Five Books

Knitting is hugely popular. In a world where we can buy all the knitted goods we want, why take up knitting? Number one, it’s really fun! The world is very digital, very screen based, and knitting is an incredible thing you can do that doesn’t require a screen.

Andrew Hunter Murray is a writer and broadcaster from London. His novels have hit the Sunday Times top 10 bestseller charts, been Waterstones’ Thriller of the Month and been nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. When not writing, Andrew presents The Naked Week on BBC Radio 4, co-hosts the award-winning smash podcast No Such Thing As A Fish, writes jokes and journalism for Private Eye magazine, and hosts the Eye’s podcast, Page 94.

What were your criteria for choosing these five books? It’s simply that they made me laugh. They’re all very different, and they all have very different ways of making me laugh. Let’s talk about your first choice: The Hopkins Manuscript, by R. C. Sherriff. The Hopkins Manuscript is a very prescient bit of sci fi from 1939. The premise is simple: the moon is going to crash into the Earth. That’s a very serious situation, and the only reason this book is a comedy in most part is because of the narrator.

Thank you for joining us on Five Books to discuss the work of James Baldwin. Could you begin by introducing us to Baldwin: who he was, and why we should continue to read him today? A pleasure to be here. Baldwin is, without doubt, one of the foremost American authors of his generation.

In your book, you cover a lot of battles in a lot of places over an extremely long period of time. What did you ultimately conclude? This is my fifth, and as with all the books I’ve written, it’s not exactly the one I started out writing. Generally, I do people- and story-led books, which relates to two or three of my choices that we’re going to talk about. This was a diversion. Most historians who are in the genre want to do a book like this because it’s almost like exercising your chops.

If you’ve ever been at all curious about ancient Carthage and why the Romans fought the Punic Wars against them, or why Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and what happened to him afterwards, this is the book for you. It’s a snapshot of a Mediterranean world before the Roman Empire, and a fascinating civilization where men often had the same name (e.g., Hannibal or Hasdrubal) and child sacrifice may have been practised. This is a really immersive book; I read it cover to cover.

Thank you for selecting these five historical novels that bring to live the women who have been written out of history. In a previous interview, you described historical fiction as “an important subset within the mainstream of the writing and studying of history,” and I thought that was a striking way of framing it. Perhaps you’d expand on this point in the context of women’s history specifically. Yes.

What is a memoir, in your view? It is a factual account of somebody’s life where the writer enters a contract with their reader, saying, ‘I am going to be true to the facts as I remember them, and the emotional truth will remain.’ But we must all accept that memory is fallible and that people can have differing interpretations of the same experience. Memoir usually has something to say about not only the personal but also the political, or a wider point to make.

It seems we live in a very dishonest age. Why choose to write and read about honesty now? Dishonesty—which includes behaviors like lying, cheating, stealing, bullshitting, being hypocritical, misleading, and deceiving oneself—has been around for as long as there have been humans. But I choose to work on these issues now because, as the title of my most recent book indicates, I believe we are confronting an honesty crisis today.

You’re a professor of social anthropology at Oxford and the author of Age of Security, a new book about the security industry and our obsession with self-protection. When you began working on the book, did you think about what an anthropology book aimed at a general reader should do? A very good question. Anthropology’s strength has often been in seeing the big issues in the intimate, everyday side of life. That’s also the case in many of the books I’ll be discussing today.