American poet Danez Smith and Zambian-born British poet Kayo Chingonyi read from their latest collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Kumukanda (both Chatto and Windus). Two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry, their work investigates race and the frustrations of being expected to write only about race, as well as gender, politics, exile, longing, and everything else that poetry can encompass. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is distraction? Do we need more or less of it? And how might it be sensed, indulged, or explored in the essay and other kinds of writing? This event brought together three essayists - Adam Phillips, Anne Stillman, and Matthew Bevis - to consider the values and vagaries of distraction and its close relatives. The talk was run in conjunction with the Cambridge Humanities Review, an independent journal of long-form essays and reviews. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To celebrate the publication of In Therapy: The Unfolding Story (Profile/Wellcome Collection), Susie Orbach was in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi. In this new updated edition, Orbach, who The New York Times called the 'most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud' explores what goes on in the process of therapy through a series of dramatized case studies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In an age of increasing individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal argues that we have lost the art of radical happiness—the art of transformative, collective joy. Lynne Segal was at the shop to discuss Radical Happiness and the political and emotional potential of being together with writer and campaigner Melissa Benn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carol Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester, reflects in her latest book Aurelia (Reaktion) on the very particular place that fairy tales hold in our culture and in the popular imagination. 'Aurelia is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects' writes the essayist Maggie Nelson. Mavor was in conversation with cultural critic, mythographer and historian of the folk tale Marina Warner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To celebrate the publication of the London Review Bookshop's beautiful limited edition of Peter Carey’s new novel 'A Long Way From Home', LRB publisher Nicholas Spice spoke to Carey about his deep family connections with cars, maps and stories, the question of race in Australia, and how all these things come together in the new work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acclaimed children's writer, poet, educationalist and broadcaster Michael Rosen was at the shop to present his latest book So They Call You Pisher! (Verso), a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood. Born into a Jewish Communist family in the East End of London in 1946, Rosen's early life was one of Party meetings, radical camping holidays, revolutionary hopes and disillusionments, and of political self-discovery. Warm and witty, his memoir gives a vivid account of growing up on the left in post-war Britain. Michael Rosen was in conversation with the medical writer and journalist Anne Karpf, author of, most recently, The School of Life's How to Age. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays Richard Sennett explores displacement in the metropolis through two vibrant historical moments: mid-nineteenth-century Paris, with its community of political exiles, a place where ‘you look in the mirror and see someone who is not yourself’; and Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed restrictions on ‘outsider’ groups – including prostitutes as well as Jews – had some surprising cultural consequences. Richard Sennett discussed these ideas with Sewell Chan, international news editor at the New York Times. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last in the year of her death in 1992. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver Press) brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays together in one volume for the first time, with a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed. To celebrate the publication, Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of the acclaimed Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, discussed Lorde's work and legacy with Sarah Shin, co-founder of Silver Press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My House of Sky (Little Toller) tells the hitherto largely unknown story of J.A. Baker, author of nature writing classic The Peregrine. Working with an archive of materials that only came to light in 2013, Hetty Saunders provides an invaluable insight into the life of the reclusive naturalist, whose work has influenced writers and artists as diverse as Richard Mabey and Werner Herzog. To celebrate the publication of this new biography, Hetty Saunders was joined by Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks, and conservationist and editor of Baker's Diaries, John Fanshawe. The evening was chaired by Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The two parts of Mary Beard’s latest book were originally given as lectures in the LRB’s prestigious Winter Lecture series, and subsequently appeared as essays in the magazine itself. In each part of the book, Mary Beard deals with the history and politics of women in public life, and draws on personal experience, family history and an unrivalled knowledge of the Classics. On November 21st at 7pm Mary Beard was at St George’s Bloomsbury where she spoke about her latest book *Women & Power* and about her position as one of Britain’s most prominent public intellectuals. Mary Beard was joined by Professor Sarah Churchwell, professorial fellow in American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marx’s Das Kapital, published in three volumes between 1867 and 1883, exercised a profound influence on the history and politics of the 20th century, and, despite the expectations of many, continues to resonate through the 21st. In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (Profile), David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate School and the author of many highly acclaimed books on Marx and Marxism, explains in clear and concise language just what it is that makes Marx’s analysis so powerful, and what it still continues to offer us for the future. Harvey was in the bookshop in conversation with architectural critic and journalist Owen Hatherley, author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia and Landscapes of Communism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do we think about when we think about football? Football is about so many things: memory, history, place, social class, gender, family identity, tribal identity, national identity, the nature of groups. It is essentially collaborative, even socialist, yet it exists in a sump of greed, corruption, capitalism and autocracy. At our event in the Bookshop on 2 November, Philosopher Simon Critchley attempted to make sense of it all with writer, critic and Norwich City fan Juliet Jacques. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following her Man Booker shortlisted Autumn, Ali Smith was at the shop to present its sequel Winter, (Hamish Hamilton), the second in a quartet of novels reflecting and embedded in the shifting seasons. A book full of truths for the post-truth era, Winter confronts and contrasts this bleakest of seasons with the evergreen qualities of love, memory, art and laughter. Smith was in conversation with Olivia Laing, writer and critic, and author of, most recently, The Lonely City (Canongate). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iain Sinclair has been writing about London for most of his adult life, and if any of us can even begin to understand this peculiar sort of city that we sort of call a sort of home, then it's with Sinclair that we begin. The Last London (Oneworld) is the culmination of Iain's London project, although 'project' is far too determined a word to describe a body of work so many-layered, so prodigiously polyvalent. At our event at St. George's, Bloomsbury, he talked about the book and the city with comedian, writer and film director Stewart Lee, another Londoner from elsewhere. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Twenty years after Kathy Acker's untimely death, Chris Kraus has provided the first full biography of the avant-garde artist, writer and counter-cultural heroine. Sheila Heti writes of After Kathy Acker (Allen Lane) 'This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there.' On the 25th September, Chris Kraus, the author of amongst many other books I Love Dick ('the most important book about men and women written in the last century.' according to Emily Gould in the Guardian) was joined in conversation about Acker by writer Juliet Jacques, the author of Trans: A Memoir (Verso). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A very special evening at the Bookshop poet, playwright and translator Anne Carson. With Robert Currie and Ben Whishaw, Anne performed Lecture On The History Of Skywriting, a piece originally commissioned by Laurie Anderson for New York Live Ideas. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Four of the most interesting poets working today read at the bookshop, to mark the publication of Cambridge Literary Review 10: Vahni Capildeo, Drew Milne, Luke Roberts and Eley Williams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Americans don’t actually believe in death.' Siri Hustvedt and Lisa Appignanesi were in conversation in the bookshop. Hustvedt's latest collection of essays on art, sex and psychology, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, is published by Sceptre; Prospect magazine, reviewing the volume, called her 'a writer of blazing intelligence and curiosity'. Lisa Appignanesi's Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness was published in 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was in conversation at the Bookshop with Rory O'Bryen. Best known in the UK for novels such as Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador and The Dream of My Return, Castellanos Moya is a writer who, in the words of Natasha Wimmer, 'has turned anxiety into an art-form and an act of rebellion, and redeemed paranoia as a positive indicator of rot'. This event took place in association with Cervantes Institute London and the Embassy of El Salvador. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Minton, Reader in Architecture at the University of East London and author of Ground Control, asks, in her latest book Big Capital (Penguin), a very big question: 'Who is London For?' As the cost of housing spirals upwards, putting this most essential of all necessities beyond the financial reach of the majority of Londoners, Minton draws on original research to bring us the stories of those in the frontline of the struggle to keep a roof over their heads, to analyse how we got into this mess, and to suggest some practical policies for how we might start to get out of it. Anna was in conversation with Oliver Wainwright, the architecture and design critic for the Guardian. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philip Hoare, who won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009 for his magnificent Leviathan, continues his exploration of our watery world with RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (Fourth Estate). In searching the past and present for stories encapsulating the human fascination with the sea, Hoare mixes natural history with travel writing, autobiography and literary criticism to create an invigorating portrait of the oceans, and of their often fatal allure. He was in conversation with Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, The Trip to Echo Spring and To the River. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

PalFest, The Palestinian Festival of Literature, which brings writers from around the world to Palestine to read to and meet their readers, celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This Is Not a Border is an anthology of essays, poems and stories from some of those writers and artists as they respond to their experiences at this unique festival. Heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and courage in the most desperate of situations. To celebrate the launch of this remarkable anthology, we were joined for an evening of readings and discussion by its editor Ahdaf Soueif, contributors Jeremy Harding and Rachel Holmes, and Bashir Abu-Manneh, lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Kent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew O’Hagan’s latest book The Secret Life brings together three of his finest long essays, each of them investigating the strange, vexed intersections and conflicts between the virtual and the real, and what they mean for the nature and construction of identity in the modern world. ‘Ghosting’ tells the story of O’Hagan’s difficult collaboration with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; in ‘The Invention of Ronald Pinn’ he uses the real identity of a deceased young man to create an entirely spurious one that exists only in cyberspace, and ‘The Satoshi Affair’ explores the strange history of Craig Wright, the man who may or may not be the inventor of Bitcoin. As well as being ‘The best essayist of his generation’ (New York Times), O’Hagan is an acclaimed novelist and contributing editor at the LRB. He was in conversation about his latest work with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Gallery and author of Ways of Curating. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ali Smith was at the shop to read from and talk about her (now Booker nominated!) novel Autumn, an unconventional love story that plays with boundaries of time and space and is the first in a quartet of seasons. Smith won the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction in 2015 for How to Be Both and has been short-listed for the Man Booker prize on several occasions. Smith was in conversation with The Guardian journalist Alex Clark. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his latest book In Writing (Hamish Hamilton) psychoanalyst and regular LRB contributor Adam Phillips celebrates the art of close reading and asks what it is to defend literature in a world that is increasingly devaluing language. Through a vivid series of readings of writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald, Phillips draws on his work as a practicing psychoanalyst to demonstrate, in his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to, and of, each other. He was joined in conversation by Dr Devorah Baum, Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is the co-director of the feature film The New Man (2016) and author of two forthcoming books, Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke (Profile). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Beatty, winner of 2016's Man Booker Prize, will be in conversation with Lola Okolosie, Guardian journalist and editor-at-large of Media Diversified. The Sellout (Oneworld) was the first novel by a US author to win the Booker; Beatty's other novels, being released in new paperback editions, are The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff and Slumberland. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Writer, filmmaker, architectural critic and essayist Jonathan Meades was in conversation with his publisher, John Mitchinson (Unbound Books) to discuss his career in literature, criticism and journalism. Meades’ literary works include novels Filthy English (1984) and Pompey (1993) and autobiography An Encyclopaedia of Myself (2014). His most recent work, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (2017), is his first cookbook. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To celebrate the publication of Vanishing Points, a new showcase of writing from El Salvador, Tania Pleitez Vela and Claudia Castro Luna were at the shop to discuss the anthology, which aims to challenge the traditional concepts of nationality and the idea of a 'national literature'. The anthology includes stories from the likes of Horacio Castellanos Moya, Jacinta Escudos, Miguel Huezo Mixco, Rafael Menjívar Ochoa and Ana Escoto, showcasing authors that reside in El Salvador as well as authors that have emigrated to the United States, Mexico, Argentina and Europe. Thus, Vanishing Points offers both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking readers an array of linguistic, thematic and aesthetic contrasts. This is Kalina’s second volume––the first one was dedicated to poetry and published in 2014––and also a first of its kind: a bridge and an opportunity for Salvadoran writers to establish a dialogue with the literary community at large. This event took place with the support of the Embassy of El Salvador. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laurent Binet, who won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman for his first novel HHhH, was at the shop to read from and discuss his second, The 7th Function of Language (Harvill Secker). The new book is a global conspiracy thriller encompassing the death of Roland Barthes, semiotic theory and the sex life of Michel Foucault. 'It had me rolling on the floor of the Paris Metro when I read it', wrote Alex Preston in the Observer. Binet was in conversation with Christopher Tayler, contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Future Sex, Witt captures the experiences of going to bars alone, online dating, and hooking up with strangers. After moving to San Francisco, she decides to say yes to everything and to find her own path. From public health clinics to cafe conversations about 'coregasms', she observes the subcultures she encounters with a wry sense of humour, capturing them in all their strangeness, ridiculousness, and beauty. The result is an open-minded, honest account of the contemporary pursuit of connection and pleasure, and an inspiring new model of female sexuality - open, forgiving, and unafraid. Witt spoke at the Bookshop in conversation with Katherine Angel. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Patricia Lockwood was at the shop to read from her new memoir, Priestdaddy (Penguin), a hilarious account of growing up with a Catholic priest for a father, and her 2013 collection of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. It was the first UK reading from one of the liveliest poets writing at the moment, whose other occupations include trolling the Paris Review on Twitter. Patricia was in conversation with Dawn Foster, whose most recent book, Lean Out, was published last year by Repeater Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ocean Vuong was in conversation with Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers (Faber and Faber), and read from his eagerly-awaited first collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Cape Poetry). Vuong’s work has won plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic: in the New Yorker, Daniel Wenger wrote that ‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move’. In 2016, Vuong was awarded the Whiting Award. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the publication of the first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short fiction,The Debutante and Other Stories (Silver Press) and the republication of her memoir Down Below in this centenary year of her birth, cultural critic Marina Warner and novelist Chloe Aridjis discussed Carrington's absurd, funny and provocative fiction and paintings. Carrington first started to paint and draw among Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s, escaped the war via New York to Mexico City where she met Diego Riviera, Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz and became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement. Warner, who came to know Carrington in the 1980s in New York, and Aridjis, Carrington's friend from Mexico City, discussed the life and legacy of a singular artist and writer with Silver Press publishers Joanna Biggs and Alice Spawls. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Though he was admired by some of the liveliest cultural figures of the twentieth century, David Jones is not known or celebrated in the way that Eliot, Beckett or Joyce have been. Thomas Dilworth's biography - the first full biography of Jones, and thirty years in the making - aims to redress this oversight, reframing the poet, visual artist and essayist as a true genius and the great lost Modernist. Thomas Dilworth discussed Jones's life and work with writer and journalist Rachel Cooke, with readings from the book's editor and publisher, poet Robin Robertson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In The Zoo of the New, poets Don Paterson and Nick Laird have cast a fresh eye over more than five centuries of verse, from the English language and beyond, looking for those poems which see most clearly, which speak most vividly, and which have meant the most to them as readers and writers. Don and Nick will be at the shop to read from and discuss this essential new work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls? Well, no, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne Cordelia Fine argues, it’s a lot more complicated than that. She spoke about her latest book Testosterone Rex (Icon Books), an examination of the vexed and fascinating interplay between nature and nurture in the construction of gender, with writer, broadcaster and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Auster discussed his first novel in seven years, the extraordinary 4 3 2 1 (Faber) in which a single individual, born in 1947 in Newark, follows four divergent paths through the life and history of mid-twentieth-century America. Auster’s work, in prose, poetry, memoir and film, has often explored multiple and shifting identities, and in 4 3 2 1 - whose protagonist, like Auster himself, is part of the Baby-Boomer generation - he continues his uniquely powerful exploration of selfhood, time and the relationship between fiction and reality. Auster was in conversation with author and journalist Alex Preston. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and featured rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, New York and Queen Mary University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and featured rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y, New York and Queen Mary University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For nearly 80 years, New York's 92nd Street Y has been a home to the voices of literature, hosting in its famed Reading Series the greatest literary artists of the 20th century and recording for posterity their appearances as part of its vast audio archive. Featuring Hisham Matar on Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Oswald on Ted Hughes and Tessa Hadley on Eudora Welty, the *Writers on Writers* series invited contemporary authors to discuss the legendary voices that have meant the most to them. Each conversation was led by Bernard Schwartz, who produces 92Y's Reading Series as director of its Unterberg Poetry Center, and features rare archival recordings. In collaboration with the 92nd Street Y and Queen Mary University of London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gwendoline Riley was at the bookshop to talk about her new novel, First Love, an exploration of marriage as battleground. Anne Enright described her previous novel, Opposed Positions, as ‘more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart’; Stuart Kelly called it ‘a continual joy’. Riley was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin 2012); the discussion was chaired by Joanna Biggs, author of All Day Long (Profile 2015) and editor at the London Review of Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Money makes the world go round: but what is it really? And how is it produced? Above all, who controls its production, and in whose interests? Money is never a neutral medium of exchange. Political economist Ann Pettifor and journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan discuss history’s most misunderstood invention: the money system - a system that is dominated by men. While women are largely responsible for managing household budgets, they have on the whole been excluded from managing the nation’s financial system and its budgets. At present the networks that dominate the financial sector are overwhelmingly male, and often shockingly sexist. Their dismissive attitude towards half the population and their enjoyment of an unequal distribution of knowledge are not coincidental. Feminism is uniquely well-placed to ask: how can democracies can reclaim control over money production? Can we subordinate the out-of-control finance sector to the interests of society and the ecosystem? The creation and management of society’s money does not currently loom large in contemporary feminism. But it is a feminist issue, and is central to the liberation of women from the servitude of unpaid work. Ann Pettifor's latest book The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers is published by Verso Books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Édouard Louis was born into poverty in northern France, as Eddy Belleguele, in 1992. His autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, newly translated into English as The End of Eddy (Harvill Secker), draws an unsparing portrait of the violence, alcoholism, racism and homophobia of the milieu into which he was born, and quickly became a sensational bestseller both in France and throughout Europe. Louis was at the shop to discuss his work with the novelist Tash Aw. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Grand Hotel Abyss is a majestic group biography exploring who the Frankfurt School were and why they matter today. Combining biography, philosophy and storytelling, Jeffries explores how the Frankfurt thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century. In conversation with Sarah Bakewell, the author of the critically acclaimed At the Existentialist Café, portraying the lives and ideas of the existentialists, Jeffries discussed how the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society, and how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Never has the story been told so well,' said the New York Review of Books of Anthony Gottlieb's The Dream of Reason, a history of Western philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. In The Dream of Enlightenment he continues the story with the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Gottlieb was in conversation with Julian Baggini, author of numerous works on philosophy, including The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 Other Thought Experiments and his most recent, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will (Granta), for an evening of conversation about the history of philosophy, and how to write about it for a popular audience. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roger Hardy worked for more than 20 years as a Middle East analyst with the BBC World Service. In his new book, The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East, he argues that the causes of the region’s troubled present are rooted in the era of Western colonial domination. Hardy discussed his book with Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Hazem Kandil, lecturer in political sociology at Cambridge, and BBC broadcast journalist Robin Lustig. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Icon of radical American Letters Eileen Myles has produced more than 20 volumes of fiction, memoir and poetry over the past three decades, a body of work that led the novelist Dennis Cooper to describe them as 'one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature.' To mark the publication of their novel Chelsea Girls in paperback and a new collection of poetry I Must Be Living Twice (Serpents Tail and Tuskar Rock respectively) Eileen Myles was at the shop to read from and discuss their work with Olivia Laing, author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and most recently The Lonely City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.