Podcast
Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith.
Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith.
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and critic Ruth Scurr, whose new book marks today’s 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death to cast a fresh light on this most written-about of characters. In Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows, she finds an unexpected thread running through the life of this
Play 47 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Richard Dawkins to talk about his new book Books Do Furnish A Life: Reading and Writing Science. Richard tells me – among much else – what makes science writing (and science fiction) exciting; the questions science can (and can’t) answer; why he felt it necessary to
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
Hwaet! My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Maria Dahvana Headley, whose new book is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf. She talks to me about how she has produced what she bills as a “feminist translation” of this most macho of poems; about the poem’s braided history and complex language; and
Play 45 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book club podcast my guest is Roland Philipps – whose new book Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal tells the morally murky and humanly fascinating story of Mathilde Carre – a vital figure of the early days of resistance in occupied France. Roland’s story describes her heroic early work;
Play 30 mins
The Book Club
My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and it’s still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It’s a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality
Play 42 mins
The Book Club
My guest this week is crime queen Lynda La Plante – talking about her new novel Judas Horse, and three decades of her most famous creation, Prime Suspect‘s Jane Tennison. She tells me how she wrote her way out of acting, why so much crime drama now turns her off, why she thinks it’s so
Play 47 mins
The Book Club
This week on the Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the veteran foreign correspondent Michela Wrong to talk about her new book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. While Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame has basked in the approval of Western donors, Michela argues, his burnished image
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the former editor of the Today Programme, Sarah Sands. Sarah tells me how an addiction to the buzz of news and gossip gave way in her to a fascination for the opposite, as described in her new book The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons From Monastic Life.
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Horatio Clare – whose superb latest book is about going mad. Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing, tells the story of Horatio’s recent breakdown and forcible hospitalisation – what he experienced, how he recovered, how it pushed him to investigate the unquestioned assumptions
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
The public conversation – especially on social media – is widely agreed to be of a dismally low quality. In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by two people who have ideas about how we can make it better. Andrew Doyle’s new book is Free Speech: And Why It Matters; Ian Leslie’s is Conflicted:
Play 51 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club is the bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman, whose fascinating new book River Kings spins a global history of the Vikings out of a single carnelian bead found in a grave in Repton. Cat tells me how much more there was to the Viking culture than our traditional image of arson,
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the philosopher Toby Ord to talk about the cheering subject of planetary catastrophe. In his book The Precipice, new in paperback, Toby argues that we’re at a crucial point in human history – and that if we don’t start thinking seriously about extinction risks our species may
Play 45 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by one of the funniest writers working today. Shalom Auslander’s new novel is Mother For Dinner, which is set in perhaps the most oppressed minority community in the world. He talks to me about cannibalism, identity politics, his beef with tragedy… and an extremely high-risk prayer
Play 41 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Winchester, whose new book takes on one of the biggest subjects on earth: earth. Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Made The Modern World starts from the author’s own little corner of New England – what he proudly calculates at a bit more
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are the writer and Women’s Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter — but a year ago they became ‘sister widows’, as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
In the first Book Club podcast of the year, we’re marking the moment that George Orwell comes out of copyright. I’m joined by two distinguished Orwellians — D. J. Taylor and Dorian Lynskey — to talk about how the left’s favourite Old Etonian speaks to us now, and how his reputation has weathered. Was he
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
This week’s Book Club podcast celebrates the 75th anniversary of the publication of Nancy Mitford’s breakthrough novel The Pursuit of Love. Laura Thompson, author of the biography Life In A Cold Climate, joins me to talk about the way the book was written, how it helped create the Mitford myth – and how it shaped
Play 39 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we remember the great John Le Carre. I’m joined by one of the late writer’s longest standing friends, the novelist Nicholas Shakespeare. He tells me about Le Carre’s disdain for – and debt to – Ian Fleming, his intensely secretive and controlling personality, his magnetic charm, his thwarted hopes
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book The Moth and the Mountain tells the story of a now forgotten solo assault on Everest that ended in disaster. But as Ed argues, the heroic failure can be a richer and more resonant story than any triumph —
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart. His first novel, Shuggie Bain, tells the story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. It’s a story close to the author’s own. He joins me from the States
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
On this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about a subject that never ceases to arouse strong feelings: Auntie Beeb. My guests, Patrick Barwise and Peter York, say – in their new book The War Against The BBC: How an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain’s greatest cultural institution… And why you should
Play 51 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is James Hawes. The bestselling author of The Shortest History of Germany turns his attention in his latest book to our own Island Story: The Shortest History of England. He tells me why he thinks there’s real value in so brief an overview of our history, how
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the sculptor Antony Gormley and the art critic Martin Gayford to talk about their new book Shaping The World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now. They talk about the special place sculpture occupies in the arts, the lines of connection between its ancient origins and the avant-garde, and
Play 38 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the publisher and historian Carmen Callil, whose new book Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times, tells the story of how her 18th-century ancestors were transported to Australia. She uses their story as a window into a densely imagined account of English and Aussie social
Play 32 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes, whose new book Pandora’s Jar: Women In The Greek Myths investigates how the myths portrayed women from Pandora to Medea, and how those images have been repurposed in the retellings of subsequent generations. She tells me why Theseus isn’t quite
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the irrepressible Gyles Brandreth – whose latest book is the fruit of a lifelong love of the theatre. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes is a doorstopping compendium of missed cues, bitchy put-downs and drunken mishaps involving everyone from Donald Wolfit to Donald Sinden. Gyles explains how
Play 28 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s edition of the Book Club podcast I’m joined by two guests. One is Rowland White, whose new book, Harrier 809: Britain’s Legendary Jump Jet and the Untold Story of the Falklands War, tells the story of the air war in the Falklands from the frantic logistical scrambling when ‘the balloon went up’,
Play 49 mins
The Book Club
If you know the name of Christiaan Huygens at all, it’ll probably be as the man who gave his name to a space probe. But Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of Dutch Light: Christaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe, joins this week’s Book Club podcast to argues that this half-forgotten figure was the most
Play 34 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the distinguished Irish historian Roy Foster, talking about his new book On Seamus Heaney. He tells me how ‘Famous Seamus’’s darkness has been under-recognised, how he negotiated with the shade of Yeats and the explosive politics of Ireland to find an independent space to write from,
Play 35 mins