Contact the Convenor: Coralie Palmer
This group is for readers drawn to all the varieties of non-fiction: history, biography, autobiography, essays and letters, travel, social analysis, popular science and more.
Book selections will appear 3 months in advance, so are already detailed for January, February and March 2025.
May 2025
Tuesday 6th May
- 14:00 – 15:00
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Non Fiction Book Group
Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland by Jacek Hugo-Bader
In his Polish homeland, this journalist is a byword for his investigations and his courage. He has, not surprisingly, always been obsessed with Russia: his book records a trip hitch-hiking across the frozen wastes of Kolyma, the far eastern Siberian zone that was gulag country. His experiences are informed by conversations with every kind of inhabitant from oligarch to beggar, and related with a distinctive and appealing mix of energy, humour and scepticism.
June 2025
Tuesday 3rd June
- 14:00 – 15:00
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Non Fiction Book Group
Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bulloug
This book made a huge critical splash in 2022 and has become an essential read across the public, private and third sectors as well as a bestseller. A rigorous investigator and a gifted writer, Bullough has created a shocking and spellbinding read that reveals the profound corruption now embedded in Britain’s role as the world’s money launderer.
July 2025
Tuesday 1st July
- 14:00 – 15:00
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Non Fiction Book Group
Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon
A Life Sacred and ProfaneIn his life of this devout, troubled and violent genius, Graham-Dixon translates painstaking research into an arresting account that has the story arc of classical tragedy. Mastery of detail vividly renders the atmosphere of daily life, from eating (and fighting) in cookhouses to keeping dirt (and lice) at bay and the ubiquity of swords and daggers (especially at night). Against this background we follow the artist through the creation of his gorgeously original paintings, to the final desperate struggle for his art and his life.