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• The History Book Buffs2026-10-15Audio✓ Read

  The Wager: Shipwreck, Mutiny and the Art of Writing History

  How do you make a history book read like a novel—and where should you draw the line?This week on History Book Buffs, Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse discuss David Grann’s The Wager, an extraordinary story of shipwreck, survival and mutiny. Both loved the book, but what makes its storytelling so powerful?When HMS Wager is wrecked off the coast of South America, naval discipline gives way to competing loyalties and a desperate struggle to survive.

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• The History Book Buffs2026-10-01Audio✓ Read

  Lord Cochrane: The real Jack Aubrey?

  Thomas Cochrane: The real-life Master and Commander | Peter Moore’s A Dangerous GameNaval hero. Political radical. Convicted fraudster. Thomas Cochrane’s life makes the fiction he inspired look almost tame.Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse discuss Peter Moore’s A Dangerous Game, a biography of one of Britain’s most extraordinary—and troublesome—naval commanders.

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• The History Book Buffs2026-09-17Audio✓ Read

  Locked up with a Nazi

  We’re back — and starting with a book that genuinely floored us.In 1949, Polish resistance fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski was thrown into a Warsaw prison cell with Jürgen Stroop, the SS general responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. They lived together for 255 days.The result was Conversations with an Executioner: Moczarski’s extraordinary attempt to understand the man beside him.

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