Robin Hanbury-Tenison's guide to defeating pandemics and more

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

This week's Book Club podcast is brought to you rather later than we'd planned. In spring this year, the explorer and writer Robin Hanbury-Tenison was due to be talking to me about his new book Taming The Four Horsemen: Radical Solutions to Defeat Pandemics, War, Famine and the Death of the Planet. We'd been excited to have him on, not least because his book's interest in pandemic disease was starting to seem strangely prescient. The day before we were due to record, Robin emailed me to say that he had developed a terrible cough that would make recording impossible so we agreed to postpone our conversation. The next I heard was from Robin's son Merlin: Robin had been taken into hospital with Covid and the prognosis was grim. He'd been given only a 20 per cent chance of survival. But survive he did -- and once his health permitted we finally had our encounter. Listen to Robin talk about what the collapse of ancient civilisations can teach us about our own, how he sees the future of agriculture and medicine... and about what he remembers of his latest expedition to the gates of the beyond.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Book Club is brought to you in association with the Charles Stanley Community,
0:04.5	providing our clients, colleagues and friends with practical support and conversation.
0:09.5	Find out more at Charles Stanley Community.
0:18.4	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:24.1	and today my guest is Robin Hanbury Tennyson, the explorer and author. Now originally, I should say,
0:31.7	this podcast was to have taken place in the middle of March when Robin's new book, Taming the Four Horsemen, radical solutions to defeat pandemics, war, famine in the middle of March, when Robin's new book, Taming the Four Horsemen, Radical Solutions to
0:39.7	Defeatemics, War, Famine in the Death of the Planet, eschatological book, was coming out. And we agreed
0:46.9	in advance this podcast. You know, this is becoming, as COVID starts to get a grip, an unexpectedly
0:52.8	topical podcast to be doing. It became still more
0:55.4	topical because I think on the morning we were due to record it, I got an email from Robin saying,
0:59.8	I've just got back from a holiday in Europe and I've got a terrible cough, so I'm not going to be
1:05.3	any good at recording. And two or three days later, I heard from Robin's son Merlin that Robin actually
1:10.2	had been taken into
1:10.9	intensive care with COVID. So Robin, you've lived through one of the Four Horsemen you describe in
1:16.0	your book. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like? What can you remember of it?
1:22.3	Well, there's an extraordinary irony in it because over the last two years, while I've been writing
1:26.8	this book about the Four Horsemen and the various catastrophes that I see looming and my rather radical solutions to them.
1:35.3	The first one, the white horse, represents pestilence. That of course is a pandemic. And actually as early as page four in the book, which was published on February the 13th, incidentally.
1:45.8	I say we are due for a pandemic inevitably. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
1:51.3	Everybody agrees with this and blow me almost immediately after that, I'm whisked off to
1:57.3	Derriford Hospital and spent seven weeks, five weeks in intensive care, in
2:02.6	induced coma and have it as badly as anybody's habit. I was given a less than 5% chance of survival.
	...

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