Best Simon Higgs Podcasts (2025)

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Thomas Levenson – So Very Small: How humans discovered germs, uncovered infectious diseases, and deluded themselves that we had conquered them 40:45

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2M ago40:45

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“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 …

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Mike Jay – Free Radicals – How A Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science 43:46

3M ago43:46

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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…

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Peter Hogan – Resident Alien

3M ago

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They walk among us … possibly. 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 …

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John Cassidy – Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World

4M ago

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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 bec…

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Eleni Kyriacou – A Beautiful Way To Die

5M ago

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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, te…

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John Higgs – Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who

6M ago

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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 defini…

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Ian Leslie – John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs

6M ago

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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 b…

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Simon Hart – Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip 36:30

7M ago36:30

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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 ende…

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Joanne Harris – Moonlight Market 25:49

9M ago25:49

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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 …

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Jerry Brotton – Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction 36:06

10M ago36:06

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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 wh…

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Robin Choudhury – The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ

11M ago

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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,…

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Evie Wyld – The Echoes

1y ago

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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.…

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Marcus Chown – A Crack In Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage 37:35

1+ y ago37:35

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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-intu…

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Scarlett Thomas – The Sleepwalkers 28:55

1+ y ago28:55

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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 ha…

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Adrian Mackinder – Death and the Victorians 32:27

1+ y ago32:27

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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 a…

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Alwyn Turner – Little Englanders – Britain in the Edwardian Era 39:35

1+ y ago39:35

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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…

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Howard Jacobson – What Will Survive of Us 32:21

1+ y ago32:21

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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 e…

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Philip Norman: George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle

2y ago

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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 b…

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Sarah Ogilvie – The Dictionary People – The Unsung Heroes Who Created The Oxford English Dictionary 35:30

2y ago35:30

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A goldmine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars and, above all, readers! In a time before the internet, the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was the Wickipedia of its day, crowdsourcing its contributions from thousands of readers across the world. Over decades, millions of slips inscribed with words and quotations poured into a met…

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Mike Jay – Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind 32:35

2y ago32:35

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Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! 😉 We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950’s. Timothy Leary in the ‘60’s, Hunter S Thompson in the ‘70’s, those two guys who started the craze for smoking cane-toad venom in ‘90’s. Investigators who became their own guinea pigs. But “the heroic tradition of discovery”, as Mike Jay p…

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Neil Jordan – The Well Of Saint Nobody 23:50

2y ago23:50

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Have you never forgotten someone you’ve slept with? Neil Jordan is best known as an internationally famous film director, of course – The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire and many others. But he is also an accomplished novelist. The Well Of St Nobody is a story of legend, of music and eroticism, of consequences and of identity. “T…

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Cathi Unsworth – Season Of The Witch: The Book Of Goth

2y ago

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Margaret Thatcher and Goth Culture It was the Age of Thatcher, and beyond the playgrounds of the red-braces wide boys and the Sloane Square privileged, it was grim. Unemployment was a weapon in the class war. The Yorkshire Ripper ran riot. Bitter industrial disputes divided communities, while the police was brutally remade into a national instrumen…

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Lawrence Krauss – The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos 41:14

2+ y ago41:14

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Lawrence Krauss – Head Of Zeus – £20.00 Professor Lawrence Krauss has made major contributions to the field of theoretical physics and is one of the world’s great scientific communicators with a gift for illuminating complex ideas. His new book, The Known Unknowns makes a tour d’horizon of the frontiers of current knowledge, touching on such questi…

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Barry Forshaw – Simenon: The Man, The Books, The Films: A 21st Century Guide 26:35

2+ y ago26:35

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Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books – £12.99 Is there any man or woman in England who knows more about crime writing than Barry Forshaw? Here at The Books Podcast he is our go-to man. He is also delightful company. Simenon’s Maigret books are the most successful non-anglophone crime series in the world. Easily up there with Sherlock Holmes and Philip M…

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Joanne Harris – Broken Light 22:53

2+ y ago22:53

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Joanne Harris – Broken Light – Orion £20.00 If every piece about Joanne Harris starts by reminding us that she is the author of Chocolat, she can live with that. It might be close to a quarter of a century ago, but it was a dazzling success and made her a household name, while the film adaptation took her to the Oscars, where Alfred Molina made sur…

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Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success And Failure From Butler to Corbyn 29:44

3y ago29:44

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Steve Richards – Atlantic Books – £10.99 Steve Richards’ last book was an entertaining and penetrating discussion of the last ten Prime Ministers (or at any rate, the last ten at the time of publication – we’ve had a couple more since then.) But as he writes in his new book, “Most routes to Number 10 are blocked.” But some of the nearly men and wom…

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Joel Meadows – Tripwire 30th Anniversary 16:38

3y ago16:38

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Joel Meadows Heavy Metal Entertainment £35.99 Tripwire is thirty, and we were intrigued when this beautiful anniversary book arrived at The Books Podcast. What is Tripwire, you ask? It’s a… well, it’s a magazine. Hm… funny name for a magazine. What sort of magazine? A slightly geeky magazine. Geeky? OK, it’s a magazine for anybody who shares the in…

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David Hepworth – Abbey Road: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Famous Recording Studio 29:57

3y ago29:57

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David Hepworth – Bantam Press – £25 The world has many holy places – Mecca, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Wetherspoons on King St in Hammersmith – but for some of us these are all trumped by Number 3 Abbey Rd in St John’s Wood. EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios. Even today musicians and bands – good bands – are …

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Louise Willder – Blurb Your Enthusiasm – an A-Z of Literary Persuasion 27:36

3y ago27:36

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Louise Willder – OneWorld – £14.99 Quick review of Louise’s checklist of adjectives not to be used in a blurb: breathtaking, spellbinding, dazzling, powerful, beautiful. So I can’t say it’s any of those. Readable? Well, as she points out, it’s a book. Darkly comic. That just means unpleasant, doesn’t it? I also can’t accuse it of ‘mordant wit’. Alt…

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Nick Wallis – The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail 39:19

3+ y ago39:19

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Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25 It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, obliged to pay thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds “back” that they never stole…

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Rachel Gross – Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage 27:31

3+ y ago27:31

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Rachel Gross – W W Norton – £19.99 There comes a time in every woman’s life when her body bumps up against the limits of human knowledge. In that moment, she sees herself as medicine has seen her: a mystery. An enigma. A black box that, for some reason, no-one has managed to get inside.” This was the experience of Rachel Gross, who found that the s…

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Howard Jacobson – Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings 35:21

3+ y ago35:21

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Howard Jacobson – Jonathan Cape – £18.99 It is striking that one of our finest novelists didn’t publish his first novel until he was nearly forty, and characteristically, he was ticking off literature’s late starters as he passed them by. Reading Howard Jacobson, you would say that he was born to be a writer, and he would have concurred. Mother’s B…

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Simon Mason – A Killing In November 20:44

3+ y ago20:44

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Simon Mason – Riverrun – £14.99 A beautiful girl is strangled in the Provost’s lodge in an Oxford College while the college is shmoozing a billionaire Emirati. It is a situation which calls for delicate handling, so it is perhaps a shame that new DI Wilkins is sent by mistake to take charge of the investigation. A town and gown setting. An odd coup…

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Dr Thomas Halliday – Otherlands: A World in the Making 23:11

3+ y ago23:11

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Dr Thomas Halliday – Allen Lane – £20 Otherlands is a kind of travel book, traveling in time and across the globe, pushing back through the last half-billion years, showing you ever stranger beasts and more and more unfamiliar landscapes. Each chapter takes us to a location in the world that exemplifies a nexus of evolutionary change. Odd details c…

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Robert J Lloyd – The Bloodless Boy 26:18

3+ y ago26:18

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Robert J Lloyd – Melville House Press – £18.99 In 1678 London was rebuilding after the Great Fire of London, just twelve years earlier. Among the great men undertaking this enterprise was Robert Hooke, who is a central character in Rob Lloyd’s The Bloodless Boy. A scientist and energetically modern visionary: “Some parts of Nature are too large to …

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Prof Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God An Anatomy 30:34

4y ago30:34

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Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou – Picador – £25 “Once upon a time, in the book of Genesis, humans were made in the visual image and likeness of God. It was a social, as well as a corporeal correspondence, celebrating both the fleshly wonders of the human body and the personable presence of the deity.” So says Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou. …

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Nicholas Wapshott – Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market 23:27

4y ago23:27

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Nicholas Wapshott – W. w. Norton – £22.95 Not many academic economists are household names. But when I was young, Milton Friedman was. The high-priest of Monetarism and intellectual descendant of Friedrich Hayek, his theories were much admired by right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile Paul Samuelson made his m…

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Robb Johnson – The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child Versus The State 22:52

4y ago22:52

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Robb Johnson – PM Books – £17.99By Green-Shoot

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Alwyn Turner – All In It Together: England in the Early 21st Century 29:09

4+ y ago29:09

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Alwyn Turner – Profile Books – £20By Green-Shoot

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Adrian MacKinder – Stan Lee – How Marvel Changed The World! 27:33

4+ y ago27:33

27:33

Adrian MacKinder – Pen & Sword White Owl £19.99 $29.99 Face Front, True Believers! This is the story of the man who gave the world the Marvel Universe, who bestrode the comic-book industry like a colossus, and who said “Face Front, True Believers!” a lot.In later life Stan Lee became nearly as famous as his creations, appearing in cameo in a score …

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Paul Theroux from the archives – Chicago Loop 15:56

4+ y ago15:56

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Paul Theroux – Hamish Hamilton – £20.95 Long before he was the father of Louis Theroux, Paul Theroux was a distinguished and prolific travel writer and novelist. Born in 1941 (and we are delighted to note he is still with us), it is well-known that he joined the Peace Corps in 1963 and was declared persona non grata in Malawi by the dictator Hastin…

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Philip Norman – Wild Thing: The short, spellbinding life of Jimi Hendrix 25:56

5y ago25:56

25:56

Philip Norman – Weidenfeld and Nicolson – £20 It is generally accepted that Jimi Hendrix is the most important guitarist in the history of rock music. In just four years he revolutionised everybody’s idea of what an electric guitar was capable of, set new standards for showmanship, and left a dazzling catalogue of recordings. Poster boy for the 27 …

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Larry Watson – The Lives Of Edie Pritchard 22:59

5y ago22:59

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Larry Watson – Algonquin Books £21.99 $27.95 The Lives of Edie Pritchard is Larry Watson’s eleventh novel, and he is at the height of his powers. It is a big novel set in Larry’s back yard of the states where the Midwest becomes the West. We follow the heroine Edie through three points in her life from a young married woman through to her early old…

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Liz Williams – Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism 29:31

5+ y ago29:31

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Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95 In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy. Thus, she makes j…

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Chris Kirkham - Decoherence 25:56

5+ y ago25:56

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Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99 You have to salute a debut novel that swaggers its ambition. Boasting the subtitle “A quantum whodunnit”, Decoherence duly boasts chapters called ‘Entanglement’, ‘Wave Function’, ‘Entropy’ and so on. Our hero, Sirius Peabody, is a theoretical physicist, and his way of seeing the world is very much the subs…

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Stephen Tow – London, Reign Over Me: How England’s Capital Built Classic Rock 21:43

5+ y ago21:43

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Stephen Tow – Rowman and Littlefield £15.99 To have been young in London in the 1960’s must have been very heaven. At least if you had a yen to see live music in clubs and pubs and a dilapidated hotel on an island in the River Thames. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Pink Floyd… (stop me when it gets dizzying). The city…

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Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights 31:30

5+ y ago31:30

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Helen Lewis – Jonathan Cape £13.59 Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outl…

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Barry Forshaw – Crime Fiction – A Reader’s Guide 30:06

5+ y ago30:06

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Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books £12.99 Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction. Writer, commentator, editor, broadcaster and enthusiast, his fingerprints are everywhere. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it is he. Why is crime fiction the most popular of all genres? It’s a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle. And ever…

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Steve Richards - The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Harold Wilson to Theresa May 34:41

6y ago34:41

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Steve Richards – Atlantic Books £20 You have to wonder why the office of Prime Minister is so coveted. While many politicians aspire to Number Ten, more or less all the Prime Ministers in this book spent at least some of their time in office in political Hell. And yet they typically cling on to office like grim death, and in some cases never get ov…

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Graeme Garrard – How To Think Politically 25:02

6y ago25:02

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Professor James Bernard Murphy and Graeme Garrard – Bloomsbury: £10.49 In an overview of the great political thinkers of the ages, comprising thirty of the most trenchant minds in history, you would imagine that there would be room for the Sage of Hounslow. But for some reason Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant are all preferred to Tim Haigh, who does…