Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

The latest Tory leadership debate was a grim spectacle

The eyes had it, in last night’s leadership debate. Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak took turns directing to the camera a puppy-eyed gaze. Tom Tugendhat blinked manfully, as if overcome from time to time with a sense of his humble desire to serve. Kemi Badenoch blinked, too – but more in the way of someone

Kavita Puri: Partition Voices

39 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Kavita Puri, whose book Partition Voices excavates the often traumatic memories of the last generation to remember first-hand the mass migration and bloody violence of the partition of India. She tells me why the story has been so shrouded in silence – there isn’t a memorial

The fatuous idea that politicians must be ‘in touch’

I was in Hyde Park on Friday watching an open-air Pixies show with very great delight when somewhere between ‘Vamos’ and ‘Debaser’ one of my companions bid fair to harsh my buzz by asking what I reckoned to the Tory leadership contest. Well, goodness. I mumbled something about not really having a dog in the

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected

Lindsey Fitzharris: The Facemaker

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Lindsey Fitzharris – whose new book is The Facemaker: One Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. At its centre is the compelling figure of Harold Gillies – ace golfer, practical joker, and pioneer of the whole field of plastic surgery. Lindsey

The past stinks

‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could,’ says Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, ‘they didn’t stop to think if they should’. These, among the wisest of that fictional oracle’s many wise words, are what came to mind as I read of a whizzy new pan-European science project called Odeuropa. Historians and chemists

Simon Jenkins: The Celts

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club is Simon Jenkins. His new book The Celts: A Sceptical History tells the story of a race of people who, contrary to what many of us were taught in school, never existed at all. He tells me how and why ‘Celts’ were invented, what it has meant and

Abortion should not be just another culture-war ding dong

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is an American story, and a global one. What the hell – it’s asked with some justice – does it have to do with the rest of us? In part because, as is sometimes said, when America sneezes the UK catches a cold. But also because the intoxicated global

Philip Mansel: King of the World

44 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Philip Mansel. We talk about his new biography King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV. He tells me what really drove the great megalomaniac, whether he was a feminist avant la lettre, how his depredations in the Rhineland anticipated Putin’s in Ukraine

How Meghan Markle can shake off the bullying allegations

She must be fit to be tied, the Duchess of Sussex. I know I would be. It was reported yesterday that a Palace investigation into allegations that she bullied junior members of staff during her early unhappy years in the Royal Family is to be ‘buried’. We’re told that the results of the investigation will

Andrea Elliott: Invisible Child

40 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the New York Times‘s Andrea Elliott, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City. She tells me how she came to spend seven years reporting on a single, homeless family in Brooklyn, how she negotiated her

Are we ignoring AI’s ‘lived experience’?

Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public against the wishes of his employers with his belief that an artificial intelligence called LaMDA has achieved sentience. Mr Lemoine has posted the (edited) transcripts of several of his conversations with LaMDA, a chatbot, in

China Miéville: A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto

49 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the writer China Miéville to talk about his new book A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto. China makes the case for why this 1848 document deserves our attention in the 21st century, why even its critics would benefit from reading it more closely and sympathetically,

The monarchy pantomime

Down on the Embankment in London, yesterday, we came upon a peculiar sight: a completely stationary parade. Floppy-hatted drummers, with a vaguely heraldic look, marched on the spot in columns. Behind them there were equestrian forms, mid-leap, with their lower halves made to look like marble statues and their upper bodies made of clockwork, trailing

Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony: Noise

39 min listen

My guests in this week’s Book Club podcast are Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, co-authors (with Cass R Sunstein) of Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgment. Augmenting the work on psychological bias that won Prof Kahneman a Nobel Prize, this investigation exposes a more invisible and often more impactful way in which human judgments go

Imperial measures are culture war bait

The idea of reintroducing imperial measures in honour of the Queen’s Jubilee has one quality that will have commended it to No. 10’s wizard wheezes department. It seems to have driven remoaning liberal elite types pleasingly bananas. It’s the perfect culture war bait, because it plays into the stereotype: if you are unshakeably complacent in your conviction that Brexit, and the government which advanced it

William Leith: Finding My Father

55 min listen

My guest in the Book Club podcast this week is my namesake (but no relation) William Leith – whose new book The Cut That Wouldn’t Heal: Finding My Father describes the death of his father and the way it caused him to revisit and re-evaluate his childhood. We talk about the perils and possibilities of

Should a trans woman inherit a peerage over their older sister?

It’s House of Lords reform, Jim, but not as we know it. Matilda Simon has applied to contest the next by-election for hereditary peers, in the hope of taking her hereditary seat as Baron Simon of Wythenshawe. Matilda, Lord Simon? Here, in one story, is a positively combustible mix of the 21st and 11th centuries.

Wendy K. Pirsig: On Quality

30 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to Wendy K Pirsig – widow of Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bestselling book of philosophy of all time. Wendy tells me about her late husband’s big idea – the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’, as set out in a new

In praise of smartphones

The online PE teacher Joe Wicks has announced, in a fit of self-reproach coinciding with the launch of his new television programme, that he considers himself addicted to his smartphone. He says he forced himself to take a whole five days off social media in order to be more ‘present’ for his children, and that