John Lanchester, Tom Crewe and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join James Butler to dissect Keir Starmer's victory and the historic collapse of the Conservative Party. They discuss what the result ...

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of the empire, and her premiership. Onboard HMS ...

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, ...

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine. They discuss the current state of the conflict, what a Trump presidency might mean for US policy and whether Ukraine’s use of long-range..

George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing, to ...

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he ...

Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. In the fourth episode, Mary and Irina climb inside a tiny cell to explore the Ancrene Wisse, a guidebook written in ...

In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit ...

Gerontologist, pacifist, novelist, medical doctor and mollusc expert – Alex Comfort was far more than just the author of the staggeringly popular Joy of Sex. In her review of a new biography, Florence ...