You can get 10 weeks of The Spectator as well as unlimited access to our website, app and archive if you subscribe today.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash PIMS to get a free bottle of PIMS and 10 weeks of the issue for just £10.

That's spectator.com.com. UK full slash PIMS.

But hurry, it's only while stocks last.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary ed for the Spectator. And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the writer and critic Michael

Bracewell, whose new book is

Souvernear, which is A Count of London in the years between 1979 and 1986.

Michael, welcome.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Now, souvenir is, it's not a straight history and it's not quite a memoir.

What sort of book do you think of it as?

I mean, what were you trying to do with it?

Well, the beginnings of the book were actually quite straightforward.

I'd been asked in another capacity whether I would write a book, or a short book,

anyway, about the phenomenon

in the art world back in the late 80s and early 90s called Young British Art, you know,

Damien Hearst and all that stuff. And so I started doing this rather aware of the fact that

whilst young British art was happening in London,

I was in fact living in Manchester, so I wasn't maybe best placed to write a book about him.

But I did start writing about London and the London art world in particular in the years before

young British art. And that proved to me in terms of my interests to sort of be a way into

something because I began remembering London in the early part of the 80s, the first half of the

...