Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

Sam Leith

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

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

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

Sam Leith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spectator Books: Greek myths, reimagined

This week the Books Podcast leaves its dank burrow and hits the road. I travelled to the southern Peloponnese to catch up with the Orange-prize winning novelist Madeline Miller, where she was hosting a reading weekend at the Costa Navarino resort. Madeline’s first novel, The Song of Achilles, retold the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of

Spectator Books: how fake news took over the world

My guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of ‘post-truth politics’ in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War

Spectator Books: the sisters who founded modern China

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspective. In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Jung narrates the lives of the Soong Girls — one of whom was married to

Spectator Books: who was Susan Sontag?

My guest in this week’s books podcast is Benjamin Moser, author of an acclaimed new biography of one of America’s most celebrated (and controversial) intellectuals of the twentieth century: Sontag: Her Life. I asked Benjamin how he sorted fact from myth, about tracking down the inventor of that haircut, and about Annie Leibovitz’s take on

Books Podcast: Israeli short stories with Etgar Keret

This week’s podcast features the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, talking about his new collection of short stories Fly Already. Topics on the agenda: how an Israel writer can address the Holocaust, why one of Etgar’s stories caused a dear friend of his to have to change his name, whether writing stories is a useful thing