Sam Leith

Hwaet! My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Maria Dahvana Headley, whose new book is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf. She talks to me about how she has produced what she bills as a “feminist translation” of this most macho of poems; about the poem’s braided history and complex language; and

In this week’s Book club podcast my guest is Roland Philipps – whose new book Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal tells the morally murky and humanly fascinating story of Mathilde Carre – a vital figure of the early days of resistance in occupied France. Roland’s story describes her heroic early work;

My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and it’s still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It’s a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality

My guest this week is crime queen Lynda La Plante – talking about her new novel Judas Horse, and three decades of her most famous creation, Prime Suspect‘s Jane Tennison. She tells me how she wrote her way out of acting, why so much crime drama now turns her off, why she thinks it’s so

This week on the Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the veteran foreign correspondent Michela Wrong to talk about her new book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. While Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame has basked in the approval of Western donors, Michela argues, his burnished image

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the former editor of the Today Programme, Sarah Sands. Sarah tells me how an addiction to the buzz of news and gossip gave way in her to a fascination for the opposite, as described in her new book The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons From Monastic Life.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Horatio Clare – whose superb latest book is about going mad. Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing, tells the story of Horatio’s recent breakdown and forcible hospitalisation – what he experienced, how he recovered, how it pushed him to investigate the unquestioned assumptions

The public conversation – especially on social media – is widely agreed to be of a dismally low quality. In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by two people who have ideas about how we can make it better. Andrew Doyle’s new book is Free Speech: And Why It Matters; Ian Leslie’s is Conflicted:

My guest on this week’s Book Club is the bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman, whose fascinating new book River Kings spins a global history of the Vikings out of a single carnelian bead found in a grave in Repton. Cat tells me how much more there was to the Viking culture than our traditional image of arson,

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the philosopher Toby Ord to talk about the cheering subject of planetary catastrophe. In his book The Precipice, new in paperback, Toby argues that we’re at a crucial point in human history – and that if we don’t start thinking seriously about extinction risks our species may

In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by one of the funniest writers working today. Shalom Auslander’s new novel is Mother For Dinner, which is set in perhaps the most oppressed minority community in the world. He talks to me about cannibalism, identity politics, his beef with tragedy… and an extremely high-risk prayer

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Winchester, whose new book takes on one of the biggest subjects on earth: earth. Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Made The Modern World starts from the author’s own little corner of New England – what he proudly calculates at a bit more

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are the writer and Women’s Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter — but a year ago they became ‘sister widows’, as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new

In the first Book Club podcast of the year, we’re marking the moment that George Orwell comes out of copyright. I’m joined by two distinguished Orwellians — D. J. Taylor and Dorian Lynskey — to talk about how the left’s favourite Old Etonian speaks to us now, and how his reputation has weathered. Was he