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Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by two guests. One is Martin Gafford, a spectacular regular, and one of our most

distinguished art critics, and the other is Anthony Gormley, one of our foremost, possibly the foremost

national sculptor. And their book together,

a new book fabulously illustrated, fabulously produced, full of interesting things, is called

Shaping the World, Sculpture from Prehistory to Now. It's a big book as it needs to be. And it's a book

that's a conversation. Can you tell me first of all how a conversation

between the two of you know, artist and art critic who you'd think of maybe as natural enemies in the

wild turned into a book? I've never taken that view about artists. I know some critics feel

they ought to keep rigidly apart from artists

and not have their views contaminated by artists' views,

but I think the opposite, which is that artists are really the people who know what's going on,

an art history.

And so I've always assiduously talked to them.

And Anthony, I started talking actually about 20 years ago when we first met,

and the book was a sort of continuation of a series of conversations we'd had over probably

18, 17 years by the time we started formally doing it. But actually, most of the conversations,

the serious conversations happened

in the last sort of 18 months, I would say.

...