Sam Leith

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 invisible to us, that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means?

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 Aristotelian plot, and the unusual way his psychic second wife sends him off to sleep.

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 new book Down In The Valley: A Writer’s Landscape — and who’s here to talk about the pleasures and difficulties of coaxing reminiscences out of this laureate of English rural life. Essential listening for anyone for whom Cider With Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning formed part of a literary education.

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.