On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ariane Bankes, whose mother Celia was one of the great beauties of the early twentieth century. Ariane's new book The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century tells the story of the defiantly bohemian lives of Celia and her twin sister Mamaine, whose love affairs and friendships with Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Edmund Wilson and Freddie Ayer put them at the centre of the political and intellectual ferment of their age.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the author and historian Kathryn Hughes, whose new book Catland tells the story of how we learned to love pusskins. Content warning: contains Kipling, Edward Lear, some stinking carts of offal, and the troubled life and weird art of the extraordinary Louis Wain.

On this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Percival Everett, who has followed up his Booker-shortlisted The Trees with James, a novel that reimagines the story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the fugitive slave Jim. Percival tells me what he learned from Mark Twain, how being funny doesn’t make him a comic novelist, and why Black resistance to racism is a matter of language itself.

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Dorian Lynskey. In his new book Everything Must Go, Dorian looks at the way humans have imagined the end of the world from the Book of Revelations to the present day. He tells me how old fears find new forms, why Dr Strangelove divides critics, and why there’s always a few people who anticipate global annihilation with something that looks like longing.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, whose hair-raising new book Nuclear War: A Scenario imagines – minute by minute – what would unfold if the nuclear balloon went up. But rather than a work of fantasy, this is based on meticulously sourced reporting about the effects of nuclear weapons and the structures and policies that govern them. We all knew it would be bad but Jacobsen tells us just how bad, and how fast, and quite how little the people who push the button will actually know about what's going on.

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the Pulitzer prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose new book is the memoir A Man of Two Faces. He tells me about the value of trauma to literature, learning about his history through Hollywood, falling asleep in class... and the rotten manners of Oliver Stone.    

My guest in this week's Book Club is Joel Morris, an award-winning comedy writer whose credits run from co-creating Philomena Cunk to writing gags for Viz and punching up the script for Paddington 2. In his new book Be Funny Or Die, he sets out to analyse how and why comedy works. He tells me why there are only three keys on the clown keyboard, what laughter does for us in neurological terms, and why Laurel and Hardy could get away with anything.

This week's Book Club podcast sees me speaking to the critic and novelist Lauren Oyler about her first collection of essays, No Judgment: On Being Critical. Lauren and I talked about the freedoms and affordances of the essay form; about how making and criticising art has been changed – and hasn't – by the advent of the digital age; why it's weird we all still treat the internet as if it's a new thing; and about why David Foster Wallace can still be a role-model even after his cancellation.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter's new book How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler tells the story of Sefton Delmer, the great genius of twentieth-century propaganda. Peter tells me about Delmer's remarkable life, compromised ethics, and the lessons he still has to offer us.  

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, whose new book takes him out of the territory of fiction and into something slightly different. American Mother is written in collaboration with Diane Foley, mother of Jim Foley, the journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014. He tells me how he came to reinvent himself as (not quite) a ghostwriter, why he thinks you can use the tools of the fiction-writer to get at journalistic truth, and about what it was like to sit in the room with Diane Foley and the man who murdered her son.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Tom Chatfield, whose new book is Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are. He tells me what we get wrong about technology, what Douglas Adams got right, and why we can't rely on Elon Musk and people like him to save the world.