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Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked with Complicité, Florence + the Machine, Beyoncé, U2; designed installations at Tate Modern, the Serpentine, the V&A, Trafalgar Square, the Imperial War Museum and the UN General Assembly; sets for the ROH, the Met and La Scala. Etc. Etc.
She spoke to Magnus about her recent book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, published by Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. It is a miracle of book design and making, exceptional for its production values, careful artistry and sheer technical whizz and exuberance. Thames & Hudson’s commissioning editor called it “the most complex book production” he’s seen in his 28 years with the publishing house.
Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena
Music:
U2, Beautiful Day, performed live in 2001 at the Fleet Center, Boston, MA, USA
Stormzy, Blinded By Your Grace, Pt.2, performed live in 2018 at the BRIT Awards, London
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Casement was one of the first to expose the horrors of the Belgian Congo and the Peruvian rubber industry. In 1911 he was knighted; five years later he would be executed in Pentonville Prison for conspiring with the Germans to provide arms for the Easter Rising. His fraught life — as a humanitarian, a closeted queer man and an Irish Nationalist — is the subject of Roland Philipps' fantastic new biography, Broken Archangel. We are delighted that he has returned to the podcast for a second time (after Victoire in 2021) to speak to Johnny about the book.
Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Damien Dempsey, Banna Strand
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Fehlende Folgen?
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A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland, a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and often witty account of the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewhere.
Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: The Song of the Stakhanovite Unit
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The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing is a brilliant biography of a complicated man. It's not a cradle-to-grave doorstopper, but the story of the publisher's life through twelve books, including his mother's diary and Lolita.
Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Kleine Dreigroschenmusik: II. Die Moritat von Mackie Messer
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Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul. It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as the process of ‘catching souls’.
Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Nick Drake, When the Day Is Done
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Marina spoke with Laura Freeman about her new book, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Remarkably, this is the first biography of Jim Ede ever to appear. It’s a marvellous book — already a shop favourite this summer — studded with anecdotes: Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth arguing over who first put a hole in their sculpture; studio visits to Brancusi and Picasso; a hypochondriac David Jones; the Tate flood; etc.
Interviewed by Marina Scholtz
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: César Franck, Prélude, FWV 21
Photo credit: Paul Allitt
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Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians, his first book, was an eye-watering collection of houses and gardens from Tangier to Milan and the Dolomites… each scene a private space: tasteful, indulgent, never grandiose. Now the great aesthete has turned his eye to the Aegean with Haute Bohemians: Greece: Interiors, Architecture, and Landscapes. It is, of course, sumptuous.
We are delighted that Miguel has recorded a podcast with us to mark the book’s publication and - another delight - that his interviewer is Sofka Zinovieff. Both are great friends of the shop, and we are immensely grateful to them.
Interviewed by Sofka Zinovieff
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Sofia Vebo, I Tabakiera
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It’s a few months since we’ve given a new podcast but we’re delighted to break the silence with a conversation with Margaret Jull Costa, the distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese, about the Spanish writer Javier Marías.
Javier was a client at John Sandoe’s from the mid-1990s, soon after his work first started appearing in English with the Harvill Press. Although he rarely came to the UK, we continued to send him books in Madrid regularly until his death last year. His work is deeply engaged with England, MI6, Oxford, detective stories, and the mysteries of interpretation and translation. His last work to be published (in March this year) is Tomás Nevinson, which is a sequel to Berta Isla. These two extraordinary books have many of the same preoccupations as his trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow – which I described in the Spectator as a work of genius when I reviewed it. But the best place to start reading him is probably his first novel to be published in the UK, All Souls.
Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Cover photograph by Marzena Pogorzaly
Music: Chubby Checker, Hucklebuck
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The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a discursive and extraordinarily erudite book on an abstruse but delightful subject: those who collect, hoard, deal or care for astonishing manuscripts and illuminated books. His cast includes a Greek forger, a French priest, a rabbi, and indeed a prince… De Hamel is tremendously engaging and often funny.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Joachim Held, Das Ander Buch. Ein New Künstlich Lautten Buch, 1549: Nach Willen Dein
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George Balanchine’s life cut the twentieth century in two. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. Mr B.: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century is more than a biography, and more than a book about ballet. It’s about a changing century and a revolutionary approach to art. Magnus talks to Jennifer Homans – ballet critic for The New Yorker – about her brilliant, intense and wonderfully readable book.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music, in order of appearance:Igor Stravinsky, Claire Quellet, Sandra Murray: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (version for Piano 4 hands): V. Rondes printanieres (Spring Rounds)Igor Stravinsky, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez: Concerto in E-Flat Major “Dumbarton Oaks”: I. Tempo Giusto
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A History of Water is a riddling title but the subtitle, Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History, points towards its rich cultural and historical context.Edward Wilson-Lee is a Cambridge academic who specialises in making big stories out of archival minutiae. His superb new book follows the paths of two men in sixteenth-century Portugal. One, a humane and intellectually curious archivist to the King, was found dead in 1574 after falling foul of the Inquisition. The other was a rogue who become the Portuguese national poet. Beyond its intrigue as a murder investigation, this is a spectacular portrait of the world's expansion during the period, and how the imperial attitudes that resulted might have been otherwise.
Interviewed by John de Falbe
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Josquin Des Prez, Sanctus "D'ung aultre amer"
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We are delighted to bring you a new podcast with Karina Urbach, author of Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook. It tells the remarkable story of her Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished – for decades - under a false Aryan name. Dr. Urbach is an historian at the University of London; her book is expertly researched, using international archives, family papers, interviews, etc and has an extraordinary range – from Shanghai in the 1930s to Dachau, Vienna to Lake Windermere, the Kindertransport, the US intelligences services, publishing protocols under the Nuremberg laws, emigration and the creation of new lives in new worlds.Interviewed by Arabella von Friesen
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), Act II: Zuhälterballade performed by the Dreigroschenoper Band in 1928
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Laura Beatty could turn straw into gold. In Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher, she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. She speaks to Johnny about her pursuit of this forgotten figure, through markets and cobbled streets, via Chaucer and George Eliot...
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Mikis Theodorakis and Thanasis Vasilas, Galazio Taximi
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Vashti speaks to Magnus about her new memoir, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live. From London in the Swinging Sixties to a hippie retreat in the Outer Hebrides: she and her partner travelled – slowly – by horse and wagon. She gave up music, disillusioned with the pop industry, until her 1970 album was rediscovered thirty years later.
This podcast is particularly exciting for us because, as we discovered while recording it, Vashti once worked in (what is now) John Sandoe's. The art room on the ground floor used to be a veterinary clinic; she worked there after leaving her record label in the 60s and before leaving London altogether.
We have a number of signed copies so please telephone, email or order online if you would like one.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music, in order:
Vashti Bunyan, I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind
Some Things Just Stick In your Mind
Train Song
Rainbow River
Rose Hip November
Just Another Diamond Day
Here Before
I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind
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Dame Eileen is joined by the novelist Salley Vickers to talk about Will She Do?: Act One of a Life on Stage. It is a marvellous memoir, beginning with her youth in Tottenham and ending when her theatrical career takes off. Forthright, transparent, dry, funny... there is nothing remotely precious about Dame Eileen’s account of herself. It is a delight!
Please email, telephone (+44 (0)20 7589 9473) or order online if you would like a copy.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Dusty Springfield, Don't Let Me Lose This Dream
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Johnny once wrote of Robert Edric that 'his was the most significant body of work from a novelist in a generation.' He has written over twenty novels; My Own Worst Enemy is his first memoir. He spoke to Johnny about growing up in Sheffield in the 60s, as well as books, food, friendships, and what it's like to write about your own family.
Please email, telephone (+44 (0)20 7589 9473) or order online if you would like a copy.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Leo Kottke, Machine No. 2
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Salley Vickers wrote her latest novel in a Wiltshire cottage during lockdown. She talks to Johnny about the importance of gardening while writing, Shropshire's historic pagan landscapes, and the complications of family relationships.
Click here to order a copy of The Gardener; choose to collect from Sandoe's or have us post it to you.
Two sisters buy a rambling house in the Welsh Marches. One decides to bring the neglected garden back to life with the help of an Albanian migrant living in the nearby village. The work allows her space to contemplate her complex relationship with her sister and their difficult upbringing. Characteristically evocative and perceptive.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Nick Drake, Man In A Shed
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In anticipation of Christmas and the excitement of the coming weeks, we are thrilled to present a reading of one of Eva Ibbotson’s short stories. Some of our most obliging customers will already know her as an author of unparalleled charm and humour. Who else could combine an immense fish, a blunderbuss, love, moustaches and a vast, rose-sprigged chamberpot? A feast of Central European sensibility that will make you long to sip coffee and drift away all afternoon on a Biedermeier sofa... We have the right to post this magnificent piece of transporting bliss until the end of January, and we hope you enjoy it quite as much as we do.
Introduction by Arabella von Friesen, read by John de Falbe, and edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Johann Strauss II, Tales from the Vienna Woods piano version
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2021 marks 200 years since the Greek Revolution and Mark Mazower's new book - The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe - is as timely as it is thrilling, expertly researched and vividly told. He spoke to Johnny de Falbe about this first 'romantic' European revolution.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music: Marika Ninou, Soúroupo Me Sinnephiá
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Some may have supposed that Thubron had done his last Big Journey (he is now 82), but this is arguably his biggest yet, and most arduous. Indomitable, venerable, he follows this immense river from its source in remote Mongolian bogs to where it emerges in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East. It is a complicated journey, much of it surrounded by poverty, desolation, wrecked environments, social collapse and historical contortions in spite of the natural wonders of the landscapes through which he passes. CT is always fascinating and compelling, and this introduction to a world scarcely known to the West is an astonishing feat.
We have a limited number of signed copies. Click here to order the book online, or get in touch by telephone or email to reserve a copy.
Edited by Magnus Rena
Music, in order:
Orkiestra Moskva, Na sopkach Mandzurii
Maxim Troshin, The Hills of Manchuria
Nikolai Nazarov, Separate Exemplary Ochestra of USSR Defense Ministry, On the Hills of Manchuria
Alexander Zlatovski, On the Hills of Manchuria
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