Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Britain’s Prince Andrew’s current travails that “according to visitors to Royal Lodge,” he now “spends much of his time playing video games.” Even before all the unpleasantness with the child-rape allegations against Jeffrey Epstein, one of the Prince’s more
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Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the crime writer Peter James. Peter has contributed the introduction to a new edition of the classic thriller The Eagle Has Landed, which is 50 years old this month. He tells Sam what it was that made Jack Higgins’s novel so groundbreaking, about what it takes to
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The last time I saw my cousin, the former Tory MP Danny Kruger, I found myself trying to ginger him up a bit. I said, which I thought then and thought now – and which I can’t think it is betraying a confidence to say publicly – that the low state of the Conservative party was a bummer for those who sat
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Luke Kemp. In his new book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Luke seeks lessons from prehistory to understand how societies grow and flourish, what kills them, and where we are now. He tells me what Hobbes got wrong, why ‘civilisation’ isn’t always
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I log in so infrequently these days that Facebook has, I’m pleased to say, nearly given up on me. Like a half-hearted stalker whose head has been turned by a fresh victim, it sends me alerts and updates with ever-diminishing regularity, and few of them remotely tempt me to click. So it was quite unusual to see one, a few days ago, that did make me click. It
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This week’s Book Club podcast is Ben Schott. The author of the world- (or downstairs-loo-) conquering Schott’s Original Miscellany returns with Schott’s Significa, a deeply reported and constantly surprising book in which he uses the private languages of various communities – from gondoliers to graffiti writers and from Swifties to sommeliers – as a way
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The question has changed, as one Oxford don noted wanly on social media, from ‘What are you reading at university?’ to ‘Are you reading at university?’ Such is the state of undergraduates entering English literature courses these days, brains addled by scrolling on their mobile phones, that universities are now offering ‘reading resilience’ courses to help them tackle the unfamiliar task
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Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historical novelist Philippa Gregory. In her gripping new book Boleyn Traitor, Philippa seeks to rescue Jane Boleyn from the vast condescension of history. She tells Sam how fiction allows her to make plausible speculations about the gaps in the record, how she works to make the
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Say what you like about Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, but his ‘flooding the zone’ thing really works, doesn’t it? Bannon’s thesis about political communication – which is, really, a thesis about political communication as political warfare – is that you need to pump out such a torrent of outrageous and chaotic actions and pronouncements that the press
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There’s a very short list of important questions, these days, to which the right answer is ‘Tony Blair’. I mean, a really short list. In a round of the US gameshow Jeopardy, when the host says ‘Tony Blair’, nobody is going to win a doublewide trailer by piping up: ‘Who would be the best person
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Sam’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Sudhir Hazareesingh, whose new book Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World reframes the story of Atlantic slavery. He explains why the familiar tale of enlightened Europeans bringing about abolition leaves out the most important voices of
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Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Roger Lewis, whose book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers has been republished to mark 100 years since the comedian’s birth. Roger tells Sam about the difference between Sellers’s public persona and private life, plus his influence on comedy today. They also discuss how
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We are in the grip of old habits. We assume, most of us, that when a prominent political figure is assassinated, the motive for the killing is political. So it was with Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Before anything was known about the killer, President Trump’s allies and outliers decided that it was a symptom of the
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Grade: A As gamers of my generation who grew up on the Metal Gear series will know, its creator Hideo Kojima is a got-dang genius. The attention to detail and love and inventiveness he gave to 1998’s Metal Gear Solid and its sequels was second to none. There were quirks (smoking was good for you);
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Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrew Bayliss, author of Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower. Andrew tells Sam what we know — and don’t know – about these much-mythologised figures from the Ancient world and tells the story of how a tiny city-state punched above its weight, until
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Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know isn’t even out yet, and already someone has spotted a goof. In response to an early review in a Sunday paper – which reports that McEwan’s novel is set in a world where a Russian hydrogen bomb has missed its target in the United States, exploded in
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Albanian-born political philosopher Lea Ypi, whose new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined reconstructs the story of her grandmother’s early life amid the turbulence of the early and mid twentieth century. She talks to me about using the techniques of fiction to supply the gaps in the archive,
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“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That perennial funeral favourite, 1 Corinthians 13, has a lot to answer for. Generations of so-called grown-ups have, whether through the fear of God or
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This week’s Book Club podcast marks the 80th anniversary this year of the publication of Brideshead Revisited. This conversation is from the archives, originally recorded in 2020 to mark its 75th anniversary. To discuss Evelyn Waugh’s great novel, Sam Leith is joined by literary critic and author Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and
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Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her
