Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Keir Starmer has thrived, over the past few years, by being a bit boring. Every day, I fancy, he wakes up in the morning, and after he has finished sanding his face and arranging his hair with Araldite, solemnly addresses the mirror and promises himself: no unforced errors. He probably has a list of don’ts: don’t in a moment
48 min listen
On this week’s Book Club, I’m joined by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli to talk about his new book Anaximander and the Nature of Science, in which he explains how a radical thinker two and a half millennia ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells me how
It’s funny how powerful a concrete example of something can be, isn’t it? The thing that brings a situation home to where you live. It’s a reminder of how basic, for all our theoretical sophistication, humans really are. Tell someone that bond yields are increasing at an alarming rate, and unless they are a bond trader they won’t feel that alarm in their
34 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. In his new book Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces, Robert describes how being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis plunged him from his comfortable life as an English literature professor at Oxford into a frightening and disorienting new world; and how literature itself helped him learn to navigate
Roald Dahl was, in many respects, a horrible man. He was a narcissist, a bully, a liar, an anti-Semite, a tax-dodger, a faithless husband and – if his daughter’s account is to be believed – a cruel and thoughtless father. None of which has anything whatever to do, it scarcely needs saying, with the content
37 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the scholar and biographer Richard Bradford, whose new book Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer looks at the rackety life and uneven oeuvre of one of the big beasts of 20th-century American letters. Mailer, as Richard argues, thought his self-identified genius as a writer licensed any amount
Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five
29 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it’s in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how
The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is
57 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, she
How big does a bath need to be for ‘sex frolicking’ to be a possibility? That’s not, if you’d asked anyone six months ago, the question on which the reputational future of the monarchy might be in part held to depend – and yet here we are. A bizarre photograph has been released by the brother of
54 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn’t eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be
The cliché is that it’s scandals about sex that tend to do for Tories, and scandals about money that do for their counterparts on the opposite benches. To give credit to the current generation of Tories, though, the last decade or so has seen, in this department, a feat of triangulation quite undreamed of by
60 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses, which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle’s notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting
Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me. All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from
38 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is a true believer. And that, I think, makes him very dangerous to the monarchy indeed. He came across well: modest, steely, scrupulously honest by his own lights, unshakably coherent in his view of the world and in
Children’s writing has been having a bit of a moment over the past couple of weeks, after a conversation on social media between children’s authors gathered into a sort of cri de coeur about the public neglect of their craft. Children’s books, they said, are barely covered in newspaper review pages or on the radio these
65 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt – whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa – and along the way explains what’s so
Two weeks ago, like most people, I hadn’t so much as heard of ChatGPT. By last week, I was hearing of practically nothing but. After OpenAI released its large-language model chatbot for the public to play with, it passed a million users in five days flat. Hype poured in. Columnists asked it to write the opening paragraphs of their columns about ChatGPT –
