Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
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 – in one case thanks to having children and the other to the modern fatwa on 'cultural appropriation' – she didn't get to write.
From our UK edition
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 of absentmindedness call for a national strike; don’t demand the eradication of the state of Israel; don’t promise to tax the rich till the pips squeak; don’t appear in the same hemisphere, let alone same photograph as anyone with a grey beard. Geese routinely walk unstartled across his path.
From our UK edition
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 Anaximander’s way of thinking still informs the work scientists do everywhere, how politics shapes scientific progress and how we can navigate the twin threats of religious dogma and postmodern relativism in search of truth.
From our UK edition
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 gut. But tell them that it’s going to be impossible to buy salad in the supermarket, and unless they are Jordan Peterson, they will freak the hell out. The tomato shortage is what the young folk call 'relatable content', and those empty tomato shelves are a political Rorschach blot. You see in them whatever you want to see. Brexit, for instance.
From our UK edition
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 around it.
From our UK edition
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 of his books. But for once it’s the contents of the books, rather than the adult prejudices of the author, that are drawing heat. Puffin books, as the Telegraph reported at the weekend, has quietly reissued edited versions of Dahl’s canon: ‘This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.
From our UK edition
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 of personal bad behaviour – up to and including stabbing one of his wives. As the book makes clear Mailer was a racist, misogynist, homophobe, thug and a boor. But was he also, actually, any good? And will he last?
From our UK edition
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 or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’. There are two things that seem worth noticing about this.
From our UK edition
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 the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush administration with his support for the Iraq War, why it still makes sense to think about 'fate' in a world without gods and why George H W Bush was a paragon of the tragic mindset while his son George W Bush was a tragic hero.
From our UK edition
The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back. The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up this very afternoon. I’m interested, as I expect we all are, to see how she develops there the arguments that her piece for the Telegraph set out.
From our UK edition
57 min listen
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution, she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to forget or ignore it, shapes the high politics and daily lives of the Chinese nation. She tells me why official amnesia on the subject is a surprisingly recent development, how 1989's Tiananmen Square protests changed the course of the country, and why so many ordinary Chinese people still, extraordinarily, pine for the days of Mao.
From our UK edition
How big does a bath need to be for 'sex frolicking' to be a possibility? That’s not, if you’d asked anyone six months ago, the question on which the reputational future of the monarchy might be in part held to depend – and yet here we are. A bizarre photograph has been released by the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell in an attempt to discredit Virgina Roberts Guiffre's claims of abuse. The photograph made the front page of the Daily Telegraph, no less. It showed two people, described in the accompanying story as 'acquaintances' of Ghislaine Maxwell, sitting facing each-other, fully clothed, in the bathtub of Maxwell’s old home.
From our UK edition
54 min listen
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn't eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be a good time to do it, and gives a jaw-dropping sense of what the night sky looked like when the earth was young.
From our UK edition
The cliché is that it’s scandals about sex that tend to do for Tories, and scandals about money that do for their counterparts on the opposite benches. To give credit to the current generation of Tories, though, the last decade or so has seen, in this department, a feat of triangulation quite undreamed of by the likes of David Cameron or even Tony Blair. The Conservatives have retained a creditably strong showing in the extra-marital nookie and unwanted sexual advances stakes; but my goodness, they haven’t half upped their game in financial sleaze. Using 'I was simply careless' as your explanation for why you accidentally seem to have not paid several million pounds in tax won’t really cut it All credit to Boris Johnson for captaining the team.
From our UK edition
60 min listen
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses, which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle's notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting their wives pick out the curtains, why we call ginger-haired people "redheads" and, oddly, how a pooping dog might do in a pinch as an aid to navigation.
From our UK edition
Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me. All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe. It’s quite the retrospective performance review What’s more unusual is what happened next.
From our UK edition
38 min listen
In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to be both Orpheus and Eurydice.
From our UK edition
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is a true believer. And that, I think, makes him very dangerous to the monarchy indeed. He came across well: modest, steely, scrupulously honest by his own lights, unshakably coherent in his view of the world and in his view of his place in it. He combined the moral authority of a victim of trauma with the unruffled calm of the fanatic. It was an extraordinarily, dangerously seductive performance. Moral clarity, a simple story, an injury nobly borne, a righteous crusade against a corrupt institution – these are the things that public opinion finds it very easy to get behind.
From our UK edition
Children’s writing has been having a bit of a moment over the past couple of weeks, after a conversation on social media between children’s authors gathered into a sort of cri de coeur about the public neglect of their craft. Children’s books, they said, are barely covered in newspaper review pages or on the radio these days. Prizes for their creators have dwindled in number – the Smarties and Guardian prizes have long gone by the board, and the children’s category at the Costa book awards went down with that ship. We all know about the dwindling stock of public libraries. The writers complained, too, that publishers are using celebrity name recognition for the path of least resistance: diverting their marketing budgets into ghostwritten pap by TV stars.
From our UK edition
65 min listen
In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt - whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa - and along the way explains what's so good about mammoths, how cutting-edge cognitive science explains Paleolithic art, why cavemen didn't live in caves... and why you can draw a line from prehistoric Lascaux to Tony the Tiger.
