Hello, this is Everything Else, a new culture podcast from The Financial Times.

We're into film not finance, music not markets, and style, not stocks.

My name's John Sonia.

And I'm Griselda Mario Brown. We're both culture editors here at the FT.

On this episode, we're here from the Israeli couple behind Honey

and Coe, an award-winning restaurant that serves up home cooking from the Middle East and

Central London. I love it. Think chargrawed meats and cinnamon puddings. Okay, before that,

we're looking back on 2016. It will probably go down or it will go down as the year of

post-truth politics, populist unrising and loads of sad, sad celebrity deaths. But it was also

the year of Hamilton, Beyonce and Picasso. We're joined in the studio today by a writer and historian

and associate editor of the FT, Simon Sharma. Thank you for joining your Simon. Hello,

pleasure. John, we're going to start with you. You were ranting about this earlier to me. What is your cultural low point of the year? Yeah, we're going to start on a bum note. Sorry, we'll get to more fun stuff later. And it's not like it's the most important cultural low light of the year, but it was just something that really left like a horrible taste on my mouth. The Italian journalist Claudio Gatti revealed the identity of novelist Eleanor Ferranti. As you will probably know, she's written under a pseudonym since 1992, and she's written these wonderful novels, which I'm sure we've probably read. I've only read one of them, but you love them, don't you? Yeah, I've read all of them and loved them, the Neapolitan Quartet. A wonderful depiction of kind of female friendship at its best and worst, I think. It was a really baiting article. It was a really snide article writing about... Basically, he uncovered her through her financial records, he wrote all about you know the 11 bedroom

mansions she had bought in rome and the you know houses in tuscany and it just had a really

left a really horrible flavor in my mouth also the dripping self-congratulation of that whole

exercise was horrible they thought really and there's something about kind of there are so few avenues left, you know, in our digital world of any kind of artistic mystery.

It was just such a shame for that to kind of...

It was like you can't be successful and have a little bit of mystery left.

No, exposure and transparency are everything.

Exactly.

Inslavement to the public gaze.

No, it's sickening, really.

Normally kind of the literary world is,

...