John Sandoe Books John Sandoe Books

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