This week marks the 160th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth. In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Penny Bradshaw, author of An A–Z of Beatrix Potter, and the historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes, whose books include Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World, George Eliot and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton.

We plunge into the Potterverse. Does Potter get her due as a literary writer? How animal are her animals? And what went wrong for Ginger and Pickles?

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and author of Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. He tells me why, contrary to what we may have learnt at Sunday school, early Christianity flourished not despite the Roman empire, but because of it.

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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Dave Eggers, talking about his new book Contrapposto. Dave tells me why, after years of writing tech-saturated satire, he returned to the world of art; how a novel 20 years in the making became a love story about talent, ambition and the mystery of making beauty; and why he thinks art ends when theory begins.

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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, talking about his new book All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches. Ben tells me why a debate between two visions of what makes the US special has been playing out since the nation's conception, what Frederick Douglass has to say to the America of the 21st century, and why Ben Franklin didn't think the constitution was sacred. 

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In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli to discuss his new book 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist's Argument Against Rearmament, where in imitation of Einstein and Bertrand Russell, he uses his platform as a public intellectual to speak against the logic of nuclear escalation. He tells me what the Nazis got right and the US got wrong in the later years of the Second World War, why physicists have a bad conscience about the bomb – and why the threat to civilisation has never been greater.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Edited by Ed Parker.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the Children’s Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, whose new book, A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now, describes what he discovered from the travels he undertook during his work with BookTrust and the Laureateship.

He tells me what he learned about what really happens when a parent reads to a child, why the crisis in childhood reading is down to much more than the rise of screens – and how Heidi can save your life.

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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrea Wulf, talking about her fascinating new book, The Traveller: George Forster and the Search for Humanity. Andrea tells me about the now-forgotten adventurer who sailed with Captain Cook, toured Europe as an intellectual celebrity and sparred with Kant and Rousseau over race and human civilisation – before throwing his lot in with the French Revolution.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Siri Hustvedt, talking about her new book, Ghost Stories, a memoir of her long and loving marriage to the novelist Paul Auster, and of his death from cancer. Siri tells me why this book ‘needed’ to be written, what their relationship was like, how ‘horrible things’ came to this literary golden couple, and how she explains the experience of being visited, three days after his death, by her husband’s ghost.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Edmund Richardson, author of a new biography of Alexander the Great called Alexander: God, King, Man. Edmund tells me why there is still a fresh story to tell about this most storied of historical figures, why his empire collapsed as soon as it came into being yet nevertheless changed history – and how Alexander conquered the world by mistake.

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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.

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