Hello and welcome to this Christmas special episode of Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government.

I'm Catherine Haddon. So all of us at the IFG have spent the year reading government reviews, white papers, select committee reports, consultations, manifestos, there were a lot of them.

Plans for change even, you get the idea. But from time to time,

we do put down the 300 page PDF to try and rise above the fray and look at the bigger

political picture or even take our minds off politics entirely with something very different.

So this podcast is going to step away from the treadmill of political news and instead take a look at what books we've been enjoying or maybe enduring.

Over the next 45 minutes or so, a rolling cast of IFG favourites will be dropping in and out of the studio to share their top tips on nonfiction, fiction, biographies, thrillers and more.

There might even be some sci-fi.

There is.

And joining me throughout is an IFG colleague who knows everything about all of our reading tastes,

and that's Nicola Blacklaws, who, amongst many things, runs the IFG's book club.

Hello, Nicola.

Hi, Kath.

Nicola, for our listeners,

give us a sense of how the book club came about. I think we started it during the pandemic in sort of Christmas 2020 when all of our socialising was online. We had a book club where

everybody across IFG came along and talked about their favorite

book of the year or the thing they've most enjoyed reading. And we liked it so much that we

kept doing it. And a few years later, we're still here doing it. And we do a summer one as well.

So in advance, so we can all prepare our summer reading for holiday time and so forth.

And I mean, give us a flavour of the discussions that happened.

We were just talking about it.

And from time to time, you do feel a bit of the pressure of, you know,

...