Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

<div>My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Armando Iannucci – the satirist behind <em>Alan Partridge</em>, <em>The Thick of It</em>, <em>Veep </em>and <em>The Death of Stalin</em>. What many of his fans might not know is that he's also a devoted scholar of Milton – whose influence is to be found in his first published poem <em>Pandemonium: Some Verses on the Current Predicament</em>. Armando tells me what hurt him into verse, identifies the moment that led him to abandon an English Literature PhD for a career in comedy – and explains why there's as much sadness as savagery in his mock-epic description of the Covid epidemic. </div>