Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
34 min listen
My guest this week is the writer M. John Harrison, who joins me to talk about the rerelease of his 1992 novel The Course of the Heart – a deeply strange and riddling story of grief, friendship, memory and occult magic. We talk about why this book is so personal to him, what he learned
Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a
Grade: D– There’s some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. ‘Grinding’ – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious
36 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is one of the most popular living thriller writers. Karin Slaughter has made her native Georgia her fictional territory, and she joins Sam as she launches a new series set in a whole new county, with the book We Are All Guilty Here. They talk ‘planning
Retromania is well and truly upon us. Neil Young just headlined Glastonbury. Noel Edmonds is back on the telly. And a Tory MP has been turned over by a Sunday newspaper in a cash-for-questions scandal. Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1997. The humiliated party this time around is George Freeman, a former science minister
44 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is science writer Carl Zimmer, whose new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe explores the invisible world of the aerobiome – the trillions of microbes and particles we inhale every day. He tells me how Louis Pasteur’s glacier experiments kicked off a forgotten
50 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian William Dalrymple, whose bestselling account of ancient India’s cultural and economic influence, The Golden Road, is newly out in paperback. He tells me why the ‘Silk Road’ is a myth, how Arabic numerals are really Indian – and how he responds to being Narendra
Of course they’ve called it ‘Humphrey’. The cutesy name that has been given to the AI tool the government is rolling out across the civil service with unseemly haste is a nod – as those of an age will recognise – to the immortal sitcom Yes, Minister. But it may also prove to be more
34 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by Lucy Mangan, author of Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. She tells me what teenagers did before they had Young Adult books to read, the bizarre demise of the author of Goodnight Moon, and the wisdom of forsaking the busy world for an armchair and
So, there we have it. The President of the United States wants to bypass state governors and deploy the National Guard and the US Marine Corps against his own citizens. This comes after Donald Trump’s administration, apparently impatient with the existing legal immigration process, started bundling black and brown people into vans with a view
Grade: A In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they
40 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Alice Loxton, whose new book Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives is just out in paperback. In it, she tells the story of the early lives of individuals as disparate as the Venerable Bede and Vivienne Westwood. On the podcast, Alice
Some wise person – I have a strong sense it may have been our own Christopher Fildes – once offered a compelling theory of the cyclical nature of financial crises. They happened, he argued, shortly after the last person at the bank to remember the most recent crash reached retirement age and cleared his desk.
40 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise
I’ve seen a lot of people, lately, making the case that the big problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s government is that its leader doesn’t know what he thinks. The case, essentially, is that he’s in perpetual campaign mode; and that rather than leading (as he’s elected to do) and making the case for the policies
39 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Geoff Dyer, who’s talking about his memoir Homework, in which he describes growing up as an only child in suburban Cheltenham, and how the eleven-plus and the postwar settlement irrevocably changed his life – propelling him away from the timid and unfulfilled world of his working-class parents. Geoff, in
As I was passing through Stockholm’s Arlanda airport last week, a WhatsApp from a colleague pinged into my phone as I came through arrivals, so I’m able, as it happens, to quote verbatim my thoughts at the time: ‘Just in the arrivals hall now, and as I queue in “all other passports”, I am once
48 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, activist and Spectator contributor Julie Bindel. In her new book Lesbians: Where Are We Now?, Julie asks why lesbian liberation seems – as she sees it – to have taken one step forward and two steps back. She traces the history of lesbian activism, explains why we’re wrong to
It’s always heartwarming to hear of a person who starts from humble origins and, through sheer entrepreneurial vim, makes something spectacular of himself, isn’t it? Such as story appears to be that of Graham King, founder and boss of Clearspring Ready Homes. It was reported yesterday that Mr King has this year crossed that all-important
50 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Daniel Swift. Daniel’s new book, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, tells the fascinating story of a theatrical innovation that transformed Elizabethan drama – and set the stage, as it were, for the rise of our greatest playwright.
