Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian rubber industry. In 1911 he was knighted; five years later he would be executed in Pentonville Prison for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a closeted queer man and an Irish Nationalist — is the subject of Roland Philipps' fantastic new biography, Broken Archangel. We are delighted that he has returned to the podcast for a second time (after Victoire in 2021) to speak to Johnny about the book. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by M ..read more

A conversation with Anna Reid. Her history of Ukraine, Borderland, has become seminal in the last few years. This new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and surprisingly witty account on on the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewhere. This narrative of the brutalities might be seen as a blueprint for subsequent interventions. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by Magnus R ..read more

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. Thankfully it's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper; instead it tells his life through twelve books, including his mother's diary and Lolita.    Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik: II. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer ..read more

Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul. It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as the process of ‘catching souls’.    Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Nick Drake, When the Day Is Done ..read more

Marina spoke with Laura Freeman about her new book, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Remarkably, this is the first biography of Jim Ede ever to appear. It’s a marvellous book — already a shop favourite this summer — studded with anecdotes: Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth arguing over who first put a hole in their sculpture; studio visits to Brancusi and Picasso; a hypochondriac David Jones; the Tate flood; etc.  Interviewed by Marina Scholtz  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: César Franck, Prélude, FWV 21  Photo credit: Paul Allitt ..read more

Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians, his first book, was an eye-watering collection of houses and gardens from Tangier to Milan and the Dolomites… each scene a private space: tasteful, indulgent, never grandiose. Now the great aesthete has turned his eye to the Aegean with Haute Bohemians: Greece: Interiors, Architecture, and Landscapes. It is, of course, sumptuous.  We are delighted that Miguel has recorded a podcast with us to mark the book’s publication and - another delight - that his intervi ..read more

It’s a few months since we’ve given a new podcast but we’re delighted to break the silence with a conversation with Margaret Jull Costa, the distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese, about the Spanish writer Javier Marías. Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to the UK, we continued to send him books in Madrid regularly until his death last year. His work is deeply engaged with England, MI6, Oxford, detective stories, and the mysteries of interpretation and tra ..read more

The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a discursive and extraordinarily erudite book on an abstruse but delightful subject: those who collect, hoard, deal or care for astonishing manuscripts and illuminated books. His cast includes a Greek forger, a French priest, a rabbi, and indeed a prince… De Hamel is tremendously engaging and often funny. We have a limited number of signed copies. Please get in touch by email, telephone, or through our we ..read more

George Balanchine’s life cut the twentieth century in two. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. Mr B.: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century is more than a biography, and more than a book about ballet. It’s about a changing century and a revolutionary approach to art. Magnus talks to Jennifer Homans – ballet critic for The New Yorker – about her brilliant, intense and wonderfully readable book. We have a limited number of signed copies. Please get in touch by email, telephone, or through o ..read more

A History of Water is a riddling title but the subtitle, Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History, points towards its rich cultural and historical context. Edward Wilson-Lee is a Cambridge academic who specialises in making big stories out of archival minutiae. His superb new book follows the paths of two men in sixteenth-century Portugal. One, a humane and intellectually curious archivist to the King, was found dead in 1574 after falling foul of the Inquisition. The other was a rogue who become the Portuguese national poet. Beyond its intrigue as ..read more