Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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48 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I talk to Peter Turchin about his new book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. He proposes a scientific theory of history, mapping the underlying forces that have led to the collapse of states from the ancient world to the present day, and warns of very turbulent
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I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had vague memories of his grinning, chipmunk-like face getting up to antics with Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. I noticed when he was in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, because that was all over the
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39 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the writer and critic Laura Freeman to talk about her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Laura’s book is the portrait of one of those figures who, without ever quite taking the spotlight themselves, was nevertheless hugely influential in kindling the love
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37 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we celebrate the life and weigh the literary reputation of Martin Amis, who died at the end of last week. I’m joined by the critic Alex Clark, the novelist John Niven, and our chief reviewer Philip Hensher – all of whom bring decades of close engagement with Amis’s work
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When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster that I’d seen advertised in a comic. It depicted Superman, whom I held in high regard, scragging a distinctly second-tier villain called Nick O’Teen; the relic of some lame early-eighties anti-smoking campaign. For reasons I can’t now fathom, I burned to have this on my bedroom wall. I remember it now
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Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’ (though he defined more than one era); that he was ‘genre-defying’ (he defied more than one genre); that he was an ‘enfant terrible’ (it will be wryly noted that he remained an enfant terrible, somehow, into
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53 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about a very new version of a very old book. Leo Africanus’s The Cosmography and Geography of Africa was the first book to introduce Africa to the people of Western Europe. Part Baedeker, part-natural history, part-memoir, part-history book, it dominated the Western understanding of that continent for hundreds of
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Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the 40-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine – regarded as the leading publication for brain-imaging research in the world. The board, whose members include very senior figures in the world of brain science, is protesting what it sees as the publisher Elsevier’s greedy and
From our UK edition
48 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the writer Madeleine Bunting, whose new book is The Seaside: England’s Love Affair. She tells me how the great seaside resorts came into their 19th century pomp, how abrupt was their mid-century decline, and of the terrible desolation that has succeeded the idyll of donkey rides, ices and
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A detail much noted in the commentary on Saturday‘s coronation was that His Majesty decided against making his first trip to the Abbey in the Gold State Coach. Who can blame him? His mother described riding in that particular wagon as ‘horrible’, and even Queen Victoria had as little to do with it as she
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38 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Shehan Karunatilaka, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Shehan tells me about writing a novel whose protagonist is dead on page one, about putting the chaos of Sri Lanka’s long civil war on the page, and about the importance of
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It’s not the genuine asylum seekers that Suella Braverman and her crew are determined to prevent reaching our shores, we are often told. It’s the illegals. With our traditional British values of tolerance and fair play, we are one of the most welcoming nations on earth to those in real need. The issue is, we hear again and again,
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I can remember exactly where I was when I first fell in love with Tetris. It was the student bar of Oriel College, Oxford, in the very early 1990s. I’d gone to visit my friend Ed, and we bunged a few 10ps into the sticky arcade cabinet in the corner of the bar while we chatted and drank our
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If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel
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57 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. In his new book Quantum Supremacy, Prof Kaku explains how – as he sees it – the advent of quantum computers is going to turn the world as we know it on its head. He explains the extraordinary possibilities and perils of the
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It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You
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23 min listen
This week: Sam Leith explains how he’s been keeping up friendships by playing online scrabble (00:55), Lionel Shriver questions Nike and Bud Light’s recent marketing strategy (06:52) and Angus Colwell reads his review of the V&A Dundee’s tartan exhibition (15:24).
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The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it
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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
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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
