The Book Club | 19 July 2023 | 0h 40m | Listen Later 
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Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Ferdinand Mount about his book Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson. Discusses why he thinks it’s fair to compare Boris Johnson with a cast of despots and autocrats from Indira Gandhi and Oliver Cromwell to Louis Napoleon and even Adolf Hitler – and why he sees the impulse to autocracy as an ineradicable thread in human history.
Tag: The Book Club
Caitlin Moran: What About Men?
The Book Club | 12 July 2023 | 0h 51m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Caitlin Moran about her book What About Men? Having written one of the bestselling works of popular feminism of the last 20 years – How To Be A Woman – she turns her attention to the other half of the population. Discusses how to reboot masculinity for the 21C, why she felt she needed to write such a book, and what qualifies her to do so; why she thinks young men are turning against feminism; what she says to the people who accuse her of trading in stereotypes; and why she thinks Jordan Peterson is a poor excuse for a ‘public intellectual’.
Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams
The Book Club | 5 July 2023 | 0h 46m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Tom Whipple about his book The Battle of the Beams: The secret science of radar that turned the tide of the Second World War. Describes the ingenious technological, psychological and espionage battles that made electromagnetic warfare a decisive – if under-appreciated – contributor to Britain’s victory in the air war and, finally, in the Normandy Landings.
Peter Turchin: End Times
The Book Club | 7 June 2023 | 0h 48m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Peter Turchin about his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Proposes a scientific theory of history, mapping the underlying forces that have led to the collapse of states from the ancient world to the present day, and warns of very turbulent times ahead.
The Cosmography and Geography of Africa
The Book Club | 17 May 2023 | 0h 53m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Richard J Oosterhoff about their translation of Leo Africanus’s The Cosmography and Geography of Africa. Part travel guide, part natural history, part-memoir, part history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of years. Discusses the book, which was the first to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe; its tangled manuscript history; its mysterious author; and what it gets wrong about giraffes.
Katja Hoyer: Beyond the Wall
The Book Club | 5 April 2023 | 0h 49m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Katja Hoyer about her book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990. Explains that there is much more to the East German state than the Berlin Wall, the Stasi, and the grey totalitarian dystopia of popular imagination. Discusses Erich Honecker’s wild side, the importance of coffee to East German morale, and how inevitable or otherwise were the historical forces that saw Germany first divided, and then reunited.
See also Dan Snow’s interview with her about her book Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918.
Victoria Smith: Hags
The Book Club | 22 March 2023 | 0h 45m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Victoria Smith about her book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women. Discusses the resurgence of one the oldest forms of misogyny. Suggests feminists of each new generation seem destined to forget or reject the lessons learned by the previous one, and argues that female bodies – and the life experiences that go with them – are something that can’t be wished away by postmodern theory.
Sarah Wheeler: Glowing Still
The Book Club | 8 March 2023 | 0h 41m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Sarah Wheeler about her book Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road. Looks back over her life as a travel writer, discussing her background in Bristol, her travelling life, and the past and future of travel writing.
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