speculates on what the advent of AI will mean for the coming conflicts, and how we might bend the technology to our purposes. Can we, for instance, code in morality?

Nicholas Wright – MacMillan – £22

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Tom Doyle – Ringo: A Fab Life

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

In the 70’s, he was a happy drunk … by the 80’s, he was just miserable!

It is 1962. Ritchie Starkey – better known by his stage name of Ringo Starr – is widely acknowledged as the best drummer in Liverpool. His current gig is with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He evenhas a featured star slot singing the old Shirelles number ‘Boys’. He is a professional musician.

Then two scruffy Beatles turn up and invite him to jump ship and join them.

Ringo’s response: Well, I’ve got this gig here at Butlins with Rory for the summer season; I can’t just drop everything and leave them in the lurch. I’ll be with you on Saturday.

The Beatles did moderately well.

So was Ringo the luckiest man in show-business? Well – yes and no, says Tom Doyle. And not necessarily for the reasons you think. With The Beatles and after The Beatles, Ringo was something special. He got to participate in the greatest show on Earth (as Lennon put it), but can you imagine The Beatles without him?

The Beatles gig lasted eight years (Ringo was the only Beatle present at the very last recording – A Let It Be overdub, since you ask), or you might say it has lasted 60 years. It has been in many ways a Fab Life.

Tom Doyle – New Modern – £25.00

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Mark Blake – Shine On – The Definitive Oral History Of Pink Floyd

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Syd Barrett was probably not really an acid casualty!

Version 1.0.0

Peter Jenner (Floyd’s first manager): “Syd’s behaviour was avant-garde and I thought avant-garde was good. Of course in hindsight, we should have taken a break, but none of us knew what we were doing and we had an album out.”

Nick Mason (Floyd’s drummer): “We wanted to be pop stars and Syd didn’t.”

David Gilmour (Floyd’s guitarist): “I heard Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and was sick with jealousy.”

Nick Mason: “Other bands seemed so professional.”

Bob Ezrin (Collaborator on The Wall): “Roger Waters was fun to write with. He was just difficult to live with.”

David Gilmour: “(Atom Heart Mother was)… possibly our lowest point artistically.”

Rick Wright (Floyd’s keyboards): “Rock bands live or die by whether there anyone who can write. You don’t rock the boat.”

Roger Waters (Floyd’s bassist): “David played that descending guitar part in ‘Dogs’, which is very important, great in fact. But apart from that…”

Nick Mason: “Roger’s great mistake… was to underestimate David’s determination and resolve.”

David Gilmour: “If we could get away without talking to the press, we would.”

Mark Blake – New Modern – £25

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Thomas Levenson – So Very Small: How humans discovered germs, uncovered infectious diseases, and deluded themselves that we had conquered them

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

“A gentleman’s hands are [always] clean”

Infectious diseases caused by bacteria have killed well over half of all humans who have ever lived on Earth. Historically, bacterial infections have started major pandemics such as the bubonic plague, which is estimated to have killed 50-60 per cent of the population of Europe during the Black Death in the 14^th Century.

And yet when a person in Oregon came down with bubonic plague in 2024 it was a non-event. The pathogen involved was quickly identified and antibiotics given. There was no chain of infection and no epidemic. And the patient lived.

Germ theory is one of the most transformative developments in human history. The story involves heroic insight, pompous stubbornness, meticulous epidemiology, scientific breakthroughs, and on the other side of the ledger, catastrophes of human misery and carnage. So Very Small takes in the panorama from the pandemic to the Petrie dish. So which one is worst scourge of mankind? Smallpox, plague, TB, childbed fever, gangrene, cholera, typhus? Realistically, it depends on which one is knocking at your door. Tim asked Tom Levenson for his candidate when he discussed the book with him via Zoom.

Thomas Levenson – Head of Zeus – £25

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Mike Jay – Free Radicals – How A Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

I mean, you’ve got’a laugh, aintcha!

Nitrous Oxide made “a picaresque journey from laboratory to lecture hall, variety palace to dentist’s chair.” A substance that does not exist in nature, it fairly blew the minds of the radical scientific community in the late 18^th Century when it was isolated and synthesised. Some of them couldn’t decide whether it was more remarkable medicinally or recreationally. What they did know was that it was a wonderful product of a modern scientific sensibility.

It is a story that takes in Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Humphrey Davy, Peter Mark Roget (yes, that Roget), James Watt, and at its centre, the strangely undercelebrated Thomas Beddoes, who becomes the hero of Mike Jay’s delightful account. As the vanguard of modern anaesthesia this ‘laughing gas’ was one of the great boons to mankind, but such is the richness of material that it doesn’t really make much of an appearance until half way through the book. Before that we need to encounter a riot in Birmingham (“it was, like most riots in the 18^th Century, unclear what the mob was rioting against”), a wild genius from Penzance, and a highly unorthodox pneumatic medical institute in Bristol. Tim was transported.

Mike Jay – Yale University Press – £11.99

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Peter Hogan – Resident Alien

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

They walk among us … possibly.

When a book is turned into a film or, in this case, a comic into a television series, there are usually disagreements about which is better, ranging from polite opinions to open cultural warfare. Resident Alien seems to have bridged the gap, or survived the transformation, pretty well: now both a successful TV series and a popular … they used to be called “Comics”, then they graduated to be styled graphic novels (or, as Terry Pratchett said, ‘Big Comics’).

Our hero, Harry Vanderspiegel, is the small town doctor in Patience, Washington State. His side hustle is solving crimes. Harry is also an extra-terrestrial alien. Not the Invade-Earth-and-Subjugate-The-Human-Race kind of alien, nor yet the abducting and unwelcome probing kind. Harry likes us, and he likes his life in Patience, fitting in and making friends.

The trick with Harry is that while the reader (and viewer) sees him for the alien he is, his friends and neighbours don’t notice his difference … oh, and the FBI are after him – it is only a matter of time before his secret is revealed! On one level a throwback to the Dickensian model of serial publication, the comic is a modern version of long-form fiction. Consumable as episodes month by month, or in collected volumes.

Tim sat down with writer Peter Hogan to find out where the idea originally came from and how the process works between writer and artist … and which he prefers, comic or TV (spoiler alert – he’s happy with both!).

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John Cassidy – Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World

Posted on May 28, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Capitalism and government go hand in hand – one feeding the other

Some people think of economic history as a trifle dry, but how can you resist a book that includes quotes like these:

“The love of money (as a possession) is… a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” (Keynes).

“Capitalism is an economic system, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s become a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds.” (Rund Abdelfatah)

How many critics of Capitalism can you name? I bet you can only think of a very few. Marx and Engels, I suppose. Keynes. Maybe Thomas Picketty in recent years. But how about Rosa Luxemburg; Kondratiev if you have a smattering of economic history; and (in his own, deeply unhelpful way) Milton Friedman?

John Cassidy has put his mind to it and finds so many trenchant critics of Capitalism that he can’t find space for even Max Weber and J K Galbraith. But, as he says, they haven’t derailed the Capitalism juggernaut: it ploughs on, untroubled by the immiseration of the masses or the spoilation of the world we live in. He explains that criticisms of Capitalism are broadly of two kinds – baseball and zoo (you’ll hear what he means in the interview) and, in Capitalism and Its Critics he shows how this syndrome is nothing new.

John Cassidy – Allen Lane – £35:00

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Eleni Kyriacou – A Beautiful Way To Die

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Would you kill to be famous?

If we want impossible glamour and corruption we could do worse then 1950’s Hollywood.

A Beautiful Way To Die is a romp of ambition and decadence in which everyone has an agenda and dark secrets. It weaves its magic through carefully-embedded real-life locations and oblique references to real-world Hollywood scandals, telling a lively tale of a dazzling movie star couple, a wannabe starlet, a mystery woman sequestered and brutalised in a sanatorium, a studio fixer and a pill-pushing studio Dr Feelgood.

Tim met Eleni Kyriacou at her publishers to explore this exciting milieu, to discuss the significance of the casting couch, and to carefully tiptoe round spoilers.

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.

Eleni Kyriacou – Head of Zeuss – £16.99

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John Higgs – Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Wot, no Daleks?!?

If you had a time machine and could return to 1963 you would be surprised at the haphazard genesis of Dr Who. We think of it today as the eternal jewel in the BBC crown, but the show was curiously unloved by the Corporation in its first long run. It only made it to air by the skin of its teeth, and the Head of Drama, having definitively ruled out any ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was livid when The Daleks hove into view. Later, Michael Grade, who hated the show, tried to cancel it and was overruled by the fanbase.

John Higgs is a fan – oh, me too! – and he brilliantly tells the story of Dr Who, the in-universe developments, the production background, that relationship with the BBC, the community of Whovians, and crucially the actors who played The Doctor. John identifies at least three golden ages of Dr Who, and as he says, most shows are lucky to get one. William Hartnell (first doctor) once said, “If I live to be ninety, I think a little of the magic of Dr Who will cling to me.” Subsequent actors, some of them highly distinguished, discovered that Dr Who was that kind of part. The magic clings to them.

John Higgs – Weidenfeld & Nicolson: £25.00

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Ian Leslie – John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

They created each other

Does the world actually need another Beatles book? There are Mongolian peasants in one-yak villages far outside Ulan Bator who could tell you how John and Paul met at the Woolton Church fete in July 1957, and offer a considered opinion of the relative merits of Revolver and Sgt Pepper.

Ian Leslie has performed a marvellous balancing act in telling a story that is in the public domain while bringing a fresh consideration of the relationship between the creative powerhouse of The Beatles. He has listened to Lennon and McCartney’s output as if it were a dialogue between them, and while he doesn’t go so far as to claim that every song is a message from one to the other, this approach throws up fascinating and vivid insight. After exploring the history and processes that forged the greatest musical legacy of the Twentieth Century, Tim found himself compelled to ask the vital question: did John need Paul more than Paul needed John?

Ian Leslie – Faber – £25

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Simon Hart – Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip

Posted on March 6, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

Strap in, this is going to be quite a ride!

31 October 2023. “Amongst today’s HR joys is the report from Emma that a departmental SpAd (Special Adviser) went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with a blow-up doll. Just another day at the office, I suppose.”

Well, it’s just another day at the office if you happen to be Chief Whip of His Majesty’s government.

Simon Hart was Member of Parliament for Camarthen West and South Pembrokeshire from 2010 to 2024, and served in Boris Johnson’s cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, and later was Rishi Sunak’s Chief Whip, during “one of the most tumultuous eras in modern-day Britain.”

“How do you win an 81 seat majority in December 2019, yet burn through three different PMs, concluding with a thorough beating at the hands of an unproven Labour alternative less than five years later?” Simon had a front row seat and kept a diary. He offers fascinating insights into the mechanics of running the government, while also entertaining us immoderately. He is ably assisted in this latter enterprise by the likes of Nadine Dorries who “is of course crazy”, Neil Parish, a decent man who introduced the nation to the concept of tractor porn, and the sublimely deluded Liz Truss.

Simon Hart – MacMillan – £25

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Joanne Harris – Moonlight Market

Posted on January 18, 2025 by Johnny Mindlin

If you can’t see it … is it real?

Click here to by the book

“What does real mean? Is love real? Or magic, or hope, or joy, or the quest for enlightenment? Are any of those things less real just because they’re woven in words?… Fairy stories matter. They’re how we understand what’s true.”

Joanne Harris is serenely unconcerned with the subdivisions of literary genre. Her new book is, yes, a fairytale, but one that breaks through into the real world, the world of the Sightless Folk – as the fairy Folk call us. The war between the Daylight Folk and the Midnight Folk is waged, as it were, in the negatives rather than in the prints.

And that’s where Tom Argent finds them. He is a photographer, and he notices that people and things show up on his negatives which he never saw while he was taking the pictures.

Tom Argent falls for the sheer glamour of one of the Daylight Folk, but he is warned to forget her forever: the alternative is True Love and Certain Death. “Love is not a partnership”, she tells him, “It is a hunting ground, where only the strongest can survive.” So The Moonlight Market is a love story – more than one, really. But not necessarily the love story that Tom thinks it is.

Joanne Harris – Gollancz: Hardback £22.00, Paperback £9.99

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Jerry Brotton – Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

Where are we?!?

Why deep South but far North?

Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West?

When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going?

Is the North Pole a real place?

Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it’s always Charlemagne.)

How do we know which way is which?

Jerry Brotton’s delightful new book asks and answers such questions on every page.

Jerry is a Professor at Queen Mary University in London, so Tim went to compare notes on what it means to be a northerner living in the south.

Jerry Brotton – Allen Lane – £20.00

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Robin Choudhury – The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ

Posted on November 9, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

What lies within?

Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature so widely in our visual imagery and iconography.

The human heart, Robin Choudhury tells us, has been “…the dwelling place of the soul, the source of life, a furnace or fermentor providing the heat of living bodies, the source of semen and a repository of deeds. It has become the seat of love and desire.” It has fascinated the greatest minds in history and exercised the genius of the finest artists.

The Beating Heart is an odyssey through the history of apprehending the organ culturally and physiologically, with Leonardo da Vinci providing the perfect point of convergence. Professor Choudhury’s particular insight is that this is the same narrative in different guises.

Robin Choudhury – Head Of Zeus – £35

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Evie Wyld – The Echoes

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

The sins of the mother are visited upon the children

The Echoes is many things in Evie Wyld’s new novel. It is the rural backwater in Australia where Hannah grew up, and it is also the shape of the book, as the past reverberates down the generations. Philip Larkin said that man hands on misery to man, but for Evie it is mothers who seem to do this. Among the achievements of her novel is to show why they do it and make them sympathetic.

And there’s another echo. When the novel opens Hannah has made a life for herself in London after returning to the area where her grandmother lived as a child. But her London boyfriend Max has been killed in a road accident, and rather to his surprise he finds himself a ghost, haunting the flat where they lived. But as the book progresses, we learn that this isn’t really Max’s novel, it is Hannah’s, and that of her family torn apart by the echoes of the past. We met Evie in a delightful café in South London, very close to where the novel is set, and the day was so lovely that we sat outside for our discussion.

Evie Wyld – Jonathan Cape – £18.99

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Marcus Chown – A Crack In Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

Black holes aren’t black!

If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can’t escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in space.

So they’re not holes. And they’re not black.

But they are among the most fascinating and counter-intuitive objects in the universe. Not to mention that they are, in Marcus’s phrase, “the stuff of physicists’ nightmares.” Why? Because the maths tells us that any star a little bigger than the sun will eventually collapse into a singularity – a point of infinite density and infinite temperature. And physicists don’t like infinities. What are they like? How were they investigated? Who figured it all out? And what do we still not know about them?

We talked to Marcus Chown at his publisher’s offices in London.

Marcus Chown – Head Of Zeus – £20

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Scarlett Thomas – The Sleepwalkers

Posted on April 19, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

You tell yourself “It’s OK, it’s OK … ” but it’s really not!

Scarlett Thomas is a tricky novelist to categorise. She has a playful, restless, sleeves-rolled-up approach to writing, in which she seldom ducks the dark turn and the big idea. And you can’t doubt her commitment. She once earned an MSc in Ethnobotany by way of research for a book.

Tim has been a fan since the intriguing and dazzling The End Of Mr Y. BooksPodcast caught up with her at her publishers in London and sat down to discuss her new book, The Sleepwalkers.

Islands, secrets, betrayals, sinister goings-on, ambiguities, night-time chases, a disastrous wedding and a fraught honeymoon, there is a hint of the gothic about The Sleepwalkers. There is also the thrilling ambiguity of the (possibly) unreliable narrators.

It’s a hell of a ride … for all concerned.

Scarlett Thomas – Scribner UK – £16.99

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Adrian Mackinder – Death and the Victorians

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

The origins of modern death

Let’s face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance.

The advent of industrialisation and the explosive expansion of the great cities had created an unprecedented problem – too many corpses, with all the squalor and disease that came with them. But alongside the practical requirements of disposal there was an increasingly sentimental attitude to the dear departed.

For the Victorians, the dead were only just out of reach, and might yet be contactable. The Society for Psychic Research boasted adherents including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Arthur Balfour, W B Yeats and Arthur Conan-Doyle. These days we tend to think of spiritualism as batshit crazy, but it was, as Adrian Mackinder argues, a modernist response, using the technology and sensibilities of a scientific age to prove the existence of the afterlife and investigate the world beyond the veil.

Death and the Victorians takes a cheerful tour through all the facets of the Victorian approach to death, including resurrection men, ghost hunters, Ouija boards and the strange exhumation of Lizzie Siddal. It is all hugely entertaining.

Adrian Mackinder – Pen Sword Books RRP £25

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Alwyn Turner – Little Englanders – Britain in the Edwardian Era

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

End of Empire

History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn’t really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era.

There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxious about anarchists and terrorists. There is the looming possibility of war. The complacency of the Conservative hegemony is shattered by the Liberal landslide of 1906, not to mention the rise of the Labour Party, and the hangover of the Boer War has raised a question unfamiliar to the British: “Are we the baddies?”

Alwyn Turner has a brilliant eye for the emblematic. The cheerful swindler and MP, Horatio Bottomley who “nursed his constituency with a devotion that bordered on bribery.” The creeping respectability of the music-hall (the first ever Royal Command Performance is in 1912). Sherlock Holmes getting mercenary: “I play the game for the game’s own sake”, he said while the old Queen was on the throne, but by 1901 he is accepting payment for his investigations.

Turner turns a powerful spotlight on this neglected decade (and a half.) Our most entertaining historian characteristically finds the mood of the nation in popular songs and novels as much as newspapers and parliamentary debate. In his company the Edwardian era comes alive.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Dublin Castle Pub in Camden.

Alwyn Turner – Profile Books £25:00

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Howard Jacobson – What Will Survive of Us

Posted on February 11, 2024 by Johnny Mindlin

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. It’s risk!

Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobson’s new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is rightly celebrated for his dialogue and, as so often before, it is rich with allusion and steeped in his passion for English literature. The novel is explicitly and unabashedly a love story and love was what Howard most wanted to talk about when we met.

“The minute you fall deeply in love … melancholy strolls into the garden”.

For Lily and Sam love strikes with a thunderclap. Lily is in love at first sight. Sam takes a couple of days longer. Both in relationships past their sell-by date, they embark upon an extraordinary affair that they are convinced will last forever.

Howard Jacobson seems incapable of writing a bad sentence (although he tells us that it’s just that we don’t get to see them.) His latest book shows him still in full literary flight.

Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape RRP £18.99

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Philip Norman: George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle

Posted on October 29, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Was George Harrison really the “Economy Beatle”?

Philip Norman wrote Shout!, the first grown-up biography of The Beatles, shortly before John Lennon was murdered. People told him he was crazy, that The Fabs were yesterday’s news, that everybody already knew everything there was to know about the band. He wasn’t crazy. Fifty-three years after they broke up The Beatles are still an industry, or as Philip puts it, practically a religion.

Even today there is passionate disagreement about George Harrison. There are those who point to the triumphant first solo album, All Things Must Pass, as proof that he was always Lennon and McCartney’s equal and was unfairly sidelined in the band. And others will argue that anybody would have been overshadowed by the powerhouse songwriting partnership, and that he doesn’t need to be John or Paul to be an indispensable part of The Greatest Show On Earth.

John Lennon said that Something was the best song on Abbey Road. Here Comes The Sun is the most downloaded Beatles track. On the other hand, you have to be a real George fan to hear anything worthwhile in Only A Northern Song or Blue Jay Way.

So how did the fourteen year old kid who fought for his place in the Quarrymen become the Beatle most resistant to playing live? How did he come to break the First Commandment of the Beatle fraternity? How did he become one of the most important British film producers of the 1980’s? Philip Norman calls him ‘The Economy Beatle’ and he has written a beautiful life of the study in contradictions that was George Harrison.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at 21Soho, in association with Walthamstow Rock n Roll Book Club. With help from various parties, including www.meetthebeatlesforreal.com

Philip Norman ‎ Simon & Schuster UK £25.00

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Sarah Ogilvie – The Dictionary People – The Unsung Heroes Who Created The Oxford English Dictionary

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

A goldmine of nutters, obsessives, murdere r s, vicars and, above all, readers!

Click here to buy the book

In a time before the internet, the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was the Wickipedia of its day, crowdsourcing its contributions from thousands of readers across the world.

Over decades, millions of slips inscribed with words and quotations poured into a metal shed in an Oxford garden to be assembled into the magnificent, comprehensive, authoritative dictionary that was a wonder of the age.

It is understandable that attention has tended to focus on the principle Editor, James Murray, who devoted thirty-six years to the project (he got it to the letter T), but a chance discovery sent Sarah Ogilvie on a quest for the unpaid contributors to the O.E.D., and it was a gold mine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars, and above all, readers.

Dr Ogilvie fell in love with them and has gleefully made a book packed with more lurid and remarkable stories than you could shake a philologist at.

Sarah Ogilvie Chatto & Windus £22:00

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Mike Jay – Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! 😉

We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950’s. Timothy Leary in the ‘60’s, Hunter S Thompson in the ‘70’s, those two guys who started the craze for smoking cane-toad venom in ‘90’s. Investigators who became their own guinea pigs.

But “the heroic tradition of discovery”, as Mike Jay puts it, has a much longer and more interesting history. The second half of the Nineteenth Century in particular saw the introduction of most of the substances discussed in this book, and was perhaps the golden age of getting stoned for science.

The problem, of course, is that there is no way of investigating the experiential effects of narcotics, stimulants, analgesics, hallucinogens, etc, except by becoming one’s own subject. Combining introspective investigation with scientific rigour in experiment – what could possibly go wrong? Even Sigmund Freud, who thought that he had discovered a miracle cure-all in cocaine, drifted over from research to recreation, although he never became an addict.

Others were less disciplined.

Yale University Press £20:00

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Neil Jordan – The Well Of Saint Nobody

Posted on August 6, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Have you never forgotten someone you’ve slept with?

Neil Jordan is best known as an internationally famous film director, of course – The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire and many others. But he is also an accomplished novelist.

The Well Of St Nobody is a story of legend, of music and eroticism, of consequences and of identity.

“The girl who had walked her mother through those dry stone walls decorated with crutches was not the girl who had lost her virginity on the living-room floor of Tonglee Road; was not the girl who rattled out her Bach fugues in front of the Rachmaninov virtuoso…” The virtuoso is William Barrow, and for him the encounter has little significance. He doesn’t even recognise her when they meet again. But years later Tara is a piano teacher scratching a living in a little village in west Ireland, and the famous pianist turns up in her village and doesn’t know her. But she knows him. She takes up a position as housekeeper for him and begins to invent a legend around the well in his garden, and bit by bit the gears of story begin to grind and the past comes crashing into the present.

Head Of Zeus £20.00

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Cathi Unsworth – Season Of The Witch: The Book Of Goth

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Margaret Thatcher and Goth Culture

It was the Age of Thatcher, and beyond the playgrounds of the red-braces wide boys and the Sloane Square privileged, it was grim. Unemployment was a weapon in the class war. The Yorkshire Ripper ran riot. Bitter industrial disputes divided communities, while the police was brutally remade into a national instrument to break the miners.

And maybe you remember the pop music of the time: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Wham!

But there was a more intense musical response to the wretchedness of the times, more intense and more appropriate. Punk had come to a sticky end, but it inspired a new generation of malcontents who had plundered their older siblings’ record collections and steeped themselves in literature of darkness and dismay. Bands like The Cure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Joy Division, and poster girl Siouxsie Sioux with her Banshees erupted in a hundred different scenes to vent their anger and frustration, to record their nightmares, and in some cases to chase that elusive #1 and an appearance on Top Of The Pops.

It was the season of the witch.

Nine Eight Books £22:00

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Lawrence Krauss – The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Lawrence Krauss – Head Of Zeus – £20.00

Click here to buy the book.

Professor Lawrence Krauss has made major contributions to the field of theoretical physics and is one of the world’s great scientific communicators with a gift for illuminating complex ideas.

His new book, The Known Unknowns makes a tour d’horizon of the frontiers of current knowledge, touching on such questions as: Is infinity real? Does the multiverse actually exist? Is quantum mechanics true? Can we create consciousness? And lots more. It is an exhilarating read, and as he writes, “Focusing on the edge of knowledge provides an opportunity to explain how far we have come…”

He is also, incidentally, a dazzling close-up magician so you might say that reality and perception are meat and drink to him. We spoke to him at his publishers during a brief visit to the UK, and it made for a lively chat.

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Barry Forshaw – Simenon: The Man, The Books, The Films: A 21st Century Guide

Posted on June 4, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books – £12.99

Click here to buy the book

Is there any man or woman in England who knows more about crime writing than Barry Forshaw? Here at The Books Podcast he is our go-to man. He is also delightful company.

Simenon’s Maigret books are the most successful non-anglophone crime series in the world. Easily up there with Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe, but with an entirely different approach to detection. Maigret is closer to psychologist or priest than sleuth.

But Simenon regarded his romans dur – hard novels – as his real writing, and Andre Gide said he was the greatest French novelist of his time.

Having fairly recently come to Simenon, Tim fell upon Barry’s handy book like a starving man upon food, and visited him to explore the character of the man and the special genius (and prodigious productivity) of his writing.

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Joanne Harris – Broken Light

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Johnny Mindlin

Joanne Harris – Broken Light – Orion £20.00

If every piece about Joanne Harris starts by reminding us that she is the author of Chocolat, she can live with that. It might be close to a quarter of a century ago, but it was a dazzling success and made her a household name, while the film adaptation took her to the Oscars, where Alfred Molina made sure that she was included in all the invitations.

Every one of her novels since Chocolat has been a best-seller, and it is safe to assume that Broken Light will also be a big hit.

A seven year old girl is taken to a magic show which shows her an uncovenanted possibility. This was an age, as she says, when magic was easier than maths, and the magician’s assistant whispers in her ear “Little girl. Make them look.” Half a lifetime later, she will.

The strapline for Broken Light says that it is about the invisibility of women, and of course it is, although that sells it rather short. Without any descent into polemic, it is about half a dozen contemporary issues, and rather wonderfully about itself. When she becomes menopausal Bernie Ingram rediscovers her unexpected power, and her world doesn’t know what has hit it.

Joanne has said that Broken Light goes where Stephen King’s Carrie might have gone if Carrie had been a menopausal woman instead of an adolescent girl, and, as Tim observes, if it had been written by a woman.

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Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success And Failure From Butler to Corbyn

Posted on December 18, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Steve Richards – Atlantic Books – £10.99

Steve Richards’ last book was an entertaining and penetrating discussion of the last ten Prime Ministers (or at any rate, the last ten at the time of publication – we’ve had a couple more since then.)

But as he writes in his new book, “Most routes to Number 10 are blocked.” But some of the nearly men and women are bigger and more substantial figures than the ones who made it to the top. Why did John Major become Prime Minister when Michael Heseltine did not? Why did Michael Foot lead the Labour party instead of political heavyweights like Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins? What prevented Neil Kinnock from making the final leap? And does Jeremy Corbyn deserve a place on the list?

Steve looks in detail at eleven of the ‘lost leaders’, political actors who might have been expected to achieve their ambition, but who, for interestingly different reasons failed to do so, with his characteristic insight and deep knowledge. Steve Richards is a distinguished political columnist, journalist and presenter. He also presents a popular one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival and around the country, called Rock and Roll Politics, which is also the title of his hugely successful weekly podcast.

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Joel Meadows – Tripwire 30th Anniversary

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Joel Meadows Heavy Metal Entertainment £35.99

Click here to buy the book

Tripwire is thirty, and we were intrigued when this beautiful anniversary book arrived at The Books Podcast.

What is Tripwire, you ask? It’s a… well, it’s a magazine.

Hm… funny name for a magazine. What sort of magazine?

A slightly geeky magazine.

Geeky?

OK, it’s a magazine for anybody who shares the interests of editor in chief, Joel Meadows, but there again, Joel’s interests are mainstream geek, so that’s alright. And one of his interests is illustrative art, principally comic-book and movie art, and Tripwire is in love with it. And that endears it to me.

We visited Joel Meadows to discuss the past thirty years and hear his origin story. And why is it called Tripwire? I’ll ask him.

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David Hepworth – Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studio

Posted on October 22, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

David Hepworth – Bantam Press – £25

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The world has many holy places – Mecca, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Wetherspoons on King St in Hammersmith – but for some of us these are all trumped by Number 3 Abbey Rd in St John’s Wood. EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios.

Even today musicians and bands – good bands – are sometimes intimidated by the sheer history of the place. To stand where the Beatles stood and sing where the Beatles sang is to feel the shadow of genius. And you might also rate Elgar, Noel Coward and Jacqueline du Pre. Not to mention Bernard Cribbins. True, much of the paraphernalia has been cleared out. The mixing desk on which Pink Floyd compiled The Dark Side Of The Moon was sold off years ago, and even the ashtray that stood beside Ringo’s drum kit fetched £2,000 at auction.

But while other recording studios come and, mostly, go, Abbey Road endures. Abbey Road means something. And Abbey Road has tales to tell.

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Louise Willder – Blurb Your Enthusiasm – an A-Z of Literary Persuasion

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Louise Willder – OneWorld – £14.99

Quick review of Louise’s checklist of adjectives not to be used in a blurb: breathtaking, spellbinding, dazzling, powerful, beautiful. So I can’t say it’s any of those.

Readable? Well, as she points out, it’s a book.

Darkly comic. That just means unpleasant, doesn’t it?

I also can’t accuse it of ‘mordant wit’. Although it is funny. Very. ‘Rich tapestry’. She’s got a point there – I don’t know what that means. ‘Reminds one of Martin Amis.’ Yes, I think we can definitely shelve that one!

Oh – I know. I can crib her quote from Charlie Brooker: “The potential all-time #1 bestseller”.

Will that do?

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Nick Wallis – The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25

It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, obliged to pay thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds “back” that they never stole in the first place.

And all of this visited upon their staff by the Post Office – an institution since 1660, and one of the most trusted brands in British life.

You were probably aware of the scandal as it emerged into the public arena, and you were probably shocked. But the picture is more monstrous and terrifying than you imagined. As the journalist who did most to expose this terrifying story it has fallen to Nick Wallis to write the book, and it is exemplary.

This podcast goes on a bit longer than usual. There was a lot to talk about.

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Posted in Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics | Tagged Books, Hiagh, Jail, Nick, Podcast, Post Office, postoffice, Scandal, Tim, Wallace | Leave a comment

Rachel Gross – Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Rachel Gross – W W Norton – £19.99

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There comes a time in every woman’s life when her body bumps up against the limits of human knowledge. In that moment, she sees herself as medicine has seen her: a mystery. An enigma. A black box that, for some reason, no-one has managed to get inside.”

This was the experience of Rachel Gross, who found that the standard treatment for her own (very common) condition was practically medieval. As a science journalist her response was to research the present state of knowledge, and investigate in detail the biology and background of the female reproductive system.

Vagina Obscura explores the structures, purposes and functioning of the whole system, as well as adumbrating the reasons that it has historically been the poor relation in anatomical studies. Femaleness was for centuries, an inferior version of maleness, and even quite recently femaleness was regarded, as Rachel Gross says, as “the iPhone factory setting while maleness was all the bells and whistles.”

Vagina Obscura is a highly readable report from the front line of present knowledge of women’s anatomy. It turns out to be much more interesting, complex and dynamic than the medical profession ever imagined. Who knew?

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Posted in History, Science | Tagged clitoris, health, uterus, vagina, Women, women's | Leave a comment

Howard Jacobson – Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Howard Jacobson – Jonathan Cape – £18.99

It is striking that one of our finest novelists didn’t publish his first novel until he was nearly forty, and characteristically, he was ticking off literature’s late starters as he passed them by. Reading Howard Jacobson, you would say that he was born to be a writer, and he would have concurred. Mother’s Boy is the account of the road to his realisation, taking in his childhood, his education, his wives and his travels. Wolverhampton does not come out of it well.

If we observe that Mother’s Boy reads like one of Howard Jacobson’s novels that is only to its advantage. But this is not outtakes from Coming From Behind, Kalooki Nights or The Mighty Walzer – rather the other way round. Mother’s Boy is vivid, muscular, laugh out loud funny, acutely observed, and in its own way merciless, only the object of the pitiless pen is Jacobson himself.

Tim starts off the conversation – as he so often does – with a confession.

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Posted in Biography, Humour | Tagged Biography, Boy, Howard, Jacobson, jewish, Jewishness, Mothers | Leave a comment

Simon Mason – A Killing In November

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Simon Mason – Riverrun – £14.99

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A beautiful girl is strangled in the Provost’s lodge in an Oxford College while the college is shmoozing a billionaire Emirati. It is a situation which calls for delicate handling, so it is perhaps a shame that new DI Wilkins is sent by mistake to take charge of the investigation.

A town and gown setting. An odd couple detective partnership. A gratifying cast of suspects. And more twists and turnings than you could shake a Porter’s Lodge at. Simon Mason has kicked off his new police procedural series with a swagger.

A Killing In November is his first crime novel, having previously written adult literary, as well as children’s and young adults’ fiction. Tim kicked off the conversation by reminding Simon of the last time they met.

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Dr Thomas Halliday – Otherlands: A World in the Making

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Dr Thomas Halliday – Allen Lane – £20

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Otherlands is a kind of travel book, traveling in time and across the globe, pushing back through the last half-billion years, showing you ever stranger beasts and more and more unfamiliar landscapes. Each chapter takes us to a location in the world that exemplifies a nexus of evolutionary change.

Odd details capture your imagination and answer questions you never knew you had: In the Jurassic period, in the absence of wood-boring predators, logs lasted rather longer than they do now; Who knew? You wouldn’t have seen flowers until the Cretaceous either, a mere 145 million years ago, not to mention a world without grass, which evolved even more recently than that. Then there are herbivorous crocodiles, lizards with wings on their hind legs and don’t start me on 6-foot penguins and penis worms. Who knew?

Paleobiologist, Dr Thomas Halliday knew. In Otherlands, he shows you the world as it once was, presenting interwoven ecologies and placing you there as an observer of the most amazing story ever told. There is almost too much to take in, but there is something to ravish your imagination around every corner.

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Posted in History, Science | Tagged Dinosaurrs, Halliday, Thomas | Leave a comment

Robert J Lloyd – The Bloodless Boy

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Johnny Mindlin

Robert J Lloyd – Melville House Press – £18.99

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In 1678 London was rebuilding after the Great Fire of London, just twelve years earlier. Among the great men undertaking this enterprise was Robert Hooke, who is a central character in Rob Lloyd’s The Bloodless Boy. A scientist and energetically modern visionary: “Some parts of Nature are too large to be comprehended, some too little to be perceived. Our most solid definitions are imperfect, only expressions of our misguided apprehensions, not the true nature of things themselves.” Hooke was a man of boundless curiosity.

But in this novel Hooke finds himself reluctantly drawn into a perplexing murder mystery, with his friend and recent assistant Henry Hunt, who risks life and limb to investigate.

In 1678 the Civil War was also a recent convulsion, and the political aftershocks of that febrile time provide the fuel that ignites the present fire. What appears to be the inexplicable murder of a small boy, exposes abominations, revenges, and a plot to kill the King.

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Prof Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God An Anatomy

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou – Picador – £25

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“Once upon a time, in the book of Genesis, humans were made in the visual image and likeness of God. It was a social, as well as a corporeal correspondence, celebrating both the fleshly wonders of the human body and the personable presence of the deity.” So says Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou. She has written a fascinating volume, scholarly and hugely entertaining, exploring the ancient conception of the god of the bible, focussing on his corporeality and presence in his followers’ lives.

Professor Stavrakopoulou is, herself, also entertaining and engaging and we have a high old time discussing her book, which illuminates our understanding of the Jewish and Christian bibles, and, inter alia, it just might put the cat among the theological pigeons.

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Nicholas Wapshott – Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

Posted on October 15, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Nicholas Wapshott – W. w. Norton – £22.95

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Not many academic economists are household names. But when I was young, Milton Friedman was. The high-priest of Monetarism and intellectual descendant of Friedrich Hayek, his theories were much admired by right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile Paul Samuelson made his mark with his bestselling economics textbook which was the standard text for decades. I used it myself at school.

Nicholas Wapshott has a brilliant eye for the narrative that unlocks the subject for the general reader. In the case of Samuelson and Friedman, Wapshott’s springboard is the column in Newsweek magazine that the two economists shared, or rather alternated for the thick end of twenty years. The dialogue between the arch-Keynesian and the apostle of free markets makes for an exhilarating intellectual journey, told with great clarity and enormous brio by a writer who can make even economic history fun.

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Robb Johnson – The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child Versus The State

Posted on August 11, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Robb Johnson – PM Books – £17.99

The argument of this book is that in the post-war period state schools were beginning to fall under the control of the educationalists who worked there, and ideas of equality and libertarian, child-centred education were beginning to impact upon the schooling experienced by the underprivileged. This Prague Spring of education, state education with a human face, has since been subjected to a ruthless attack by the right, and the future of education now looks pretty much like Orwell’s vision of the future in 1984… a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Teacher by day, and acclaimed songwriter by night, Robb Johnson has worked within the system for thirty years and seen the possibilities of education undermined by the requirements of schooling. We took the train down to sunny Hove to discuss the wintery gloom of post-Thatcher education with him.

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Posted in Cultural History, Politics | Tagged child, children, education, Johnson, Robb, school | Leave a comment

Alwyn Turner – All In It Together: England in the Early 21st Century

Posted on June 27, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Alwyn Turner – Profile Books – £20

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For some years now Alwyn Turner has been retelling the recent history of the nation in his trademark style focussing on social changes rather than Westminster shenanigans. With his brilliant eye for the telling example and his prodigious research, he paints a vivid picture and draws acute conclusions.

This lively book, bringing us nearly up to date, is the most readable and entertaining of history books. Whether discussing the fragmentation of social cohesion by arguing that in pop music the Spice Girls might have been the last group that really mattered, or analysing class conflicts in terms of the different attitudes towards Roy Chubby Brown and Jimmy Carr, Alwyn invariably hits the target and makes larger points. Tim channelled his inner fogey and visited him at home in London, only to find himself confessing that he isn’t fond of Greggs, the bakers.

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Posted in Cultural History | Tagged Alwyn, Blair, Farage, Nigel, Tony, Turner | Leave a comment

Adrian MacKinder – Stan Lee – How Marvel Changed The World!

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Adrian MacKinder – Pen & Sword White Owl £19.99 $29.99

Face Front, True Believers! This is the story of the man who gave the world the Marvel Universe, who bestrode the comic-book industry like a colossus, and who said “Face Front, True Believers!” a lot.
In later life Stan Lee became nearly as famous as his creations, appearing in cameo in a score of the films based on the characters he had created. But for nearly twenty years he laboured in an unprepossessing corner of popular culture, writing comic-books for kids. It was only with the Marvel revolution that comics exploded into the main stream. Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, The X-Men – all products of Stan Lee’s Marvel in the early 1960’s.
Who Stan Lee was and how it all happened is the subject of this book.
‘Nuff said!

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Paul Theroux from the archives – Chicago Loop

Posted on March 7, 2021 by Johnny Mindlin

Paul Theroux – Hamish Hamilton – £20.95

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Long before he was the father of Louis Theroux, Paul Theroux was a distinguished and prolific travel writer and novelist. Born in 1941 (and we are delighted to note he is still with us), it is well-known that he joined the Peace Corps in 1963 and was declared persona non grata in Malawi by the dictator Hastings Banda for assisting in the escape of his political opponent.

Paul Theroux’s first big success as a writer was the classic The Great Railway Bazaar in 1972, and he is also the author of Mosquito Coast, and Riding The Iron Rooster.

In 1990 Tim met him to talk about his newest book. Chicago Loop is not perhaps his best-known work, but as we will hear Tim was much taken with it.

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Posted in Archive, Fiction | Tagged Chicago, Crime, Loop, Louis, murder, Paul, Theroux, thriller | Leave a comment

Philip Seargeant – The Art of Political Storytelling

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

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This is the story of one man’s mission to save the world from the forces of evil. To do battle against a corrupt and self-serving enemy bent on enslaving an innocent population. In order to achieve this, he has to venture deep into hostile territory, abandoning the comfortable existence he once had, and embark on a perilous unforgiving journey. At each stage of the journey he’s assailed by fierce and unscrupulous opponents.

But, at the moment of utmost crisis, he’s able to realise his true potential. Through self-belief, force of character and complete conviction in his cause he faces down the enemy in one final conflict. In doing so, he achieves the unachievable and wins a famous victory. In the closing scene he returns triumphant, not only in what he’s accomplished personally but also in having saved the world from a cataclysmic future.

This is either the plot of most adventure stories or the “back-story” offered the world by ambitious politicians, bent on power at any cost. Philip Seargeant looks at this kind of narrative and finds many parallels in the way right-wing political leaders present themselves. Venturing into the world of video interview, we asked him to expand on his ideas.

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Philip Norman – Wild Thing: The short, spellbinding life of Jimi Hendrix

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Philip Norman – Weidenfeld and Nicolson – £20

Click here to buy the book — Click here to buy the book on Amazon

It is generally accepted that Jimi Hendrix is the most important guitarist in the history of rock music. In just four years he revolutionised everybody’s idea of what an electric guitar was capable of, set new standards for showmanship, and left a dazzling catalogue of recordings.

Poster boy for the 27 Club (rock musicians who died at that age), Hendrix died in London fifty years ago. That anniversary prompted Philip Norman to add to his wonderful series of biographies of the greats. We joined Philip in his garden to talk about what Jimi Hendrix still means to us.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Music | Tagged Guitar, Hero, Jimi Hendrix, Megastar | Leave a comment

Larry Watson – The Lives Of Edie Pritchard

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Larry Watson – Algonquin Books £21.99 $27.95

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The Lives of Edie Pritchard is Larry Watson’s eleventh novel, and he is at the height of his powers. It is a big novel set in Larry’s back yard of the states where the Midwest becomes the West. We follow the heroine Edie through three points in her life from a young married woman through to her early old age and grandmotherhood, as she learns that she cannot escape from being the person that others need her to be. “When you’re back home you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never were that person.” Even Tim can go a little bit fanboy when he gets to talk to one of his favourite novelists. Larry in Wisconsin and Tim in London talked via skype about brothers, guns, women, violence, and identity. Spoiler alert: Tim liked it.

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Posted in Fiction | Tagged Brother, LArry, Twin, Watson | Leave a comment

Liz Williams – Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95

In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy.

Thus, she makes judicious assessments of, for instance, claims that present magic accesses ancient knowledge (weak), and considers what we can actually know about druidic practices (not much for sure), but she does find the roots and traces of pre-christian spirituality in a culture which didn’t take notes.

We are on much firmer ground when it comes to witchcraft, wicca and cunning folk, and Liz is able to tidy up Tim’s confusion between them.

And she is brilliant and entertaining on more recent expressions of paganism and magic, touching on Aleister Crowley, The Golden Dawn, Madame Blavatsky, the Hellfire Club and so on, not to mention Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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Posted in Cultural History, History, Humour, Philosophy, Religion, Science | Tagged Aleister, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Club, coven, Crowley, druid, druids, Harry Potter, Hellfire, Liz, Madame Blavatsky, magic, occult, Pagan, Paganism, potions, religion, sourcery, spells, The Golden Dawn, warlock, wika, Williams, Witch, witchcraft, wizad | Leave a comment

Chris Kirkham – Decoherence: A Quantum Whodunnit

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99

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You have to salute a debut novel that swaggers its ambition. Boasting the subtitle “A quantum whodunnit”, Decoherence duly boasts chapters called ‘Entanglement’, ‘Wave Function’, ‘Entropy’ and so on. Our hero, Sirius Peabody, is a theoretical physicist, and his way of seeing the world is very much the substrate of this cheerful murder mystery. Chris Kirkham has great fun with this: “The whole police approach defied the laws of physics”, says Sirius at one point. And since the police are notoriously Newtonian in their approach to crime, Peabody and his new best friend, the lovely Annabelle Bronte (yes, she has a sister) feel compelled to try to solve the crime with reference to the wave-particle duality and super-positioning. It sounds more high falutin’ than it really is. Chris never lets the physics get in the way of the phun.

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Posted in Fiction, Humour, Science | Tagged Chris, Kirkham, Physics, Quantam, whodonit | Leave a comment

Stephen Tow – London, Reign Over Me: How England’s Capital Built Classic Rock

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Stephen Tow – Rowman and Littlefield £15.99

To have been young in London in the 1960’s must have been very heaven. At least if you had a yen to see live music in clubs and pubs and a dilapidated hotel on an island in the River Thames. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Pink Floyd… (stop me when it gets dizzying). The city was a musical crucible, taking American jazz and blues, English folk and whimsy, and a host of European influences, and transmuting them into the spun gold of classic rock, with a little help from art colleges and a couple of fellows named Marshall.

Stephen Tow and Tim Haigh are both young enough to have missed the party, and old enough to have gazed backwards wistfully from the late ‘70’s at what seemed then (and to be honest, seems still) a golden age. They share their enthusiasm via a transatlantic Skype connection.

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Posted in Cultural History, History, Music | Tagged Beatles, Cream, Eel Pie Island, London, Me, Over, Pink Floyd, Rign, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, The Yardbirds | Leave a comment

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Helen Lewis – Jonathan Cape £13.59

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Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outlook are on display in this entertaining book. By focussing on eleven of the struggles that have got us this far in the quest for an equal society – Divorce, Education, Abortion, Safety and so on – she discusses the history, the current issues, the state of play and the women who got us here in a terrifically readable way. Polemical, funny and extremely well-informed.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics, History, Humour, Politics | Tagged Difficult, feminist, femisnism, Helen, Lewis, Women | Leave a comment

Barry Forshaw – Crime Fiction – A Reader’s Guide

Posted on January 19, 2020 by Johnny Mindlin

Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books £12.99

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Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction. Writer, commentator, editor, broadcaster and enthusiast, his fingerprints are everywhere. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it is he. Why is crime fiction the most popular of all genres? It’s a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle. And every puzzle has a solution. Tim Haigh pounded the mean streets and leant on his informers, he sifted the evidence and demolished the alibis, he kissed the femme fatale and sent the samples to the forensic lab to be… forensicced, and eventually he felt Barry’s collar, hauling him down the nick for a little chat. We find them face to face across a plastic table in a drab interview room with the two-way mirror and the dual tape recorder.

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Posted in Cultural History, History | Tagged Barry, Crime, Fiction, Forshaw, guide | Leave a comment

Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to May

Posted on November 19, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Steve Richards – Atlantic Books £20

You have to wonder why the office of Prime Minister is so coveted. While many politicians aspire to Number Ten, more or less all the Prime Ministers in this book spent at least some of their time in office in political Hell. And yet they typically cling on to office like grim death, and in some cases never get over its loss.

Steve Richards, the most thoughtful and incisive of journalists and commentators, has written a detailed and hugely entertaining study of the nine Prime Ministers of the modern era, from Harold Wilson to Theresa May.

Packed with anecdote and analysis, and unashamedly fascinated by the elements of leadership required to succeed, Steve’s book sets out to explode the easy caricatures and show the abilities and qualities each Prime Minister brought to the job, and why they were so often not the right ones.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History, Politics | Tagged Blair, Callaghan, Cameron, David, Harold, Heath, James, John, Major, Margaret, May, minister, number 10, politics, Prime, Richards, Steve, Ted, Thatcher, Theresa, Wilson | Leave a comment

Graeme Garrard – How To Think Politically

Posted on October 27, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Professor James Bernard Murphy and Graeme Garrard – Bloomsbury: £10.49

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In an overview of the great political thinkers of the ages, comprising thirty of the most trenchant minds in history, you would imagine that there would be room for the Sage of Hounslow. But for some reason Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant are all preferred to Tim Haigh, who doesn’t rate a chapter to himself. Go figure.

“Politics”, wrote Lord Roseberry, “…is an evil-smelling bog.” It is the thesis of this brisk tour d’horizon that on the contrary, ideas matter in political discourse, and the writers pursue this notion with a kind of Plutarch’s lives of great philosophers. Highly readable, and with a subtly understated agenda – that the greatest political thinking of the past might provide a sort of corrective to the malaise of the present nadir – How To Think Politically is an elegant primer in the field.

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Posted in Cultural History, History, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged Engels, Garrard, Ghandi, Graeme, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Mao Tze Tung, Marx, Plato, politically, politics, think, thinking | Leave a comment

Mike Isaac – Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber

Posted on October 7, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Mike Isaac – Norton: £19.99

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It is not unusual in Silicon Valley for head office to lay on dinner for the employees. The cost is nugatory in these fabulously money-rich tech companies and it encourages people to work past quitting time, and eat before going home. It is typical of Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, that he gave this practice a twist – he stipulated that dinner would not be served before 8:15 p.m. And that story is about the most benign thing we learn about him in Mike Isaac’s wonderfully lucid account of Kalanick and the business he built in his own monstrous image. Dazzling growth, commitment to excess, chicanery, toxic culture, contempt for the rules and a single-minded determination to fight dirty and win big, Uber may be the most egregious exemplar of the great Silicon Valley enfants terribles.

Have you taken an Uber recently? … Are you sure you still want to?

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics | Tagged Android, Apple, Cab, iPhone, Mike Isaac, Taxi, Uber | Leave a comment

Ray Connolly – Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition

Posted on August 3, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Ray Connolly – Malignon £7.95

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“I’d like to say Thank You on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition.” John Lennon on the roof of the Apple Building on January 30^th 1969 at the end of the last public Beatles performance. It had been the Greatest Show on Earth, but what if it hadn’t happened? What if the Beatles had not passed the vital 1962 audition with George Martin at Parlophone which got them their recording deal? As well as being a friend of the Beatles, Ray Connolly is exactly contemporary with them, and comes from the same part of the world. He has a terrific feel for the time and place and a marvellous ear for Beatle talk. Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition is a delightful novella about the boys getting on with their lives, and one woman’s determination that their music should be heard.

Incidentally, this book was also a Radio Play on the BBC.

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Posted in Cultural History, Fiction, Humour, Music | Tagged Beatles, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ray Connolly, Ringo Star | Leave a comment

Ross Barnett – The Missing Lynx – The Past And Future Of Britain’s Lost Mammals

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Ross Barnett – Bloomsbury £16.99

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15,000 years ago, Britain was a very different place. The ice age was ending, and the country was lush and untamed. Sea level was then so low that Dogger Bank, in the North Sea, was then Doggerland, and our ancestors lived there, sharing the land with a dazzling variety of megafauna – big animals to you and me. And what a cast list – lions, wolves, woolly mammoths and rhinos, bears and bison and many more. For palaeontologist, Dr Ross Barnett, this was barely yesterday. Unlike the dinosaurs, people exactly like us met these animals and knew them. They have only just disappeared. By turns elegiac, scientific, enthusiastic and indignant, The Missing Lynx is a wonderfully accessible picture of this lost fauna, and the story of what happened to them.

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Robert Elliott Smith – Rage Inside The Machine – The Prejudice of Algorithms and How to Stop The Internet Making Bigots of us All

Posted on July 2, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

Robert Elliott Smith – Bloomsbury £20.00

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In the privacy of my complacency, I am pleased to count myself moderately bright – not Stephen Fry clever but, you know, able to tie my own shoelaces and read without moving my lips. So it is bracing for me to venture from time to time into areas of learning where I find myself very much the pedestrian, and the reason I do here is because I am very interested in the matter of how algorithms impact upon our lives and in the relation between artificial intelligence and human consciousness.

Rob Smith is a bona fide expert in evolutionary algorithms. He has helped create software systems that learn fighter jet manoeuvres, describe immune system behaviour, reveal emotion in financial markets and explain how social networks propagate political polarisation.

Despite their ubiquity, algorithms are not well understood by the general population. They are now so complex that nobody can properly unpack them, and they display emergent properties that no-one can predict or control. Rob Smith has written a magnificently lucid book explaining how we got here and showing what algorithms are and what they are not. Carefully delineating how they were developed, and what assumptions and prejudices underlie them, he has written a timely and engaging book for the interested layman. Me, in other words.

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Ben Burgis – Give Them An Argument: Logic For The Left

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

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What is the purpose of debate? Is it to convince somebody, somewhere of something, or is it merely to undermine the other side and bolster your own prejudices?

You may have noticed that political discourse is not always conducted in a civil and measured manner. Especially when the participants are physically removed from each other, say via journalistic writing or social media. In particular, right-wing polemicists are fond of throwing around terms like ‘libtards’, and claiming to have ‘crushed’ or ‘destroyed’ their opponents. There is an unattractive swagger to the claims of some of these people to have exclusive title to the use of logic. Ben Burgis, a philosophy PhD and avowedly Marxist, thinks that the left needs to work on its debating chops.

In his feisty little book he discusses the way that the right has claimed the high ground of dispassion, and proposes approaches and tools for countering this unwarranted security. Taking aim at the traditional leftist hostility to the very notion of logic, and such right-wing bêtes noire as Ben Shapiro, Burgis takes up the cudgels on the side of the angels. “Don’t mistake this book as a plea for civility” he writes. Not much danger of that, Ben.

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Posted in Politics | Tagged argument, ben shapiro, debate, jewish, left wing, political, politics, right wing | Leave a comment

Joel Meadows – Masters Of Comics

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

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We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine include horror films, prog rock and, for the purposes of this interview, comic books. For me it was American super-heroes: Batman and the Fantastic Four and speech balloons screaming, “Mortal, I say thee nay!” and “Not all my power can save me!” But actually, comic books have come a long way since the cheap paper and four-colour separation of my childhood. They are glossier, they are more detailed, much better presented, and much more expensive. Joel Meadows takes a tour of some of the finest and most illustrious practitioners of the art of graphic story-telling, bearding them in their lairs – or ‘studios’ – exploring their techniques and work-spaces in a sumptuously illustrated volume. From stalwarts of the industry such as Bill Sienkiewicz and Walt Simonson to current stars like Frank Quitley and Frank Cho, he takes us right to their drawing-boards. It is a lovely book and it vividly reminds us what we liked about comic-books in the first place – the drawings.

Joel highlights some upcoming events. We will list them here as information becomes available:

MASTERS OF COMICS SIGNING WITH LAURENCE CAMPBELL, SEAN PHILLIPS AND POSY SIMMONDS

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Randy Ross – God Bless Cambodia

Posted on February 21, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

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A man can travel well and he can travel badly*. The hero of Randy Ross’s God Bless Cambodia is on the ‘badly’ end of the scale. At 48 Randy Burns is tired of ‘the miserable game’ (dating). He has been laid off from his job. His friends are getting paired up and unavailable to him. And then in a bookshop he comes across a travel guide that promises marvels and delights if he were to take a four month tour of the world on the cheap. It is lying.
A succession of red-eye flights takes Randy through South America, Europe, Africa and the far east, searching for romance, but more often discovering that he had arrived out of season.
Randy, the author, mines a rich seam of comedy in the misery of a certain kind of American man out of his comfort zone. Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson it is not. But then maybe Bill Bryson has never tried to hire a ‘money-honey’ girlfriend in Thailand. Tim talked with Randy on skype while somebody was fixing Randy’s roof. With a hammer.
*Women always travel well.

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Julian Baggini – How The World Thinks

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Johnny Mindlin

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When we use the word ‘philosophy’ what we usually mean is “western philosophy’. But as the philosopher and bestselling author Julian Baggini points out in his new book, western philosophy accounts for only around 20% of the world’s population. Other peoples have other philosophical traditions, and as Dr Baggini argues, the underlying philosophical assumptions inform and shape the ways we think and live, even if we never consider them.

Tim is perhaps the ideal reader for this book, insofar as he is fairly parochial in his philosophical outlook, and he found it stimulating to be asked to consider the bigger picture and see how other traditions chime with, contrast with, and shine a light on the western outlook. He found it rewarding and enlightening, and he couldn’t wait to tackle some of the issues in conversation with the writer, and also to take up the cudgels on behalf of his parochialism.

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Posted in Cultural History, Philosophy, Religion | Tagged Baggini, China, Christian, comparative, Haigh, Islam, Julian, Philosophy, Tim | Leave a comment

Ray Connolly – Being John Lennon

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Johnny Mindlin

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“Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? We will tell you. It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an ‘A’. Thank you, mister man, they said, thanking him.” So wrote John Lennon, shortly before he became the most famous man on the planet.

And that’s all the background you’re getting. Tim is a self-confessed Beatles anorak. Many people have Chekhov’s Revolver on their mantelpiece, but only Tim has Stanislavski’s Sgt Pepper and Dostoevsky’s Rubber Soul as well. And he is only too delighted to delve into the minutiae of John Lennon’s life with a fellow… anorak.

There are countless Lennon biographies, which variously just map out the events of his life, or in lurid terms portray a monster, or a broken child or a grotesque. Being John Lennon is not a memoir, but a full-scale life by a man who knew Lennon well, as a friend, and shows him as a human being. Ray Connolly met the Beatles when they were making Magical Mystery Tour, and he was one of the journalists Lennon regularly turned to when he wanted to talk. And Lennon loved to talk. About the Beatles, about Paul McCartney, about Yoko Ono, about May Pang, and everything else in his life. But mostly about John Lennon.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Music | Tagged John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ray Connolly, The Beatles, Yoko Ono | Leave a comment

Tom Kirkham – Pop Life

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Johnny Mindlin

2016 was a bad year. Globally, it was the year of Brexit and was rounded off with a Trump! It was bad for pop music too: David Bowie had died in January. And then it seemed the heroes were rushing for the exit. Bowie was closely followed by Merle Haggard and Glen Frey (of the Eagles), and later in the year, Lemmy, Sir George Martin, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and a dozen others. And then on April 21^st, Prince, died.

On the personal level Tom Kirkham was already having a bad year. He was feeling his mental health wobbling. And Tom Idolised Prince. He was devastated. He felt the urgent need to do something to give his life structure and purpose. So he decided to attend a live music gig every week for the next year. Music is Tom’s balm and his passion. And with this plan he at least knew what he had to do. No matter how he felt, he had to get to that gig. Pop Life is a heartfelt, funny, ever so slightly crazed chronicle of that intense year.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Humour, Music | Tagged bipolar, David Bowie, depression, George Martin, gig, gigs, Lemmy, Leonard Cohen, Mental health, music | Leave a comment

Robert Kuttner – Can Democracy Survive Globalisation?

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Johnny Mindlin

John Maynard Keynes said, “Above all, let finance be primarily national.” Keynes understood the dangers of unfettered finance, and if he’d had his way the Bretton Woods system of international controls would have been still stronger. In his new book, the distinguished journalist and commentator, Robert Kuttner, writes, “Government needs to explicitly assert its right to prevent global laissez-faire forces from undermining its capacity to devise and broker a decent social compact at home.”

Kuttner’s book brilliantly sketches the construction before and after the Second World War of a system in which capitalism was effectively regulated and delivered widespread benefits, at least within the western democracies, and its dismantlement in the period since the mid-70’s. He shows with admiral lucidity how and why the free-trade shibboleths captured the centre-left and acquired the power to hugely favour a tiny and very narrow section to the disadvantage of the overwhelming majority.

We can see the results in the election of President Trump, in Brexit and in the rise of ultra-nationalist far-right parties in Europe and beyond. The dangers are obvious, and Kuttner draws disturbing parallels with the rise of fascism in the thirties. Can democracy survive? Tim was hoping to ask him that very question.

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Posted in Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics | Tagged Brexit, Democracy, Euarope, Globalisation, Grexit, politics, Trump | Leave a comment

Toby Litt – Wrestliana

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Johnny Mindlin

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When we visit Toby Litt in his office at Birkbeck University of London he tells us that all the books in the building have had to be removed because the Georgian building can’t take the weight. All, it seems, except those in his office, which appears to be single-handedly keeping the faith. This seems right. Toby is very much a man of literature – he teaches creative writing at Birkbeck and he has published thirteen fine novels and collections of stories. But Toby’s new book is not fiction. It is by turns a meditation on his ancestry, the meaning of being a father, an examination of the neglected sport of Cumberland and Westmoreland Wrestling, an essay on writing and a treatise on masculinity. Somehow it all adds up..

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, History | Tagged Cumbrland, Litt, Toby, Westmoreland, wrestliania, Wrestling | Leave a comment

Grady Hendrix – Paperbacks From Hell

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Johnny Mindlin

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You might think it eccentric to speak of a golden age of satanic possession, murderous infants, flesh-eating crustaceans and Nazi leprechauns, but for enthusiasts of paperback horror novels, the 70’s and 80’s were the glory days. This was a time of the most lurid nightmares spawned, it seemed, from the very bowels of Hell. This was a time when books were proud to be horror rather than ‘chiller’ or ‘thriller’, and when the word Satan on the cover was a guarantee of sales (even if there was nothing supernatural inside). Grady Hendrix has written a hugely entertaining history and celebration of this splendid time. We talked to Grady via skype from a restaurant kitchen in downtown New York. At least that’s where he said he was… we haven’t visited our basement since. Continue reading →

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Christopher Fowler – The Book of Forgotten Authors

Posted on November 20, 2017 by Johnny Mindlin

Christopher Fowler is a good friend of this site, having appeared with us three times already. But then, he will keep writing books that we find irresistible. This time he has assembled an Aladdin’s Cave of writers who have been neglected in one way or another. Some of them have been completely forgotten, as the title suggests – Rosalind Erskine anybody? – but then there are the writers whose names are familiar, but whose books we have forgotten to read – Ronald Firbank, Leslie Charteris? – or who have fallen out of favour (or print) – Dennis Wheatley, Sven Hassell, Barbara Pym?

This is catnip to Tim. He dived into the contents list like a kid in a sweetshop, finding the authors he has read, noting the ones he should have, and discovering some he is certainly going to. He got together with Chris in his palatial, minimalist flat to discuss their shared enthusiasm over a cup of tea.

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Ben Aaronovich – The Furthest Station

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Johnny Mindlin

You might think a man who had a couple of Dr Who serials under his belt (1980’s – the Sylvester McCoy era), might rest on his laurels, but like the rest of us Ben Aaronovitch has a living to make. Ben has a solid CV of writing for television and TV spinoffs, but he has recently been making serious waves with his series of supernatural police procedural novels and graphic novels, starting in 2011 with Rivers Of London. He allows that the success of these Peter Grant books has considerably exceeded his expectations. But we’re not surprised. There is always room for well-written, funny, urban fantasy, right?. We met Ben at his publishers in Blackfriars to discuss the latest instalment – The Furthest Station. Continue reading →

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Posted in Fiction, Humour | Tagged Ben Aaronovich, Dr Who, Ghosts, London | Leave a comment

Steve Richards – The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost its Way

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Johnny Mindlin

Steve Richards has presented a series of half hour broadcasts for the BBC about British prime ministers, which he delivers as live and without a script or even notes. They are brilliantly insightful, and wonderfully fluent. With characteristic modesty, Steve says that any of us might have made these programmes, on the grounds that we all lived through those times. He is wrong. He is among our most distinguished and trenchant political journalists, and I doubt that there are six people in the country who could have made them.

His new book considers the most fascinating development of recent politics – the rise of the outsider. A loss of trust and faith in the mainstream, he says, is a trend and he considers how the political mainstream has lost its mojo while the agenda has been hijacked by individuals and organisations that in times past would never have come close to power. Essentially, says Steve, the centre-left and the centre-right in one case abandoned ideology and in the other lurched into incoherence. In this interview, we discuss how this happened, what it is doing and what it is going to mean.

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Robert Newman – Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Johnny Mindlin

Since his Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution, Robert Newman’s entirely iconoclastic re-examination of the evidence has excited readers and listeners with its unashamed linking of the science with wider issues, specifically socio-political ones. In his latest book, Neuropolis – a brain science survival guide, Newman targets a sub-species of pop-neuroscience that he dubs bro-science – a pessimistic, denigrating take on the brain that is based more on macho posing than on research. He sets out to destroy it using proper science. Continue reading →

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Tim Haigh – Z is for Zeugma

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Johnny Mindlin

“Since his death in 1960, Timothy J Haigh has been widely recognised as the least gifted of the great mystery novelists of the golden age of travel writing…” So begins the introduction to Z is for Zeugma. Yes, Tim has killed himself off for fun.

Switching chairs for the purpose, he finds himself as interviewee rather than -er, for this playful little book. John Mindlin is obliged to step and ask the questions just this once.

In this not-really-a-novel-at-all Tim gives free rein to his propensity for embracing any joke that occurs to him in a loose narrative that sends up every cliché of crime writing, and quite a lot of several other genres.

“Z is for Zeugma is the first of (Tim Haigh’s) posthumous works. Let us hope there will be many more.”

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If you’re outside the UK, please click on the book cover image to buy the book.

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Philip Norman – Paul McCartney: The Biography

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Johnny Mindlin

When Philip Norman published “Shout” in 1980, it quickly became and long remained the standard Beatles biography. It was noted at the time that there was a marked preference for Lennon over McCartney in that book and Philip was pretty much tagged anti-McCartney. In the years since then, he has reassessed his attitude and came to the conclusion that he had been unfair. McCartney, he now acknowledges, is colossally talented, nobody’s lightweight and is a better and more interesting man than he had been given credit for.

As it happens, Tim didn’t pick up on the bias in “Shout!” because he shared it and, like Philip, has followed a parallel path to a huge admiration fo Paul McCartney. Tim loved Philip’s recent biography of Mick Jagger so he was dying to read his superb full life of McCartney.

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Lawrence Block – The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

We last spoke to the great American crime writer, Lawrence Block, nearly two years ago. Although Larry is one of the world’s great travelers – he has visited something like 135 different countries – he was at home in New York on this occasion, while we are in London, England. We toyed with the idea of going to the shore and rigging up a transatlantic telephone with two tin cans and a very long piece of string, but opted instead for the technological wizardry of Skype.
The new book finds Larry very much on form: The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes is a steamy noir thriller of sex and violence, reminiscent of James M Cain. We were intrigued by the moral ambiguity, the insalubrious setting of inland Florida, and especially the consummate skill with which he handles the pretty full-frontal erotica. But of course, Lawrence Block has form in that area…

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Jamie Cawley – Beliefs And The World They Created

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

It goes without saying that there is a difference in kind between what you “believe” and what I “know to be true”. Whether it is the True Religion (be it Judaism, Christianity or Islam), Dawkinsite scientific certainty or the Demonstrable Facts of realpolitik, we all have our cherished articles of faith, and it can be fighting talk to question the shibboleths. So you might think that Jamie Cawley is a brave man to undertake a panoramic discussion of belief as a recurring phenomenon in human societies. Between the worldwide emergence of polytheism and the contemporary creed of Environmentalism, he makes a brisk and entertaining tour of the high watermarks of belief around the world, which will almost certainly offend many, and that, in Tim’s opinion, is a noble ambition.

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Mike Ripley – Angels And Others

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

I first met Mike Ripley at a beano in 1990 to celebrate Collins Crime Club, for which occasion a special collection of stories was published. I can prove my claim about my whereabouts on that nefarious occasion in 1990, and by way of evidence we present Exhibit #1, the bloodied corpse of my contemporary account of the assembly of (literary) killers for Collins Crime Club.

I barely escaped with my life!

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I still have that book (well, of course I do!), and it contains the story which was my first encounter with Fitzroy Maclean Angel. It says something about the story that I have a remarkably vivid recollection of it. Mike has written fifteen novels about Angel, and, in that quarter century, a handful of short stories. I have read the novels, of course, but the rest of the stories are new to me. Angels and Others is, so to speak, the Complete Short Stories (since it includes all Mike’s non-Angel stories as well.)

You’ll have noticed that I have not really categorised the Angel books, because while broadly in the genre of crime writing, I’m not sure exactly in which sub-genre they sit. Happily, Mike knows, and he was able to set me straight.

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Mike Jay – High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

Our noble species has a fraught relationship with intoxicants, narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. We crave their mind-altering powers, but once they become woven into the fabric of our cultures, we have to either come to terms with them, or make generally futile attempts to shun them. The range of substances is breathtaking, from the completely natural – peyote, alcohol, tobacco – to the explicitly synthetic – LSD, Ecstasy and the dazzling variety of contemporary designer drugs – but what is most striking is the ubiquity of the human embrace of the possibilities of getting out of our heads. We are a junkie species.
Books about drugs are catnip to Tim, so he tracked Mike Jay to an opium den in Turnham Green, to get his fix by discussing this succinct and beautifully illustrated overview of the relationship we have had with mind-altering substances. It was an intoxicating interview.

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Armin Navabi – Why There Is No God – Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

As a youth in Iran, Armin Navabi was advised that if a Muslim boy died before the age of fifteen, God, in his infinite benevolence, would ensure that he went to heaven. Terrified that he would miss his step and fall into divine disfavour, Armin threw himself out of a window when he was fourteen, hoping to cash in on this guarantee. Happily he did not perish, although he spent many months in a wheelchair. This gave him a good deal of time to think, and the end point of his reflections was atheism.

Later he founded Atheist Republic, a non-profit organisation aimed at creating a worldwide community of atheists, and with the purpose of joining in the controversy that is raging these days about the status of religion in general. Why There Is No God is his primer for new participants in the debate. It is a good-natured book offering twenty arguments for the existence of God and adumbrating the atheist responses to them.

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Nicholas Wapshott – The Sphinx – Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Johnny Mindlin

Click here to buy the book Senator Burton K Wheeler put the question best: If the war in Europe was America’s war, why was she not fighting it? It was the vital question of its day. Should America join the European war or not?

There are various approaches to history where wars are concerned. One is military history – who shot whom. Much more interesting is the political intrigue – who came out on top, and how.

After the Great War, there was a strong, not to say, dominant strain of isolationism, a huge apprehension of the dangers of getting into another European war.

The isolationists were a mixed bunch, comprising principled constitutionalists liberals, and American Firsters, through to appeasers, defeatists, anti-semites, and outright fascist sympathisers. The cast includes Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Father Coughlin, not to mention the politicians including Wheeler. The broad outline of the story is fairly well known, and has been tackled piecemeal by other historians, but it takes Nicholas Wapshott to tell the full sweeping story in beautiful lucidity of how Roosevelt subtly dealt with each of his opponents and transformed public opinion, and in fact, triumphantly, came out on top. I spoke with him on the eve of publication.

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Toby Litt – Lifelike

Posted on November 22, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

If your taste runs to the dead-pan, you could do worse than read Toby Litt. By turns funny, scabrous, touching, serious, playful and obsessive, his twelfth book, Life-like is presented with an absolutely straight face. How are you supposed to take this? Are you intended to laugh? Is it OK to be aroused? Does that passage really belong in this book? Toby never blinks.

Toby’s interest in form and experimentation is well-established, and so this book is neither properly a novel nor a simple story collection, with the focus flying apart from the starting point of the marriage of Agatha and Paddy, with whom we are familiar from Toby’s eighth book, Ghost Stories. Tim loved that novel, so he was very happy to come back to these characters, and, when it turned out that Toby wanted to play games in the new book, Tim was delighted to join in.

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Alwyn W turner – The Last Post

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

alwynturner-thelastpost No Man’s Land is already littered with books on the Great War, and there will be many more hurled into the fray, but not many of them will be as original as this thoughtful and engaging treatment by the historian Alwyn W Turner. Ostensibly a history of the bugle call that came to symbolise the honour of a military death, it ranges very much more widely, taking in all the main symbols of remembrance (all associated with the First War rather than the Second) and serves also as a history of the development of social attitudes towards the soldier, and of public opinion in locating the significance of war.

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Posted in Cultural History, History, Music, Politics | Tagged Alwyn, Books, Hiagh, Last, Podcast, Post, The, Tim, Turner | Leave a comment

Christopher Fowler – Nyctophobia

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

Callie is a young woman with a bit of a past (and a mild case of nyctophobia), an adoring husband and a home filled with light … but where there is light there must also be darkness…

Christopher Fowler made his name with chiller fiction, and Nyctophobia is a splendid return to the genre. It takes a gleeful inventory of the elements of the ghost story, and finds new ways to creep up on you, and most importantly of all – it is scary. Tim spent the night he read it nervously going round his house turning all the lights on.

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Anne McCaffrey from the archive – Renegades of Pern

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

Anne McCaffrey was the first woman to win the prestigious Hugo award for science fiction, and also the first woman to win a Nebula award. In her Dragonriders of Pern series she created one of the great fantasy novels sequence. It comprises more than thirty novels, most of which include dragons, and is notable for pioneering the inclusion of strong and effective women in science fiction.

Anne McCaffrey died in 2011 at the age of 85, but back in 1990 Tim had the great pleasure of meeting her to discuss the fourteenth book in the series, Renegades of Pern. They got on like a house on fire.

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Mike Ripley – Margery Allingham’s Mr Campion’s Farewell: the Return of Albert Campion Completed by Mike Ripley

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

In Albert Campion, Margery Allingham created one of the timeless golden age detectives, often spoken of in the same breath as Lord Peter Wimsey and Inspector Alleyn. When she died in 1963 her husband and collaborator Philip Youngman Carter continued the series for two more books. A third was left incomplete. Well, we say incomplete. There was merely a fragment, four chapters kicking off a new Campion novel, but with no plot outline or notes for how it was supposed to continue.

Mike Ripley made his name with the brilliant comedy thriller ‘Angel’ series. In 2012 the Margery Allingham Society asked him to finish the incomplete Campion book, which he called Mr Campion’s Farewell.

Tim is a long-standing fan of Angel, and is easily persuaded to become a fan of Campion as well. For Tim, it was time to meet Campion in person, and also Ripley, believe it or not.

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George Cooper – Money, Blood and Revolution

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

Who would you turn to if the discipline of economics was in a crisis and you were looking for a solution: Mr Spock or Captain Kirk? Mr Spock would work through the existing data with methodical rigour and implacable logic, while Captain Kirk would make an intuitive leap in the manner of Copernicus or Darwin, and show us an entirely new way of looking at the problem. In his book, Money, Blood and Revolution, George Cooper contends that what economics needs right now is a Captain Kirk, to provide a paradigm shift by simply taking a different perspective on the existing picture. Tim comes blundering in with all the insight and acuity of Nurse Chappell, but minus the miniskirt, to explore George’s vision of a simplified model of economic systems and the engine of prosperity.

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Humaira Shahid – Devotion and Defiance

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

Humaira Shahid might have had a gilded life, and no-one would have blamed her. She was born into the privileged classes of Pakistan, enjoyed a happy and liberal childhood, and married well into a newspaper dynasty. The important men in her life adored her and admired her and encouraged her to fulfil herself rather than take the subservient role imposed on many Pakistani women. She became an academic, teaching literature, and that might have been that. But Humaira’s personal life contained a series of heartbreaking tragedies, and as she participated in her husband’s journalistic activities, she gained a first-hand knowledge of dreadful injustice and suffering in Pakistan. Driven by a fiery passion she became, first a campaigning editor, and then a vocal member of the Assembly in Punjab Province.

Devotion And Defiance is Humaira’s account of the course of her career. It is a fascinating insight into the workings of Pakistani politics, a rallying call to arms on behalf of the oppressed and brutalised women of Pakistan, and also a touching memoir of her own life.

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Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics, Religion | Tagged Humaira, human, jouranlism, Pakistani, political, politics, rights, Shahid, womens | Leave a comment

Lawrence Block – The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Johnny Mindlin

Bernie Rhodenbarr is the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in New York City. He is best friends with a lesbian who owns the nearby dog grooming parlour, and they eat lunch together every day. He is nearly friends with the local cop, Ray Kirshman, who regards him as an unofficial consultant. But most of all, Bernie is a burglar. When a man named Smith comes into the store and asks him to steal an original manuscript of an F Scott Fitzgerald story, Bernie finds himself embroiled in a couple of tangled webs, which he is uniquely qualified to untangle.

Lawrence Block is a past master at this kind of thing, weaving in to his fabric obsessive collectors, early American siversmithing, literary backstories, and, naturally, a juicy murder. Half the fun is seeing how he brings all these elements together for the finale, but the other half is the fluent writing that gets you there.

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Larry Watson – Let Him Go

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

“I’d follow you anywhere. If you don’t know that, what do you know?”. So says George to his wife Margaret as they journey, at her behest, to try and get back their grandson. In a beautiful and utterly memorable novel, Larry Watson takes us to the bleak
and unforgiving landscape of the Badlands of North Dakota in 1951 and into the lives of complex and vivid characters.

The book is the road trip and the confrontation at the end of it. It is a journey that Tim was thrilled to follow every step of the way.

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Iain Banks from the Archives

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

Yesterday, we heard the sad news of the death of Iain Banks at the unacceptably young age of 59. Iain was never the darling of the literary establishment, but he was the favourite author of hundreds of thousands of passionate readers, and Tim had rated him one of the best of his generation since his stunning debut with The Wasp Factory in 1984.

In 1995 Tim interviewed Iain on the occasion of the publication of his fourteenth novel, Whit. Iain was unfailingly friendly and forthcoming whenever we asked for access to him. With grateful thanks to Iain for his kindness to this site, we present this slightly edited version of that interview.

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Christopher Fowler – Film Freak

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

There was a time when film publicity consisted of having a poster painted, and sending the posters with the reels of film in the van when they were delivered to the cinemas.

And then advertising industry foot-soldiers Christopher Fowler and Jim Sturgeon had an idea. What the movies needed was somebody who did film publicity in a much more imaginative way. They were right.

What happened after that is laugh out loud funny, indiscreet and revealing, and treads cheerfully on the feet of silver screen glamour; and it is all weirdly plausible.

Whether he is telling the story of his ill-judged first visit to the Cannes Film Festival (everybody’s first visit to Cannes is a horror story), facing up to his responsibility for the Brentford Nylons advertising campaign, or offering his insights into the darker corners of movie history, Fowler is excellent company.

But Film Freak is also a thoughtful meditation on what has been lost in movies, and a tender account of the final days of the British Film Industry in Soho.

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Martin Amis from the Archive – London Fields

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

London Fields is in many ways the quintessential Martin Amis novel. At the end of the Twentieth century – ten years in the future when Tim interviewed him in 1989–there are looming portents of global catastrophe, which stand in for Amis’s fear of nuclear annihilation. There is sex, there is mystery, there are post-modern games with authorship, there are degenerate underclass characters, including one of Amis’s immortal creations in Keith Tallent, the would-be darts magus, and there are bucketloads of scabrous humour. But there is also tenderness and a heartfelt investment in children and the future. If Amis has never written anything better than London Fields since then, there is no shame in that.

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Gore Vidal from the archive – Palimpsest

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

After half a century as a great novelist and America’s finest essayist, in 1995 Gore Vidal got round to writing… well, not an autobiography, but at any rate a memoir. Why a memoir? Gore told Tim that by the age of seventy he found that he figured in hundreds of other people’s memoirs, and that from his point of view they had almost all got it wrong. Whether this was due to self-serving lapses in memory or shameless lying, Gore decided to proffer a few corrections. If this also meant indulging in a spot of high class gossip, that was OK too. He had plenty to gossip about.
Vidal had an enviable pedigree. His maternal grandfather was the legendary T P Gore, Oklahama’s first senator. His father was FDR’s Secretary of Aviation (and incidentally had an affair with Emilia Earhart). Gore himself was born at West Point and was intimate with the cream of Washington society. His political friends included Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK. His artistic peers included Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando. Vidal had known everybody, and was not shy of dishing the dirt on any of them.

Tim fell upon Palimpsest as a starving man upon food, and couldn’t wait to pump Vidal for gossip about some of the great and the good, and especially the liars.

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John Mortimer from the archive – Rumpole And The Angel Of Death

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Johnny Mindlin

John Mortimer occupied positions at the very top of not one but two professions. He was a great writer – we need think no further than A Voyage Around My Father, and he was one of the most eminent barristers and QCs of his generation. The happy collision of these two strings to his bow was of course Rumpole of the Bailey, and in 1995 Tim had the pleasure of discussing with him the tenth collection of stories, Rumpole And The Angel Of Death.

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