Sam Leith

'Not funny. Try Punch.' This, unkindly, used to be the boilerplate rejection letter from Private Eye to those who submitted jokes to the magazine. And the UK’s only prize for comic fiction, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, has just doled out the equivalent of five dozen such notes – its judges having decided that not one of this year’s 62 submissions was funny enough to deserve the prize, and that it would therefore not be awarded this year. In an odd way, I find this cheering. One reason for that is personal. My own first novel The Coincidence Engine was shortlisted in 2011, so I deduce from that that it must have been funnier than every novel published this year.

In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m joined by the historian Richard Overy to talk about his new book The Birth of the RAF, 1918. 100 years ago this spring, the Royal Air Force took to the skies for the first time. Now, it’s one of the most important planks of our military power in the world, and we look back on its history through — if such a thing can be pictured — Battle-of-Britain-shaped spectacles. Yet, as Richard argues, it was far from inevitable that a separate air-force would come into being, that having done so it would continue to exist beyond the end of the First World War, or even that the Royal Air Force would be Royal.

In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the brilliant Carlo Rovelli — who with the publication of his million-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics in 2014— took his place with Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman as one of the great popularisers of modern theoretical physics. We’re talking today about one of the most difficult fundamental questions in the universe: the nature of time. Do we have free will? Can you understand physics without maths? Just what is Roger Penrose on about? We tackle all these questions and more. Admittedly, it’s an unequal match. I supply the David Bowie quote: Carlo supplies the profound insights.

In this week's Books Podcast I'm joined by Stig Abell -- editor of the Times Literary Supplement, sometime LBC talk radio host, former managing editor of the Sun and (once) the youngest ever director of the Press Complaints Commission -- to talk about his new book How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation. Stig talks about Britain's magnificently chaotic hodgepodge of institutions, his own unusual career, how the press is doomed, being a "centrist dad", the joys of PG Wodehouse -- and his first and only encounter with Richard Desmond.

It always seems to be the way that when attempts are made to promote the life of the mind, they end up being particularly dumb. An instance, today, comes with the publication of a clickbaity list of the 'Top Twenty Books By Women That Changed The World', a promotional stunt ahead of Academic Book Week next week. We’re all encouraged to pile on the hashtag #acbookswomen and cast our votes – though the website as far as I can see doesn’t contain a mechanism to vote and the visitor has to guess at the books on the shortlist by squinting at a series of thumbnails of the covers. Anyway I got a press release so I have a head start.

In this week’s books podcast, we’re using the occasion of the Man Booker International Prize shortlist to talk about the pleasures and perils of literature in translation. I’m joined by Boyd Tonkin, a former chair of the International Booker and author of the forthcoming The 100 Best Novels In Translation, and Frank Wynne, whose translation of Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex 1 appears on this year’s shortlist. They tell me how to really annoy Milan Kundera, about why the best author to translate is a dead author, how the UK fell into “the parochialism of large nations”, and how a translator saved Italo Calvino from himself. Do give it a listen.

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to the historian Lisa Hilton about the latest in her series of what she calls “filthy books” — the raunchy art-world thrillers she writes as L.S. Hilton. The third in the trilogy that began with Maestra (described as “like Lee Child, but with sex instead of punching”), Ultima is out this week and concludes the story of Judith Rashleigh’s corpse-strewn progress across the international scene. Lisa tells me about why murderers might slide down bannisters, why she hates her American editors, how she came to love her sociopathic heroine, and what she learnt from Joseph Roth, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Conran.

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to Richard Holloway about his new book Waiting For The Last Bus. Richard is famous for having, as some would think rather inconveniently, “lost his faith” while serving as Bishop of Edinburgh. He talks to me about how it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and about how being half in and half out of Christianity has given him a special perspective on old age, death and dying. Does he look to an afterlife? Not since a particularly momentous walk in the Pentlands. And how is it that he maintains Philip Larkin — who wrote of religion as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade” — had “the soul of a priest”? Listen in and find out.

In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to N. T. Wright, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the theology of St Paul, about a new book — Paul: A Biography — in which he takes an approach to the man. He tells me what Paul was really like, how our understanding of him is distorted both by medieval theology and modern secularism, why you should spell “pneuma” with a lowercase P, and how we’ve got it all wrong about the Road to Damascus…. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes.

The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on the longlist; one from French and one from Spanish, smarty-pants that he is. It also bears noting how many of these books have only appeared in English thanks to the perspicacity of small presses, and lists with a special interest in translated fiction. Not one of these books is on the main imprint of a major fiction house – bearing out Milan Kundera’s wise remarks about what he calls the 'parochialism of large nations'.

In this week’s Books podcast, I’m joined by the great Wendy Cope, whose new collection Anecdotal Evidence is just out. I talk to her about why she’s funniest when she’s most serious, the fascination of writing in form, the disappearance of Jake Strugnell, the recent row over whether the spoken-word work of Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest counts as “real poetry”, and get the scoop on her second-worst marital row ever — plus, she reads some poems from her new book. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this.

I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought it might be worth reposting the remarks I made in running over the shortlist, and linking, where possible, to the Spectator’s coverage of the books in question. (It’s to my shame that we didn’t review Gareth Russell. As I mention, popular Tudor history books come thick and fast and sometimes the good ones slip through.

This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that - despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at any previous point in history. And he attributes this to the values of the Enlightenment. I asked him: which Enlightenment? Can morality really be based on reason alone? And what’s a professor of cognitive science and linguistics doing in this subject area anyway? You can hear his answers below. And if you enjoyed that, please do subscribe on iTunes.