The scapegoat in question is the Duke of Buckingham: favourite and lover of James I and beloved friend of his son; husband, father, art collector, tireless statesman… The cost of his pearl-spilling outfit when he went to meet Henrietta Maria would have paid the mercenary army for four months. He was hated so fiercely by the time of his stabbing in a Portsmouth inn that his murderer was cheered en route to London. This biography of the fabulously handsome skimbleshanks is a scintillating portrait of a complex man and his tumultuous times.  Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena 

'motherhood is frequently politicised, but rarely acknowledged in all its fullness to be political' We were delighted that Helen Charman, a Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, whose writing has been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze and The Stinging Fly, came to the shop to speak about her new book, Mother State. The impetus behind the book — a history of motherhood in the UK and Ireland — is that motherhood is an inherently political state of being, and should be considered in terms of collective responsibilities as well as individual. The communities that she is interested in — anti-nuclear campaigners, lesbian squatters, the wives of striking miners... — present a world in which mothering is a powerful, radical act.  She was joined in conversation by Kate Briggs (The Long Form and This Little Art, both published by Fitzcarraldo).  To hear about upcoming events in the shop and new episodes on our podcast, please click here.  Edited by Magnus Rena

Five years - almost to the day - since the first episode of the Sandoe's podcast, we welcome back the very first author to have graced our airwaves: William Dalrymple. In September 2019 he came to discuss The Anarchy; he returns, on our 80th episode, for The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. He traces the rise and spread of Buddhism from its roots, showing the dominance of Indian culture in the ancient and early medieval worlds. WD's customary grace, zest and elegance render unfamiliar names and ideas both accessible and compelling. There's a limited number of signed copies so please give us a ring, email or order through our website if you'd like one. Interviewed by Arabella von Friesen  Edited by Magnus Rena 

Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. He's been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; and his first novel, Dreams of Leaving - one of the earliest books to be published by Bloomsbury soon after it was established in 1986 - found fans in everyone from the drummer of Souxsie and the Banshees to the New Statesman, who said, “When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it's a wonder other people bother”. His latest book is called How to Make a Bomb (or Dartmouth Park in its American edition). It's a heady, swirling novel about a writer's psychic collapse which begins in Norway and takes him to Cadiz and Crete. There are shades of John Fowles's The Magus to it: acute, sensitive, eerie but compulsively readable.  Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena

Acclaimed historian Giles Milton (Checkmate in Berlin, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Paradise Lost) talks to Johnny about his new book on the US and Britain's diplomatic mission to brace Stalin against the Germans and bring him into WW2 as an ally.  Edited by Magnus Rena

Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked with Complicité, Florence + the Machine, Beyoncé, U2; designed installations at Tate Modern, the Serpentine, the V&A, Trafalgar Square, the Imperial War Museum and the UN General Assembly; sets for the ROH, the Met and La Scala. Etc. Etc.  She spoke to Magnus about her recent book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, published by Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. It is a miracle of book design and making, exceptional for its production values, careful artistry and sheer technical whizz and exuberance. Thames & Hudson’s commissioning editor called it “the most complex book production” he’s seen in his 28 years with the publishing house.  Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena  Music:  U2, Beautiful Day, performed live in 2001 at the Fleet Center, Boston, MA, USA  Stormzy, Blinded By Your Grace, Pt.2, performed live in 2018 at the BRIT Awards, London 

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 Magnus Rena Music: Damien Dempsey, Banna Strand

A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland, a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and often witty account of 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. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena Music: The Song of the Stakhanovite Unit

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. It's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper, but the story of the publisher's 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

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

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

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 interviewer is Sofka Zinovieff. Both are great friends of the shop, and we are immensely grateful to them.  Interviewed by Sofka Zinovieff  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music:  Sofia Vebo, I Tabakiera

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 translation. His last work to be published (in March this year) is Tomás Nevinson, which is a sequel to Berta Isla. These two extraordinary books have many of the same preoccupations as his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow – which I described in the Spectator as a work of genius when I reviewed it. But the best place to start reading him is probably his first novel to be published in the UK, All Souls. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe  Edited by Magnus Rena Cover photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly Music: Chubby Checker, Hucklebuck

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. Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Joachim Held, Das Ander Buch. Ein New Künstlich Lautten Buch, 1549: Nach Willen Dein

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. Edited by Magnus Rena Music, in order of appearance: Igor Stravinsky, Claire Quellet, Sandra Murray: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (version for Piano 4 hands): V. Rondes printanieres (Spring Rounds) Igor Stravinsky, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez: Concerto in E-Flat Major “Dumbarton Oaks”: I. Tempo Giusto

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 a murder investigation, this is a spectacular portrait of the world's expansion during the period, and how the imperial attitudes that resulted might have been otherwise. Interviewed by John de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Josquin Des Prez, Sanctus "D'ung aultre amer"

We are delighted to bring you a new podcast with Karina Urbach, author of Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook. It tells the remarkable story of her Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished – for decades - under a false Aryan name. Dr. Urbach is an historian at the University of London; her book is expertly researched, using international archives, family papers, interviews, etc and has an extraordinary range – from Shanghai in the 1930s to Dachau, Vienna to Lake Windermere, the Kindertransport, the US intelligences services, publishing protocols under the Nuremberg laws, emigration and the creation of new lives in new worlds. Interviewed by Arabella von Friesen Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), Act II: Zuhälterballade performed by the Dreigroschenoper Band in 1928

Laura Beatty could turn straw into gold. In Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher, she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. She speaks to Johnny about her pursuit of this forgotten figure, through markets and cobbled streets, via Chaucer and George Eliot...  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Mikis Theodorakis and Thanasis Vasilas, Galazio Taximi  

Vashti speaks to Magnus about her new memoir, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live. From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled – slowly – by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with the pop industry, until her 1970 album was rediscovered thirty years later.  This podcast is particularly exciting for us because, as we discovered while recording it, Vashti once worked in (what is now) John Sandoe's. The art room on the ground floor used to be a veterinary clinic; she worked there after leaving her record label in the 60s and before leaving London altogether.  We have a number of signed copies so please telephone, email or order online if you would like one.  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music, in order:  Vashti Bunyan, I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind  Some Things Just Stick In your Mind  Train Song  Rainbow River  Rose Hip November  Just Another Diamond Day  Here Before  I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind 

Dame Eileen is joined by the novelist Salley Vickers to talk about Will She Do?: Act One of a Life on Stage. It is a marvellous memoir, beginning with her youth in Tottenham and ending when her theatrical career takes off. Forthright, transparent, dry, funny... there is nothing remotely precious about Dame Eileen’s account of herself. It is a delight!  Please email, telephone (+44 (0)20 7589 9473) or order online if you would like a copy.  Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Dusty Springfield, Don't Let Me Lose This Dream

Johnny once wrote of Robert Edric that 'his was the most significant body of work from a novelist in a generation.' He has written over twenty novels; My Own Worst Enemy is his first memoir. He spoke to Johnny about growing up in Sheffield in the 60s, as well as books, food, friendships, and what it's like to write about your own family. Please email, telephone (+44 (0)20 7589 9473) or order online if you would like a copy.  Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Leo Kottke, Machine No. 2   

Salley Vickers wrote her latest novel in a Wiltshire cottage during lockdown. She talks to Johnny about the importance of gardening while writing, Shropshire's historic pagan landscapes, and the complications of family relationships.  Click here to order a copy of The Gardener; choose to collect from Sandoe's or have us post it to you.  Two sisters buy a rambling house in the Welsh Marches. One decides to bring the neglected garden back to life with the help of an Albanian migrant living in the nearby village. The work allows her space to contemplate her complex relationship with her sister and their difficult upbringing. Characteristically evocative and perceptive.    Edited by Magnus Rena  Music: Nick Drake, Man In A Shed

In anticipation of Christmas and the excitement of the coming weeks, we are thrilled to present a reading of one of Eva Ibbotson’s short stories. Some of our most obliging customers will already know her as an author of unparalleled charm and humour. Who else could combine an immense fish, a blunderbuss, love, moustaches and a vast, rose-sprigged chamberpot? A feast of Central European sensibility that will make you long to sip coffee and drift away all afternoon on a Biedermeier sofa... We have the right to post this magnificent piece of transporting bliss until the end of January, and we hope you enjoy it quite as much as we do.   Introduction by Arabella von Friesen, read by John de Falbe, and edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Johann Strauss II, Tales from the Vienna Woods piano version

2021 marks 200 years since the Greek Revolution and Mark Mazower's new book - The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe - is as timely as it is thrilling, expertly researched and vividly told. He spoke to Johnny de Falbe about this first 'romantic' European revolution.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Marika Ninou, Soúroupo Me Sinnephiá

Some may have supposed that Thubron had done his last Big Journey (he is now 82), but this is arguably his biggest yet, and most arduous. Indomitable, venerable, he follows this immense river from its source in remote Mongolian bogs to where it emerges in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East. It is a complicated journey, much of it surrounded by poverty, desolation, wrecked environments, social collapse and historical contortions in spite of the natural wonders of the landscapes through which he passes. CT is always fascinating and compelling, and this introduction to a world scarcely known to the West is an astonishing feat.    We have a limited number of signed copies. Click here to order the book online, or get in touch by telephone or email to reserve a copy.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music, in order: Orkiestra Moskva, Na sopkach Mandzurii Maxim Troshin, The Hills of Manchuria Nikolai Nazarov, Separate Exemplary Ochestra of USSR Defense Ministry, On the Hills of Manchuria Alexander Zlatovski, On the Hills of Manchuria

Craxton, that wonderful painter and funny, lovely man, could be in no better hands than Ian Collins’s… This biography is all that might be hoped for – thorough, loving, full of Craxton’s vitality and wit, with never a dull paragraph.    Music: Manos Hadjidakis, To Waltz Ton Hamenon Oneiron    Edited by Magnus Rena

James Marriott and his co-author Terry Macalister have spent decades researching and writing about the oil industry. Their new book plunges us into the murky world of Britain's crude oil corporations. They frame the industry as a new kind of imperialism, with hidden pipelines as its polluting engine and anonymous firms as its operators. It has the pace and intrigue of a well-plotted thriller.   Edited by Magnus Rena.   Music: PJ Harvey, Last Living Rose

The former head of the National Gallery, NPG and Royal Academy talks openly about the art museum's place in society today.   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: David Bowie, Andy Warhol

OL talks to Magnus Rena about her new book, Everybody: A Book about Freedom. It's a sweeping, collective biography of a dozen glamorous but stifled figures: Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Nina Simone, Wilhelm Reich, Malcom X, Marquis de Sade, Ana Mendieta, etc. What they all share is an urge to break through various inherited constraints and seek out that strange and slippery thing called freedom.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Nina Simone, Mood Indigo    Cover image: Ana Mendieta, Imágen de Yágul, 1973

The horsemen of the title are those of the Apocalypse, the terrifying outriders of war, pestilence, famine and death. Dr Mayhew considers developments in several fields to argue that we are pushing back successfully these dreadful tides. It's a gripping, lively narrative that is surprisingly uplifting. We wish we could take credit for the inspired choice of introductory music for this podcast but, in this case, those laurels must go to Emily herself.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Denis King, Black Beauty Theme (Galloping Home)

Helena's citrusy history of Italy, The Land Where Lemons Grow, sold by the armful when it came out in 2014. Her new book tells the story of one fragile instrument and its journey across Europe, from Wales to Cremona to Russia. We still have some signed copies (at the time of uploading); please get in touch by email or telephone to reserve a copy.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Broen Ensemble with Greg Lawson, Shaloka (trad. Armenian)

In medieval Europe, literacy rates among adult males was only 25% in cities, dwindling to 1% in villages. At the same time in Florence it was 70%. So what made this city the literary hub of Renaissance Europe? After his bestselling Brunelleschi's Dome, Ross King returns to Florence to follow the life of Vespasiano da Bisticci, the first bookseller of modern Europe.   Edited by Magnus Rena

Not so much a sequel to ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, this short, superb and immensely powerful book is nevertheless complementary to his earlier book. Read it, give it, think about it; read it again.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Claude Debussy, Deux Arabesques, performed by Alain Planès

Roland Philipps' new book, Victoire, is a gripping story of espionage, seduction and double-crossing. It follows Mathilde Carré, a spy in the intelligence networks of Occupied France. To discuss the book, Roland is joined by Daniel Lee, author of The SS Officer's Armchair which came out last year.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Le Quartette Swing Émile Carrara, Le Charmeur des Serpents

... A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing. Horatio talks to Arabella von Friesen about what he refers to as "one of the stranger journeys of a travelling life". Please email, telephone or order online to reserve a copy.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: John Martyn, Go Down Easy 

Simon Heffer, distinguished historian and editor of the diaries (the first volume of which is published today), is joined by Tim Bouverie.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Jack Hylton & His Orchestra, Why Can't You     

A short, powerful memoir of a Jewish family’s flight from the Gestapo in Italy, 1943. Read by Arabella von Friesen.    Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Ernesto Bonino, Strolling About     

... The Frozen Winter of 1962 and How Britain Emerged a Different Country... with moving parallels to our current situation. You can order a copy through a website here.   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Helen Shapiro, Walkin' Back to Happiness. 

Episode two of Ben Schott's spiffing homage.    Read by John de Falbe, edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher 

The first biography of this much loved author, bonne vivante, European, and John Sandoe customer, mentored by Aldous Huxley. Hastings’ earlier biographical subjects include Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamond Lehmann.   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Horn Concerto No. 3 in E Flat major 

Another lockdown, another double-bill of Wodehouse Wednesdays - but not quite as you know it. John de Falbe reads from Ben Schott's latest homage to Plum: Jeeves and the Leap of Faith.    Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher 

Johnny interviews Sir Tom, while Dame Hermione - a leading literary biographer - gives a short introduction to her new book.   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: William Bolcom, Graceful Ghost Rag

Brighton, 1968: a film producer, a novelist and an actress find their private lives encroaching into their public worlds. Pressures build on the trio… Click here to order a copy of Will Boyd's latest novel   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Cream, Badges 

Do you write in the margins? Have you lied about reading War and Peace? Which books are your 'comfort reads'?  Martin Latham muses with Johnny on a life spent around books.    Edited by Magnus Rena

Johnny chats to the illustrious academic about her dazzling new book, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe.    Edited by Magnus Rena

To accompany the publication of his new book, Loyd (an old friend of the shop) talks about Baroque Rome... in all its rich papal splendour.   Edited by Magnus Rena    Music: Federico Maria Sardelli, Fuga Prima 

David chats to Johnny about his latest novel: a gorgeous, rich, magnificent imagining of a 1960s pop group...   Edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Fairport Convention, Who Knows Where The Time Goes 

From P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Dynamite.   Read by John de Falbe, edited by Magnus Rena   Music: Cab Calloway, Minnie the Moocher