John Mitchinson

I remember this episode with great fondness for the simple reason that it's about Penelope Fitzgerald, who I hadn't read before we started work on Backlisted and has become one of my favourite authors, bar none.

Absolutely.

I've now read everything she wrote, pretty much, at least a couple of times.

And the marvellous biography.

And the marvellous biography.

Human Voices is, I think...

It's a funny thing to say, isn't it?

It's one of the lighter ones, and yet at the same time it isn't very light.

But it perhaps lacks the depth of field that she reached by the time she got to her last novel, The Blue Flower.

Yes.

Nevertheless, Human Voices was a wonderful book when it was published, a wonderful book seven years ago, and I'm certain remains a wonderful book in 2026.

Yeah, so last Saturday at the Hot Tin in Falishan, which is a new arts venue in Kent down the road from me,

they asked me to host an event with the filmmaker sarah wood and the novelist ali smith and at this event which was really really good ali read from spring and so it's appropriate in the because we're doing penelope fitzgerald i can say with accuracy that ali smith read the beginning of spring

You've been working on that all week.

That's all I've got.

That's all I've got for this episode.

I've got nothing.

I've got nothing else.

So Ali read the opening chapter and she said to the audience before she started, how do you all feel about me reading something with quite a lot of invective?

I'm trying to capture the feeling of what it's like to be alive in Britain just before Brexit.