SPACE: THE HUMAN STORY
TIM PEAKE
Only 628 people have ever left Earth, so when one of them writes a book on the subject it’s worth a look. “Major Tim”, of course, has plenty of personal insight to offer — the physical and psychological pressures, the changed perspective on life, the danger, the humour and even the ennui — but he’s also spoken to astronauts of all eras to make this a true survey of mankind’s mission to the stars. And the pictures are amazing.
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PLANET EARTH III
MATT BRANDON, MICHAEL GUNTON AND JONNY KEELING
The only thing more eye-wideningly incredible than watching whales breach or spirit bears hunt on David Attenborough’s latest series? Getting to revel in that glorious imagery one gorgeous image at a time. The 250 rich-in-colour, rich-in-detail pictures in this book are the best way of doing that; and, similarly, reading the text allows some of the facts to sink in better than when watching on TV.
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THE EXCHANGE
JOHN GRISHAM
Remember The Firm? It’s been 30 years since Grisham’s global bestseller was published, but there was the small matter of a Tom Cruise movie version to keep this lawyer-for-the-Mob story fresh in your mind. And now, there’s a sequel: Mitch McDeere is back — and entangled in a $100 million hostage situation with murderous Libyan terrorists. The plot is every bit as twisty-turny as readers have come to expect from Grisham; read it now and smugly tell friends you know what’s going to happen when the movie is made.
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THE LAST DEVIL TO DIE
RICHARD OSMAN
If you like your crime a little more local — set in the recognisable world of Ryman, Robert Dyas and Oliver Bonas, all name-checked in his Kent-based novels — turn to Richard Osman. There’s a reason his gazillion-selling Thursday Murder Club novels have done so well: they combine clever plots with warm, rounded characters and a deliciously British sense of humour. This fourth instalment is pitched perfectly in the worlds of art and antiques forgers and their darker hinterland, and you really don’t need to have read the previous three to enjoy it.
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MY NAME IS BARBRA
BARBRA STREISAND
Streisand’s no flash-in-the-pan starlet: her six-decade career has seen her conquer the highest heights in the worlds of writing, directing, singing and acting. So no surprise that her memoir isn’t the usual slim, self-congratulatory volume: instead we get a 992-page confessional of her life, loves, disappointments, diva moments and even near-miss at becoming romantically involved with Prince Charles. No punches go unpulled, no bullying leading men go unnamed, no opportunity for self-reflection goes untaken — and not a single page drags.
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MAKING IT SO
PATRICK STEWART
There’s no shortage of excellent anecdotes in Stewart’s long-awaited autobiography – being upstaged by a priapic dog while performing Shakespeare, being “blanked” by Queen Elizabeth when she knighted him, borrowing Paul McCartney’s car for a joy-ride to Bath — but there’s a lot more to it than that. The actor started life in more-than-modest circumstances, raised by an alcoholic father in a one-up one-down house in West Yorkshire. And it’s all here…
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RADIO TIMES 5-STAR FILM GUIDE VOLUME 1
Getting RT’s experts to agree on a whittled-down list of just 250 films — from the 1000-odd they’ve given five stars to over the years — wasn’t always pretty. But the result is a definitive guide to the world’s best movies, from 1902’s Le Voyage dans la Lune to 2023’s Oppenheimer, as well as all the information you need (where to stream or rent them), and plenty you don’t (reviews come complete with trivia gems).
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EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR: THE QI BOOK OF SPORTS
JAMES HARKIN AND ANNA PTASZYNSKI
Santa’s elves aren’t the only ones gearing up for Christmas; the QI elves have also been busy coming up with this ticklish compendium of sporting curiosities. From professional pillow-fighters to Premiership football and its sometimes highly creative terrace chants, some are snigger-out-loud funny, some head-shakingly bizarre, but none are dull. Look out for the stories on David Attenborough’s involvement in the evolution of the tennis ball, and Michael Palin’s disgrace at a conker championship.
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UNRULY: A HISTORY OF ENGLAND’S KINGS AND QUEENS
DAVID MITCHELL
What do you get if you ask a comic to write a history book? A surprisingly good history book. Perhaps inevitably described as “Horrible Histories for grown-ups”, this is a highly readable survey of our country’s kings and queens from Arthur to Elizabeth, written by panel-show star Mitchell. Erudite, entertaining and the sort of work that will grace anyone’s downstairs toilet.
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SAS: FORGED IN HELL
DAMIEN LEWIS
For a secretive outfit operating in the shadows, the SAS has certainly spawned a lot of books — but this one tells the less-often-heard tale of the Regiment’s early days during the Second World War. It’s “against all odds” stuff, with the new force sent to punch through the enemy’s coastal defences in advance of an Allied invasion in 1943. Writer Damien Lewis keeps things edge-of-the-seat, as usual — expect this book, like several of his others, to be snapped up by Hollywood soon.
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BOOK REVIEWS BY ED GRENBY
]]>The reason Armitage is cooing is because I’ve asked him, like I ask all the writers I interview, to describe his book, which he does, neatly, thus: “Geneva is a destination crime thriller that centres on a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who is drawn into a crime of which she is the victim but doesn’t realise it”.
But the backstory to the backstory is intriguing, too. A prolific and very popular narrator for Audible, Armitage was asked by the giant online audiobook store if he would like to write his own: “They said, ‘Would you be interested in writing a crime thriller?’ I was, and they immediately said the word ‘ghostwriter’. But I insisted that if I was going to speak the words [reading, inevitably, the audiobook] they were going to be my words, every single one of them.”
It was a risk – “I got to play director, I got to play all the characters, I got to play the architect of the world I was building; and, actually, it could have been a huge failure.” But the 51-year-old’s background gave him confidence to create a plot and people. “My work as an actor means I’m always imagining myself on the inside of characters, and the training at drama school sometimes borders on studying psychology. Then there’s all the things I’ve gathered along the way, working with script editors to structure a story, seeing what gets cut and what remains – that’s been very, very useful.”
And has he had any personal experience of dealing with dementia, gaslighting, or someone trying to steal his life – all elements of the book’s gripping and adroitly told story? “No personal first-hand experience,” he says, “but every actor looks at some other actor’s career – especially if they’ve gone up for the same role and the other guy gets it – and says, ‘That was supposed to be my part’. I’ve certainly watched other people and gone, ‘I would kill for your career’. It’s a very common phrase...”
Who is Armitage’s acting nemesis, then? “Sometimes your agent will send you a script, and it’ll have someone else’s name on it, and then you realise, ‘Oh, they’ve turned this down’. I would get scripts with Jude Law’s name on them, or Eric Bana’s.”
So if anything unfortunate happens to either of them, we’ll know who’s behind it? “Indeed! But no, I usually just think, ‘Oh well, if Jude doesn’t want that role, I’ll do it’. I’m a ‘yes’ man: I love going to work so I don’t say no to very much.”
What about playing Bond, as Armitage is one of the names regularly mentioned in connection with the 007 role. “Oh, every three weeks there’s a newspaper story about that. My nephew still asks if I’m going to be James Bond, and I say ‘No. You just read it in a paper’. It’s an amazing role, but I’m probably more likely to be tempted towards playing the villain.”
Meanwhile, there’s already a movie adaptation of Geneva to think about. “Sony are going to adapt it with me, but I can’t yet tell you who will be the star. I don’t want to tempt fate, but the book is currently in the hands of my dream actor for the lead role. She’s reading it now...” And to direct? Would he like to hire, say, Peter Jackson? “I would. I feel like he really opened out the world of The Hobbit, and that Tolkien would have loved it. Though Peter would probably want to make Geneva in 3D with a massive centrepiece and a fantasy element. He loves all that.”
Armitage could certainly be forgiven for being precious about his debut novel, especially considering how hard he worked to get it written. “I started writing it in my Winnebago in Manchester on the set of Stay Close [the 2021 Netflix miniseries based on Harlan Coben’s novel]. Then it was in a hotel room in Seville, then in Madrid, then in Rome at weekends when I was shooting [2022 conspiracy thriller movie] The Man from Rome.
"There were also many, many long-haul flights backwards and forwards from New York, and I finally finished it on the set of Obsession.”
There was pleasure too, though: “I went to Geneva on a little road trip right at the end, just to go back and fill in some details – that was one of the best parts of the job. But I also really loved those times beavering away at 3am on a plane while everyone else was sleeping or watching Marvel films. I just love telling stories.”
ED GRENBY
Whether you’re looking to start a good reading habit or just wanting to treat yourself, a friend or a family member, the RT Book Club is the gift that keeps on giving!
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The winner of the 2005 Man Booker prize for The Sea and several other awards, Banville is frequently listed among the runners and riders in contention for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2006, he began writing detective novels featuring morose pathologist Quirke – played on television by Gabriel Byrne – under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. More recently, he has published them under his own name, teaming Quirke with DI St John Stafford for a series of elegant adventures set in 1950s Ireland. “I invented Stafford because I got bored of Quirke – he’s so bloody gloomy!” says Banville of his creation, from his home in Dublin. “Stafford is an Anglo-Irish Protestant, the son of a big house, and such a person would never have been a police detective in 1950s Ireland. It’s an impossibility, and I like that about him. And what I like about Quirke is that he’s completely incompetent. He wouldn’t recognise a clue if it bit him on the leg. I like my pair of shambling amateurs. They’re human beings like the rest of us. They do their best.”
Their latest investigation, The Lock-Up, takes place in 1957, in the Ireland of Banville’s youth. “It was effectively a totalitarian state,” he says of the country then. “The Church had absolute control, and the State was hand in glove with the Church. We were all brainwashed.”
‘You can make things up… in one book, I hadn’t a clue who had done the killing’
A young woman, Rosa, is found gassed in her car. It appears to be a suicide until Quirke’s autopsy suggests otherwise, and a layered story unspools embracing race, class, sex and feminism. For Banville, the whodunnit aspect is less important than the evocation of character and place. “I’m with Raymond Chandler: I don’t particularly care who killed Professor Plum in the library with a lead pipe,” he says. “The plot is secondary. It’s all about people, human beings and their failings, their secrets and their crimes.”
Does that mean he doesn’t plan out every detail of the story in advance? He laughs. “This is one of the joys of writing crime fiction: you can make things up and change your mind instantaneously. There’s a wonderful childish pleasure in that. In one book, I was two days from the end and I hadn’t a clue who had done the killing. For The Lock-Up, I went to a writer’s centre and gave myself a week to finish the book. I was leaving on Saturday lunchtime, and on Friday evening I decided I wasn’t happy with the way it was going. Then I had a brilliant idea, and I sat down next morning and wrote the last chapter.” Such spontaneity is at odds with Banville’s painstaking approach to his literary novels – such as The Sea and The Singularities, published last year – in which a single line can take a day to write. Those labours are now in the past, he says. “The Singularities was my last book of that kind. It took me six years to write, and I’m 77. As the Americans say, ‘Do the math’. Now I’m writing crime fiction, but doing it differently.”
Banville’s move into genre fiction hasn’t always endeared him to the crime-writing community. He has little time for his contemporaries – “I don’t read them; I tried and then gave up” – preferring the company of old masters such as Chandler and Georges Simenon. Appearing at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, his assertion that he wrote his crime books much more quickly than his literary novels implied that he was slumming it. Cue uproar. “They all hate me! I started writing these books and they all got very annoyed when I said that I wrote them quickly. But Simenon wrote his books in ten days. I don’t see anyone complaining about Simenon, so why me?”
He fears that less bulletproof writers are living through a more censorious age. “I would not like to be a young writer now,” he says. “I’m pretty well impregnable – I’m not on Twitter or social media, I don’t read reviews, I don’t care what anyone says about me. Why bother? But I can imagine younger writers are terrified of saying something someone doesn’t like. I was talking to a writer the other day, I won’t say his name, who was almost in tears because of what people were saying about him on Twitter.” He sighs. “Can you imagine? God almighty!”
R ather than navigating Twitter, Banville is happily dreaming up further adventures for Quirke and Stafford. “When I was a teenager, I’d take my dog for a walk in the fields and tell myself stories and act out little plays; in a way, that’s what I’m doing again. I’m having a second childhood of playing with stories, characters and plots. Writing is never easy, but I do like making up things.”
GRAEME THOMSON
Join the RT Book Club now, and each month or quarter receive a novel or non-fiction book chosen by us especially for you - one we're sure you will enjoy. Selected from the latest new releases by the team here at RT, join now and each month or quarter receive your book, then go online to our exclusive members' discussion area to share your thoughts.
Our past books have all been brand new releases, mostly hardbacks, and we often have extras included, such as copies signed by the author, or exclusive webchats with the author themselves!
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He’s downplaying not just the wisdom with which his latest book, Getting Better, is laced, but also how hard-won it has been. It covers his two life-threatening illnesses and slow, incomplete recovery from a 40-day Covid coma; family tragedies in his own generation and that of his parents; and, most harrowingly of all, the sudden death of his 18-year-old son. “People ask me how I’m still standing,” he admits, “so I’ve unfolded it all and said, ‘Well, when that happened, I did this.’ Then they can go in that direction themselves, if they want, or do something different.”
With its non-prescriptive tone, its refreshing lack of that Paltrow-style “woo-woo”, its deep but not navel-gazing thoughtfulness and its very British humour (a key chapter is called “Raisins to be Cheerful” for both profound and comic reasons), Getting Better is, I suggest, like a self-help book for people who wouldn’t be seen dead with a self-help book. “In some respects that’s right,” agrees Rosen. “Self-help books tend to give you a whole set of instructions, whereas I’m just telling stories about things that have happened to me. And I’ve always liked the idea that books leave readers with a nice space in which they can argue with what they’re reading. “I always argue with books I read, so I hope people will do that with mine.”
Some parts might be useful to some readers, others to others, he adds. “So you can take it like those ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ stories kids read: ‘If you want the hero to head into the forest, turn to page 80’. Except here you can choose your own ‘not-coping adventure’ – just turn to page 100 and read the chapter that’s appropriate to you, if you like.”
‘Is it a self-help book? I’m just telling stories about things that have happened to me’
I worry that, as with every other wise book I’ve ever come across, I’ll read it, resolve to live as it suggests, then forget everything and carry on as normal as soon as I close the tome – but Rosen reassures me. “Don’t laugh, but [when I’m down] I play Bob Dylan’s Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues over and over and over again. On YouTube, it says it’s got 850,000 views, and probably most of those are me. It doesn’t help me come up with any answers, but just listening to Dylan going through a rough time in that song relieves me of something.”
There is a lot of comfort, Rosen adds, simply in knowing that others have been through similarly tough times: “We’ve got that word we borrowed from German – Schadenfreude – for taking pleasure in other people’s sorrows. But maybe we need another one – Hoffnungfreude, perhaps, because Hoffnung is German for “hope” – for when we take hope from other people’s troubles instead.”
Even if no one else found the book useful, it would have helped its author at least. It’s the first time he’s written in depth about the death of his son Eddie in 1999 – and, he says, “that’s one of the little measures I give to myself, which shows I’m actually managing to cope. That place where Eddie sits in my brain isn’t… bleeding. It isn’t… harming me. He’s there, every day, but it doesn’t [as it once did] hurt so much that when somebody says something, I sort of explode.” Rosen, who returns to the airwaves this week in a new series of Radio 4’s long-running show about language, Word of Mouth, reckons it’s not just him that’s changed, but the country’s culture, too. We are all, he says, more comfortable thinking and talking about feelings than we were.
Asked why, Rosen mentions the pandemic, Ukraine, 9/11, greater access to education – and even Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, with her much-talked-about “Are you OK?” address to the audience of This Morning. “There’s an interesting comparison there. Can you imagine Robin Day doing that? Or Freddie Grisewood? Or Robert Robinson?”
For people who haven’t yet read Getting Better, I press Rosen for a bit of advice from it that’s so universally applicable they – and we – could all benefit. He offers his “one thing” principle: “If you’re in a difficult situation, and it keeps repeating itself in your head and you feel stuck and desperate, then as you go to sleep at night think of one thing you did that day that you feel good about. Maybe you swept the backyard. Or perhaps you simply made some toast for yourself that you really liked. You don’t have to have been Mother Teresa, it could be anything at all. And it sounds nuts but focusing on that one good thing can push away some of those spectres and apparitions and raging mush – and send you to sleep with a smile on your face.”
ED GRENBY
CLICK HERE BUY GETTING BETTER BY MICHAEL ROSEN
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When I was 25 years old,” begins Dasha Kiper’s book, “I moved in with a man who was 98.” It’s an intriguing opening line, but the pages that follow are even more fascinating. Until she paused to write Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, which is Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Kiper was a consulting clinical director at an Alzheimer’s organisation in New York.
The 98-year-old, Mr Kessler, was a Holocaust survivor and dementia sufferer, and the story of how Kessler and Kiper coped together is just the first of several painful, poignant, funny, revealing and instructive case studies that form the spine of the book. Much has been written about dementia, Kiper acknowledges, but she “wanted to explore the difficulties that care-givers have. Usually we think about their mourning, grief, frustration... We often don’t realise that care-givers, in some ways, begin to mirror the people they’re taking care of. They find themselves acting in ways that are irrational, argumentative, agitated.”
For instance, she says, loved ones looking after dementia sufferers will get angry with the patient for their “failings”, even though they know it’s the disease that is responsible. “The care-giver is aware that it’s their husband or wife’s brain that’s at fault, and yet they can’t help holding their loved one accountable. In my work supporting care-givers, a lot of them would say, ‘I know the person who has dementia is supposed to be irrational, but why am I sometimes acting crazier than the person I’m taking care of?’ ” The answer, reckons Kiper, is something called “dementia blindness”, which she likens to optical illusions. “When we look at [the famous example of two lines that appear to be different lengths but aren’t], we know, intellectually, that the lines are the same length; but our mind is playing tricks on us and we fall for the illusion anyway and ‘see’ one longer line. It’s the same with dementia: you know your husband is ill, yet you’re also talking to him and it doesn’t feel like he’s ill. So you find yourself falling into the same patterns of behaviour as before he became ill.”
This is a situation that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever looked after someone with dementia for an extended period: you get furious with them for what seems like stubbornness or wilful recalcitrance, even though your rational brain tells you it’s not. Reassuringly, though, “there are good reasons why we have dementia blindness. It’s not because care-givers are ‘bad’; it’s because there are neurological and cognitive forces at play, not just for the person who has the disease, but for our own ‘healthy’ brain. “We’ve evolved to be deeply social creatures, projecting a sense of ‘self’ onto other people, but with dementia a person’s self becomes fragmented, so they remember things sometimes but not others. And the way our minds are built gets in the way of accepting this. So we find ourselves thinking, ‘Well, you were lucid a moment ago when it suited you, and now you’re playing ill.’ So the care-giver feels like they’re being gaslighted or manipulated.
And of course, they’re not, but it’s so hard for our brains to deal with that fragmentation.” (By way of example, Kiper mentions “one care-giver who told me that her father forgets who she is – but still notices that she’s gained 15 pounds”.) Kiper is careful to avoid telling care-givers what to do. “There are already some great manuals for those dealing with dementia; I recommend one called The 36-Hour Day.” She sees the purpose of her book as explanation and reassurance. She wants care-givers “to know you’re not a monster because you keep yelling at your husband. It’s not because your willpower is weak; it’s because you’re human, with a human brain. Give yourself a little bit of grace – and, ultimately, it will make you a better partner and care-giver.” In the support groups she’s run for stressed care-givers, she found that simply realising “you’re not the only one who yells” was hugely valuable. “There’s a lot of laughter in those groups’ rooms,” she says – partly because dementia brings so much “absurdity”, and partly because it’s such a relief to find “you’re not the only person going crazy. Dementia is a crazy situation”. Find a way to accept your own shortcomings as a carer, counsels Kiper, “because you’re mortal. And those biases, intuitions and logical fallacies that make you act irrationally… are the exact same ones that make you feel full of love for your family.”
ED GRENBY
Book of the Month: The Premonitions Bureau
Listening back to my recording of this interview is a distinctly spooky experience. We are speaking two days before the Queen’s death, and Sam Knight – who has written a book about people who can see the future – asks me: “What if I had a vivid, specific premonition that something dreadful was about to happen at Balmoral?”
Normally, I’d wave this off as mere coincidence (it’s the day of Liz Truss’s audience with Her Majesty, so that’s probably why it’s in his mind), but Knight’s book poses enough troubling questions to give me pause. To be clear, The Premonitions Bureau is not some schlocky pseudo-scientific manifesto for mysterious powers, and not a word of it is fictionalised. Knight is a highly respected journalist – a staff writer for the globally esteemed New Yorker magazine, in fact – and his book is about a very specific, very curious, very British moment in the history of the study of precognition. “When people ask me what the book’s about,” explains Knight, “I say it’s the story of a psychiatrist in the 1960s who came to believe that some people could see the future. And he designed an experiment to try to capture that. And then it all went terribly wrong.”
The psychiatrist was John Barker, the experiment was the establishment of a quasi-official British Premonitions Bureau, and the result was a mass recording of the public’s (mostly meaningless) premonitions – but also the discovery of two “percipients” whose predictions of calamities were uncannily accurate. “I wanted to write a story that touched on the paranormal and occult, but without an agenda to make you draw any particular conclusion,” insists Knight.
“I’m really not writing about whether premonitions are real or not. I’m writing about the human experience of believing that they’re real, and how that changes your life. And, in Barker’s case, whether it can influence your death.”
Because the “went terribly wrong” bit of Barker’s experiment concerns the moment when those two percipients both, separately, foresaw Barker’s imminent death. (Knight was in the dusty silence of Cambridge University Library, he says, when he came across “a brown envelope marked ‘Miscellaneous Files of the Society for Psychical Research’, and there was a copy of this memo from Barker saying he’d just been told he was going to die. Finding that felt like seeing the winning goal in the Cup final.”)
A spoiler alert seems a little redundant in a book about premonitions, so suffice it to say that Barker did indeed die very soon after. In another arresting irony, he had long believed – and published a book to the effect – that one could be literally scared to death, and it’s hard to think of a more alarming occurrence than being told by two people you believe to be prescient that your time has come. Knight is just as interested, though, in the percipients themselves, in “what it feels like to think that you might be sensing the future. If you can see signs everywhere pointing to what’s going to happen next, and no one else can, you’re considered mad. And in many cases, you probably are. So you don’t say anything. And then if something does happen, you feel this great guilt.” (The Bureau was set up, in the aftermath of Aberfan, with the idea that it might be able to provide early warnings of future disasters.) If that all sounds a bit remote, reckons Knight, it’s not. “It’s actually quite a common occurrence.
There’s a huge number of us who carry something inexplicable in our lives or our family’s lives: the coincidence that led you to meet your partner, or that time [your grandfather] knew something bad was going to happen that day so he didn’t get on that train. Most of us inhabit both a logical, rational world and at the same time one where we think maybe things are connected. The book engages with those questions, and with the neuroscience and psychoanalysis behind them, as well as the history and philosophy there.”
If you think this could only have happened in the 60s, Knight has news for you on that front, too: “These things move in waves. The great flowering of psychical thinking and spiritualism was from 1900 to 1930, the first shattering 25 years of the century, with World War One and that dramatic social and technological change. Then it’s no coincidence that the 60s, when the events of this book take place, were a time of similarly dramatic social and technological change, and the threat of being wiped out by nuclear war.
“I think there’s a reason why this kind of magi- cal thinking or yearning for explanations comes to the surface and gets into the heads of scien- tists and otherwise eminently rational people at these times. It’s too early to say whether we’re living through another of those moments now, but you could certainly make a plausible argument for it. We are due another one – and the conditions seem right.”
ED GRENBY
To receive this month’s choice,The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight, for £14.99 (incl p&p), sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed — and enjoy free delivery with your book sent giftwrapped to your door.
No, not the Book Club film about 50 Shades of Grey – but an actual book club, complete with specially selected books, the chance to discuss with other members and even an overall saving on the price.
Everyone knows that book clubs help motivate you to do the reading and help you make new friends – but a good book club can be a gateway to so much more, and impact the most unexpected areas of your life.
The RT Book Club has been running since 2019 and featured over 40 books to date, many of them signed or with signed bookplates.
Each book is a new release especially selected by the RT team for our readers, which can be enjoyed on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed.
3-month and 6-month trial membership options are also available either as a gift or to try the club out – but if you’re still unsure there are plenty of reasons to give a book club a go and benefit your life in the most unlikely of ways.
Book settings may well become your next travel destination
Book clubs can do far more than enrich the mind – and may well stimulate all your senses by influencing your next choice of holiday destination. Sure pilgrimages to film locations are popular, but visits to book settings are also a common pastime, with Outlander, Angels & Demons and, of course, Harry Potter prompting fan trips all over the world.
Perhaps Julie Andrews’ memoir Home Work will inspire your own journey to Hollywood? Jonathan Agnew and Phil Tufnell’s Test Match Special might just tempt you to watch some international cricket live? Monty Don’s latest book may just inspire you to visit our nation’s many lovely gardens?
Reading isn’t just a hobby, but a gateway to a whole new world – and in some cases, these new worlds might just become a reality.
Reading is good for the brain – in more ways than one
Hobbies don’t need to be physical exercise to be healthy – and reading is one of the most mentally stimulating leisure activities out there. One study published in the National Library of Medicine has found a link between reading and structural brain development, while a Tohoku University study has found that seniors who read daily improved cognitive functioning and may even have a lower risk of diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
It’s not just your brain development that reading can benefit, but your emotional development also – a study by The New School for Social Research has shown that reading fiction increases your ability to empathise, as experiencing other perspectives in literature allows a heightened ability to understand how others feel in real life also.
Book clubs can broaden your horizons
Reading may give you new perspectives when it comes to understanding other people, but it can also open your eyes when it comes to the literary world. Book clubs are renowned as a way to explore new genres and styles that you likely would have overlooked, as well as providing the motivation to actually read this new selection rather than adding it to your backlog that you know you’ll never finish.
The RT Book Club includes both novels and non-fiction books, and while several (but not all!) are linked to shows and figures from our TV screens they still cover a wide variety of genres, styles and topics. So from showbiz autobiographies to thoughtful novels to historical accounts, there’ll always be something different to keep you on your toes – you may even find a brand new favourite that you’d never have considered in a million years!
Reading can lead to self-improvement
Reading more often obviously will expand your vocabulary and improve your grammar, but can also provide several unexpected benefits. Book clubs can boost teamwork and have been used by businesses across the world to improve efficiency, so are a sure-fire way to build relationships even if it is online.
Reading, of course, is also one of the best ways to improve your writing, which will come as a welcome relief to anyone who uses the skill in their line of work. It’s also highly recommended for anyone who writes fiction in their leisure time, or may even be considering penning a novel – reading different styles, and then dissecting storylines, characters and writing choices with others is one of the best English Literature classes available as an adult.
Reflect not just on books, but society as a whole
While reading may seem to only offer immediate benefits to your writing and vocabulary skills, it is one of the rare hobbies that can provide you with an education not just in the realm of words but about the entire world. Depending on the book topic you may find yourself pondering politics, debating history or reflecting on society at large, all from the comfort of your living room.
Going online to the members' discussion area can then open your eyes to interpretations you hadn’t even considered, and provide you with perspectives from all over the country.
Socialise with ease online
The RT book club has an exclusive members' discussion area to allow you to share your thoughts online about each month’s book. This of course allows you to socialise with others who share your passion, prompting potential friendships and deep conversations, all within an exclusive community where you can feel free to reach out for any queries or issues you have with the book at any time.
As an online book club, this may be a better option for anyone who might be nervous about discussing books in person in front of large groups and eases the pressure by allowing you to reply and formulate your opinions at your own pace. Best of all it is far easier to invite guest speakers to online book clubs – we often have exclusive webchats with the authors themselves, as well as signed copies!
A break from life – and stress
Don’t forget that after all reading is meant to be fun! Books are a fantastic way to temporarily take a break from real life and retreat to a more idyllic literary world and have long been used to help combat stress – especially before bed, as The Mayo Clinic recommends to aid restful sleep.
Reading is also a great excuse for a snack or maybe even a glass of wine or two – perhaps you could even make your food themed?
Sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed.
Join today and each month or quarter we select a book that we think our readers will love, and deliver - for free - giftwrapped to your door.
If you do not wish to pay via paypal, you can call us on 03302 232 639 to join the Book Club.
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One of the biggest days in British history was a long time coming. The 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth had acceded to the throne in February 1952, following the death of her father, King George VI.
She was Queen for more than a year before the detailed plans for her Coronation fell into place on Tuesday 2 June 1953: the ceremony itself in Westminster Abbey, the coach procession through central London, the public celebrations and street parties, as well as the BBC’s live TV broadcast that would reach homes not just in the UK but across the world.
The occasion saw an unprecedented surge in the sales and rentals of television sets, with more than 20 million Brits glued to their own or their neighbours’ screens.
Radio Times, of course, had it all covered. Now articles and beautiful illustrations from our 1953 Coronation Number have been reproduced in a new souvenir issue, Radio Times: Her Majesty The Queen – along with many other moments from the monarch’s 70-year reign and her lifetime on air. To buy your copy see below…
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Tongue is never far from cheek in the book, as hinted at by the title What Is Your Problem?. But there’s a semi-serious point smuggled in there too, says Dee. “I think it’s good to be reminded that you can approach your problems with humour. Sometimes it can be more useful to stand back and laugh at your situation than take it too seriously. Everyone can relate to the idea of being in a bad place, and then going out with a mate, having a cup of coffee, telling them what’s going on and finding that you’re actually laughing about it. That can be as helpful as drilling down into the issue and unpacking it. I’m certainly not debunking psychotherapy or counselling: counsellors can be miracle-workers, and I would never hesitate to recommend it to people who need it. I’m just saying that sometimes we can approach these things ourselves – we’re stronger than we think.”
And occasionally, he says, the solution to our troubles is even simpler. “You know, ‘Pull yourself together’ is often a pretty good piece of advice. ‘Crack on’ is perhaps just what we need to hear. These days mental health seems to get mentioned every other sentence. And that’s great that we’re no longer stigmatising the idea of talking about it; but at the same time we need to be sure we’re not claiming ‘mental health issues’ when in fact they’re just normal emotions like feeling anxious or sad one day. Doing that just belittles serious mental illness.”
If Dee sounds impatient, he’s probably earned the right to be. The I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue chairman has always been open about his own struggles with depression and alcohol, but today Dee is frank too about how therapy helped him (“saved my life”) and Alcoholics Anonymous didn’t. “I benefitted from stepping back from it and realising that I was very depressed and was drinking in a very harmful way, but that that didn’t mean I wasn’t able to have a normal life. I wasn’t relating to what I was hearing at AA, and thought, ‘Well in that case, I’m out.’ “I do still like a glass of wine and a beer, but I’ve learnt that actually I can structure my life so that it’s not what I live for.”
These days, continues Dee, “I’m a contented person” – which is even better than being a happy one, he insists. “Happiness is variable. You can make your child happy by buying her an ice cream. So do you give her ice creams all the time? Obviously not. You actually want her to be contented – and she’s contented because there’s structure in her life and a loving environment. These things are more meaningful, especially as she goes on into adulthood, than having an ice cream every single day.” If it’s a surprise to hear there is actual contentment lurking behind that trademark Dee scowl, it’s the same for him. “It’s a miracle to me that it’s worked out this way. And I’m certainly not advocating my route to anyone else. If someone came up to me and said, ‘I’m in AA, and I read what you said. Should I start drinking again?’, I’d say absolutely not. You stay where you are and do what you’re doing. I’ve got my story and you’ve got yours; let’s both do our own thing.” He ponders the happiness vs contentment ice cream analogy again, and adds: “Have a Cornetto instead.”
ED GRENBY
To receive this month’s choice, What Is Your Problem? by Jack Dee, for £14.99 (incl p&p), sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed — and enjoy free delivery with your book sent giftwrapped to your door.
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Osman’s untruth concerns the secret identity of the Club’s real-life inspiration. He’s previously claimed to have got the idea after visiting a friend’s mum at her old people’s home – but under intensive interrogation from Radio Times (“Why would you visit someone else’s mother?”) he admits his deception: “OK, it was actually my mum. I’ve been drawn into my own subterfuge. The truth is, I visit her all the time, and her retirement community reminds me of an Agatha Christie location: it’s a beautiful little village in Sussex. But the people who live there have done extraordinary things with their lives – they’re underestimated now, but they have these incredible skills and experience and wisdom, and that combination makes for the perfect detective.” Could Mrs Osman and her pals really crack a case then? “Could four very intelligent people solve a murder? Yes. Could they get away with everything that happens in the books? Probably not, but neither could Holmes or Poirot in theirs. The spirit of what happens here is true, though, because it’s about new friendships in later life, making mischief, being overlooked and taking advantage of that, and about a last hurrah.”
He makes retirement homes sound fun – does he believe that’s true? “God, yeah. There’s so much gossip, so many people, so much of a laugh. My mum is just surrounded by people: any time she wants, she can open the front door and she’s got mates there; any time she wants, she can close it and watch Morse. It’s like university but without the work. Honestly, I’m 50 now and in 15 years’ time I want to be in one of those places.” Right now he lives in south London with his partner – that ’s another RT exclusive, as he’s told previous interviewers he lives alone. “No, I’m actually very happily in a relationship, have been for ages. But you can’t believe everything you read. I saw once, on my Wikipedia page, that I was Oprah Winfrey’s nephew.”
And what about reviews? Does he believe them? I point out a particularly stinging one for his new novel, The Man Who Died Twice, from fellow crime writer Joan Smith in The Sunday Times (“a novel so flawed that it is hard to believe it would ever have been published without a celebrity’s name on the cover,” she called it). “That did upset me,” admits Osman. “It felt very personal, like it wasn’t really a reflection on the book, but a vindictive attack on me. Success doesn’t armour-plate you against feelings, and I do get upset by things.” Other peers have been kinder, he says. There are several semi-secret societies of crime writers, each with their own sacred oaths and initiation rites – “and I’ve been very warmly welcomed,” says the new boy. “They knew I wasn’t some cynical interloper, that I was a real lover of crime fiction. So they’ve revealed all their secrets: the special handshakes, how to really murder people, all that stuff… “The lovely thing about books,” continues the game-show-producer-turned-presenter-turned novelist, “is that writers aren’t rivals. TV’s much more cut-throat, because you’ve only got a few channels and limited slots. In telly, I’ve got rivals till the end of time. Pointless and The Chase have been rivals for 12 years.”
In fact Osman only “gave up the day job” as a TV production executive last December. So is the brains behind House of Games, Eight out of Ten Cats and Deal or No Deal still fizzing with ideas for quizzes? “TV development is rarely sitting around the table talking about monkey tennis. It’s spending three weeks scientifically testing a concept in every possible way – not just some people with beards and glasses saying, ‘I know! How about Ben Fogle in a submarine?!’” He pauses. “Which, by the way, is a good idea.” The viewer’s loss, at least, is the reader’s gain. The Man Who Died Twice is every bit as deliciously funny, warm and unputdownable as its prequel – and Osman has signed up for at least another two. “After that, we’ll see. I don’t want The Thursday Murder Club to become like Murder She Wrote, with coincidental homicides every five minutes. “I want every book to lead on from the previous one, so I’m just getting them into deeper and deeper water, and at some point they will run out of available oxygen. But not for a little while yet, I hope. And when they do, I might try to launch a new detective, maybe a whole new series. Who knows, perhaps it’s DCI Fogle and his underwater detection agency…”
ED GRENBY
To receive this month’s choice, The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, sign up to the RT Book Club by the 4 of October, on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed — and enjoy free delivery with your book sent gift-wrapped to your door.
To order The Man Who Died Twice for £17.50 including p&p without joining the RT Book Club, click here or call 03302 232 639*
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The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show – featuring Elton John, Angela Rippon, the cast of The Good Life and a host of heavyweight broadcasters dressed as sailors singing There Is Nothing like a Dame – encapsulates everything we still hold dear about Britain’s greatest comic duo: their daftness, daring and deceptive guile. “Affectionate mockery was what they did best,” says Barfe , author of Sunshine and Laughter: the Story of Morecambe and Wise. “They’re comfortable but not cosy. There is a little spike, a little edge, about them.”
Sunshine and Laughter is a fascinating account of the career of two men we feel we know so well. Ernest Wiseman started out in the 1930s in a double act with his father, before going solo. Around the same time, a bespectacled boy, born John Eric Bartholomew, accompanied by his formidable mother Sadie, was also making an impression as a junior member of the comedy circuit.
The pair first met as teenagers in 1940 and soon began working together. Back then, Wise was the taller and more successful of the two; in many ways, he would always remain the senior partner. “Ernie was the problem solver, the businessman, and incredibly easy-going,” says Barfe. “Eric was the worrier.” On screen, Wise was the sensible one and Morecambe was cast as an agent of chaos – but in reality, the reverse was true. “Ernie loved disruption, he was much more freewheeling,” says Barfe. “Ernie would roll with it, whereas Eric liked things locked down tight.”
It was Morecambe who got “terribly cold feet” over the legendary sketch with André Previn, from 1971, fearing that it was under-rehearsed. “They liked a whole week of rehearsal with their guest stars,” says Barfe, who’s also written biographies of Les Dawson and Ken Dodd. “Even Shirley Bassey would come along to the North Kensington Community Centre or the ‘Acton Hilton’ and spent a week quite happily just being around Eric and Ernie. Yes, it was work, but it was also tremendous fun. They were taskmasters but you wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Barfe’s book makes clear the extent to which Eric and Ernie paid their dues. Their first BBC television series in 1954 was fairly disastrous, and it wasn’t until the mid-60s that they found a way of working that put their personal chemistry centre stage. “It took [comedy writer] Eddie Braben and a flash of inspiration,” says Barfe. “Partway through a meeting he said, ‘Why aren’t you like this on television? You two sitting here talking naturally is funnier than you are on television.’ He said, ‘If I can write stuff like this, we’re on to a winner.’”
From that moment, Morecambe and Wise blossomed. Only the occasional shadow encroached on the sunshine. Though the pair made a number of successful appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Eric’s commitment to his young family, as well as his first heart attack in 1968, put paid to any serious efforts to break America. A more lasting regret was their failure on the big screen: the duo made several films, but never managed to capture the magic they exuded on stage and television.
Throughout it all, there were no tiffs, no scandals. “They were good Northern boys!” says Barfe. Had Morecambe not died in 1984, 15 years before Wise, following a third heart attack, what might the future have held? “They were quite consciously slowing down. They had decided 1983 was going to be the last Christmas special. Eric was seeing the warning signs, health-wise, and wanted to take it easy, but he would have happily come out once a year to do something with Ernie. They could have done straight acting. They would have done panel games together. If Eric had lived and was well enough, wouldn’t a Morecambe and Wise revival of ‘The Sunshine Boys’ have been perfect?”
Instead, almost 40 years later, they remain a beloved staple of the seasonal schedules. The key to their longevity, says Barfe, is the fact that there was “no dominant partner. No matter who led or who followed, they were completely in tune with each other. It was a Rolls-Royce of synchronisation. The Christmas specials of 1971, 1976 and 1977 are the three time capsules. In 100 years people will see those and realise why Morecambe and Wise were so funny and so loved. Because I think they are going to stand up for ever.”
GRAEME THOMSON
To receive this month’s choice, Sunshine and Laughter by Louis Barfe, for £21.50 (incl. p&p), sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed — and enjoy free delivery with your book sent gift-wrapped to your door.
To order Sunshine and Laughter for £21.50 including p&p without joining the RT Book Club, click here or call 03302 232 639*
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Rani’s memoir, The Right Sort of Girl, certainly isn’t your usual anodyne celebrity autobiography (“It felt important to talk about something meaningful rather than just ‘And then I moved to London and I got a career in telly and I lived happily ever after’”). Written largely in the form of a letter and lessons to her younger self – chapter headings include Families Are Never Simple, You Can Love Home But Also Desperately Need To Leave, and You Will Party, Whether You’re Allowed To Or Not – it feels refreshingly spontaneous and unfiltered. “That’s because it was an outpouring,” she confirms. “I can’t believe how much I wrote. I obviously had a lot to get off my chest!”
The breezy, no-nonsense style that’s endeared Rani to audiences on Countryfile and Woman’s Hour runs through the book, too. “I was just writing it for myself,” she explains. “I wasn’t really thinking about it being published – which is why I’m so petrified at the moment. I’m sick-to my- stomach nervous, because my life, like everyone else’s, is complicated and messy. And the reader I was most nervous about was my mum. But I’ve spoken to her, and said, ‘Look, I’m going to say all this stuff ’, and she said ‘Say it. Because I never could.’” Rani’s very aware of giving a voice to those who find theirs stifled. “This book is especially for those South Asian kids who’ve never heard their story told, and particularly young girls. But it’s also for people who’ve never had access to this world I grew up in, so they can understand what it means to be a Punjabi lass from Yorkshire.
Hopefully it’s a universal story that anyone who’s ever felt outside anything will relate to. And that’s pretty much every woman, for a start.” If she sounds angry, she explains, that’s because she is. “I’m a TV presenter, so of course I’m normally upbeat — who wants to see a miserable old git doing Countryfile? — but there are definitely burning flames in the pit of my belly. How can there not be, how can we live in this society and not be angry with what’s going on around us? “I’m fuelled and driven by how we women, and particularly women of colour, are constantly told not to be angry, how when we’re cross about injustice, it’s flipped around so that we’re the problem.” Rani won’t name names, not out of cowardice but because there are too many to mention.(“I’ve worked for every single channel, and this is an industry-wide problem,” she sighs.)
Amazingly, she retains a sense of humour about it: “When people talk about diversity, I’ll always say, ‘You’re absolutely right. I’m often the only northerner on the show!’”. And, joyously, she recounts how fans of two of the BBC’s more traditional shows have embraced her. When I started on Countryfile,” she says, “I would get the odd person who felt the need to tell me what they thought about me being on their favourite programme, the odd racist comment, the odd sexist one; but generally people have been really receptive. And with Woman’s Hour, too. It’s so grown-up, so Establishment, it’s the heart of the nation. For a while, I thought, ‘What am I doing here? Are they sure they want me?’. But I’ve had so many people come up and say, ‘We’re delighted to have a voice that reflects us on there.’ “I’m the same myself,” she continues. “I still rush excitedly over to the telly if there’s someone Asian on it. And that’s why seeing a brown lass doing all right on Strictly meant such a lot to Asian people. It’s a national institution, and you don’t see many brown faces on it, certainly not many that do well.”
Defeat still rankles – “Nobody is happy when they’re voted out, let me tell you. It doesn’t matter who you are, that hurts” – but Rani just might have found a way past that. “I often think about doing it again,” she muses. “That would be great: going back and winning it this time.”
ED GRENBY
To receive this month’s choice, The Right Sort of Girl by Anita Rani, for £14.99 (incl. p&p), sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed — and enjoy free delivery with your book sent gift-wrapped to your door.
To order The Right Sort of Girl for £16 including p&p without joining the RT Book Club, click here or call 03302 232 639*
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This jump-starting all happened in a radically new landscape, and my book Nature Cure was the result: a compulsive, written-in-real-time account of a hectic rite of passage [and being republished to mark Mabey’s 80th birthday]. I’d roamed the Chilterns’ ancient beechwoods and chalk hills for half a century, and they’d moulded my being. Now I was adrift in a shapeshifting arena of immense skies and capricious wetlands. The water quickened everything: the urgent flocks of waders, the swell of peat underfoot, the transmutation of field to lake in winter floods, the very notion of a horizon. It seemed a world of limitless possibility. I went out wideeyed each day “off the map and into the territory”, and came back to put it all down on my manual typewriter. I’m still exhilarated when I read my breathless accounts of those days, and relive the thrill of my mind and senses reawakening after two years of dormancy. But I’m unsure now whether I should have called the memoir Nature Cure.
Nature played a minor role in my recovery, which was chiefly the result of love and friendship – and of beginning to write again. The turning point was when my new partner Polly, with an extraordinary leap of insight, sat me down under a tree with a notebook and asked me to keep a diary while she was away. I did, and in a matter of weeks I’d reclaimed who I was: an unrepentant scribbler. Nature Cure is not so much an account of the now fashionable “nature therapy” as it is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story written four decades later than usual. What I found as I came out of my illness was that, in my imagination, nature seemed to be “recovering”, too. It felt more resilient, mischievous, inventive, independent. That was the “cure” of the title. Not the relief of my own misery, but the possibility of escape from our species’ neuroses with our arrogant beliefs that nature is there for our benefit, has no independent agency, and needs us for its very survival.
‘ I was adrift in a shape-shifting arena of immense skies’
The idea of the book first surfaced in an article I wrote just after emigrating to Norfolk. It had the ridiculously pompous title, “Living as if nature really mattered”, and was a mish-mash of my emerging beliefs about other beings as equal neighbours, and the American Deep Ecology tracts I was devouring. But it made the point, and served as a kind of blueprint for the new life I was cobbling together. So I have not changed the title, any more than I have tinkered with the text, which for better or worse is an authentic account of what was happening in that tumultuous year. As for the Waveney Valley, the location where the story is played out, we still live there, and witness its changing fortunes. The fens, which I’ve grown to love, thrive. Lost orchids have returned, ancient connections restored. But the ordinary countryside between is in a state of degeneration.
After what seemed like a change in heart in the early years of the new millennium, agriculture is intensifying again. Ancient hedges are being grubbed out at a rate that rivals that in the bad old days of the 1970s. Grassland is being lost to paddocks and illinformed tree-planting schemes. The hares and golden plover flocks and stubble sparrowhawks that I celebrated have vanished. The chemicaldriven collapse in insect populations is draining the villages of swifts and martins. I’m not sure what kind of book Nature Cure would have been if the scale of these losses had been apparent back then.
At the time of its first publication, in 2005, the book was one of the first in a genre that the press came to label “the new nature writing” – memoirs in which the reflections of the observer were entwined with the observed details of the natural world. I can’t say it seemed that “new” to me, and “new nature writing” is now rightly regarded as a risible and obsolete coining. But the memoir form in which fellow beings also feature is a vital medium for asserting that we are all inextricably part of nature, and for exploring the paradox of bewitching beauty co-existing with existential threat. The challenge for all of us is to keep our prime focus on the natural world, in all its pains and ecstasies, and resist employing it as no more than a mirror for our own feelings.
Extracted from Nature Cure by Richard Mabey (Little Toller, £18)
To receive this month’s choice, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, for £14.99 (incl p&p) — with bookplate signed by the author — sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed and enjoy free delivery with your book sent giftwrapped to your door for your convenience!
You will receive a novel or non-fiction book that we at Radio Times recommend especially for you — one we’re sure you will enjoy. Over a year, the Book Club monthly subscription remains at £14.99 regardless of the book price, representing an overall saving on 12 books. In 2020, our Book Club members saved over £29* and enjoyed reading across many genres, from history and autobiography to contemporary fiction. We also have a brand-new Facebook group† just for members to discuss this month’s book — visit radiotimes.com/bookclubgroup to join.
**Based on publishers’ prices. † Facebook group only available to paying members]]>A woman is taking pictures of him, then she stops and they both run away, laughing. Months later the same woman comes across a notice in her local library advertising a Short Story Slam, where a paying audience votes on their favourite five-minute rendition. She turns up every six weeks for almost a year before she wins £9.87, her share of the takings on the door and, it would transpire, her first earnings from writing.
The idea for the one-man demonstration came from a book/art project called Learning to Love You More, and Claire Fuller and her husband had become involved because it took them out of their comfort zone and they liked that. When that project came to an end, and still seeking a challenge, she entered the Slam because, “There’s kind of that weird sense of achievement that you’ve done something that you would never normally do. And you’ve got away with it. I liked that, and I liked the feeling of having written something.”
Inadvertently, and then via a two-year part-time MA course and a deal with Penguin, she had stumbled out of “marketing” and into a new career, at the age of 40. Her debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the 2015 Desmond Elliott prize. Nominations and lavish praise followed for Swimming Lessons and Bitter Orange. And now her most recent work, Unsettled Ground, has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and she’s on Radio 4’s Front Row this week to talk about it.
‘ I set the characters running… and later find out what the novel is about’
Curiously enough, the book also deals with people being taken out of their comfort zone, but not willingly or for kicks – quite the reverse – and has much to say about modern life and those it has left behind, in this case the rural working class.
“There is an awful lot of fiction that deals with the urban poor,” says Fuller, “but I struggled to find any about the rural equivalent, with no public transport or internet access, library closures and everything else that is being taken away. People still live like this.”
Her characters Jeanie and Julius certainly do: they’re 51-year-old twins, who share a run-down cottage with their mother Dot and live a hand-to-mouth existence from the land and odd jobs, with barely a nod to the 21st century.
Their accommodation, a recurring theme in Fuller’s books, is barely habitable but is rent-free due to an unusual arrangement with the local landowner. And then one morning Dot dies of a stroke, and the twins are left to come to terms with grief, imminent eviction and a world that, in its unseemly rush to embrace “progress”, has forgotten people like this still exist – sans TV, sans bank account, sans everything. Add to the mix the violent death of their father almost four decades previously, a crime and a web of family secrets, and the scene is set.
“I don’t really plan out what’s going to happen,” explains Fuller. “I try to get to know my characters, and then when I have them – that is to say, when I understand and feel for them – I start the book and set them off running. “It’s a little bit scary because I don’t know where it’s going to go until a year and a half later when I’ll finally find out what the novel is all about. But it’s fun to just let them go and see what they do; I find it as exciting as I hope any reader would. I don’t want to question that process because it’s worked for me so far.” That’s probably sensible, because it’s this nervous sense of anticipation and empathy that drives the narrative – with a kind of righteous indignation and energy that rides shotgun to the wonderful descriptive prowess employed by the author.
Fuller’s countryside is not twee or picture-postcard; it’s real and under your feet. From the moment the book opens you are there. She brings us the smells, the earthy substance of a garden fork turning over the soil, the land as something more than just landscape, and an idea of what it means to the vulnerable yet determined Jeanie as she attempts to cling to the idea of belonging and home (no matter how homely) that runs deep in us all.
Julius is less easy to love but not difficult to root for as he faces his own set of challenges brought about by dislocation – although, as Fuller laughs, “Readers seem to care more about the dog. Which says something about the British, I suppose. “I’ve had people email me to say, ‘I’m in the middle of reading your book and I need to know whether the dog survives or not before I carry on.’ And yes, I tell them, you can carry on reading. But the most incredible feedback I’ve had is about Jeanie, from people saying that they cried for her and are still thinking about her. That’s the kind of reaction you want, as you really don’t know until the book’s out there whether it’s going to work.”
For a woman who thrills in leaving her comfort zone, either in person or by proxy through her fictional characters, she may have to change the winning formula for her next book – as she is in grave danger of becoming one of this country’s most consistently fabulous novelists.
BILL BORROWS
To receive this month’s choice, Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller, for £14.99 (incl p&p) — with bookplate signed by the author — sign up to the RT Book Club now on a monthly or quarterly subscription to suit your reading speed and enjoy free delivery with your book sent giftwrapped to your door for your convenience!
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]]>The “Bomber Mafia” (so named by military peers for their sealed-lip secrecy) were a bunch of borderline-renegade US Air Force pilots who, together with some similarly maverick scientists in their orbit, more-or-less invented the idea of precision warfare. With the right tech, airmen and moral fibre, they believed they could defeat an enemy through surgical bombing strikes, and without recourse to the waves of cannon-fodder they’d witnessed dying in the First World War. “Then, much to their surprise,” continues Gladwell, “a war actually breaks out. And they discover that life is not as simple and clean in practice as it is in theory.”
These men were dealing in truly revolutionary concepts, but that of course is Gladwell’s stockin-trade. The author of The Tipping Point and Outliers seems to specialise in zeitgeist-defining “big idea” books, and his new one, The Bomber Mafia – though told with the muscular, driving narrative and fizzingly charismatic (real-life) characters of a movie – is no different. “I don’t draw any grand lessons here, which I usually do in my books. But the story does raise this question about how technology and morality are tied up together. And that has real relevance in the present day, because we now have a group of people in Silicon Valley who have pursued various kinds of revolutions and seem to be completely indifferent to the moral implications of what they’re doing. No one at Facebook, say, seems at all concerned about the ways in which their platform can be used to distort things, or make people unhappy. If you hand over all the decisions to technicians or engineers, though, you get the world you deserve. Moral principles are just not on their radar. And I say that as the son of an engineer.”
Sure enough, the high ideals of the Bomber Mafia soon met the realities of war – and the more ethically ambiguous outlook of the military top brass. “From [British Air Chief Marshal] ‘Bomber’ Harris and Winston Churchill, as well as some on the American side, there was scepticism. Churchill, for instance, was impatient with the dreaming of the Bomber Mafia – because his country was on the line. The Americans were protected across the Atlantic, and could afford to experiment with new ideas. For the British, the stakes were much higher.”
For the Japanese, the stakes were higher still, it turned out, as what was begun by the Bomber Mafia morphed into something they never envisaged – including a napalm attack on Tokyo in 1945 that killed more civilians than the atomic bombs of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. So is the world safer now? Would Dresden, Tokyo or Hiroshima happen today? Would our current leaders have the moral courage for a longer but less fatal war? “Well, there are many millions of us relieved we have an adult in the White House again,” says Gladwell (who lived in England until he was six, but is now a New Yorker). “As for your guy… Boris Johnson is what my mother would’ve called a ‘ginnal’. It’s a Jamaican word for a rascal or rogue, trickster or con man. A troublemaker.”
The problem goes way beyond Washington DC or Downing Street, though, according to Gladwell. “These days we’re not really comfortable thinking in moral terms. Back then, it wasn’t such a stretch, because organised religion was a much stronger part of people’s education, if not their inner lives. They had an innate moral vocabulary, which we don’t have now. “You can see it in this endless debate about ‘cancel culture’, too. Cancel culture is what happens when you have a generation of people who are not raised with a Christian ethic of forgiveness. Forgiveness is so counterintuitive it needs to be taught, and you can only learn it if you are exposed to a body of thought which places forgiveness at its centre. It’s not about being Christian, it’s about being exposed to that idea of forgiveness. Previous generations were educated and encouraged to think in moral terms, such as forgiveness, in a way that isn’t happening at the moment.” Can’t we learn from history, though? Isn’t that why writers write about it? “All authors, I think, do secretly hope that business or political leaders will read our work and be influenced by it. But you know what? Our hopes are routinely dashed.”
ED GRENBY
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