4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
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0:00.0 | If you enjoyed the Spectator's podcasts, why not subscribe to the magazine as well? You can get 12 weeks of The Spectator for just £12, plus a free £20 £10, John Lewis or Waitrose Voucher if you go to spectator.com.com. This is a podcast-only deal, and we hope you take us up on it. |
0:26.8 | Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. |
0:29.3 | I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator. |
0:32.4 | This week, my guest is the writer Philip Marsden, |
0:35.7 | whose new book is Under a Metal Sky, |
0:40.5 | A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder. I have a great joy of interviewing Philip live at the Jaipur Literary Festival 2025, so we're out in the field. I hope that |
0:47.3 | doesn't affect the sound quality. Philip, this is a book which takes a sort of tour through a lot of the |
0:53.8 | things we find in the earth, |
0:55.1 | with rocks and minerals. |
0:57.1 | Can you sort of start between what the way into this book was for you? |
1:01.1 | Okay, well, I was one of those sort of childhood geeks who walked around with their eyes fixed on the ground, |
1:08.1 | and anything that glittered or was patterned like a fossil would |
1:12.7 | just grab my attention like thousands of children and that was my basically my sort of years |
1:18.3 | between five and and ten and my big find then was was a was a was a giant ammanide which which for a |
1:26.5 | seven-year-old was even bigger than that it seems now. |
1:29.9 | And then I sort of went to my teens and I sort of forgot all that and sort of traveled and |
1:36.0 | did various books about far off places and digging around stories around the Middle East |
1:42.2 | and all sorts of things. And I came to this sort of late. |
1:45.3 | And it came first, actually, from a, from, from, from, I live in Cornwall. |
1:50.7 | And Cornwall, of course, is one of the great hotspot, the sort of geological hotspots of the world. |
1:55.5 | Great mining tradition there. |
1:56.7 | And I kind of avoided the mines because, I mean, they're fascinating. |
... |
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