John Sandoe Books

When you think of the Vikings – if you ever do – where do you think your information comes from? If we tend to think of them all as marauders, it’s probably because the sources of information have generally been outsiders. Since the Vikings had no written records of their own (the Icelandic Sagas were hundreds of years later), it’s only with the advent of modern archaeological techniques using DNA, isotopes and other microdata that we can begin to get a fuller picture. One of the foremost historians of the Vikings to have benefited from recent archaeology is Neil Price. In his new book The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age, Neil looks at twenty-five grave sites to present an utterly riveting account of the Viking world, including vikings (pirates, with a small v), traders, slaves, men, women and children from all strata of society from Greenland to the Volga. Interviewed by John de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena

Rupert Thomson has attracted the kind of critical acclaim which would flatter any rockstar, let alone writer. He's been compared to Dickens, Kafka and Grace Jones; The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his 100 favourite novels of all time; and his first novel, Dreams of Leaving - one of the earliest books to be published by Bloomsbury soon after it was established in 1986 - found fans in everyone from the drummer of Souxsie and the Banshees to the New Statesman, who said, “When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it's a wonder other people bother”. His latest book is called How to Make a Bomb (or Dartmouth Park in its American edition). It's a heady, swirling novel about a writer's psychic collapse which begins in Norway and takes him to Cadiz and Crete. There are shades of John Fowles's The Magus to it: acute, sensitive, eerie but compulsively readable. Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena

Es Devlin's name will be familiar to some; many will have seen her work without realising it. Winner of three Olivier awards, her work ranges from small theatres to vast stadiums, from Adele to Don Giovanni and Sir John Soane. She designed the set for Sam Mendes’s ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the National Theatre; she’s collaborated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli; has worked with Complicité, Florence + the Machine, Beyoncé, U2; designed installations at Tate Modern, the Serpentine, the V&A, Trafalgar Square, the Imperial War Museum and the UN General Assembly; sets for the ROH, the Met and La Scala. Etc. Etc. She spoke to Magnus about her recent book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, published by Thames & Hudson in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. It is a miracle of book design and making, exceptional for its production values, careful artistry and sheer technical whizz and exuberance. Thames & Hudson’s commissioning editor called it “the most complex book production” he’s seen in his 28 years with the publishing house. Interviewed and edited by Magnus Rena Music: U2, Beautiful Day, performed live in 2001 at the Fleet Center, Boston, MA, USA Stormzy, Blinded By Your Grace, Pt.2, performed live in 2018 at the BRIT Awards, London

A conversation with Anna Reid. Many will know her from Borderland, a brilliant history of Ukraine. Her new book, A Nasty Little War, is a fascinating, grisly and often witty account of the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia. After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies’ support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewhere. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena Music: The Song of the Stakhanovite Unit

Johnny interviews Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of the Economist since 2003, about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer's Search for the Soul. It is a characteristically distinctive and subtle account of the process that the veteran obituarist and biographer describes as the process of ‘catching souls’. Interviewed by Johnny de Falbe Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Nick Drake, When the Day Is Done

Miguel Flores-Vianna is a modern Midas of interior design photography; everything his lens touches turns to gold. Haute Bohemians, his first book, was an eye-watering collection of houses and gardens from Tangier to Milan and the Dolomites… each scene a private space: tasteful, indulgent, never grandiose. Now the great aesthete has turned his eye to the Aegean with Haute Bohemians: Greece: Interiors, Architecture, and Landscapes. It is, of course, sumptuous. We are delighted that Miguel has recorded a podcast with us to mark the book’s publication and - another delight - that his interviewer is Sofka Zinovieff. Both are great friends of the shop, and we are immensely grateful to them. Interviewed by Sofka Zinovieff Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Sofia Vebo, I Tabakiera

The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a discursive and extraordinarily erudite book on an abstruse but delightful subject: those who collect, hoard, deal or care for astonishing manuscripts and illuminated books. His cast includes a Greek forger, a French priest, a rabbi, and indeed a prince… De Hamel is tremendously engaging and often funny. Edited by Magnus Rena Music: Joachim Held, Das Ander Buch. Ein New Künstlich Lautten Buch, 1549: Nach Willen Dein