If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community,

discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter,

sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com.

This episode is brought to you by Perk, the intelligent platform for travel and spend.

The trip was great, but now for the fun part, sorting my receipts, said no one ever.

Yep, endless admin sucks up valuable time, but Perk takes care of the work behind the work

by automating travel and spend management so your Perk takes care of the work behind the work by automating travel

and spend management so your teams can take care of business. No more navigating booking sites,

chasing approvals or reconciling receipts, just real work with real impact. Perk, powering

real work. Discover Perk at perk.com slash Empire.

Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand.

And me, William Drupul.

In our writers series, we have been talking about Writers of Empire.

We brought you some really hefty names there.

Orwell, Conrad.

But in the next couple of episodes, we're going to flatten the subject, hopefully not the mood,

because we're going to look at the 2D, the comic books, the graphic novels.

For many of us, our first inkling that the world is much bigger than we know.

And we're going to be talking about wonderful, wonderful books like Asterix and Oblix, Baba the Elephant, and Tintin and Snowy.

And just even thinking of those names and looking at the picture of Oblix with his enormous trousers and babbo with a little crowd in his head and his wonderful green suit or snowy with a bone in his mouth, just takes you straight back to when you were seven or eight and first had these copy books.

So your friends had the comic books and you had to beg them or give them a sweetie or something to get your hands on them. But of course, they are all books with a deep

route in the period of empire, and they contain all manner of material which people today

...