This edition of the Book Club podcast is brought to you in association with serious readers who make a serious reading light.

It's got what they call daylight wavelength technology, which as far as I can tell, means it replicates the spectrum of daylight.

You can adjust its focus and brightness.

It's fantastically easy to position.

It's got a kind of long snake-like arm you can use to fix it in place. And speaking

as somebody's tried it out, it's a godsend to someone with aging eyes and a serious reading habit.

Use the offer code TBC to claim £100 off any HD light with free delivery and a 30-day

money-back guarantee. Go to www.seriousreaders.com forward slash Spectator.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

My guest this week is the biographer Sue Piddo,

whose new book is Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gogh. Now, extraordinarily to me,

this book begins with a set of teeth. How was that your starting point? How was that my starting point?

Well, during the four years I was writing the book, people asked me two questions.

They said, why do you want to write about a paedophile and why do you want to write about

someone who spread syphilis throughout the South Seas?

This seemed like quite a good question.

But anyway, before I started writing,

I had read, I'm an art historian, by the way, so, you know, I'm nuts about Gougain,

but I had read an article in a scientific journal called Anthropole about Gogan's teeth being

discovered. And the story behind this was that

Gagin spent his last three years on little island called Hiva Oa. And there he built himself a native

...