Hi, I'm Rachel Gunliff. I'm Tom Gatti. I'm Kate Mossman. I'm Rachel Cook.

And on today's special edition of the New Statesman podcast, we're going through our

cultural highlights of the last year.

Kate, Rachel, Tom, thanks so much for joining us. We're going to try and do a sort of whistle-stop

tour through books and TV shows and music and maybe even some film over the next 40 minutes.

And it's really over to you guys to talk about some of the stuff that you've written about in the

magazine over the last year, some of the cultural highlights that you've found personally

moving and to try and encourage the rest of us along. So I thought we'd start with you, Tom,

and with the author Catherine Rondell for two reasons, one, which is that she won the

Bayley-Gether prize for, not a fiction this year, two obviously very important that she

featured in the special issue of the New Statesman edited by Gweta-Tunberg. Take it away, Tom.

Yes, so I feel like I've come along to show until I've got my copy of Catherine Rondell's book

here, but it's not actually her biography of John Dunn, which won the Bayley-Gether prize.

It's the golden mole and other living treasure, which is the second book that the

prodigious and prolific Catherine Rondell published this year. I love this book so much. It's a

deceptive little book because it looks like it could be a children's book or a kind of very

classy Lou book, perhaps. When you open it, you might think it's this a kind of

compendium of amazing facts, animal facts, you know, like the kind of annuals my kids read,

and it is that, but it's so much more. It's very urgent in its message. It's very beautifully written,

just a briefly describe it. It's 22 short chapters on different creatures, the 22nd being the human,

and it's full of what Catherine Rondell calls astonishments, so she's picked creatures

that have something truly remarkable about them. So whether that's the Greenland Shark, which lives

...