The Booking Club: Recent Episodes
Jack Aldane
Leading authors and commentators discuss their latest books and breakthroughs at their favourite haunts | Hosted by Jack Aldane | Formerly The Corner Table | Music by Boogie Belgique.
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An astonishing undercover investigation into the paranoid and misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere, by the Orwell Prize-longlisted author of Hired James Bloodworth.
Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the 'manosphere', as men search for new forms of belonging.
In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres?
Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for 'alpha males', dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers.
Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity. (Atlantic Books)
James meets Jack at Palm Court Brasserie in Covent Garden.
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London, 2012. Johnny Voghel is stuck. He has a dead-end job at a small university and a wilting relationship and is grieving the death of his parents. When his half-brother Lawrence returns to the old family home from Chicago after a period of estrangement, Johnny decides to do everything he can to win back his affection. It’s a quest he pursues with the help of Lawrence’s childhood sweetheart and a pair of mysterious and seductive students adrift in the city during the height of Olympics fever.
A generational saga that takes place over a fortnight, and a comedy about confusion and loss, The Boys follows Johnny as he revisits old grievances, cultivates new friendships – and tries to take control of his fate.
Leo meets Jack at Jincheng Alley on New Oxford Street.
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Our society tells us over and over that if we're going to achieve anything, we'd better do it while we're young. We fixate on stories of prodigies; we put our children in piano lessons or language classes as toddlers, hoping to give them the best shot at success we can.
As for ourselves, too many people feel it's too late to change the course of their own lives. Whether we are at the start of our careers and sense we're on the wrong path, or feeling unsettled in our late or middle years, we all wonder how we can reinvent ourselves? Is it too late? This book by Henry Oliver has answers. Late bloomers - individuals who experience significant success later in life - offer lessons for people who feel frustrated.
This book encourages people to think about themselves as potential late bloomers and to discover and encourage and advocate for late blooming in others. After all, it's never too late to discover our hidden talents and our accomplish our goals - the road to success is never as straightforward as we are lead to believe. Julia Child didn't discover that she loved to cook until she was thirty-seven. Vera Wang started her design business at forty.
And Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in his sixties. This inspiring, passionate book combines wonderful story-telling with fascinating new research, to shift expectations around our life trajectories. You'll discover a range of blueprints for self-reinvention, pairing the newest insights from psychology and neuroscience with late bloomers' remarkable life stories.
Henry meets Jack at Ye Olde Chesire Cheese on Fleet Street.
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When Miranda Sawyer interviewed Noel Gallagher in 1995, his gag wishing Damon Albarn would die of AIDS became front-page news. This fascinating pop history, exploring the mid-90s moment when British music suddenly meant everything, explains why. Picking out twenty key songs, delving into the surprising stories behind them and their unlikely creators, Uncommon People takes us back to when Jarvis Cocker became a national hero, Trainspotting was a global hit, fire-starting seemed like a good night out - and it felt as though the revolution was happening.
Initially a music press nickname, Britpop became an unexpected musical movement centred around outsiders and misfits, drop-outs and weirdos who refused to compromise on their ideas, even when they were thrust into the international spotlight. Not just a scene for white guys with guitars, but something wilder and more interesting, with songs that have proved timeless. Exploring the era's key artists - Oasis, Blur, Tricky, Pulp, Underworld, Manic Street Preachers, The Prodigy, Suede, Chemical Brothers, Garbage, Supergrass, Radiohead, PJ Harvey and more - through their definitive anthems, Miranda Sawyer transports us back to the beating heart of the nineties.
Uncommon People re-lives the mad exhilaration of what it was like to hear these songs for the very first time - and what it was like to make them. With amazing new interviews, and I-was-there insights, this book offers a backstage pass to all the most interesting bits of Britpop's Greatest Hits.
Forget New Labour, forget earnest trend theories, this book is all about the music, the people and being right there, right now. (John Murray Press)
Miranda meets Jack at Goodfare Italian in Camden, London
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Donald McRae has been immersed in boxing for fifty years. He has followed fighters around the world and won multiple awards for his writing. But, in recent years, McRae’s love has waned, as criminality and corruption consume the soul of boxing.
In 2018, grieving the death of his sister and with his parents terminally ill, he sought refuge in boxing again – just as Tyson Fury completed an incredible comeback, proving that the ring can still offer exhilaration and redemption.
From Fury’s resurrection to the first undisputed heavyweight champion this century, boxing can be epic and electrifying.
It can also be disappointing, as McRae discovers when he documents doping’s insidious rise or travels to Saudi Arabia where boxing ignores state repression. In The Last Bell, McRae takes us ringside to thrilling bouts with great contemporary champions and fighters as different as Fury, Canelo Álvarez, Oleksandr Usyk, Katie Taylor, Regis Prograis and Isaac Chamberlain.
Whether in London or Las Vegas, he shows us what it is like to see joy pour out of a boxer in the dressing room after a magnificent victory or to hold the hand of a fighter being wheeled away on a stretcher after a devastating defeat. As he tries to reconcile the contradictions which lie at boxing’s murky heart, McRae is unflinching and compelling.
McRae helps boxers open up about their doubts and fears and charts the courage of fighters facing ordeals from depression to war. And in telling the heartbreaking story of Patrick Day, he faces death in the ring. The Last Bell is his most powerful and personal book yet, a riveting account of life, death and boxing.
Donald meets Jack at Superwan Thai
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The British empire was built on slavery, but it also pioneered abolition. It spread democracy, but it also seeded geopolitical instability. It devastated nature but it also gave birth to modern notions of environmentalism.
In this urgent sequel to Empireland, award-winning author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera extends his examination of British imperial legacies beyond Britain to the wider world.
Travelling across outposts of the former empire from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond, Sanghera puts to bed the conventional balance-sheet view of imperial history where the good is merely weighed up against the bad.
In Empireworld, Sanghera instead seeks out nuance to reveal how contradictory forces of the British empire have shaped our world and what they mean for our place within it today. (Penguin)
Sathnam meets Jack at Pizza Express
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How we live is shaped by how we eat.
You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises.
And most of us now rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which is now contending with unprecedented challenges. The need for a better understanding of how we feed ourselves has never been more urgent.
In this wide-ranging and definitive book, philosopher Julian Baggini expertly delves into the best and worst food practises in a huge array of different societies, past and present.
His exploration takes him from cutting-edge technologies, such as new farming methods, cultured meat, GM and astronaut food, to the ethics and health of ultra processed food and aquaculture, as he takes a forensic look at the effectiveness of our food governance, the difficulties of food wastage and the effects of commodification.
Extracting essential principles to guide how we eat in the future, How the World Eats advocates for a pluralistic, humane, resourceful and equitable global food philosophy, so we can build a food system fit for the twenty-first century and beyond. (Philosopher's Synopsis).
On this episode, Julian meets Jack at BOX-E in Bristol
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Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action.
But speaking truth to power can be dangerous - and power will stop at nothing to stay on top. As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?
Darting between decades and genres, Jonathan Coe's latest novel THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE is a wickedly funny and razor-sharp new novel from one of Britain’s most beloved novelists, showing how the key to understanding the present can often be found in the murkiest corners of the past.
Jonathan's work has received many prizes and awards, including both Costa Novel of the Year and Prix du Livre Européen for Middle England. In France he won the Prix Médicis for The House of Sleep and has been appointed Officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres. In Italy he has also won the Premio Flaiano (for Number 11) and the Premio Bauer-Ca’ Foscari. The citation for the latter prize concluded that ‘for his keen interest in the most crucial issues of contemporary civilization, Jonathan Coe may be considered a complete novelist and a classic of our times’.
On this episode, Jonathan meets Jack at North Sea Fish in Bloomsbury, London
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From famous wordsmith Tom Read Wilson comes another breathtaking adventure through the English language. Discover the fascinating origin stories behind the words we use in this delightful follow-up to Every Word Tells a Story, Wonderful Words That Tell A Tale, illustrated by Ian Morris.
Unlock a whole new side to language in this abundant literary adventure. The etymological route, definition and word origin are explored for four words from every letter of the alphabet, unlocking over 100 wonderful word tales. One word per letter is brought to even more life with an extended poem that can be read or enjoyed aloud, making this a wonderful book to read alone or share with friends and family.
Every word is paired with timeless, characterful watercolour illustrations by Ian Morris. Wonderful Words to Tell a Tale is a journey into the English language through beautiful stories and artwork, a venture to be dipped intoand enjoyed over and over again. (Quarto)
On this episode, Tom meets Jack at Kutir in Chelsea
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The Battle of Ideas festival 2024, which took place at Church House in Westminster on 19 & 20 October, was a sell-out success. As part of the event, Jack Aldane hosted English comedian Geoff Norcott live for a lunchtime recording of The Booking Club in front of a packed room to discuss Geoff's latest book: The British Bloke Decoded.Laughing from beginning to end, they dissect what makes two British blokes from two successive generations both similar yet fundamentally distinct, why women and men tend to gravitate towards specific tasks around the house, the good that could come from installing a Minister for Men in the UK Government, and more.FULL LIVE VIDEO AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE.Follow and subscribe to The Booking Club:YouTube: @bookingclubpodTwitter/X: @bookingclubpodInstagram: @bookingclubpodTikTok: @bookingclubpod
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People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on.
Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way.
By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about the scale of human folly.
From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders. (Hachette)
On this episode, Jonn meets Jack at Bellanger
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Andy Clarke, Sky Sports' lead boxing commentator and one of the nation's most respected boxing pundits, goes in search of the knockout: the most dramatic and devastating moment in sport.
How does it feel to land that ultimate blow? How does it feel to suffer it? The Knockout assesses the impact it has on the fighters and the people close to it and asks what it takes mentally, physically and emotionally for a person to enter into an arena where the stakes are so unimaginably high.
Agony and ecstasy, triumph and disaster, hope and despair, self-belief and doubt, The Knockout embraces it all.
Part macro, part micro exploration, the narrative will move across the physical, psychological, social and even philosophical aspects of the knockout. With insights from renowned commentators, as well as fighters, their coaches, doctors and family members, this is a complete look at the finishing blow that brings any match to a sudden close, and the repercussions that follow. (Quarto Publishing PLC)
Andy met Jack at Fiore Truck in Forest Gate, East London.
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The stories we read as children are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures.
In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics.
Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations.
Sam met Jack at Pizza Express in Euston, London
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Technology has delivered a world that we expect to revolve around us, our needs and preferences, and our unique personalities. We willingly hand over intimate information about ourselves in return for a world that’s easier to navigate.
We live in the Personalised Century, where we view ourselves in terms of what rather than who we are – the objects of others’ recognition, rather than the subjects and authors of our own lives. Is this a sign of our shrinking sense of self?
Interrogating the historical currents that have brought us here, Timandra Harkness envisages a messier, riskier and less comfortable world than the one into which we’re sliding. Challenging readers to look at what’s missing from their personalised menus, Technology is not the Problem encourages us to look afresh at the familiar: not just the technology we use every day, how we relate to the world and those around us. (Harper Collins)
Timandra and Jack met at Jamaica Wine House in the City of London.
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On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all.
Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong.
Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive. (HarperCollins)
David and Jack met at Dar's in Hampstead, North London.
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Rory Sutherland is the vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK and the co-founder of its Behavioural Science Practice. He is the author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, writes The Spectator’s Wiki Man column, presents several series for Radio 4, serves on the advisory board of the Evolution Institute and is former president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. His TED talks have been viewed more than 7 million times.
Now, he joins Jack Aldane on The Booking Club days before the 2024 General Election to discuss the myriad reasons Great Britain needs more alchemists in positions of power, why listeners should subscribe to the political and economic theory of Henry George, and what is fundamentally at fault with the UK tax system.
Rory and Jack met at Sea Containers in London, which houses Ogilvy and its in-house restaurant and bar Cucumber.
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What does it mean to live a good, whole and fulfilling life? And if the world really is ending, or at least expecting turbulent change, what kind of people will we need when it happens?
In Fully Alive, Elizabeth Oldfield explores how we can build spiritual core strength for an unstable age.
Drawing on the ancient wisdom of faith and stories from her own life, Oldfield writes about her quest to live a meaningful, fulfilling life, and the niggling questions that bother all of us below the surface, such as:
How can I focus on what really matters and stop getting so distracted by trivialities?
How do I become a depolarising person in a culture of outrage, tribalism, and division?
Can I find my highs in expansive, life-giving ways, rather than in a bottle of wine or a tub of ice cream?
And what kind of world am I leaving for the next generation?
Fully Alive is for readers looking for an honest conversation about the deepest questions in our ordinary lives, and practical, meaningful ideas to help us pay attention to the people we are becoming. For ourselves, our communities and the world.
Elizabeth and Jack meet at The Anchor and Hope in Southwark
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For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. In The Status Game, bestselling author Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for status that ultimately defines who we are.
From the era of the hunter-gatherer to today, when we exist as workers in the globalised economy and citizens of online worlds, the need for status has always been wired into us. A wealth of research shows that how much of it we possess dramatically affects not only our happiness and wellbeing but also our physical health – and without sufficient status, we become more ill, and live shorter lives. It’s an unconscious obsession that drives the best and worst of us: our innovation, arts and civilisation as well as our murders, wars and genocides.
But why is status such an all-consuming prize? What happens if it’s taken away from us? And how can our unquenchable thirst for it explain cults, moral panics, conspiracy theories, the rise of social media and the ‘culture wars’ of today?
On a breathtaking journey through time and culture, The Status Game offers a sweeping rethink of human psychology that will change how you see others – and how you see yourself (Harper Collins).
Jack met Will at Parrillan in Borough Yards, London.
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In times of plenty, we stuff ourselves. When the food runs out, we're stuffed too. How have people in the British Isles shared the riches from our fields, dairies, kitchens and seas, as well as those from around the world? And when the cupboard is bare, who steps up to the plate to feed the nation's hungry children, soldiers at war or families in crisis?
Stuffed tells the stories of the food and drink at the centre of social upheavals from prehistory to the present: the medieval inns boosted by the plague; the Enclosures that finished off the celebratory roast goose; the Victorian chemist searching for unadulterated mustard; the post-war supermarkets luring customers with strawberries. Drawing on cookbooks, literature and social records, Pen Vogler reveals how these turning points have led to today's extremes of plenty and want: roast beef and food banks; allotment, fresh vegetables and ultra-processed fillers.
It is a tale of feast and famine, and of the traditions, the ideas and the laws which have fed - or starved - the nation, but also of the yeasty magic of bread and ale, the thrill of sugary treats, the pies and puddings that punctuate the year, and why the British would give anything - even North America - for a nice cup of tea.
Pen met Jack Aldane at Brunswick House in Vauxhall, London.
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Episode from Jack thanking you for listening to The Booking Club and asking you to write in with your recommendations of books, authors, restaurants for us to feature on the series in 2024.
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Pax is the third in a trilogy of books narrating the history of the Roman Empire. The series that began with Rubicon, and continued with Dynasty, now arrives at the period which marks the apogee of the pax Romana. It provides a portrait of the ancient world's ultimate superpower at war and at peace; from the gilded capital to the barbarous realms beyond the frontier; from emperors to slaves.
The narrative features many of the most celebrated episodes in Roman history: the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii; the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian's Wall; the conquests of Trajan and the spread of Christianity.
Pax gives a portrait of Rome, the great white shark of the ancient world, the Siberian tiger, at the very pinnacle of her greatness.(Little, Brown Book Group).
Tom met Jack Aldane at Noble Rot in Bloomsbury, London.
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It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth, Remi Adekoya
What really matters when it comes to race?
Western conversations on race and racism revolve around familiar themes; colonialism, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ideology of white supremacism form the holy trinity of the race debate. But what if we are neglecting a key piece of the puzzle? Something that explains why a racial order persists today despite a moral consensus it should not.
In It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth, Remi Adekoya persuasively argues that – in our capitalist world – it is socioeconomic realities which play the leading role in sustaining racial hierarchies in everyday life and in the global big picture, something regularly overlooked in the current debate. Financial power is what enables ultimate influence over events, environments, and people, and, as Adekoya expertly demonstrates, it is money more than anything else that maintains the racial pecking order. Exploring immigration, technology, media, group stereotypes, status perceptions and more, this book cleverly shows how wealth determines what’s what in key domains of modern life, and how this affects racial dynamics across the globe.
An incisive, insightful and open investigation into the links between financial power and racial hierarchies, Adekoya sheds much needed light on the status and power imbalances shaping our world and reveals what needs to be done to combat them going forward. (Hachette)
Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics, by Kenan Malik
Is white privilege real? How racist is the working class? Why has left-wing antisemitism grown? Who benefits most when anti-racists speak in racial terms?
The ‘culture wars’ have generated ferocious argument, but little clarity. This book takes the long view, explaining the real origins of ‘race’ in Western thought, and tracing its path from those beginnings in the Enlightenment all the way to our own fractious world. In doing so, leading thinker Kenan Malik upends many assumptions underpinning today’s heated debates around race, culture, whiteness and privilege.
Malik interweaves this history of ideas with a parallel narrative: the story of the modern West’s long, failed struggle to escape ideas of race, leaving us with a world riven by identity politics. Through these accounts, he challenges received wisdom, revealing the forgotten history of a racialised working class, and questioning fashionable concepts like cultural appropriation.
Not So Black and White is both a lucid history rewriting the story of race, and an elegant polemic making an anti-racist case against the politics of identity. (Hurst Publishers)
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Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he's died many times. Not just on stage - though he'll tell you about that - but in other ways, too. There's been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all...
Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn't work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for - recognition, success, the approval of others - are really the things that matter. It's a book about death that reminds us how to live. (Orion Publishing)
Mark met Jack Aldane at The German Gymnasium in King Cross, North London.
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What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population of some 750 million, sprawled from Ireland to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home, and who has newly arrived from elsewhere? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries, steward our criss-crossing planes, lovingly craft our legacy wines, fish our depleted waters, and risk life itself in search of safety and a new start?
In a series of vivid, ambitious, darkly visceral but always empathetic portraits of other people's lives, journalist Ben Judah invites us to meet them. Drawn from hours of painstaking interviews, these vital stories reveal a frenetic and vibrant continent which has been transformed by diversity, migration, the internet, climate change, Covid, war and the quest for freedom.
Laid dramatically bare, it may not always be a Europe we recognize - but this is Europe.
Ben met Jack at Abu Zaad, in Shepherd's Bush
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Depp v Heard: the unreal story is the definitive account of the gruelling court battles between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, by the reporter who was there. Using witness testimony and contemporaneous evidence, Nick Wallis has created a gripping reconstruction of the allegations of violence, drug-taking and wild extravagance which dominated two epic trials and made headlines around the world.
Nick also weaves in his own reportage and insights, bringing the courtroom drama to life and analysing how courts in the UK and USA arrived at conflicting conclusions.
If you want to know who to believe, Depp v Heard: the unreal story is your conclusive guide to what really happened.
Nick meets Jack at Babucci in Walton-on-Thames, UK
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In Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington argues that the industrial-era faith in progress is turning against all but a tiny elite of women. Women’s liberation was less the result of human moral progress than an effect of the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution. We’ve now left the industrial era for the age of AI, biotech and all-pervasive computing. As a result, technology is liberating us from natural limits and embodied sex differences. Although this shift benefits a small class of successful professional women, it also makes it easier to commodify women’s bodies, human intimacy and female reproductive abilities.
This is a stark warning against a dystopian future whereby poor women become little more than convenient sources of body parts to be harvested and wombs to be rented by the rich. Progress has now stopped benefiting the majority of women, and only a feminism that is sceptical of it can truly defend female interests in the 21st century. (Forum)
Mary meets Jack at Andrew Edmunds in SOHO, London UK
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Has any war in history gone according to plan? Monarchs, dictators and elected leaders alike have a dismal record on military decision-making, from over-ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain, or enemy capabilities. This not only wastes the lives of civilians, the enemy and one’s own soldiers, but also fails to achieve geopolitical objectives, and usually lays the seeds for more wars down the line.
Conflict scholar and former soldier Mike Martin takes the reader through the hard, elegant logic to fighting a conclusive interstate war that solves geopolitical problems, and reduces future conflict. In cool and precise prose, he outlines how to orchestrate military forces, from infantry to information, and from strategy to tactics.
How to Fight a War explains the unavoidable, yet seemingly elusive, art of using violence to force your enemies to do what you want. It should be read by everyone seeking to understand today’s wars, as well as those wishing to lead us through the coming decades of conflict. (Hurst)
Mike meets Jack at Sankey's Old Fishmarket in Tunbridge Wells
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“I am not Nicholas Rossi!” gasps Arthur Knight through an oxygen mask in March 2022. Recently discharged from a Covid ward in Glasgow, he's in a wheelchair. The police say he’s Nicholas Rossi, suspected of faking his death and wanted for rape in Utah. The story makes headlines globally. When journalist Jane MacSorley meets Arthur Knight and his wife Miranda, she thinks the police have made a mistake. She embarks on a yearlong investigation, making a unique discovery which changes everything. (Audible)
In The Booking Club's first deep-dive into the true crime genre, Jane MacSorley meets Jack Aldane at La Trompette in Chiswick to discuss the investigation: its thrills, challenges and rewards, plus an update on court hearings from March 2023.
Still wondering about the tattoo? Sign up to Audible and discover the full story now.
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Everywhere you look on the internet, people are giving - and receiving - advice. Advice that promises to transform our lives. How to eat. How to think. How to get rich. How to manage our time.
Across 8 episodes on BBC Radio 4 programme The New Gurus, journalist and author Helen Lewis travels through the strange, powerful and sometimes hidden digital spaces created by these new gurus. Where did they come from? How much power do these charismatic individuals wield? And why are so many of us turning away from the mainstream - mainstream medicine, mainstream politics and the mainstream media - and embracing the power of charismatic individuals instead? (BBC)
Helen met Jack at The Hawksmoor in Borough, Central London.
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She is the woman who clinched the 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, described as 'a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion'. She is many things beside: the first in her family to go to university; a trained barrister; a single mum; a master of persuasion.
In her former BBC colleagues' words, she was the 'booker extraordinaire', responsible for many of Newsnight's exclusives over the past decade, including Stormy Daniels, Sean Spicer, Brigitte Hoess, Steven Seagal, Mel Greig and Julian Assange.
After 12 years producing content for Newsnight, McAlister reflects with candour on her experience, sharing not just the secrets of how the best news gets made, but also the changes to the BBC, the future of 'mainstream media' in the age of clickbait and the role of power and privilege in shaping our media landscape.
This is a backstage pass to the most unforgettable journalism of our times. (Waterstones)
Sam met Jack at The Wolseley in Mayfair on Piccadilly, Central London.
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On 20 November 2022, The Booking Club podcast and Unbound teamed up to promote Rogues’ Gallery, a collection of the best satirical portraits from Martin Rowson’s Twitter #Draw Challenges.
At Stoke Newington’s legendary Thai restaurant Yum Yum, voice of The Booking Club Jack Aldane hosted a live conversation with Martin about the book’s origins, and why the joys of political caricature are accessible to anyone with a sharp pencil and an axe to grind with unchecked power.
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As a society we have never been less connected. The internet and globalisation fuel ignorance and anger, while the disconnect between people’s reality and perceived identities has never been greater.
Karl Marx outlined the idea of a material ‘base’ and politico-cultural ‘superstructure’. According to this formula, a material reality – wealth, income, occupation – determined your politics, leisure habits, tastes, and how you made sense of the world. Today, the importance of material deprivation, in terms of threats to life, health and prosperity, are as acute as ever. But the identities apparently generated by these realities are increasingly detached from material circumstances. At the same time, different identities are needlessly conflated through a process of reeling off a list of -isms and -phobias, and are lumped together, as though these groups all somehow have something in common with one another. Th is process is not just inappropriate but obscures the specific nature of problems being faced.
In The Identity Myth, David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to this trend – class, race, sex and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear but that there are more important commonalities.
In a powerful call to arms, Swift argues that we must unite against these identity myths and embrace our differences to beat inequality. (Hachette UK)
David and Jack met for the second time at Toulouse Lautrec in Kennington South London
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Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back?
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.
The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value (Manchester University Press).
Adrienne and Jack meet at Big Jo on Hornsey Road in North London.
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Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back?
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.
The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value (Manchester University Press).
Adrienne and Jack meet at Big Jo on Hornsey Road in North London.
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Public understanding of, and outcry over, the dire state of the climate and environment is greater than ever before. Parties across the political spectrum claim to be climate leaders, and overt denial is on the way out. Yet when it comes to slowing the course of the climate and nature crises, despite a growing number of pledges, policies and summits, little ever seems to change. Nature is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. We remain on course for a catastrophic 3°C of warming. What's holding us back?
In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.
The book examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value (Manchester University Press).
Adrienne and Jack meet at Big Jo on Hornsey Road in North London.
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From the Satanic Panic to the anti-vaxx movement, the moon landing to Pizzagate, it's always been human nature to believe we're being lied to by the powers that be (and sometimes, to be fair, we absolutely are).
But while it can be fun to indulge in a bit of Deep State banter on the group chat, recent times have shown us that some of these theories have taken on a life of their own - and in our dogged quest for the truth, it appears we might actually be doing it some damage.
In Conspiracy, Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge take us on a fascinating, insightful and often hilarious journey through conspiracy theories old and new, to try and answer a vital question for our times: how can we learn to log off the QAnon message boards, and start trusting hard evidence again? (Waterstones)
Jonn, Tom and Jack met at The Grapes in Limehouse, London.
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In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites readers to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently.
Discussing the nature of truth and uncertainty, the role of doubt, the pros and cons of simplification, the value of guarding against bias, the importance of evidence-based thinking, and more, Al-Khalili shows how the powerful ideas at the heart of the scientific method are deeply relevant to the complicated times we live in and the difficult choices we make.
Read this book and discover the joy of science. It will empower you to think more objectively, see through the fog of your own preexisting beliefs, and lead a more fulfilling life. (Princeton University Press).
Jim meets Jack at The Rocka in Southsea
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Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation.
When Andy goes behind bars, he also confronts his inherited trauma: his father, uncle and brother all spent time in prison. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his. As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, he searches for his own form of freedom too.
Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable book. Through a blend of memoir, storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, it offers a new insight into our stretched justice system, our failing prisons and the complex lives being lived inside. (Pan Macmillan).
Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories - one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies - and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why as the green transition takes place the long-standing predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place. (London Review of Books)
Helen meets Jack at The Palmerston in East Dulwich
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'I was amazed and intrigued by the way Leroy had stood his ground and progressed within the Metropolitan Police against so many obstacles: hostility, outright racism and being repeatedly overlooked for promotion.' Steve McQueen, from the Foreword.
Discover the incredible true story behind Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed film Small Axe: Red, White and Blue in Closing Ranks.
Leroy Logan's inspiring autobiography tells of an illustrious career and gives a fascinating behind the scenes look at the workings of the Metropolitan Police. One of the founder members of the Black Police Association Charitable Trust, Leroy relates with powerful honesty his first-hand experience of racism, and how his strong Christian faith helped him persevere in a frequently hostile work environment.
Offering encouragement to other Black officers, Leroy's passion for good policing shines through, as does his touching concern to guide and empower young people. Closing Ranks will motivate anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of race relations in Britain over the last thirty years. It's a compelling autobiography from a successful Black man who has truly made a difference. (Waterstones)
Jack Aldane meets Leroy at his favourite restaurant Yum Yum , in Stoke Newington North London.
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DAD is a deeply moving and inspiring collection of stories that represent the diversity of modern fatherhood and seeks to start a conversation that challenges the traditions associated with masculinity. Including 20 powerful and defiant stories about postnatal depression, becoming a new dad during the pandemic, miscarriage, widowhood, stillbirth, co-parenting, childbirth trauma, work-life balance, new dads at work, shared parental leave, being a stay-at-home dad, gay fatherhood and surrogacy, being a stepdad, black fatherhood, raising a child of dual heritage, being a single dad, faith and fatherhood, raising a child with autism, gender stereotypes and more. This is a ground-breaking book. A movement. Never before have a group of men come together to bare their souls and speak so openly and honestly about their fatherhood experiences. (Waterstones)
Elliott met Jack at Isolabella on Red Lion Street in Holborn, Central London
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On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. It is a scandal that has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.
This is the story of how these innocent people fought back to clear their names against a background of institutional arrogance and obfuscation, a fight dragged out by the Post Office’s refusal to accept responsibility for its failings.
Nick Wallis, an award-winning freelance journalist and broadcaster, has been pursuing this story since 2010 when he met a taxi driver who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she did not commit. Since then, he has recorded interviews with dozens of victims, insiders and experts, uncovering hundreds of documents to build up an unparalleled understanding of the story. (Bath Publishing)
Nick met Jack Aldane at Andrew's Cafe on The Grays Inn Road in Kings Cross, London
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The Booking Club's first live, in-restaurant event brings former BBC Radio voice, philosopher and author David Edmonds to the mic with Jack Aldane to talk about his favourite restaurant Paradise, in Hampstead, and his new book The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Listen and download to the full audio here.
About the book:
On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick’s, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. (Princeton University Press).
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Listen to and download The Booking Club's first live London studio event from August 2021, in which former guest author Henry Mance met Jack Aldane for part two of their conversation about his book 'How to Love Anmials in a Human-Shaped World'.
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Hyper-capitalism and extreme identity politics are driving us to distraction. Both destroy the basis of a common life shared across ages and classes. The COVID-19 crisis could accelerate these tendencies further, or it could herald something more hopeful: a post-liberal moment.
Adrian Pabst argues that now is the time for an alternative – postliberalism – that is centred around trust, dignity, and human relationships. Instead of reverting to the destabilising inhumanity of 'just-in-time' free-market globalisation, we could build a politics upon the sense of localism and community spirit, the valuing of family, place and belonging, which was a real theme of lockdown. We are not obliged to put up with the restoration of a broken status quo that erodes trust, undermines institutions and trashes our precious natural environment. We could build a pluralist democracy, decentralise the state, and promote embedded, mutualist markets.
This bold book shows that only a politics which fuses economic justice with social solidarity and ecological balance can overcome our deep divisions and save us from authoritarian backlash. (Polity)
In this enthralling book, Julian Baggini masterfully interweaves biography with intellectual history and philosophy to give us a complete vision of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s guide to life. He follows Hume on his life’s journey, literally walking in the great philosopher’s footsteps as Baggini takes readers to the places that inspired Hume the most, from his family estate near the Scottish border to Paris, where, as an older man, he was warmly embraced by French society. Baggini shows how Hume put his philosophy into practice in a life that blended reason and passion, study and leisure, and relaxation and enjoyment. (Princeton University Press)
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With factory farms, climate change and deforestation, this might be the worst time in history to be an animal. In an age of extinction and pandemics, our relationship with the other species on our planet has become unsustainable. What if we took animals' experiences seriously - how would we eat, think and live differently?
Henry Mance sets out on a personal quest to see if there is a fairer way to live alongside other species. He goes to work in an abattoir and on a farm to investigate the reality of eating meat and dairy. He explores our dilemmas around hunting wild animals, over-fishing the seas, visiting zoos, saving wild spaces and owning pets. He meets the chefs, farmers, activists, philosophers, scientists and tech visionaries who are redefining how we think about animals. (Penguin UK)
Comedian Geoff Norcott should have been Labour through and through. He grew up on a council estate, both of his parents were disabled, and his Dad was a Union man. So, how was it that he grew up to vote Tory?
In this courageously honest and provocative memoir, Geoff unpicks his working-class upbringing and his political journey from left to right. Raised by a fierce matriarch and a maverick father on a South London council estate where they filmed scenes for The Bill, Geoff spends his youth attempting to put out kitchen fires with aerosols and leaping in and out of industrial skips. But as he reaches adolescence, his political views begin to be influenced by major events including the early 90s recession, the credit crunch, and a chance encounter with Conservative PM John Major.
As an adult, Geoff begins to have the gnawing feeling that the values and traditions he grew up with no longer match Labour’s. And, as Brexit appears, he feels even more like a double agent operating behind enemy lines.
Written with warmth, wit and often laugh-out-loud humour, Where Did I Go Right? is Geoff’s attempt to understand why he ended up voting ‘for the bad guys’, and why blue-collared conservatism could be here to stay. (Hachette)
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This episode is lifted from The Booking Club's first live-streamed conversation. It features The Booking Club's host and producer Jack Aldane talking to Professor Chris Bail about Chris's new book: 'Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing'.
In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. - Princeton University Press
Writer and campaigner Louise Perry will publish a book in 2022 that'll make you question everything you thought you knew about the sexual revolution and its gift to women.
In it, Perry mounts a counterfactual challenge to the story we often tell ourselves in the West about this epoch of the 20th century. We often assume that the social and cultural changes of the 1960s transformed women from a sexually repressed class into a class freed from biology, commitment and stigma. Moreover, we assume based on the prevailing progress narrative of our time that the more explicitly sexualised our culture has become, the more sexually liberated women have become also.
But there is ample evidence today suggesting the costs of the sexual revolution have been dear for women. Perry shows how, so often, the barriers that were removed to make way for women's sexual liberation were in fact guardrails that protected them from extortion, humiliation and acts of violence perpetrated by men.
She and Jack Aldane, the host and producer of The Booking Club, met at The Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond to discuss.
Perry writes a weekly column for the New Statesman and is also the Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.
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Remi Adekoya teaches Politics at the University of York. Half-Nigerian, half-Polish, his focus is identity in its emotional, psychological and political contexts, particularly how identity, history, psychology and politics overlap in white-majority Western and black African societies.
Remi lived in Nigeria and Poland before moving to Britain. He has since written for The Guardian, Spectator, The Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Politico, Evening Standard and UnHerd among others.
A valuable new addition to discussions on race, Biracial Britain is a search for identity, a story about life that makes sense to us. An identity is a story. These are our stories (Hachette).
Part memoir, part essay, John Connell's latest memoir The Running Book explores what it is to be alive and what movement can do for a person.
It is deeply intimate and wide-ranging, local and global: Connell is as likely to write about colonialism and the effect of British imperialism in Ireland and its former colonies as he is about life on his family farm in Ballinalee, County Longford. Told in 42 chapters, each another kilometre in the 42.2k race, the whole book is 42,000 words long and it captures what it is to undertake a marathon moment by moment, in body and mind. Above all, The Running Book is a book about the nature of happiness and how for one man it came through the feet. (Pan Macmillan)
John spoke to Jack Aldane from his farm in Birchview, County Longford. He is looking forward to sushi at Yamamori in Dublin when lockdown ends in Ireland (https://yamamori.ie/).
Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it.
This is the story of how money, vested interests and digital skulduggery are eroding trust in democracy. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions on social media.
In Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, Peter Geoghegan gives a brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.
2021 has change in store for the series. Listen to find out more.
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The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies astory of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.
The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.
Weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, and charting acts of civil disobedience that challenge orthodox power at its heart, The Book of Trespass will transform the way you see the land. (Bloomsbury).
The coronavirus pandemic taught us something we ought already to have known: that care workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners are doing essential work that keeps us all alive, fed and cared for. Until recently much of this work was regarded as menial by the the same society that now lauds them as 'key workers'. Why are they so undervalued?
In Head, Hand, Heart, British journalist and author David Goodhart tells the story of the cognitive takeover that has gathered pace over the past forty years.
As recently as the 1970s most people left school without qualifications, but now 40 per cent of all jobs are graduate-only. A good society must re-imagine the meaning of skilled work, so that people who work with their hands and hearts are valued alongside workers who manipulate data. Our societies need to spread status more widely, and provide meaning and value for people who cannot, or do not want to, achieve in the classroom and the professions. This is the story of the central struggle for status and dignity in the twenty-first century. (Penguin.co.uk)
Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book, shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize, and Winner of the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Award, is 'Chaucer: A European Life' (Princeton University Press).
This groundbreaking biography recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets.Turner is Chaucer's first female biographer.
She chose to meet Jack Aldane at Gee's Restaurant in Oxford.
Douglas Murray is a British conservative author and political commentator. His recent bestsellers include The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017) and The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, published in September 2019.
Douglas meets Jack Aldane at The Wolseley on Piccadilly, St. James's in London.
Once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy and adventure. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel. As we hurtle toward a shiny, happy ‘self-driving’ future, are we destined to become passengers in our own lives too?
Driving, it turns out, offers a near-perfect embodiment of the broader changes being wrought by government and technology throughout our lives. In Why We Drive, the philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford shows the driver’s seat to be one of the few remaining places where we still regularly take risk, exercise skill and enjoy freedom. But it is here too that we discover what we are losing to automation and the technocrats, and who will profit from the vision of progress they press upon us.
Blending philosophy with hands-on storytelling and drawing on his own experience in the garage and behind the wheel, Crawford leads us on an irreverent but deeply considered inquiry into the power of faceless bureaucracies, the importance of questioning mindless rules and the battle for democratic self-determination against the surveillance capitalists. In turn he speaks up for rivalry and play, solidarity and dissent – and the existential value of occasionally being scared shitless.
Wry, humane and occasionally hilarious, Why We Drive takes us to the heart of one of the defining questions of our times: who is really in control?
(Penguin.co.uk)
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Vincent Bevins is an American journalist and writer. From 2011 to 2016, he worked as a foreign correspondent based in Brazil for the Los Angeles Times, having worked in London for the Financial Times. Bevins moved to Jakarta in 2017 to cover Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. His first book, published in 2020, is entitled The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World.
In this shocking revision of Cold War history, Bevins uses recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to piece together events from this era that few in the developed world can claim to know. They reveal the consistent brutal exterminations of unarmed leftists by right-wing US-backed militias, the scale of which did more to seal Washington's victory in the period than any clash with the Soviet Union.
Jack Aldane speaks to the author on the UK publication date of the book, 11 June 2020.
Hierarchy is taboo in the modern world, yet attempts to do away with it altogether have consistently led to humanitarian catastrophe throughout history. Renowned Confucian scholar and political theorist Daniel A Bell joins professor Wang Pei in the co-authored work Just Hierarchy to argue that we should neither think it possible nor desirable to achieve equality without social hierarchy. Bell and Wang draw on Confucian and Daoist thought to lay out the case for morally justified hierarchies as distinct from those history resolutely condemns.
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Patrick Deneen is an American political theorist and Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.
His areas of focus include ancient and American political thought, democratic theory, political theology, literature and politics, and political economy.
Deneen is the author of Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018.
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Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, associate professor at the University of Sydney, and an expert in Sino-US relations. His research is related to macro-level structure of the world economy, with a particular focus on China's global economic integration.
He is the author of several books, the latest of which is The New Authoritarianism: Trump Populism and the Tyranny of Experts. He also writes articles for several titles, including Foreign Affairs, Al Jazeera English and Truthout.
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David Patrikarakos is a British journalist, author and TV producer, best known as the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. He speaks to Jack Aldane on this first of several special episodes of the podcast, recorded during the global pandemic lockdown, about the ramifications of the coronavirus in Western Europe.
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Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, political demography and demography of the religious/irreligious.
Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities is Kaufmann's expanise yet fine-tuned analysis of the current and possible responses of white majority populations in the West to the age of ethnic transformation, and the inevitable changes this will bring to its cultural composition and identity.
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Marie Le Conte is a French journalist and political diarist living in London. She has worked for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Evening Standard. Her first book 'Haven't You Heard? Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works' is a unique chance to look beneath the veneer of decorum among the British establishment, and discover what really goes on each day inside the halls of power.
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New author David Swift's analysis of the rise of the Woke and the 'identity Left' has come at a good time. In this discussion, he and Jack Aldane meet at Swift's favourite restaurant, Toulouse Lautrec in Kennington, to discuss the 2019 UK general election and the long way back to power for The Labour Party.
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In her first book Stolen: How To Save The World From Financialisation, author and economics commentator Grace Blakeley argues that we are living through the death of an old economic order based on the failed economic policies of the 20th century. As Western countries struggle to manage the rise of right-wing extremism from within and the threat of extinction from without, it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The alternative to the bleak future this portends is a radical move towards democratic socialism, which Blakeley argues offers us the chance to free ourselves from the financial imperatives that have determined our lives for more than half a century, and that can avert our current course towards self-destruction.
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Bestselling author and historian Tom Holland meets host Jack Aldane at his favourite restaurant Andrew Edmunds in SOHO to discuss his latest book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
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Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and Deputy Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a regular voice on Talking Politics and writes a regular column for New Statesman.
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Jack Brown is a lecturer of London Studies at King's College London and No. 10's first ever Researcher in Residence. The result of his year-long study of the building is 'No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street'. The book takes the reader on a tour through space and time, into the corridors and rooms that have time and again sealed the future of the UK as a nation, and into the lives of the leaders whose imprints remain visible to this day. Many former Prime Ministers have written memoirs that seek set the record straight about their time in office. Brown here brings to life the place that bears witness to each Premier's tenure, lending it its own historical voice and giving readers a rare insight into its inner-workings.
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Martin Rowson is a British editorial cartoonist and writer. His genre is political satire. His style is to consistently launch a merciless assault on unchecked power using scatological humour and by reducing his subjects to animal and inanimate states. Martin's cartoons appear in The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. He is chair of the British Cartoonists' Association.
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Michael Rosen is an English children's novelist, poet, and the author of 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from June 2007 to June 2009. He has been a TV presenter and a political columnist. On episode 10 of The Corner Table Podcast, Michael sits down to discuss his recent memoir So They Call You Pisher! and explains why he has chosen to meet in Dalston to sample what he considers London's best falafel.
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How Britain Learned to Consume Austerity, with Owen Hatherley by The Corner Table Podcast
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Matthew Goodwin is a Professor of Politics at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. His latest book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, is co-authored with Roger Eatwell. The book is a guide to the movement which has pushed Western democracies to the brink ever since the EU referendum in the UK and the US election of Donald Trump. Misdiagnosed, mis-characterised and still very much underestimated, the book is an attempt to reset the panic button and allow readers to come to terms with what has happened and look towards the future of liberal democracy in which a more diverse range of voices will inevitably constitute the people's will.
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Claire Fox is a British writer and politician. She is the director and founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank. She is also a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and is now a registered supporter of the Brexit Party who won a seat for the party in the North West England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election. In this episode, Claire defends her convictions about the vote to leave the European Union, and considers whether modern Western societies have lost a sense in which a person's moral failure should been understood through a process of redemption rather than retribution.
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Mihir Bose arrived in the UK in 1969 with the equivalent of more than £12,500 smuggled in his underwear. Enoch Powell had delivered his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech only a year before. This set a precedent for Mihir's earliest impressions of Britain's attitude towards immigrants, and would later culminate in several life-threatening moments as a jobbing sport journalist. These and other memories are retold in Mihir's latest book Lion and Lamb, a slim volume documenting his most stark encounters with Britain's split personality: the 'king of the jungle' with claws and teeth bared towards all who dare enter its path, and the softer countenance of the lamb with which the country has built a legacy of decency and fairness.
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Sir Paul Collier is the author of eight polemical works including The Bottom Billion (2007), The Plundered Planet (2012) and Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013). His eighth book The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties was published in 2018. It addresses the split across Western societies between a middle class of highly mobile professionals and a working class rooted in provincial cities that have been left behind. The only thing that can save us from deepening this divide, he believes, is a return to pragmatism that places a premium on belonging, obligation and reciprocity from the private firm to the nuclear family. Paul is professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.
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Will Self is an English novelist and journalist whose 12th novel Phone explores the impact of late 20th century communication technology on the individual and collective conscience through the interpenetrating lives of its characters...and their phones. Phone completes a modernist trilogy preceded by the novels Umbrella (2012) and Shark(2014). The book was first published in 2017. Jack Aldane met Will at his home to discuss the novel's themes over tea.
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Stephen Law is an English philosopher and former lecturer at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the editor of Think, a philosophy journal sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His books include The Philosophy Gym, The War For Children's Minds and Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Law has chosen to meet at Quod, part of The Old Bank Hotel in Oxford, to discuss reasons why human beings easily succumb to tribalism and become immune to counter-evidence.
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Ella Whelan is the assistant editor at Spiked whose first book What Women Want rejects contemporary feminism in favour of a new women's liberation movement. Her "no ifs, no buts" defense of free speech regularly takes her on TV and radio, where she can be seen and heard battling on the subjects of identity politics, social media censorship and social inequality. Ella chose Perilla to discuss her book and what the European-themed restaurant on Green Lanes, where she grew up, means to her.
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On September 15th 2008, an investment banking firm named Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the beginning of the worst global financial crisis since The Great Depression. The crisis is not yet over, yet the story of how the system failed has been overwritten by its social and political consequences of the last decade. Leading economist and author Vicky Pryce recounts the moment Lehman Bros fell, and explains the painful journey that western economies have been on since the crash of 2008, and where it leaves them today.
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