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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-eater, and this week I'm joined by Edmund Richardson,

whose new book is Alexander God-King-Man, which is a biography of the man we know as Alexander the Great,

though he wasn't known that until a couple

of hundred years after his death. Edmund, welcome.

Thank you so much.

This is a story that's often been told and told and told and told.

What was it that made you think there's something new I can bring to this?

God, that's been told so many times. The Roman historian Aryan writing almost 2,000 years ago,

started his own book about Alexander by saying, well, why on earth does the world need another book about Alexander?

And there's definitely been a fair few of them between then and now. So, yeah, when I started thinking about, could I do something with this?

Could I tell this story in a different way?

It just seemed impossible.

Like, what could that be left to say after so many books, so many thousands of years?

There have been heroic Alexanders and villainous Alexanders and

...