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 →

Join us for our biggest, wildest, craziest and funniest virtual office party ever… featuring the prodigious talents of Professor Elemental and Brian Clegg, together with Ian Winn, Ali Gardner & the combined talents of the chatroom, Dave Bartram, and ringmaster Peter Cox. “What I don’t like about office Christmas parties”, ...read more →

What with Benedict Cumberbatch’s radical new television interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, and the recent big-screen Guy Ritchie / Robert Downey / Jude Law action movies, the Baker Street seven per-center is enjoying a major revival of interest. How appropriate, then, that the master scriptwriter of the entire Holmes canon should ...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 →

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 →

Evie Blake is the name, Valentina is her scorching new mega-erotic novel – eat your heart out E.L. James, this is an author who can write! Based on the iconic character created by the Italian artist Guido Crepax, Valentina takes a male-created fantasy figure and gives her a real woman’s ...read more →

When we asked John Simopoulos, Founding Fellow and Dean of Degrees at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to read Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner last year, we had an overwhelming response from listeners wanting to hear more from him. We’re thrilled to welcome John back to present this special ...read more →