London Review Bookshop Podcast London Review Bookshop

From this 2018 event: In Municipal Dreams (Verso), John Boughton charts the often surprising story of council housing in Britain, from the slum clearances of the Victorian age through to the Grenfell Tower disaster. It’s a history packed with incident – with utopians, visionaries and charlatans, with visionary planners and corrupt officials – and Boughton combines it with an architectural tour of some of the best remaining examples, as well as some of the more ordinary places that millions of people have come to call home. He's in conversation about his book with Owen Hatherley, architectural historian and author of, most recently, The Ministry of Nostalgia.
 
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Holly Pester's debut collection, Comic Timing (Granta), is disorienting, radical and extremely funny; Pester has a background in sound art and performance, having worked with the Womens' Library, the BBC and the Wellcome Collection, and is an unmissable reader of her own work. She read from Comic Timing and was in conversation with Vahni Capildeo, whose most recent collection is Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, 2019), and Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta and author of Kingdomland (Faber, 2019).
 
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Having an engineer as a father and an art school education, Paul Spooner became, predictably, a school-teacher, then a lorry driver. A chance meeting with mechanical model-maker Peter Markey in Cornwall led him to discover his true métier – the almost extinct profession of automatist, or maker of automata. Since then he has been relentlessly making mechanical playthings, mostly of wood, some of them not, mostly small, some of them not, all of them intricately engineered, eccentrically beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
He is in conversation about his work with Rosemary Hill, architectural historian and contributing editor at the London Review of Books. She first encountered Paul Spooner's work at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden in the 1980s and has admired it ever since. Her books include God's Architect, a biography of A W N Pugin, and Stonehenge.
 
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Patricia Lockwood was in conversation about her new book, No One Is Talking About This (and a lot else besides) with fellow LRB contributing editor, John Lanchester.
 
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Brigid Brophy (1929-95) was a fearlessly original novelist, essayist, critic and political campaigner, championing gay marriage, pacifism, vegetarianism and prison reform. Her many acclaimed novels include Hackenfeller’s Ape, The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh, The Finishing Touch, In Transit, and The Snow Ball – which Faber reissued at the end of last year – as well as critical studies of Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley and Ronald Firbank, among other subjects. She also wrote about Mozart for the LRB, and contributed 19 other unforgettable pieces in the paper’s first years, on subjects ranging from Michelangelo to Germaine Greer, animal cruelty to structuralism.


Eley Williams, who wrote the foreword for the new edition of The Snow Ball, is in conversation with Terry Castle and Bidisha about Brophy the essayist and novelist, Brophy then and now.
 
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Lauren Oyler was talking abou her first novel, Fake Accounts, with the writer Olivia Sudjic, who has described it as 'Savage and shrewd, destined to go viral. If the world does end soon I'll be glad that I read it'.
 
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