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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. My guest this week is the Australian writer, novelist and critic James

Bradley, whose new book is a non-fiction work,

Deep Water, The World in the Ocean.

James, this is an appropriately oceanic book.

You know, there's so much in it.

And I wonder if you could start by saying,

what was your way into the book, your conception of it?

Where did it start?

Look, thank you for having me.

It's great to be here.

It's a book that I have been thinking about for a really long time.

I guess the beginning of the book was that about 20 years ago, I used to go surfing a lot.

And there's a kind of thing that happens when you get out behind that back break and you're there and you can feel the swell moving.

And that kind of sense of the largeness of the world, of the, of there being kind of

other cycles around you, other kind of cycles of time, other cycles of kind of, of the, of there being kind of other cycles around you, other kind of cycles of

time, other cycles of kind of physicality and presence in the world. And I started thinking

that that was something I wanted to write about. There was a way of using the ocean to kind of

think about some of those things. And I've spent a long time thinking about it and trying to work out how to do it,

...