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

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Simon Winchester, the author of,

I think we can now pretty much say countless best-selling books from the surgeon of crowthorn

to the crack at the edge of the world. And his new book takes on a typically large and eclectic subject.

It's called Land and subtitled How the Hunger for Owners ownership shaped the modern world. Welcome, Simon.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Now, this is a big subject you take on, but you start local,

don't you? And you start personal. It's your own little plot of land with which you begin it.

Was that the origin of the book itself? It really was. I mean, I bought this land in a little

town called Wasayek in New York State, about 120 miles north of New York City. When I came back from

Hong Kong, I'd lived there for 13 years working for the Guardian mainly. Then I decided, because I'm

sort of a country pumpkin, that I'd prefer to live,

I mean, I had a flat in the city, but mostly in the countryside. And that's indeed where I

wrote the surgeon of crowthorn. But then eventually the land surrounding the house was completely

useless for anything, because it was on the north face of a rather large mountain.

It had a lot of trees, a lot of animals, a lot of little rivers, but you couldn't grow

anything on it, really.

So I decided to leave and come up to where I am now, which is in the Berkshires, or the

Berkshires where I in England, in western Massachusetts, where I've got a decent amount

of flatland, and then I have animals of various

sorts. But I nonetheless, I sold the house down in West 8, but kept the land. And I visited

every few months and things, not least because I pay taxes on it. And I think, well,

...