Bookish

Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of Bookish. He is a Fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London and the author of Inventing the Victorians, Shepperton Babylon, The West End Front, Operation Chaos and the crime novel The New Forest Murders. His biography, Barbara Cartland: The Great Dictator is published in September 2026. He is the presenter of Free Thinking (BBC Radio 4) and his 25 years of television and radio programmes include The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), 12 years of Sound of Cinema (Radio 3), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4), and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist. Liberation Radio - his collaboration with the artists Nhung Nguyen and Esther Johnson - has been staged at the Manzi gallery in Hanoi and at Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec.

A whimsical account both of postwar London and of the world of bookshops. A kind book with considerable wit. Highly readable. Clever in the best of senses