The Book Club

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Jeffrey Winters, whose new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies makes the case that democracy as it functions now isn’t, as many of us imagine, the only thing keeping the robber barons in check – it is, in fact, the very system that has enabled them to thrive. He tells me how the wealth gap in the US is now many multiples of that in ancient Rome, how extreme wealth translates into political power, and how reforming campaign finance laws is only a tiny part of the solution we need.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.

For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts

Contact us: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.

For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts

Contact us: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Sophia Smith-Galer, talking about her new book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia tells me why languages are vanishing faster than ever before, why it matters, how we can resist it and what her Italian-born nonna gave her.

Visit fleetstreetquarter.co.uk to book your tickets.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.

For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts

Contact us: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Bicks, who tells me how she put her academic work on Shakespeare to one side to produce her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. She tells me why she thinks King’s work is worthy of critical attention, what we can learn from the radical way he revised his early work, what it is like dealing with the man himself – and how there are some parts of his early novels that he even scared himself with.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.

For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts

Contact us: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter – cartoonist Joe Sacco, talking about his most recent book The Once and Future Riot, about Hindu/Muslim violence in rural India. He tells me how he knows when he’s onto a story, what cartooning can do for reportage, and why he draws himself so differently.
Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.

For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts

Contact us: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.