Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
45 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Fara Dabhoiwala, whose new book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea looks not just at the origins of free speech as an idea, but also its uses and misuses. Fara tells me the bizarre story of how he found himself ‘cancelled’, gives
There are two accounts of the negative effects for humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory, the existential, version of it is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job,
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, who is here to talk about his new non-fiction book Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance. In it, he describes how he criss-crossed Europe in search of the truth about his great-grandfather, a Jewish scientist who found himself working on chemical
Is there anyone in the Met Police, I wonder, low-minded enough to think of things in PR terms? “I’ve got a good wheeze, guv,” I imagine some grizzled lifer piping up. “Let’s get tooled up, kick in the door of a Quaker meeting house and chuck a bunch of unarmed young women in the back
Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set
32 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club is Francesca Simon. Best known for her Horrid Henry series of children’s books, Francesca has just published her first novel for grownups, a haunting reworking of a Welsh folk tale called Salka: Lady of the Lake. She tells me how she came to shift direction, what myths offer in terms of storytelling possibility
Anyone who relishes the humiliation of Sir Keir Starmer – and I know that in this respect, if only this one, many Spectator readers will make common cause with the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn – was presented with a delicacy this weekend. Here was a humiliation so exquisite, so public and so unrecoverable-from, that you
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and journalist John Lanchester, one of the contributors to Michael Lewis’s very timely new anthology of reportage on the United States federal government, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can the public learn to love a bureaucrat? John tells me why he thinks the
For those people with a therapeutic bent of mind, the phrase ‘good enough’ has an almost magical power. It says: don’t beat yourself up because your child isn’t a straight-A student, your marriage isn’t the best thing since Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, and your sobriety is patchy. Sure, you hit your kid – but
26 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the publisher Anthony Cheetham, one of the biggest figures in British publishing through the second half of the twentieth century and into this one. In his new book A Life in Fifty Books: A Publisher’s Memoir, he looks back on his career. He tells me why
Pro-Palestinian activists under the banner of Palestine Action have been waging what it’s not too much of an exaggeration to call a war against companies and institutions in this country that are seen to support Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In one attack last summer at a Bristol facility owned by the British subsidiary of the Israeli
42 min listen
This week: the carve-up of Ukraine’s natural resources From the success of Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington to the squabbling we saw in the Oval Office and the breakdown of security guarantees for Ukraine – we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of geopolitics in the last week, say Niall Ferguson and
‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet, as the Stratford man knew, is to be immortal. But there’s another way to achieve immortality through verse – and that is the route taken by William McGonagall, the ‘worst poet in history’, who was
33 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Donald Trump’s outstanding Boswell, the magazine writer Michael Wolff. Michael’s new book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, takes Donald Trump and his colourful cast of hangers-on from the aftermath of the 6 January riots to his triumphal return to the White House. Michael tells me why he thinks
It’s hard to overstate just how shocking, how grotesque and shaming, was President Trump’s outburst against Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the Oval Office. Pop went the last soap-bubble of hope any of us had that US diplomatic policy for the next four years would cleave to anything other than the mad king’s personal whims and
45 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the Assyriologist Selena Wisnom, author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History. Selena tells me about the vast and strange world of cuneiform culture, as evidenced by the life and reign of the scholar-king Ashurbanipal and the library – pre-dating that of Alexandria –
On Tuesday, the government’s consultation on AI and copyright comes to an end. There doesn’t seem to be much hope that Sir Keir and his tech-dazzled colleagues will pay much attention to it, though: long before it came to an end they made clear that their preferred plan was to change copyright law so that
Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at
49 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining,
The Chief Inspector of the schools’ watchdog Ofsted, Sir Martyn Oliver, has said he thinks the change in working habits that came about after the Covid pandemic is substantially to blame for the skyrocketing rates of children being absent from school. In 2018-19, persistent absence of pupils from state secondaries ran at about 13 per
