4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historical novelist Philippa Gregory. In her gripping new book Boleyn Traitor, Philippa seeks to rescue Jane Boleyn from the vast condescension of history. She tells Sam how fiction allows her to make plausible speculations about the gaps in the record, how she works to make the Tudors speak to us in language we can recognise, where Henry VIII went wrong — and what the Tudor court's descent into tyranny has to say to us about our own age.
Produced by James Lewis.
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Sweaterweather. |
| 0:02.1 | Bring on cozy duvet days, crisp air and crunchy leaves. |
| 0:06.9 | Out-out is out. |
| 0:09.2 | And the original pumpkin spice latte is in. |
| 0:13.1 | Handcrafted with our signature espresso and seasonal pumpkin flavors, |
| 0:17.7 | then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon and nutmeg. |
| 0:21.2 | Hot or iced? |
| 0:22.8 | PSL. |
| 0:23.8 | It's here. |
| 0:25.2 | Only at the Starbucks coffee company. |
| 0:27.5 | Subject to availability while stocks last. |
| 0:33.9 | Hello and welcome to Spectators Book's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:43.7 | We're very pleased to be joined this week by the historical novelist Philippa Gregory, whose new book is The Berlin Traitor, which tells the story of Jane Bullen, like I'm just Rochford. |
| 0:54.1 | Philippa, you must by now know the Tudor's... which tells the story of Jane Berlin. If I come to Rochford, |
| 1:00.6 | Philippa, you must by now know the Tudors inside out and back to front. |
| 1:06.2 | What is it that's the spark for thinking there's another little kind of opening here. |
| 1:07.7 | There's another story I can tell. |
| 1:10.6 | What was it that made you think Jane is someone we need to look at now? |
| 1:16.4 | I think Jane has always been anyone who knows the Tudors at all. Jane has always been a bit of an enigma in the middle of the story, that even the people who have the most cliched and stereotyped |
| 1:22.7 | beliefs about the Tudors and the Billins, whether it's Henry very bad or Henry very good and exciting, |
| 1:29.7 | whether it's an adulterous, terrible person, or Anne Leader of the Reformation, really, really interesting. |
| 1:36.2 | Whatever view you take of them, the problem of what the hell Jane Berlin is doing at the trial of her husband, ancestor, and law for incestuous |
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