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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 my guest this week is the writer Jonathan Slat, whose new book

is Tigers Between Empires, The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger from Extinction. Now, the first

thing that surprised me very early on in your book, Jonathan, was the discovery that the Siberian tiger

doesn't live in Siberia. So where are we? Thanks, Sam, for having me on. It's an absolute pleasure.

So it's a common misconception about Siberia is that it's sort of amorphous place, right,

where there's no clear definition of where it begins, where it ends. It's just, you know,

people were sent to Siberia.

Siberia is, in fact, it's a legally defined administrative region of Russia.

It's right in the center of the country.

And so everything east of Siberia is called legally, administratively, the Russian Far East.

And that's where Tigers live.

Well, Amur Tigers.

And specifically in the Amur River Basin, which

partially forms some of the contemporary border between Russia and China. So Amor is the most correct

possible term you can think of for these tigers. And these tigers, you mention that the area in

which we're interested here is right on the border with China.

...