Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
34 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson’s rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what
‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha, said I. No. We most certainly are not there yet. And it is hard to conceive of any sequence of events, up to and including an asteroid strike on SW1 or a Day of the
Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is
39 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the ‘magic third’, why it’s not just Covid that gave us superspreaders,
Robinson Crusoe on Mas a Tierra; Napoleon on Elba; Schofield on Nosy Ankarea. Island exile is an opportunity for man, that bare-forked thing, to confront his essence in solitude. Yet where Crusoe explored theology, economics and the nature of human civilisation, and Napoleon brooded on his world-historic destiny, Schofield is bellyaching to the viewers of
40 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Alan Garner whose new book of essays and poems is called Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life. Alan tells me about landscape and writing, science and magic, the unbearably spooky story behind his novel Thursbitch – and why, three weeks short of 90, he has no
The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be quoted far and wide – will not have been what he planned. With his most serious, most pained expression, Sir Keir called for ‘an immediate ceasefire in Gaza’ and… ‘the return of the sausages’. He
Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in
43 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum. In her new book I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line Lindsey intersperses her account of the many conflicts she has covered as a war reporter with the poems that have given her consolation and a
Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics. I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made ‘hard decisions’ that nobody liked – it would
32 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round the Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying
I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure, mind. It is all too easy to imagine how failures of regulation, of maintenance, of oversight, contributed to the Grenfell catastrophe. It’s easy to see how, here
32 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Thomson reflects on his childhood home following the death of his sister (1:20); Andrew Watts argues that the public see MPs as accountable for everything though they’re responsible for little (7:40); Sam Leith reveals the surprising problem of poetical copyright (13:47); Helen Barrett reviews Will Noble’s book Croydonopolis and explores the
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers? You’re allowed
46 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, artist and historian Amy Jeffs. Her new book Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic aims to recover and bring back to life the wild and fascinating world of medieval saints. She tells me what we lost with the Reformation (all the good swearing,
Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t already hate him, our new Prime Minister might like to bask in a few weeks of good vibes. Things, after all, can only get worse from here. Wouldn’t it
25 min listen
The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here’s an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom. Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939,
The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches
49 min listen
The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September with new episodes. Until then, here’s an episode from the archives with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Carlo joined Sam in March 2023 to discuss his book Anaximander and the Nature of Science and explain how a radical thinker two and a half
