All Episodes
The Book Club — 493 episodes
Anand Gopal: Days of Love and Rage
Hannah Richell: An Ocean and a Day
James Marriott: The Dawn of a Post-Literate Society
Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Cauldron
Celebrating 160 years of Beatrix Potter
Tim Whitmarsh: Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity
Dave Eggers: Contrapposto
Ben Rhodes: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches
Carlo Rovelli: 85 Seconds to Midnight
Frank Cottrell-Boyce: How Our Children Live Now
Andrea Wulf: George Forster and the Search for Humanity
Emily Wilson: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
Siri Hustvedt: Ghost Stories
Alexander the Great: God, King, Man.
Jeffrey Winters: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies
The Poems of Sylvia Plath
Sophia Smith Galer: How to Kill a Language
Caroline Bicks: My Year of Fear with Stephen King
Joe Sacco: The Once and Future Riot
Mason Currey: Making Art and Making a Living
Yann Martel: Son of Nobody
Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble
Howard Jacobson: Howl
Lionel Shriver: A Better Life
Jane Rogoyska: Hotel Exile – Paris in the Shadow of War
Francis Spufford: Nonesuch
What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?
Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation – revisited
Caroline Moorehead: The Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul
How big tech companies steal your attention
Joanna Kavenna: How To Play A Game Without Rules
C. Thi Nguyen: How To Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game
Books of the Year | Sam Leith & Philip Hensher
Speaker series: Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe's Storm
Jonathan C. Slaght: The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger from Extinction
James Geary: A Brief History of the Aphorism
Leon Craig: The Decadence
Benjamin Myers: Jesus Christ Kinski
Wikipedia founder on his 'friend' Elon Musk & finding truth online
Graham Robb: The Discovery of Britain
Nat Jansz: Comet in Moominland turns 80
Peter James: Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed
Luke Kemp: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
Ben Schott: An Unexpectedly Essential Guide to Language
Speaker series: Jeffrey Archer – End Game
Philippa Gregory: Boleyn Traitor
Sudhir Hazareesingh: Daring to be Free
Roger Lewis: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
Andrew Bayliss: Sparta – The Rise and Fall of An Ancient Superpower
Lea Ypi: Indignity
Brideshead Revisited, 80 years on: from the archives
Max Hastings: Sword – D-Day, Trial by Battle
Joanna Pocock: Greyhound
Nicola Barker: TonyInterruptor
Gary Shteyngart: Vera, or Faith
Frances Wilson: Electric Spark – The Enigma of Muriel Spark
Irvine Welsh: Men In Love – Trainspotting Sequel
M. John Harrison: The Course of the Heart
Karin Slaughter: We Are All Guilty Here
Carl Zimmer: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
William Dalrymple: The Golden Road
Lucy Mangan: How Reading Shapes Our Lives
Alice Loxton: Eighteen – A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives
Robert Macfarlane: Is a river alive?
Geoff Dyer – the Proust of prog rock and Airfix
Julie Bindel: Lesbians – where are we now?
Daniel Swift: The Making of William Shakespeare
Anne Sebba: The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
Lamorna Ash: A New Generation's Search for Religion
Philippe Sands: 38 Londres Street – On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia
Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech?
Joe Dunthorne: Children of Radium
Francesa Simon: Salka
Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis
Anthony Cheetham: A Publisher's Memoir
Michael Wolff: How Trump Recaptured America
Selena Wisnom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History
James Bradley: The World in the Ocean
Colin Greenwood: How to Disappear - A Portrait of Radiohead
Philip Marsden: Under A Metal Sky
Lissa Evans: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted
What we get wrong about The Great Gatsby
Orlando Reade: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
Rachel Cooke: The Virago Book of Friendship
Orhan Pamuk: Memories of Distant Mountains, Illustrated Notebooks
Chris Ware: The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three
Daniel Tammet: Nine Minds, Inner Lives on the Spectrum
Jonathan Coe: The Proof of My Innocence
Nick Harkaway: Karla's Choice
Josh Cohen: All The Rage
Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds
100th anniversary of A A Milne and E H Shepard, with James Campbell
John Suchet: In Search of Beethoven
Rachel Clarke: The Story of a Heart
Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin
Alan Johnson: Harold Wilson, Twentieth Century Man
Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point
Alan Garner: Powsels and Thrums
Lindsey Hilsum: I Brought The War With Me
Craig Brown: A Voyage Around The Queen
Amy Jeffs: Saints
Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939, from the archives
Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander, from the archives
Adam Higginbotham: Challenger
Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama
David Baddiel: My Family
Neil Jordan: Amnesiac
Roger McGough: Collected Poems 1959-2024
Michael Nott: Thom Gunn's Cool Queer Life
Kathleen Jamie: Cairn
Åsne Seierstad: The Afghans
Mark Bostridge: In Pursuit of Love
Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
Richard Flanagan: Question 7
The legacy of Franz Kafka
Conn Iggulden: Nero
Olivia Laing: The Garden Against Time
Jackie Kay: May Day
Ariane Bankes: The Quality of Love
Kathryn Hughes: Catland
Percival Everett: James
Dorian Lynskey: Everything Must Go
Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War
Viet Thanh Nguyen: A Man of Two Faces
Joel Morris: Be Funny Or Die
Lauren Oyler: No Judgement
Peter Pomerantsev: How To Win An Information War
Colum McCann: American Mother
Tom Chatfield: Wise Animals
Chris Bryant: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder
Paula Byrne: Hardy Women
Sathnam Sanghera: Empireworld
Adam Phillips: On Giving Up
Rebecca Boyle: Our Moon
From The Archives: Hadley Freeman
From The Archives: Anne Applebaum
From The Archives: Robert Webb
From The Archives: Speeches that shape the world
Pen Vogler: Stuffed
Andrew Lycett: The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes
Guy Kennaway: Good Scammer
Jonathan Jones: Earthly Delights
Terry Hayes: The Year of the Locust
Jonathan Lethem: Brooklyn Crime Novel
Nicholas Shakespeare: The Complete Man
Peter Biskind: Pandora's Box
Sandra Newman: Julia
Celebrating Watership Down
Caspar Henderson: A Book of Noises
Mary Beard: Emperor of Rome
Sarah Ogilvie: The Dictionary People
Francesca Peacock: Pure Wit
From The Archives: Masha Gessen
From The Archives: Tom Holland
Celia Brayfield: Writing Black Beauty
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: The Wolf Hunt
James Ball: The Other Pandemic
Ferdinand Mount: Big Caesars and Little Caesars
Caitlin Moran: What about men?
Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams
Laura Cumming: Thunderclap
Andrew Pontzen: The Universe In A Box
James Comey: Central Park West
Peter Turchin: End Times
Laura Freeman: Ways of Life
In memory of Martin Amis
Anthony Ossa-Richardson & Richard J Oosterhoff: The Cosmography and Geography of Africa
Madeleine Bunting: The Seaside
Shehan Karunatilaka: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Michio Kaku: Quantum Supremacy
Luke Jennings: #PANIC
Frieda Hughes: A Magpie Memoir
Katja Hoyer: Beyond The Wall
Henry Dimbleby & Jemima Lewis: Ravenous
Victoria Smith: Hags
Ian Buruma: Collaborators
Sara Wheeler: Glowing Still
Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: Metamorphosis
Richard Bradford: Tough Guy
Robert Kaplan: The Tragic Mind
Tania Branigan: Red Memory
Thomas Halliday: Otherlands
Ashley Ward: Sensational
A. E. Stallings: This Afterlife
Paul Pettitt: Homo Sapiens Rediscovered
Matthew Hollis: The Waste Land
Rupert Shortt: The Hardest Problem
James Heale and Sebastian Payne: Out of the Blue and The Fall of Boris Johnson
Edward Mendelson: Complete Poems of W H Auden
Christopher de Hamel: The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club
Ian Rankin: A Heart Full of Headstones
Andrey Kurkov: Diary of an Invasion
Matt Lodder: Painted People
Al Murray: Command
Peter Stothard: Crassus
Lawrence Freedman: Command
Rediscovering Josephine Tey
A.M. Homes: The Unfolding
Ian McEwan: Lessons
Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and its Discontents
Salman Rushdie: Quichotte
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones: A Question of Standing
Andrea Wulf: Magnificent Rebels
Chloë Ashby: Colours of Art
Anne Weber: Epic Annette
Allan Mallinson: The Shape of Battle
Kavita Puri: Partition Voices
Linsday Fitzharris: The Facemaker
Simon Jenkins: The Celts
Philip Mansel: King of the World
Andrea Elliott: Invisible Child
China Miéville: A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto
Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony: Noise
William Leith: Finding My Father
Wendy K. Pirsig: On Quality
Caroline Frost: Carry On Regardless
Simon Kuper: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK
Stephen Dodd: Beautiful Star – Yukio Mishima
Gideon Rachman: The Age of the Strongman
Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
Helen Bond and Joan Taylor: Women Remembered
Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and its Discontents
Colm Toibin: Vinegar Hill
Tom Burgis: Kleptopia
Christopher de Bellaigue: The Lion House
The centenary of literary Modernism
Anna Keay: The Restless Republic
The centenary of Kerouac
Philip Oltermann: The Stasi Poetry Circle
Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust
James Birch: Bacon in Moscow
Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere
Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild
Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others
Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint
Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers
Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp
Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls
Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium
Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells
Jane Ridley: George V
James Holland: Brothers In Arms
Joan Bakewell: The Tick of Two Clocks
Kate Lister: Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts
Chuck Palahniuk: Greener Pastures
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Freud's Patients
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World
Oliver Burkeman: 4,000 Weeks
Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life
Michael Bracewell: Souvenir
Michael Pye: Antwerp
Iain MacGregor: Checkpoint Charlie
Mary Ann Sieghart: The Authority Gap
Marie Le Conte: Honourable Misfits
Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal at 50
Adam Roberts & Lisa Duggan on Ayn Rand
Anne Sebba: A Cold War Tragedy
Richard Ovenden: Burning The Books
Charles Spencer: The White Ship
Lawrence Wright: The Plague Year
Lauren Hough: Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing
Julian Sancton: Madhouse at the End of the Earth
Frances Wilson: Burning Man
Happy 80th birthday, Bob Dylan
Ruth Scurr: Napoleon's life in gardens and shadows
Richard Dawkins: Books Do Furnish A Life
Maria Dahvana Headley: Beowulf
Roland Philipps: Victoire
Jonathan Dimbleby: Barbarossa
Judas Horse: Lynda La Plante
Michela Wrong: Do Not Disturb
Sarah Sands: The Interior Silence
Horatio Clare: Heavy Light
Andrew Doyle and Ian Leslie: How do we disagree?
Cat Jarman: River Kings
Judith Flanders: A Place For Everything
Toby Ord: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
Shalom Auslander: Mother for Dinner
Simon Winchester: Land
Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird: Good Grief
What would Orwell be without Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Laura Thompson: Life in a Cold Climate
Nicholas Shakespeare: remembering John Le Carre
Ed Caesar: The Moth and The Mountain
Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain
Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC
James Hawes: The Shortest History of England
Antony Gormley & Martin Gayford: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now
Carmen Callil: Oh Happy Day
Natalie Haynes: Women in the Greek Myths
Gyles Brandreth: Theatrical anecdotes
Rowland White and Tim Gedge: Harrier 809
Hugh Aldersey-Williams: The Making of Science in Europe
Roy Foster: On Seamus Heaney
Kate Summerscale: The Haunting of Alma Fielding
Ysenda Maxtone Graham: British Summer Time Begins
Julia Gillard: Women and Leadership
Annie Nightingale: Five decades of pop culture
Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare
Loyd Grossman: An Elephant in Rome
Sam Harris on the value of conversation
Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams: talking about race
Kate Teltscher: Palace of Palms
Chris Gosden: The History of Magic
Robin Hanbury-Tenison: Taming The Four Horsemen
Andrés Neuman: Fracture
Andrew Adonis: how Ernest Bevin was Labour's Churchill
Rutger Bregman: Humankind
Susanna Moore: Miss Aluminium
Adam Begley: Houdini
Kevin Peter Hand: Alien Oceans
The 75th anniversary of Brideshead Revisited
Michael Frayn: Magic Mobile
Philippe Sands: The Ratline
Mark O'Connell: Notes from an Apocalypse
James Shapiro: Shakespeare in a Divided America
Salman Rushdie: Quichotte
Toby Muse: Kilo
Craig Brown: One Two Three Four
John Carey: A Little History of Poetry
Blake Gopnik: Warhol
Don Paterson: Zonal
Hadley Freeman: House of Glass
Christina Lamb: Our Bodies Their Battlefield
Why 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything
Ed West: Small Men On The Wrong Side of History
Olivia Fane: Why Sex Doesn’t Matter
Annie Gray: Victory in the Kitchen
Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams: is race a fiction?
Samantha Harvey: The Restless Unease
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting
What do T.S. Eliot's letters reveal about his life and loves?
James Ellroy: This Storm
Piers Torday on the magic of children's books
Tom Holland: Dominion
Pete Townshend: The Age of Anxiety
David Parker on Laurie Lee: Down In The Valley
Christopher Tugendhat: A History of Britain Through Books
Daniel Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap
Thomas Penn: The Brothers York
Madeline Miller: Circe
Peter Pomerantsev: This Is Not Propaganda
Jung Chang: Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister
Benjamin Moser: Sontag, Her Life
Etgar Keret: Fly Already
Elif Shafak: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World
Frank Dikötter: How To Be A Dictator
Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939
Lemn Sissay: My Name is Why
Mick Herron on how to be a crap spy
Books for the beach with Alex Clark and Damian Barr
Adam Nicolson and Tom Hammick: The Making of Poetry
David Brooks: The Second Mountain
Jon Day: Homing
Oleg Gordievsky: the double agent who changed the Cold War
Toby Faber: the Untold Story of Faber and Faber
Benjamin Dreyer: Dreyer's English
Kit de Waal: Common People
Mike Jay: Mescaline
Marion Turner: Chaucer, A European Life
Jim Al-Khalili: Sunfall
Emma Smith: This is Shakespeare
Ursula Buchan: Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps
Bret Easton Ellis: White
Joseph Stiglitz: People, Power, and Profits.
Nicci Gerrard: What Dementia Teaches Us about Love
Cass Sunstein: How Change Happens
Clare Carlisle: Philosopher of the Heart
Clare Mulley: The Woman Who Saved The Children
Donna Leon: Unto Us A Son Is Born
Jhumpa Lahiri: The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Owen Matthews: An Impeccable Spy
Max Porter: Lanny
Peter Stanford: Angels
David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth
Deborah Lipstadt: Antisemitism
Andrew Morton: Diana, Her True Story
Josh Cohen: Not Working
Robert Alter: The Hebrew Bible
Kajsa Norman: Sweden's Dark Soul
Jonathan Ames: The Extra Man
Ed Vulliamy: When Words Fail
Chris Kraus: Social Practices
Mark Mason: The Book of Seconds
Presidential lessons from Lincoln to Trump, with Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lee Child: on the side of Goliath
Peter Frankopan: The New Silk Roads
Nora Krug's Heimat: reconciling guilt and patriotism in post-war Germany
Geoff Dyer: Broadsword Calling Danny Boy
Ben Schott: Jeeves and the King of Clubs
Robert Plomin: Blueprint
Sara Paretsky: Shell Game
Andrew Roberts: Walking With Destiny
William Davies: Nervous States
Adam Sisman: More Dashing
Neil MacGregor: Living With The Gods
Helen Parr: Our Boys
Sebastian Faulks: Paris Echo
Ian Kershaw: Rollercoaster: Europe 1950-2017
Adam Tooze: How a decade of financial crises changed the world
Can graphic novels be considered literature?
Simon Heffer: The Age of Decadence
Philip Collins: When They Go Low
Jesse Norman: Adam Smith
Ben Rhodes: The World As It Is
Margo Jefferson on Michael Jackson
Jay Rubin: The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
Judith Kerr and Matthew Kneale
Michael Pollan: How to change your mind
William Dalrymple: Koh-i-Noor
Paul Kildea: Chopin's Piano
Carl Hiaasen: Assume the Worst
Sarah Churchwell: Behold, America
Antony Beevor: Arnhem
Richard Overy: The Birth of the RAF
Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time
Stig Abell: How Britain Really Works
Boyd Tonkin and Frank Wynne: the pleasures and perils of translation
L.S. Hilton: Ultima
Richard Holloway: Waiting for the Last Bus
Gimson's Prime Ministers: Brief Lives from Walpole to May
St Paul: A Biography
Wendy Cope: Anecdotal Evidence
Jay Heinrichs: How To Argue With A Cat
Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now
Mick Herron: The Jackson Lamb novels
The Minister and the Murderer
Mohsin Hamid: Exit West
The life and work of Muriel Spark
200 years of Frankenstein
Lost Connections: Uncovering the real causes of depression
The Year in Strange Facts: The QI Elves
How totalitarianism reclaimed Russia
Richard Flanagan: First Person
The Anna Karenina Fix
Melvyn Bragg on William Tyndale
Hilary Spurling on Anthony Powell
Philip Pullman: La Belle Sauvage and Daemon Voices
Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them
Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own
Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair
The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914
Robert Harris: Munich
Anne Applebaum: Red Famine
Robert Webb: How Not To Be a Boy
Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker
World Book Club's 15th Birthday
Clive James: Injury Time
A century of Robert Lowell
The Art of the Sequel
Harry Potter at 20
Is monogamy dead?
Summer Reads
Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough
Living with the Living Dead: The wisdom of the zombie apocalypse
Jonathan Meades: The Plagiarist in the Kitchen
The Secret Lives of Julian Assange, Craig Wright and Ronald Pinn
First Novels: The shortlisted authors for The Desmond Elliott Prize
Michael Wood on William Empson
Will Self: Phone, psychosis and postmodernism
Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident
The Art of Losing Control
The Lost Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet: Globe to globe
Murray Lachlan Young: How Freakin' Zeitgeist Are You?
Stiff Upper Lip: The best and worst of British boarding schools
Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide
The Joy of Indexes
Charlotte Rampling: Who I Am
Be Like The Fox: Machiavelli's lifelong quest for freedom
Michael Morpurgo: From The Yellow Brick Road to the Second World War
Stand Firm: Resisting the self-improvement craze
The Story of Pain
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
Louise Doughty on Apple Tree Yard and Black Water
Rory Stewart: The Marches
Michael Rosen: The Disappearance of Émile Zola
Cosmosapiens: Human evolution from the origin of the universe
Antonia Fraser: Our Israeli Diary
The War on the Old
Michael Lewis: The Undoing Project
Treasure Palaces: Great writers visit great museums
The Dahl Debate
Can You Solve My Problems?: Alex Bellos on a puzzling history
The Detection Club
The Biographer's Tale
The Hatred of Poetry: Ben Lerner on the problem of verse
Far and Away: Andrew Solomon on a lifetime of travel
What's the point of the Man Booker Prize?
The Return: Hisham Matar on the search for his father
The Masculinity Problem
The Science of Not Knowing