The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Four hundred years on, we still can’t stop reading about the Tudors, and nobody has fed that habit better than Philippa Gregory.

Often called the queen of British historical fiction, Gregory has sold millions of books by asking who history forgot and who it blamed.

She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of The New Society to discuss her life, career, the forgotten women of history and why history has become so culturally in demand.

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In this week’s magazine, we published an open letter, signed by over 150 leading authors, artists and public figures, titled “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”.

https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/10/sally-rooney-is-a-writer-not-a-terrorist

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Megan Gibson to discuss why the New Statesman published this open letter in support of Sally Rooney.

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Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.

Can we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from?

These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy. In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories but is one interconnected web of relations, where things are defined by how they interact with everything else.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Carlo Rovelli.

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You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.

That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing on the shift from private to public knowledge, and how this can suddenly change behaviours or even start revolutions.

Steven Pinker joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss.

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Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting.

What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places, and when the time is out of joint?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Amit Chaudhuri, a singer, composer, poet, critic and novelist, to discuss how a story is less important – and less interesting – than the movement of life.

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"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell.

If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of John Donne and the children's fantasy series Impossible Creatures - a copy of which every Year 6 child in the country will receive this Christmas. Disney has just signed a seven-figure deal for the screen adaptation.. Rundell is being touted as the next JK Rowling.

When she's not writing Rundell works on Renaissance literature as a fellow of Oxford University.

Two themes recur throughout her work: fantasy and animals. And as you might guess from her feelings about unicorns, the two are rarely far apart.

On this episode she joins Tanjil Rashid, following the publication of her new essay collection Napolean's Orangutang to talk about what humans should learn from animals, the connection between religion and fantasy, and - in her words - why wonder is political.

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A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.

And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.

In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.

In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?

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Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the Muslim world.

He believed that his life of extreme measures and isolation was a closed chapter in 1998, after Iran stepped back from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But four summers ago, in a quiet lake town in New York, death came knocking again. Rushdie was about to give a public lecture when a man ran on stage and attacked him with a knife.

He first revisited this attempt on his life in his 2024 book Knife. Now, with his wife, the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and director Alex Gibney, Rushdie has retold this life-changing moment through film.

He spoke with Tanjil Rashid on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, with which he feels a “line of connection” - between the attack on himself and the attack on his adopted home in New York, and reflected on what it means to live in this age of terror.

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Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point.

This September she publishes her sixth: Taipei Story, a semi-autobiographical account of a summer spent learning Mandarin in Taiwan - her most personal book yet.

She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of the podcast.

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From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost constant conflict.

Is it history? Politics? Resources? Or religion driving these tensions?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book The Cauldron tells the story of the making of the modern Middle East.

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Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would ever take her to a warzone.

But following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she found herself drawn to this country under siege. She wanted to ask, what happens to art under war? And could Ukrainian culture not just survive, but flourish?

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In the summer of 2024, riots tore through British towns, and since then old questions have continued to resurface about who belongs in the country.

Taj Ali has spent years digging into a history that’s rarely told in full: the long tradition of South Asian political activism in Britain.

His debut book, Come What May, We’re Here to Stay, traces that tradition and asks what it means for Britain now.

Taj Ali joins Tanjil Rashid.

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Every year, more libraries across Britain close their doors.

As councils have their funding slashed, these are often the first spaces to go.

What do we lose when we stop reading and collecting? What is a library to a community, beyond its books?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by the University of Oxford's Bodley's Librarian, Richard Ovenden.

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To hear more conversations like this search "The Exchange" wherever you get your podcasts.

When Amia Srinivasan published The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century in 2021, it sparked widespread debate about the politics of desire, consent, and sexual justice.

In this episode of The Exchange, the Oxford academic joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss how philosophy can illuminate some of the most contentious questions in contemporary culture: from incels and pornography to whether our desires are shaped by society.

Find more from Amia Srinivasan here

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Throughout history, art, and artists, have caused moral outrage.

For a long time we had the liberal notion that we could separate great art from bad artists, but we do seem to live in a time of heightened moralisation around works of art and their creators. Why is that?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Daisy Dixon, who has written the book Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art.

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Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is one of the most anticipated films in recent cinema history.

But what is it about this story, first told maybe 3000 years ago, that so fascinates us?

Who really wrote it and why does it represent, with Homer’s other great work The Iliad, the foundation of western literature?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by The Odyssey’s latest translator, classical scholar and literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn

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Hot dogs, fireworks, old glory, it’s the 4th July. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the USA’s Declaration of Independence.

What led up to these crucial events in 1776? Was the revolution truly American? And what does this anniversary represent today?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sarah Pearsall, historian and author of Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the American Revolution.

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Tayari Jones is one of America's most celebrated novelists, twice chosen by Oprah, shortlisted for prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and read by presidents.

Her newest book was meant to be a tale of gentrification in the American South, she found herself an entirely different story. Kin follows two motherless girls coming of age in 1950s Louisiana, the Jim Crow South.It's a novel about female friendship, class, race, and motherhood.

Jones discusses her latest book, about growing up "bourgeois and segregated" in Atlanta as the daughter of civil rights activists, and what it's like to watch America try to turn the clock back on progress as it approaches its 250th birthday.

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Andrew Marr and the New Statesman's art critic Michael Prodger join Tanjil Rashid to discuss the life and legacy of David Hockney, who passed away last week.

A Bradford boy who became one of the most famous artists in the world. A gay man who made desire visible decades before it was safe to do so. A painter who took on the iPhone and the iPad and bent new technology to the oldest of artistic impulses. What do the pools, hedgerows and iPad drawings add up to?

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“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

Andrea Wulf joins us to discuss her new book The Traveller, about George Forster - the forgotten naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook at seventeen and came back convinced of something radical: that all human beings are equal.

We ask why that idea was so scandalous in the Enlightenment, why Forster has been largely written out of history, and whether travel really does broaden the mind - or whether, as G.K. Chesterton suggested, it might do the opposite.

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