So, Afro, we got some more on Jane Austen. I can tell you, I've been checking 10-pound notes out and looking at a bit more carefully now since we recorded the first couple of episodes about Jane Austen. And I've downloaded all of her novels to read through over Christmas time as a tribute to the fact that we're the 250th anniversary. When we talked last time about Jane Austen, her life and her love. What were the things that

you came away thinking that we haven't talked about? I think that my relationship with Austin has

really changed as I've grown and become better educated. And I think when I read Austin as a

school girl, I genuinely thought that the world she lived in was this kind of rarefied world that had

no connection to the geopolitics of her time. We talked about that in the last episode. It's like a hugely

seismic period with revolutions and wars and big cultural change, but also that this was the

apex of transatlantic enslavement and colonialism. And I think that the way

that is not visible in Austin's world contributes to our sense as people growing up in England today,

that it wasn't really the main event, that it was a peripheral event that wasn't really connected

to the lives people were living. And rereading it now, I see it completely differently.

And I also notice how she references that well, but in very coded language,

which I wasn't equipped to interpret at the time, these West India merchants and all these

incomes and livings, these references to bondage, I don't know

whether she was deliberately referencing that world or whether just the overwhelming fact of it

inevitably popped up in her work. But that's something that I would love to get into a bit

more in this episode. So, Lys, you're in for a huge treat today because Afro and I have

got hold of one of the greatest living novelists in the world today. A great old friend of mine,

Marlon James, who won the Booker Prize, of course, for a brief history of seven killings,

Black Lepp and Red Wolf, his most recent book, Moonwich and Spider-King. Marlon happens to be

around about. I tracked him down

and asked whether he'd come and talk to us about Austin and his relationship with her work and how

he reads it as a novelist and how he thinks about some of these questions that Af has been talking

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