Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
40 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve. As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells me how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve, where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge… and
Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the poet and artist Frieda Hughes, whose new book George: A Magpie Memoir tells the story of what caring for a foundling baby magpie taught her about life. She tells me about chaos, head-bouncing, magpie-poop, and how she managed to write about corvids without imagining her father Ted
Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at the story of David Wilson. Professor Wilson is a criminologist and historian who has published several books. Each of his books has received a scathing one-star review on Amazon from a pseudonymous critic calling himself ‘Junius’. The
50 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Katja Hoyer, whose new book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 tells the story of four decades which are vital to understanding modern Germany, but which tend to be quietly relegated to a footnote in history. Born in the GDR herself, Katja tells me how much
45 min listen
On this week’s Book Club podcast my guests are the former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby and his wife and co-author Jemima Lewis, to talk about their new book Ravenous: How To Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape. They tell me about the perils and pleasures of working with your spouse, why exercise doesn’t make
There are some genres of newspaper story that never die. Among them are sightings of Lord Lucan, public moralists discovered in adultery – and foolish MPs being caught out offering themselves for hire to undercover hacks. A fine example of the third of these broke yesterday thanks to the situationist campaigning group Led By Donkeys, who started out
46 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Victoria Smith, whose new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women explains why one of the oldest forms of misogyny is seeing a vicious resurgence in our own age. She says some of the worst of it now comes from young women. She tells me why
Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round
49 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and editor Ian Buruma, to talk about his new book Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War Two. A Chinese princess who climbed into bed with Japanese nationalist gangsters; an observant Jew who sold his co-religionists to the Nazis; and Himmler’s
Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I
41 min listen
On this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Sara Wheeler, who looks back on her travelling life in Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road. She tells me why it’s ‘a book about tits and toilets’, as well as a meditation on the past and future of travel writing and a lament for the books
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
