At the age of 43, a few weeks after he secured British citizenship, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered: the world’s first victim of polonium 210 poisoning.  The Litvinenko killing revealed that London has quietly become not only the single greatest centre of Russian capital outside Moscow, ...read more →

His origins were humble; a working-class boy from a small military town in northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle.  Today, he is one of the most influential figures in the world of literature, because  Peter Englund is Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the ...read more →

Geoff Dyer is the consummate writer’s writer: winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize, the US National Book Critics Circle Award the E. M. Forster Award, and more.  The Daily Telegraph newspaper has called him “the best living writer in Britain”.  Zadie Smith believes he is “a national treasure.” This is ...read more →

How do you go about writing a book about one of the most powerful dynasties on earth? That’s the challenge special guest Russ Baker faced when he first considered writing about the Bush family; a tribe that encompasses two U.S. Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors, two Presidents and ...read more →

In the week that Microsoft bought a fifth of Barnes & Noble’s digital businesses, and we learned that e-books sales grew 360% in the UK last year, we thought at The Naked Book we’d ignore all that – and focus on ‘mummy porn’. Why?  Well, it was the public wot ...read more →

You’ll recognize him as one of Britain’s leading thriller writers, author of the multi-million seller A Quiet Belief In Angels and ten other award-winner novels.  But you may not know much about the extraordinary personal story of tonight’s guest R.J. Ellory – a life that is just as thrilling and ...read more →

He’s been charged by elephants, black-listed by the Malaysian government, caught-up in tribal warfare in New Guinea and been bitten, stung and infected by creatures still unknown to science. Tonight, Rhett Butler (yes, that really is his name and no, we’re not afraid to go there) talks to us. Rhett ...read more →