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My interview with Nicola Upson, recorded last autumn in Heffers in Cambridge, is currently on the Bookhugger home page. In it I talk to Nicola about her second Josephine Tey mystery, set in 1930s Cornwall. Click on the image below to listen.

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Simon Winder has just published a personal and highly entertaining history of Germany and the Germans. In his preface to Germania, he writes: “[this] is an attempt to tell the story of the Germans starting from their notional origins in the sort of forests enjoyed by gnomes and heroes and ending at the time of [...]

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We mark the birthday of Charles Dickens earlier this week with a special extended edition of my interview with his biographer Michael Slater from the end of last year, which originally appeared on Blackwell Online. John Bowen, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, said: “[it] immediately takes its place as the most authoritative, [...]

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In this month’s edition of Le Monde diplomatique I have a piece about US journalist and campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich and her latest book, called Smile or Die in the UK and Brightsided in the US. I interviewed Barbara on a snowy evening in Bristol last month before she appeared at the Festival of Ideas to [...]

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Rebecca Carter is an editor of fiction and non-fiction at the Random House imprint Harvill Secker, a list that aims to continue the tradition, once announced in an advertisement for Secker, of publishing “international quality literature with a wayward streak”. She has a particular love of unusual narrative history, and novels that explore hidden corners [...]

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Although we are now in a new decade, we haven’t yet reached Chinese new year. I am taking comfort from this fact, since  I am still putting up Books of the (past) Decade choices. And of course the books that were worth reading in 2009 are still worth reading in 2010. Enough self-exculpation. I promise [...]

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