Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?” Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations
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40 min listen
My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep
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When I was young and green and working as a gossip columnist, I learned much from the energy and enthusiasm of my colleague Lady Olga Maitland. Long before Boris Johnson decided he could be an MP at the same time as editing this magazine, Olga – she was always ahead of the curve – combined
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41 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Sophia Smith-Galer, talking about her new book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia tells me why languages are vanishing faster than ever before, why it matters, how we can resist it and what her Italian-born nonna gave
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I wrote not all that long ago about this disconcerting situation we’re in where the only news story the Prime Minister seems capable of generating is a news story about the likelihood of his losing his job. Let’s just say, things haven’t exactly changed. As ever, Starmer said all the standard things about how everyone
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Grade: B+ Some of us lost a lot of our early twenties to a god-game called Dungeon Keeper, in which you built and maintained a dungeon and filled it with tricks, traps and monsters to kill the goody-two-shoes heroes who periodically tried to invade it. Minos is a descendant of that game, and a welcome
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46 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Bicks, who tells me how she put her academic work on Shakespeare to one side to produce her new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. She tells me why she thinks King’s work is worthy of critical attention, what
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There’s something, I think, very heartening and touching in reading Andrew Lloyd Webber talk about joining Alcoholics Anonymous at the ripe old age of 78. He told the Sunday Times’s Melissa Denes: “I am a recovering alcoholic. Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” He waxes lyrical about his delight in going
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter – cartoonist Joe Sacco, talking about his most recent book The Once and Future Riot, about Hindu/Muslim violence in rural India. He tells me how he knows when he’s onto a story, what cartooning can do for reportage, and why he draws himself so
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“London Has Fallen.” Little did I imagine, when I sat on the sofa with my friend Tanya gorging on Quality Street and enjoying the latest instalment of Gerard Butler’s heroically average action-movie series, that the film’s title would come to sum up a major strand of global political propaganda. In this line of thinking, London serves as an object warning of the sort
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42 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Mason Currey, author of the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. He tells me how artists, writers and composers have wrangled through history with the challenge of scraping by, and how that has affected their art, from Baudelaire’s lifelong
Weren’t those images beamed back from the Artemis II mission something to catch the breath in the throat? If something in you wasn’t stirred by the sight of Earth, glimpsed through the window of the space capsule past the silhouetted face of the astronaut Christina Koch, I don’t think you can be fully alive. And
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Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Yann Martel, talking about coming late to Homer, definitely not being influenced by Pale Fire, why he can’t resist a silly animal, and his new book Son of Nobody.
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Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it’s going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave. “MattGPT” is a nickname that will follow former academic and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to
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49 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Stefan Fatsis, whose classic Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble is 25 years old this year. Stefan tells me how a journalistic project turned into a quarter-century obsession, how dramatically tournament Scrabble differs from the living-room game, why we’re
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‘Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,’ was the verdict of the late Lord Charteris on Sarah Ferguson. He did not, I think, mean it as a compliment. But her subsequent career has shown quite how liberating such a disposition of character can be. Combine a complete lack of class or taste with a resoundingly innocent love of money,
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38 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, whose new novel Howl emerges from his rage and despair at the response to the 7 October massacre. He tells me what the novel can do that journalism can’t, why being funny is essential even in the darkest times, and
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Grade: A Lordy. The Resident Evil survival horror series is three decades old. It probably qualifies by now as Sitting Tenant Evil. Picture it snacking on flies in just the sort of dingy, hasn’t-been-tidied-for-30-years rent-controlled apartment that would make a good setting for a scene in the game. We’re still waiting for the instalment in
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Reform’s Richard Tice has been the subject of what I fear is intended as a hit-piece in the Sunday Times. “The Deputy Leader of Reform UK avoided nearly £600,000 in corporation tax after obtaining a rare legal status for his company,” it reports. “Richard Tice then channeled the company’s dividends into an offshore trust and a string of dormant businesses. Several did not
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38 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Lionel Shriver, whose new novel A Better Life offers among other things a savage send-up of liberal pieties on immigration. I asked Lionel what she was trying to do with the book (why make the argument, for instance, in a novel rather than an op-ed?), whether New York’s
