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

and this week my guest is the wife Rebecca Boyle, who joins us from the States to talk about her new book, Our Moon, A Human History.

Rebecca, this is a kind of huge huge expansive book about the moon and its meanings

and its science and all sorts of things. What was the kind of germ of this book for you?

It kind of became a lot larger than I expected it to when I first started working on it.

I've always just loved the moon and had sort of a soft spot for it as a writer. And I write a lot

about astronomy and astrophysics. The moon kind of ends up getting in the way of those things

because it's so bright. Like it's really annoying if you're an astronomer trying to study

deep sky objects or things like dark matter. The moon is in the way. You have to wait for it to

not be up for you to

do your observations. And so I felt like I wanted to say to astronomers, but the moon is really

cool too. It's an interesting thing in its own right. And it has a lot of interesting history.

We don't quite know a whole lot about how it formed, actually, which is a very active debate right now.

And I thought that was...

That's one of the most surprising things, yeah.

Yeah, I thought that was super interesting.

But as I started writing the book and researching it, I sort of came to think that it's

actually been responsible for everything that's ever happened here, or been at least

intimately involved in everything that's ever happened here. And been at least intimately involved in everything

...