The Book Club

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Nick Harkaway, whose new book Karla's Choice sees him pick up the mantle of his late father, John le Carré, in writing a new novel set in the world of George Smiley. He tells me why, having spent a career trying to put clear blue water between his own work and that of his father, he’s now steering in the opposite direction; about growing up with Smiley; about his relationship with the man so many outsiders have seen as secretive and opaque; about seeking advice from Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill; and why moving from his own style to that of his dad is just a ‘turn on the dial’.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen. With anger seemingly the default condition of our time, Josh’s new book All The Rage: Why Anger Drives the World seeks to unpick where anger comes from, what it does to us, and how it might function in the human psyche as a dark twin of the impulses we think of as love. Photo credit: Charlotte Speechley

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a 'new wave' of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he's determined never to lose his vulgarity.   

On this week's Book Club podcast we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children's publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne's snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin... and how Pooh became Pooh.