“A gentleman’s hands are [always] clean”






Infectious diseases caused by bacteria have killed well over half of all humans who have ever lived on Earth. Historically, bacterial infections have started major pandemics such as the bubonic plague, which is estimated to have killed 50-60 per cent of the population of Europe during the Black Death in the 14th Century.



And yet when a person in Oregon came down with bubonic plague in 2024 it was a non-event. The pathogen involved was quickly identified and antibiotics given. There was no chain of infection and no epidemic. And the patient lived.



Germ theory is one of the most transformative developments in human history. The story involves heroic insight, pompous stubbornness, meticulous epidemiology, scientific breakthroughs, and on the other side of the ledger, catastrophes of human misery and carnage. So Very Small takes in the panorama from the pandemic to the Petrie dish. So which one is worst scourge of mankind? Smallpox, plague, TB, childbed fever, gangrene, cholera, typhus? Realistically, it depends on which one is knocking at your door. Tim asked Tom Levenson for his candidate when he discussed the book with him via Zoom.



Thomas Levenson – Head of Zeus – £25

I mean, you’ve got’a laugh, aintcha!






Nitrous Oxide made “a picaresque journey from laboratory to lecture hall, variety palace to dentist’s chair.” A substance that does not exist in nature, it fairly blew the minds of the radical scientific community in the late 18th Century when it was isolated and synthesised. Some of them couldn’t decide whether it was more remarkable medicinally or recreationally. What they did know was that it was a wonderful product of a modern scientific sensibility.



It is a story that takes in Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Humphrey Davy, Peter Mark Roget (yes, that Roget), James Watt, and at its centre, the strangely undercelebrated Thomas Beddoes, who becomes the hero of Mike Jay’s delightful account. As the vanguard of modern anaesthesia this ‘laughing gas’ was one of the great boons to mankind, but such is the richness of material that it doesn’t really make much of an appearance until half way through the book. Before that we need to encounter a riot in Birmingham (“it was, like most riots in the 18th Century, unclear what the mob was rioting against”), a wild genius from Penzance, and a highly unorthodox pneumatic medical institute in Bristol. Tim was transported.



Mike Jay – Yale University Press – £11.99

When a book is turned into a film or, in this case, a comic into a television series, there are usually disagreements about which is better, ranging from polite opinions to open cultural warfare. Resident Alien seems to have bridged the gap, or survived the transformation, pretty well: now both a successful TV series and a popular … they used to be called “Comics”, then they graduated to be styled graphic novels (or, as Terry Pratchett said, ‘Big Comics’).



Our hero, Harry Vanderspiegel, is the small town doctor in Patience, Washington State. His side hustle is solving crimes. Harry is also an extra-terrestrial alien. Not the Invade-Earth-and-Subjugate-The-Human-Race kind of alien, nor yet the abducting and unwelcome probing kind. Harry likes us, and he likes his life in Patience, fitting in and making friends.



The trick with Harry is that while the reader (and viewer) sees him for the alien he is, his friends and neighbours don’t notice his difference … oh, and the FBI are after him – it is only a matter of time before his secret is revealed! On one level a throwback to the Dickensian model of serial publication, the comic is a modern version of long-form fiction. Consumable as episodes month by month, or in collected volumes.



Tim sat down with writer Peter Hogan to find out where the idea originally came from and how the process works between writer and artist … and which he prefers, comic or TV (spoiler alert – he’s happy with both!).

Capitalism and government go hand in hand – one feeding the other






Some people think of economic history as a trifle dry, but how can you resist a book that includes quotes like these:



“The love of money (as a possession) is… a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” (Keynes).



“Capitalism is an economic system, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s become a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds.”  (Rund Abdelfatah)



How many critics of Capitalism can you name? I bet you can only think of a very few. Marx and Engels, I suppose. Keynes. Maybe Thomas Picketty in recent years. But how about Rosa Luxemburg; Kondratiev if you have a smattering of economic history; and (in his own, deeply unhelpful way) Milton Friedman?



John Cassidy has put his mind to it and finds so many trenchant critics of Capitalism that he can’t find space for even Max Weber and J K Galbraith. But, as he says, they haven’t derailed the Capitalism juggernaut: it ploughs on, untroubled by the immiseration of the masses or the spoilation of the world we live in. He explains that criticisms of Capitalism are broadly of two kinds – baseball and zoo (you’ll hear what he means in the interview) and, in Capitalism and Its Critics he shows how this syndrome is nothing new.



John Cassidy – Allen Lane – £35:00

Would you kill to be famous?






If we want impossible glamour and corruption we could do worse then 1950’s Hollywood.



A Beautiful Way To Die is a romp of ambition and decadence in which everyone has an agenda and dark secrets. It weaves its magic through carefully-embedded real-life locations and oblique references to real-world Hollywood scandals, telling a lively tale of a dazzling movie star couple, a wannabe starlet, a mystery woman sequestered and brutalised in a sanatorium, a studio fixer and a pill-pushing studio Dr Feelgood.



Tim met Eleni Kyriacou at her publishers to explore this exciting milieu, to discuss the significance of the casting couch, and to carefully tiptoe round spoilers.



I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.



Eleni Kyriacou – Head of Zeuss – £16.99

Wot, no Daleks?!?






If you had a time machine and could return to 1963 you would be surprised at the haphazard genesis of Dr Who. We think of it today as the eternal jewel in the BBC crown, but the show was curiously unloved by the Corporation in its first long run. It only made it to air by the skin of its teeth, and the Head of Drama, having definitively ruled out any ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was livid when The Daleks hove into view. Later, Michael Grade, who hated the show, tried to cancel it and was overruled by the fanbase.



John Higgs is a fan – oh, me too! – and he brilliantly tells the story of Dr Who, the in-universe developments, the production background, that relationship with the BBC, the community of Whovians, and crucially the actors who played The Doctor. John identifies at least three golden ages of Dr Who, and as he says, most shows are lucky to get one. William Hartnell (first doctor) once said, “If I live to be ninety, I think a little of the magic of Dr Who will cling to me.” Subsequent actors, some of them highly distinguished, discovered that Dr Who was that kind of part. The magic clings to them.



John Higgs – Weidenfeld & Nicolson: £25.00

They created each other






Does the world actually need another Beatles book? There are Mongolian peasants in one-yak villages far outside Ulan Bator who could tell you how John and Paul met at the Woolton Church fete in July 1957, and offer a considered opinion of the relative merits of Revolver and Sgt Pepper.



Ian Leslie has performed a marvellous balancing act in telling a story that is in the public domain while bringing a fresh consideration of the relationship between the creative powerhouse of The Beatles. He has listened to Lennon and McCartney’s output as if it were a dialogue between them, and while he doesn’t go so far as to claim that every song is a message from one to the other, this approach throws up fascinating and vivid insight. After exploring the history and processes that forged the greatest musical legacy of the Twentieth Century, Tim found himself compelled to ask the vital question: did John need Paul more than Paul needed John?



Ian Leslie – Faber – £25

Strap in, this is going to be quite a ride!






31 October 2023. “Amongst today’s HR joys is the report from Emma that a departmental SpAd (Special Adviser) went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with a blow-up doll. Just another day at the office, I suppose.”



Well, it’s just another day at the office if you happen to be Chief Whip of His Majesty’s government.



Simon Hart was Member of Parliament for Camarthen West and South Pembrokeshire from 2010 to 2024, and served in Boris Johnson’s cabinet as Secretary of State for Wales, and later was Rishi Sunak’s Chief Whip, during “one of the most tumultuous eras in modern-day Britain.”



“How do you win an 81 seat majority in December 2019, yet burn through three different PMs, concluding with a thorough beating at the hands of an unproven Labour alternative less than five years later?” Simon had a front row seat and kept a diary. He offers fascinating insights into the mechanics of running the government, while also entertaining us immoderately. He is ably assisted in this latter enterprise by the likes of Nadine Dorries who “is of course crazy”, Neil Parish, a decent man who introduced the nation to the concept of tractor porn, and the sublimely deluded Liz Truss.



Simon Hart – MacMillan – £25

If you can’t see it … is it real?






“What does real mean? Is love real? Or magic, or hope, or joy, or the quest for enlightenment? Are any of those things less real just because they’re woven in words?… Fairy stories matter. They’re how we understand what’s true.”



Joanne Harris is serenely unconcerned with the subdivisions of literary genre. Her new book is, yes, a fairytale, but one that breaks through into the real world, the world of the Sightless Folk – as the fairy Folk call us. The war between the Daylight Folk and the Midnight Folk is waged, as it were, in the negatives rather than in the prints.



And that’s where Tom Argent finds them. He is a photographer, and he notices that people and things show up on his negatives which he never saw while he was taking the pictures.



Tom Argent falls for the sheer glamour of one of the Daylight Folk, but he is warned to forget her forever: the alternative is True Love and Certain Death. “Love is not a partnership”, she tells him, “It is a hunting ground, where only the strongest can survive.” So The Moonlight Market is a love story – more than one, really. But not necessarily the love story that Tom thinks it is.



Joanne Harris – Gollancz: Hardback £22.00, Paperback £9.99

Where are we?!?






Why deep South but far North?



Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West?



When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going?



Is the North Pole a real place?



Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it’s always Charlemagne.)



How do we know which way is which?



Jerry Brotton’s delightful new book asks and answers such questions on every page.



Jerry is a Professor at Queen Mary University in London, so Tim went to compare notes on what it means to be a northerner living in the south.



Jerry Brotton – Allen Lane – £20.00

What lies within?






Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature so widely in our visual imagery and iconography.



The human heart, Robin Choudhury tells us, has been “…the dwelling place of the soul, the source of life, a furnace or fermentor providing the heat of living bodies, the source of semen and a repository of deeds. It has become the seat of love and desire.” It has fascinated the greatest minds in history and exercised the genius of the finest artists.



The Beating Heart is an odyssey through the history of apprehending the organ culturally and physiologically, with Leonardo da Vinci providing the perfect point of convergence. Professor Choudhury’s particular insight is that this is the same narrative in different guises.



Robin Choudhury – Head Of Zeus – £35

The sins of the mother are visited upon the children






The Echoes is many things in Evie Wyld’s new novel. It is the rural backwater in Australia where Hannah grew up, and it is also the shape of the book, as the past reverberates down the generations. Philip Larkin said that man hands on misery to man, but for Evie it is mothers who seem to do this. Among the achievements of her novel is to show why they do it and make them sympathetic.



And there’s another echo. When the novel opens Hannah has made a life for herself in London after returning to the area where her grandmother lived as a child. But her London boyfriend Max has been killed in a road accident, and rather to his surprise he finds himself a ghost, haunting the flat where they lived. But as the book progresses, we learn that this isn’t really Max’s novel, it is Hannah’s, and that of her family torn apart by the echoes of the past. We met Evie in a delightful café in South London, very close to where the novel is set, and the day was so lovely that we sat outside for our discussion.



Evie Wyld – Jonathan Cape – £18.99

Black holes aren’t black!






If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can’t escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in space.  



So they’re not holes. And they’re not black.



But they are among the most fascinating and counter-intuitive objects in the universe. Not to mention that they are, in Marcus’s phrase, “the stuff of physicists’ nightmares.” Why? Because the maths tells us that any star a little bigger than the sun will eventually collapse into a singularity – a point of infinite density and infinite temperature. And physicists don’t like infinities. What are they like? How were they investigated? Who figured it all out? And what do we still not know about them?



We talked to Marcus Chown at his publisher’s offices in London.



Marcus Chown – Head Of Zeus – £20

You tell yourself “It’s OK, it’s OK … ” but it’s really not!






Scarlett Thomas is a tricky novelist to categorise. She has a playful, restless, sleeves-rolled-up approach to writing, in which she seldom ducks the dark turn and the big idea. And you can’t doubt her commitment. She once earned an MSc in Ethnobotany by way of research for a book.



Tim has been a fan since the intriguing and dazzling The End Of Mr Y. BooksPodcast caught up with her at her publishers in London and sat down to discuss her new book, The Sleepwalkers.



Islands, secrets, betrayals, sinister goings-on, ambiguities, night-time chases, a disastrous wedding and a fraught honeymoon, there is a hint of the gothic about The Sleepwalkers. There is also the thrilling ambiguity of the (possibly) unreliable narrators.



It’s a hell of a ride … for all concerned.



Scarlett Thomas – Scribner UK – £16.99

The origins of modern death






Let’s face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance.



The advent of industrialisation and the explosive expansion of the great cities had created an unprecedented problem – too many corpses, with all the squalor and disease that came with them. But alongside the practical requirements of disposal there was an increasingly sentimental attitude to the dear departed.



For the Victorians, the dead were only just out of reach, and might yet be contactable. The Society for Psychic Research boasted adherents including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Arthur Balfour, W B Yeats and Arthur Conan-Doyle. These days we tend to think of spiritualism as batshit crazy, but it was, as Adrian Mackinder argues, a modernist response, using the technology and sensibilities of a scientific age to prove the existence of the afterlife and investigate the world beyond the veil.



Death and the Victorians takes a cheerful tour through all the facets of the Victorian approach to death, including resurrection men, ghost hunters, Ouija boards and the strange exhumation of Lizzie Siddal. It is all hugely entertaining.



Adrian Mackinder – Pen Sword Books RRP £25

End of Empire






History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn’t really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era.



There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxious about anarchists and terrorists. There is the looming possibility of war. The complacency of the Conservative hegemony is shattered by the Liberal landslide of 1906, not to mention the rise of the Labour Party, and the hangover of the Boer War has raised a question unfamiliar to the British: “Are we the baddies?” 



Alwyn Turner has a brilliant eye for the emblematic. The cheerful swindler and MP, Horatio Bottomley who “nursed his constituency with a devotion that bordered on bribery.” The creeping respectability of the music-hall (the first ever Royal Command Performance is in 1912). Sherlock Holmes getting mercenary: “I play the game for the game’s own sake”, he said while the old Queen was on the throne, but by 1901 he is accepting payment for his investigations.



Turner turns a powerful spotlight on this neglected decade (and a half.) Our most entertaining historian characteristically finds the mood of the nation in popular songs and novels as much as newspapers and parliamentary debate. In his company the Edwardian era comes alive.



This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Dublin Castle Pub in Camden.



Alwyn Turner – Profile Books     £25:00

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. It’s risk!






Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobson’s new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is rightly celebrated for his dialogue and, as so often before, it is rich with allusion and steeped in his passion for English literature. The novel is explicitly and unabashedly a love story and love was what Howard most wanted to talk about when we met.



           “The minute you fall deeply in love … melancholy strolls into the garden”.



For Lily and Sam love strikes with a thunderclap. Lily is in love at first sight. Sam takes a couple of days longer. Both in relationships past their sell-by date, they embark upon an extraordinary affair that they are convinced will last forever.



Howard Jacobson seems incapable of writing a bad sentence (although he tells us that it’s just that we don’t get to see them.) His latest book shows him still in full literary flight.



Howard Jacobson Jonathan Cape RRP £18.99

Was George Harrison really the “Economy Beatle”?






Philip Norman wrote Shout!, the first grown-up biography of The Beatles, shortly before John Lennon was murdered. People told him he was crazy, that The Fabs were yesterday’s news, that everybody already knew everything there was to know about the band. He wasn’t crazy. Fifty-three years after they broke up The Beatles are still an industry, or as Philip puts it, practically a religion.



Even today there is passionate disagreement about George Harrison. There are those who point to the triumphant first solo album, All Things Must Pass, as proof that he was always Lennon and McCartney’s equal and was unfairly sidelined in the band. And others will argue that anybody would have been overshadowed by the powerhouse songwriting partnership, and that he doesn’t need to be John or Paul to be an indispensable part of The Greatest Show On Earth.



John Lennon said that Something was the best song on Abbey Road. Here Comes The Sun is the most downloaded Beatles track. On the other hand, you have to be a real George fan to hear anything worthwhile in Only A Northern Song or Blue Jay Way.



So how did the fourteen year old kid who fought for his place in the Quarrymen become the Beatle most resistant to playing live? How did he come to break the First Commandment of the Beatle fraternity? How did he become one of the most important British film producers of the 1980’s? Philip Norman calls him ‘The Economy Beatle’ and he has written a beautiful life of the study in contradictions that was George Harrison.



This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at 21Soho, in association with Walthamstow Rock n Roll Book Club. With help from various parties, including www.meetthebeatlesforreal.com



Philip Norman ‎  Simon & Schuster UK £25.00
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