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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor of The Spectator.

My guest this week is the writer Casper Henderson,

whose new book is A Book of Noises, Notes on the Oraculus.

Oraculous being a wonderful word.

Cusper, this is a book that deals with all manner and all variety in all range of sounds and noises and music from the universal to the absolutely, you know, tiny.

Can you tell me what the kind of conception behind it is and how you set out to sort of shape this book, how it hangs together? Sure, Sam. Thank you for having me on.

I'll give that a try. I mean, all origin stories are suspect, perhaps particularly with books,

but with this one, I'll give you two briefly. One was that I went to

see a murmuration, you know, a great wheeling and turning of birds in the sky on the Norfolk

coast. And of course, it was a wonderful sight, but what really astonished me that day was the

noise that the birds made as they came overhead. I could hear all their individual pairs of wings

and the wind rushing over their bodies as they came up my head could hear all their individual pairs of wings and the wind rushing

over their bodies as they came up my head. I was astonished by it and, you know, it struck me

at the time that this was, this was oraculous rather than miraculous. It was a wonder of the ear.

But it also got me to thinking, just, gosh, I don't really know very much about sound.

I mean, I've always been fascinated by music and other sounds, but I realized that actually I didn't know very much.

So that was one thing.

...