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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week, my guest is the writer Philip Marsden,

whose new book is Under a Metal Sky,

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

doesn't affect the sound quality. Philip, this is a book which takes a sort of tour through a lot of the

things we find in the earth,

with rocks and minerals.

Can you sort of start between what the way into this book was for you?

Okay, well, I was one of those sort of childhood geeks who walked around with their eyes fixed on the ground,

and anything that glittered or was patterned like a fossil would

just grab my attention like thousands of children and that was my basically my sort of years

between five and and ten and my big find then was was a was a was a giant ammanide which which for a

seven-year-old was even bigger than that it seems now.

And then I sort of went to my teens and I sort of forgot all that and sort of traveled and

did various books about far off places and digging around stories around the Middle East

and all sorts of things. And I came to this sort of late.

And it came first, actually, from a, from, from, from, I live in Cornwall.

And Cornwall, of course, is one of the great hotspot, the sort of geological hotspots of the world.

Great mining tradition there.

And I kind of avoided the mines because, I mean, they're fascinating.

...