Hello and welcome to The Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm joined by the writer Anne Seber, whose new book is called Ethel Rosenberg,

A Cold War Tragedy. And it revisits the story, which will be familiar, I'm sure, to many listeners,

of Ethel and

Julius Rosenberg. Ethel was the first woman in American history to be put to death for crime

other than murder, in this case spying for the Soviet Union. And welcome, can I start by asking you,

what put you on to this subject? What made you think, look, this piece of

relatively ancient history, there's more there. It needs to be retold. It needs to be revisited.

Thank you. Lovely to be here. It's always hard to remember the moment when you first thought,

this is what I have to write about. And as a biographer, I would say that you do have

to be fairly obsessed. I take about five years over a book. So it's really no good doing something

that someone else has suggested to you. And I do actually remember the moment when I first came

across the Rosenberg story. I was a young mother in New York, and I came across

the novel by E.L. Doctor O. It's a long time ago, 1978, called the Book of Daniel, and something

planted a seed at that point. I had a son and then a daughter, two babies, and in the fictionalized version of the story,

Dr. Odo takes a son and a daughter of Ethel Rosenberg called Isaacson in the book.

So it has a long trajectory, but the precise moment was that my previous book was about women in

wartime, Paris, and the publishers were nice enough to say to me after that book, well, Anne,

there are lots of spies in that book. There must be a spy you can extract and write a separate

biography of. And I thought about it, and there really weren't,

because most of the fascinating ones already had their own biographies.

And then I suddenly remembered Ethel Rosenberg,

...