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
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Kate Summerscale, here to talk about her latest book The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story. Kate uses the true story of an eruption of poltergeist activity in 1930s Croydon to give what turns into a thoughtful and poignant look at the mental weather
Play 32 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast my guest is the writer Ysenda Maxtone Graham, whose new book casts a rosy look back at the way children used to spend their summer holidays. British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980 is a work of oral history that covers everything from damp sandwiches and cruelty to
Play 30 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s books podcast is the former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Along with the economist and former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Julia has written a new book called Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons, which includes interviews with women who’ve reached the top roles in global institutions, from Christine
Play 38 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Annie Nightingale – Britain’s first female DJ, occasional Spectator contributor, and longest serving presenter of Radio One. Ahead of the publication of her new book Hey Hi Hello, Annie tells me about the Beatles’ secrets, BBC sexism, getting into rave culture, the John Peel she knew
Play 33 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare – which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of
Play 41 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast, my guest is that man of parts Loyd Grossman. Loyd’s new book is An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope, and the Making of the Eternal City, which explores the titanic influence of Bernini on the Rome we see today, and his partnership with Pope Alexander VII. Loyd tells me
Play 37 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the philosopher, scientist and broadcaster Sam Harris – host of the hugely popular Making Sense podcast. Sam’s new book is a selection of edited transcripts of the very best of his conversations from that podcast with intellectual eminences from Daniel Kahneman to David Deutsch, and explores
Play 66 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s podcast, we’re replaying an episode that first aired earlier this year, but now seems more relevant than ever. Sam is joined by two writers to talk about the perennially fraught issue of race. There’s a wide consensus that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong; but what actually *is* race? Does it
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast my guest is Kate Teltscher, who tells the fascinating story of one of the greatest showpieces of Victorian Britain: the Palm House in Kew Gardens. Though the gardens and their glassy centrepiece are now a fixture of London’s tourist map, as her new book Palace of Palms reveals, they very
Play 40 mins
The Book Club
On this week’s books podcast, my guess is Oxford University’s Professor of European Archaeology, Chris Gosden. Chris’s new book The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present opens up what he sees as a side of human history that has been occluded by propaganda from science and religion. Accordingly,
Play 45 mins
The Book Club
This week’s Book Club podcast is brought to you rather later than we’d planned. In spring this year, the explorer and writer Robin Hanbury-Tenison was due to be talking to me about his new book Taming The Four Horsemen: Radical Solutions to Defeat Pandemics, War, Famine and the Death of the Planet. We’d been excited
Play 33 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the Argentine-born novelist Andrés Neuman, who was acclaimed by the late Roberto Bolano as the future of Spanish-language fiction. We talk about boundary-crossing in literature, historical trauma, multilingual jokes – and his dazzling new novel Fracture, which sees a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grappling with
Play 49 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Alan Johnson and Andrew Adonis to talk about the latter’s new biography of a neglected great of British political history: Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill. He was, in Andrew’s estimation, the man who did most to save Europe from Stalin. So why has Bevin been so forgotten? In
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the historian Rutger Bregman. In his new book Humankind, Rutger argues that practically every novelist, psychologist, economist and political theorist has got it all wrong: humans are naturally caring, sharing and altruistic… and far from being the one thing that stands in the way of a
Play 47 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the writer Susanna Moore. Best known for her pitch-black erotic thriller In The Cut, recently republished to huge acclaim, Susanna has just published a superb memoir of her young womanhood in Hawaii and Los Angeles – from shopgirl at Bergdorf’s to model and actor, script reader
Play 42 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast — recorded as part of an online event with Circle Square (https://circlesq.co) — is the biographer Adam Begley. Adam’s work includes biographies of John Updike and the Belle Epoque photographer, cartoonist and aeronaut Felix Tournachon, aka Nadar. In his new book he turns his attention to the
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
Is there life, as David Bowie wondered, on Mars? In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the astrobiologist Kevin Peter Hand, author of a fascinating new book Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. Kevin explains how and where we’re currently looking for extraterrestrial life in our own solar
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast we’re talking about Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh’s great novel is 75 years old this week, and I’m joined by our chief critic Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press’s complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh’s
Play 42 mins
The Book Club
My guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is the great Michael Frayn, talking about his new book of sketches Magic Mobile, lockdown life, the joys and perils of technology, adapting Spies for the screen – and how his muse has changed as he gets older.
Play 24 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the writer and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands. His new book The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive describes his painstaking quest to track down the real story of a Nazi genocidaire who fled justice into the murky underground society
Play 38 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Mark O’Connell, a writer whose latest book Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back sees him investigate doomsday preppers, wannabe Mars colonists, the Ayn Rand billionaires buying up New Zealand, and the tourist route through Chernobyl. Why, he asks,
Play 39 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined from across the Atlantic by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro to talk about his new book Shakespeare in a Divided America, which discusses the myriad ways in which America has taken Britain’s national playwright up as its own; and then used him as a lightning-rod for the deepest
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis’, Sir Salman Rushdie said to Sam when they spoke in an interview for the Spectator’s 10,000th edition. Sam met Salman in New York a few weeks ago, before coronavirus struck down the city. This episode is a recording of that interview, where
Play 61 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I talk to the reporter Toby Muse about the vast, blood-soaked and nihilistic shadow economy that links a banker’s ‘cheeky little line of coke’ to the poorest peasants in Colombia. Toby’s new book Kilo: Life and Death inside the Cocaine Cartels traces cocaine’s journey from that unremarkable-looking shrub to
Play 41 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s podcast is the multi-talented satirist Craig Brown, whose new book One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time is, I feel confident in guessing, the most entertaining book about the Fab Four ever written. Craig joins me to talk about how he goes about his jackdaw work picking out the
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
This week’s Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey – emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses. (He’s also lead book reviewer for a publication
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
On this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Blake Gopnik — the author of a monumental new biography of Andy Warhol. Blake tells me how everything — fame, money, and other human beings — were ‘art supplies’ to Warhol, but that underneath a succession of contrived personae Warhol could be warm, generous and even
Play 33 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club is the poet Don Paterson — whose new book Zonal finds him accessing a new, confessional mode, a longer line and a childhood interest in the spooky TV show The Twilight Zone. Don talks about the relationship between poetry and jazz, the split between ‘page poetry’ and spoken-word
Play 27 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the writer Hadley Freeman, whose new book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles
Play 34 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Christina’s new book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women is a deeply reported survey of rape as a weapon of war, described in our pages by Antony Beevor as the most powerful and disturbing book he has
Play 38 mins