On Tuesday the 24th of March, our speakers will debate the motion,

this House believes we should abolish the licence fee.

Spectator Chairman Charles Moore and the telegraphs Alison Pearson

will propose the motion with Spectator editor Michael Gove

and former BBC America editor John Sopel opposing.

I'm Isabel Hardman and I'll be in the chair to maintain decorum and take your pressing questions.

Join us on Tuesday the 24th of March at 7pm and book your tickets at The Spectator.com

forward slash debate.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of the spectator, and this week my guest is the writer-win

historian Jane Ragoiska, whose new book is Hotel Exile, Paris in the Shadow of War.

Jane, welcome.

Now, this is a bit kind of that is about Paris, but you're focusing on one particular lens through which you see it, is the Hotel Letitia. Can you tell me what's special about the Hotel Letitia? What made you want to tell this story through that?

Well, I have to say that when I first set out to research this story, I wasn't thinking

about hotels at all. I was thinking about exiles, in fact, that was my starting point.

And I was particularly interested in a group of German anti-Nazis who had had to flee in

1933 when Adolf Hitlergate-Purr and ended up in Paris.

And I was really interested in the experience of exile, what it means to be a political exile.

I was thinking about Alexei Navalny at the time and, you know, the choice of staying behind when you face prison and possibly death or having to flee, and then you lose your home, your language, your means of production or all kinds of things. So that was a starting

point, but I was trying to find some way, there were all these different writers and philosophers

and politicians and it was all rather fluid and I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if I

could find something that would unite this story and enable me to tell the readers about it in a

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