John Sandoe Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

 

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