Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is Talking Politics. Happy New Year to everybody.

This is a shorter episode than normal and we're going to be talking to you about some of the books that we've read and enjoyed in 2017.

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We've already had some LRB writers on this podcast and we'll have some more soon.

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So there's a little seasonal extra.

We've got our super full panel here, Helen, Aaron, Chris, Chris, me to talk about some things that we've enjoyed reading

or even things that we haven't actually had time to read yet

but are going to enjoy reading that we think you might enjoy too.

Helen, something you've read doesn't have to be to be super politics politics that you've really liked. I really liked Durham McCulloch's book on the history of the Reformation, which is what I've been wading my way through. So when you say wading, that already makes it sound a bit heavy going. It's long. But it's a page turner, right?

I'm not saying that it's necessarily a page turner if you're not interested in the history of the Reformation,

but it's after all the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 thesis.

And I think that there's quite a lot of, not say parallels,

but in terms of the political world in which we live in,

but certainly some at least semi-parallels.

And this is a time of enormous political turbulence in terms of, in some sense,

the breakdown of the relationship between the ideal and the real in the Catholic Church.

A rebellion that Luther leads against that turns in a political direction of which he had no intention to go down whatsoever.

It becomes a class-based politics in many ways.

There's the peculiar position of England in the story of this.

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