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THE BIBLIO FILE is a podcast about "the book," and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging, long-form conversations with best practitioners inside the book trade and out - from writer to reader. Why listen? The hope is that it will help you to read, write, publish, edit, design, and collect better, and improve how you communicate serious, big, necessary, new, good ideas and stories...

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  2. Henry Hitchings on the world in Bookshops

Henry Hitchings on the world in Bookshops

Feb 4, 2019

Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history. His second book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the 2008 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is the president of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. As of 2018, he is chair of the drama section of the UK's Critics' Circle.

He was a King's Scholar at Eton College before going to Christ Church, Oxford, and then to University College London to research his PhD on Samuel Johnson.

In 2016 Hitchings edited a collection of original essays about bookshops, entitled Browse: The World in Bookshops. Its contributors included Alaa Al Aswany, Stefano Benni, Michael Dirda, Daniel Kehlmann, Andrey Kurkov, Yiyun Li, Pankaj Mishra, Dorthe Nors, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ian Sansom, Elif Shafak, Iain Sinclair, Ali Smith, Sasa Stanisic and Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

We met in London to talk about Browse, and our experiences in bookstores around the world.