Jonathan Freedland

Simon Mayo's Books of the Year

Bauer Media

Arts, Books

4.9 • 994 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist and bestselling author, Jonathan Freedland, joins Simon and Matt for a natter about his latest book - 'The Traitor's Circle'

They chat about his extensive research, love of history, the incredible real-life stories of bravery he discovered and put in the book and how and when he likes to write. Although this book is non-fiction, it reads like a thriller! Some of the stories in it are quite remarkable!

Here's a bit more info on the book:
A thrilling true story of courage, resistance and ultimately betrayal in the Third Reich, captured by internationally bestselling author and prize-winning journalist Jonathan Freedland.

The Traitors Circle tells the true, but scarcely known, story of a group of secret rebels against Hitler. Drawn from Berlin high society, they include army officers, government officials, two countesses, an ambassador's widow and a former model - meeting in the shadows, whether hiding and rescuing Jews or plotting for a Germany freed from Nazi rule. One day in September 1943 they gather for a tea party - unaware that one among them is about to betray them all to the Gestapo. But who is the betrayer of a circle themselves branded 'traitors' by the cruellest regime in history?

In another page-turning work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller, Jonathan Freedland, acclaimed author of The Escape Artist, sheds light on one of the most dramatic episodes of the second world war, telling a story of courage, resistance and ultimate betrayal that has deep moral resonance for our own time, and asks what kind of person it takes to risk everything and stand up to tyranny.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome. It's another podcast from Books of the Year. We are a podcast. We talk about books that come out in the year, but by calling it Books of the Year, it makes it sound important. It does. We do sound a little self-important, which I like. I'm going
0:24.9	to lean into that in us being amazing. And it's very odd to have podcasts hosts who sound self-important.
0:32.4	Yes. I find it very rarely, very rarely happens. Thanks very much for getting in touch all the correspondence that comes in.
0:40.9	Leo Davidson says, hello, bookworms. I have just written out my Christmas reading list.
0:47.1	I do this every year and try to get through four books over the festive holiday period.
0:52.4	Excellent. I love this. Usually three novels and one non-fiction. Okay. You'll be pleased to hear that 75% of the list is made up of recommendations from your brilliant pod. Wow. They are The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepard Robinson. Good choice. The Siege by Ben McIntyre. Excellent choice. And Carla's choice by Nick Harkaway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My fourth choice is a slightly older book that I have been meaning to read for ages
1:13.6	Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
1:15.6	Because there's always one book that we've never quite got around to.
1:19.6	Fingers crossed, I can get through all of them, keen to know what might be on your Christmas reading list.
1:24.6	Cheers, lads, says Leo.
1:26.6	Well, I have to say, on my Christmas reading list. Cheers, lads, says Leo.
1:33.8	Well, I have to say on my Christmas reading list, there is precisely nothing.
1:35.4	Yeah, I was about to say the same.
1:40.2	I have said to family and friends, please, please, don't give me a book.
1:40.7	Okay.
1:43.3	Because I have so many.
1:43.7	Right.
2:01.0	And if you are going to get me a book, get me a book, which is something to do with the book that I'm writing. Okay. Because I have so many. Right. And if you are going to get me a book, get me a book, which is something to do with the book that I'm writing. Okay. And so that's why, for my birthday, I got a book which was called sermons from the Great Ejection, which is a collection of Puritan sermons from the 1650s. Super. It's a rocking book. Oh, that's.
2:03.8	Full of the most miserable creatures on God's earth.
2:15.4	Don't do that. Yes. So really, Leo, I appreciate the spirit of what you're saying, but I just don't want to have a book for Christmas. No. So I'm going to... Normally at Christmas, I always make sure...
2:18.5	And I think I've said this before,
2:19.4	I always make sure I have an Ian Rankin.
	...

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