Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

Silicon Valley’s curious obsession with building old-fashioned communities 

It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could call it pluto-utopianism. The latest manifestation of this is California Forever. A number of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have been quietly buying up 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano county, California, and at the end of

From The Archives: Tom Holland

45 min listen

As Sam is still away, we’ve dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and

Celia Brayfield: Writing Black Beauty

45 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the journalist and author Celia Brayfield whose new book Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the story of animal rights, takes us back to the 19th century. Celia describes how Anna Sewell’s writing of the Black Beauty book ultimately led to the kinder treatment of horses, and we both recall

Why not house refugees on barges?

‘By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside,

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: The Wolf Hunt

37 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and psychologist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, whose gripping new book The Wolf Hunt tells the story of an Israeli-American mother who finds herself wondering whether her teenage son Adam could have been responsible for the death of a classmate. She tells me about using the thriller form as

Ancient worms and the problem with climate politics

The poet Elizabeth Bishop, when she was feeling blue (which she often was), used to find comfort in thinking in geological rather than human time. If the vast aeons amid which we wink in and out of existence render our lives insignificant, so too do they render our suffering. As someone else said: nothing matters very much, and few things matter

James Ball: The Other Pandemic

56 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the investigative and tech writer James Ball, to talk about his new book The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World. In it, James traces the rise and disturbing metastasis of what he calls ‘the conspiracy theory that ate all the other conspiracy theories’, and argues that what

Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion

Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in the hospitality sector, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick have been instructed by Downing Street to start talks to open the doors to young French, German, Spanish and Swiss nationals. If it goes well, the plan

Ferdinand Mount: Big Caesars and Little Caesars

40 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Ferdinand Mount who in his long career has been literary and political editor of this very magazine, as well as editor of the TLS and head of Margaret Thatcher’s Number Ten policy unit. We discuss his new book Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and

YouTube and the final state of total Kippleization 

When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium smog, I’ll at least be able to pinpoint the moment when I first knew human civilisation was doomed. Ah yes, I’ll think, as I hear scavengers scuttling towards my body across the trashscape, grunting and hooting for meat: that was the moment. That Friday evening,

Caitlin Moran: What about men?

52 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Caitlin Moran. Having written one of the bestselling works of popular feminism of the last 20 years – How To Be A Woman – she has turned her attention to the other half of the population with her new book What About Men? I asked Caitlin why she felt she

Trans activists don’t help themselves

I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this, and not all of them are laziness and cowardice. The main thing is that – though it bears on some important points of principle – it directly affects a relatively tiny proportion of the population

Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams

46 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Tom Whipple, science editor of the Times and author of the gripping new book The Battle of the Beams: The secret science of radar that turned the tide of the Second World War. He describes the ingenious technological, psychological and espionage battles that made electromagnetic warfare a decisive –

The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row 

If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman poet Qiu Jin, with substantial extracts from her poems in Chinese and English displayed in a giant projection. What you might not have noticed was that the translator was not credited anywhere in the physical

Laura Cumming: Thunderclap

50 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art critic Laura Cumming. Her new book Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death talks about her fascination for the paintings of the Dutch 17th-century Golden Age, and in particular the entrancing work of the enigmatic Carel Fabritius. She tells me how her preoccupation

Andrew Pontzen: The Universe In A Box

53 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the cosmologist Andrew Pontzen. His The Universe In A Box: A New Cosmic History describes how we have learned to simulate first the weather, and then the universe itself – and how we discovered that those simulations don’t just mimic reality but allow us to learn new things

The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet On The Western Front. For its readership in this country a devastating, grinding war against an enemy they had been encouraged to think of as bestial and inhuman huns was in recent memory. Here was

James Comey: Central Park West

32 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the former FBI director James Comey, who is making his debut as a thriller writer with an engrossing police procedural, Central Park West. Jim tells me how he mined his own early career as a prosecutor in the southern district of New York to produce this world