My guest is Ben Judah. Ben Judah is an author and journalist and the author of a brand new book,

This is Europe, The Way We Live Now. Welcome to the podcast, Ben.

Hello, thank you so much for having me.

Right. First things first, Ben. I mean, your book is very difficult to describe, or at least to categorize.

And you don't do much of an introduction at the beginning of the book to kind of set the

scene, as it were, to prepare the reader. So how would you describe your book? Well, I'll tell you a little

bit about how I came to write this book. It's a sequel in a sense of a book I wrote, you know, before

Brexit called This Is London, which was an attempt to show how London had been transformed by

immigration into a new global city. And that book, it still has a kind of quite classic,

me as the narrator, the journalist, kind of wanders around and meets people. And where that book works is I go from kind of tube stop and bus stop to bus stop.

And there's a brief little description of me finding the person, meeting the person.

And then you're under.

Then you're, you see, you listen to that person, tell their story.

And I wanted to kind of continue writing this series,

showing how familiar places are actually being transformed by the kind of modern world

into places we can't really recognise.

And I initially thought I must write a book about France.

And I went to France and I kind of traveled around France, from Paris to the Alps to the South.

And I wrote 40,000, 50,000 words of another, like, quite classic book with me as the narrator.

And I kind of absolutely hated it.

And I hated the sound of my own voice. I hated that figure

of the kind of journalist narrator. It felt really kind of old fashioned and unnecessary. And it just

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