The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

What it’s like to be played by Claire Foy

The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Show Notes

In 2014, Helen Macdonald published H is for Hawk - a book that arrived, at least on the surface, as a memoir about grief: the death of their father, and Macdonald's decision to train and live with a goshawk in the aftermath.

It was nature writing, literary biography, cultural history, and a deeply personal account of what happens when someone steps sideways out of ordinary life and into something more feral. Readers found their own stories in it about parenthood, identity, politics, and the uneasy relationship between the human world and the wild.

More than a decade on, that story has taken another form.

You can read more from Helen Macdonald here

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More from The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Oct 24, 2026

In this week’s magazine, we published an open letter, signed by over 150 leading authors, artists and public figures, titled “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”.

Oct 17, 2026

Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.

Oct 10, 2026

You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.

Oct 3, 2026

Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting.

Sep 26, 2026

"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell.

See all episodes →