The Book Club: the glory years of Antwerp

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith is talking to Michael Pye about his new book Antwerp: The Glory Years. For most of the 16th century, as he tells Sam, Antwerp was the most important town in the western world – a city in which, as never before, ideas, information, goods and money circulated free of almost any authority. It was a time of extraordinary excitement – here are Bruegel, Thomas More and William Tyndale – and enormous danger and corruption. Michael tells Sam how it came about, what lessons it offers our own age... and how it reached an abrupt and bloody end.