Does sex matter?
30 min listen
Sam Leith
Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Wednesday
Saturday
The real Calamity Jane was distressingly unlike her legend
‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ This is very much the advice that has applied to Calamity Jane over the years. She was the lover of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, avenged herself on his killer and bore his secret
Wednesday
The Book Club podcast: did Churchill’s cook help him win the war?
32 min listen
This week’s Book Club stars the food historian and broadcaster Annie Gray, whose new book Victory In The Kitchen excavates the life and world of Georgina Landemare – Winston Churchill’s cook. From the shifting roles of household servants, and the insane food of the Edwardian rich – everything jellied and moulded and forced through sieves
Saturday
Why I’m mourning Lee Child’s retirement
There is mourning in my household, as in many households, this morning at the news that Lee Child – the bestselling thriller writer, from whom we have been able to expect a new Jack Reacher novel every autumn – is laying down his pen. You can well see why he might. He has all the
Wednesday
The Book Club podcast: what do T.S. Eliot’s letters reveal?
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about the life and loves of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Professor John Haffenden joins me to discuss the impact of the opening of an archive of more than 1,000 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale — his Harvard sweetheart and the woman who for
Wednesday
‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed
James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always
The Book Club: James Ellroy on God, drugs and his mother’s murder
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I talk to the ‘demon dog’ of American letters, James Ellroy — whose latest book is This Storm. In a wide-ranging and somewhat NSFW conversation, we talk about misquoting Auden, why Ellroy hates Orson Welles, how he maps out the byzantine plots of his novels, why as a recovering
Who are today’s fictional heroes?
What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality: to do with courage above all but, in its wider connotations, to do with altruism or protectiveness and self-sacrifice. The answer that probably precedes that one, though, is a more technical, narratological one: the hero
Wednesday
The Book Club podcast: the magic of children’s books
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the children’s writer Piers Torday, author of the Last Wild trilogy and, most recently, The Frozen Sea. Why is winter such a powerful thing in children’s writing? How come children’s books are such a booming publishing sector when so many people thought that screens would all but
Thursday
Remembering the genius of Clive James
‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian polymath. I liked it. It cast him, I thought, as a sort of barnacled kraken — still hanging in there, occasionally roused to action. He was usually submitting a new poem. For a while, after
Wednesday
The Book Club: Tom Holland on Christianity’s enduring influence
In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity — and an account of the myriad ways, many of them
Thursday
‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend
When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and — we’re pleased to discover — Spectator subscriber, isn’t much like most rock stars. Sober now for three decades, he calls instead on his wife Rachel’s psychic powers.
Wednesday
The Book Club podcast: The Who’s Pete Townshend on his new novel
My guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. We talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an
The Book Club podcast: a conversation with Clive James
Clive James is gone. What a great spirit, what a lively and curious mind, what an instinct for laughter we’ve lost. I had the chance to talk to him in 2017 at his home in Cambridge about poetry, fame, late style, discovering Browning, being silly and serious, watching box sets, facing the end, and why he
Wednesday
Spectator Book Club: who was the poet Laurie Lee?
I’m joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him as a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the
Sunday
Sordid confessions of a Centrist Dad | 17 November 2019
I have a shameful secret. I’ve been watching these… videos online. Amazing what you can get in a couple of clicks these days. Being what the Corbynistas deride as a Centrist Dad, I have taken to seeking out short films of taboo figures like Tony Blair and Barack Obama, talking about current affairs and being
Thursday
Sordid confessions of a Centrist Dad
I have a shameful secret. I’ve been watching these… videos online. Amazing what you can get in a couple of clicks these days. Being what the Corbynistas deride as a Centrist Dad, I have taken to seeking out short films of taboo figures like Tony Blair and Barack Obama, talking about current affairs and being
Wednesday
The Book Club: a literary history of 20th century Britain
In this week’s Spectator Book Club, my guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can
Wednesday
Spectator Books: is meritocracy a trap?
For this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In his new book The Meritocracy Trap Daniel advances an argument that will seem startling to partisans of Left and Right alike: that meritocracy isn’t the solution to our social and political discontents, but the central
Wednesday
The Books Podcast: the tragic self-destruction of the House of York
In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the award-winning historian Thomas Penn about his new book The Brothers York: An English Tragedy — in which he argues that the ‘Wars of the Roses’ weren’t determined by a struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster so much as by the catastrophic white-on-white conflict that cause
