Sam Leith

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 get a special understanding the temper of a given time through the pivotal works of fiction and nonfiction that expressed it; books written without the historian's hindsight. Here’s a survey of familiar landmarks — as well as texts that have fallen into undeserving (and sometimes deserving) obscurity.

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 part of the problem. Our notion that hard work and proven ability should be the route to wealth and success has, he says, created a miserable underclass and a comparably miserable overclass — and is responsible for a damaging and eventually unsustainable reorganisation of Western economies. Among other sophisticated questions, I ask him: how so? And: aren’t you sounding a bit like a Marxist, there, Mr Yale Professor?

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 view. Her second, Circe, takes on the great sorceress of the Odyssey. She talked about how — as a classicist as well as a novelist — she approached reworking these canonical stories; about taking liberties with Circe; and about how the 'rape culture' of Ancient Greece speaks to us in the age of #metoo.

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 Against Reality, describes how Russia’s surreal new information politics turned out not to be a weird exception, but the harbinger of a worldwide phenomenon.

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 Chiang Kai-shek, another of whom became one of the richest women in the world and helped run Chiang’s government; and the other one of whom (the widow of the founding father of modern China, Sun Yatsen) threw her lot in with Chiang’s deadly enemy and eventual usurper, Mao Zedong. Every family has its little ups and downs!

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 their stormy love affair. Why could someone as brave as Sontag never come out? Did she have a sense of humour? And what of her will last?

My guest in this week’s podcast is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, whose latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has just been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Elif talks to me about living in exile, writing in a second language, her relationship with Istanbul, and how the West’s culture war over 'free speech' looks to someone from a country where free speech can get you thrown in jail, or worse.

This week's books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. My guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book - expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao - considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what unites and what divides the regimes of dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu.

Eighty years on from the start of the Second World War, my guest in this week’s podcast is Ian Sansom — who’s talking about 'September 1, 1939', the Auden poem that marked the beginning of that war. Ian’s new book is a 'biography' of the poem, and he talks about how it showcases all that is both best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and Osama Bin Laden.

My guest on this week’s Books Podcast is the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay. Lemn’s new memoir My Name Is Why describes his early life — given up for fostering in the late 1960s as the son of an unmarried Ethiopian mother — and his progress, when his foster family gave him up, through the care system and out the other side. It’s a powerfully affecting story, and Lemn joins me to fill in some of the gaps. How does he feel towards his foster parents now? Do the racism and institutional cruelty he experienced belong to a vanished age? And… what did Errol Brown need with an afro comb?

The spy writer Mick Herron’s Slough House series of comic thrillers has steadily established him as perhaps the most influential author in the genre since Le Carre. The latest in the series, Joe Country, is out now — and we thought to celebrate its publication with another opportunity to listen to my conversation last year with Mick — when London Rules came out -- about Slough House, slow horses and his unkillable, curry-stained antihero Jackson Lamb. Normal post-holiday service will be resumed next week with a box-fresh podcast featuring Lemn Sissay.

Even books editors have to go on holiday sometimes, so Spectator Books is taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. But so there's not a gaping gap in your life where the podcast used to be, we're bringing out some of our favourite episodes from our archive. This week, I am joined by the critic Alex Clark and Damian Barr — memoirist and host of the Savoy’s Literary Salon — to talk about summer reading. What do you take? What do you regret taking? Kindle, dead-tree or — 19th-century-style — cabin trunk full of books sent on ahead? Our discussion yielded a host of recommendations — from the brand new to the reliable old friends — that we hope will help you plan your own travelling library.

In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. I’m joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s 'footsteps' approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit the worlds of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the crucial year in the late 1790s when they lived near each-other in the Quantocks in Somerset. That meant, for him, living in the same landscape, walking the same paths, reliving the struggles with lines of verse in manuscript.

The star New York Times columnist David Brooks has never been afraid to go beyond the usual remit of day-to-day politics. His new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to the Meaning of Life, somewhere between a spiritual autobiography and a manual for living. He joins me to explain how he’s changed his mind about the meaning of life since his previous book The Road To Character (he’s cagy about whether refunds are available), about how his own humbling after the breakdown of his marriage made him a wiser and better person, and about whether a new-found appreciation for altruism could make him a socialist.

Pigeons: revolting pests who can’t tell the difference between fag-butts and chips, right? Not so, according to my latest podcast guest Jon Day, distinguished man of letters, critic, academic and… pigeon-fancier. Jon’s new book Homing describes how — suffering an early midlife crisis in young married life with fatherhood approaching — he took up racing pigeons. His book will make you look at pigeons in a new light — and also reflect on what these extraordinary birds have to tell us about the relationship between humans and animals and about the idea of home.

My guest on this week’s podcast is Caroline Crampton — whose fine and lyrical new book The Way To The Sea twines travelogue and memoir to pay tribute to the neglected mystery and beauty of the downriver portions of the Thames. Evoking Joseph Conrad and Dickens, ranging from prehistory to the sunken wrecks (and still live explosives!) of wartime ships that foundered on its shoals, from the 18th-century maritime madness to the modern day rejuvenation or social cleansing of the London docklands, Caroline tells a remarkable and fascinating story.