Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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My guest on this week’s books podcast is the author and critic Stuart Kelly. His new book, The Minister and the Murderer: A Book of Aftermaths, tells the story of the only convicted murderer ever to become a minister of the Church of Scotland. We talk about the Ten Commandments, faith and doubt, Stuart’s experiences of
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There’s a tiny mistake in Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays. She describes Geoff Dyer’s unimprovably funny ‘trick while introducing an unsmiling J.M. Coetzee at a literary festival’. And it’s a suggestive mistake. The moment she refers to is Dyer, bashful, blurting that he wondered how his younger self would have reacted if he’d one
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In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the award-festooned writer Mohsin Hamid about his latest novel Exit West — touching on the effects of technology, the migrant crisis, political writing and why his eight-year-old daughter is shaping up to be an emo kid. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like
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This week’s books podcast celebrates the centenary of Muriel Spark. I’m joined by Alan Taylor (author of a new memoir of his friendship with Spark, Appointment in Arezzo) and the critic Philip Hensher to talk about Spark’s life, legacy, special strengths as a novelist — and the mystique that continues to surround the Scottish-born, Tuscan-dwelling author
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It LIVES! This week’s books podcast honours the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein. To cut through all those high camp, bolt-through-the-neck film versions clouding our collective memory, I’m joined by the poet and critic Fiona Sampson, whose fine new book In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (reviewed in this week’s
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In this week’s Spectator Books podcast — arranged in partnership with the male suicide prevention charity CALM — I talk to Johann Hari about his controversial new book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions. In it, Hari argues that the psychiatric establishment overprescribes chemical antidepressants, and that the
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John Murray – the publisher of Byron, Goethe, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin, inter alia – turns 250 this year. This week, they’re launching – in association with The Spectator (a stripling at 190-odd) – a new international prize for non-fiction. Entrants, who must be previously unpublished in book form, are invited to submit an
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This week’s Books Podcast — the last before the Christmas break — sees the Spectator’s office flooded with elves. The QI Elves, to be precise. Four of these adorable, trivia-mining creatures — hosts of the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast — join me to look back over some of the more arcane details
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In this week’s Spectator Books Podcast, I’m talking to Russia’s most prominent dissident journalist, Masha Gessen, about her National Book Award-winning new book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. In the book, which she calls a “non-fiction novel”, Masha attempts to give a properly rounded sense — from high politics to the everyday lives
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This week in the books podcast I’m talking to Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker prize winning author of Gould’s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about his new novel First Person.Drawing on Richard’s own experience of working as the ghostwriter for a celebrated con-man, First Person tells the story of a struggling young literary writer brought
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My guest this week is the comedienne and writer Viv Groskop, and our subject is the greats of 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature. In her new book The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature, Viv tells us (among other things) how Dostoyevsky can calm you down, how Anna Akhmatova can cheer you up and how
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Last night saw the award of this year’s £30,000 Baillie Gifford Prize – the country’s most respected prize for non-fiction – to David France’s How To Survive A Plague (Picador). You can read Peter Tatchell’s Spectator review of this account of the ‘plague years’ of the Aids crisis, and the extraordinary work that activists did
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Nicola Barker has just won the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction with her new novel H(a)ppy. She earned it. If anyone is writing fiction that deserves to be called experimental at the moment (the rubric for the prize is ‘fiction at its most novel’), it’s Nicola Barker. Everything she does, as far as I can
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In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to Melvyn Bragg about his fascinating book on William Tyndale — which makes a case for the greatness of this dissenting British preacher who lived his life in exile and met his end on a bonfire, but whose translation of the Bible into English laid the foundations for
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In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to Anthony Powell’s biographer Hilary Spurling about why A Dance to the Music of Time, far from being a museum piece, is a subtly avant-garde work. We talk about the rise and fall of literary reputations, why Powell wasn’t a snob, his rivalry with Evelyn Waugh, and — unexpectedly
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In this week’s Books podcast I talk to Philip Pullman about his captivating new novel La Belle Sauvage — in which he returns to the world of His Dark Materials — and Daemon Voices, his new collection of essays on storytelling. He talks here about his magpie habits, why he thinks realism is better than
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In this week’s Books Podcast I’m talking to the Times columnist and former speechwriter for Tony Blair, Philip Collins, about one of my favourite subjects: rhetoric. His new book When They Go Low, We Go High is a fascinating look at political oratory from Pericles to (Michelle) Obama, and a vigorous argument for politics itself
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In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to the incomparable Claire Tomalin — veteran literary editor, biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pepys, Hardy and Dickens among others — about her new memoir A Life of My Own. Here’s a book that contains extraordinary hardship — domestic violence; the loss of loved ones — narrated with cool fortitude
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In this week’s Books podcast I’m joined by Alan Hollinghurst, the Man Booker prizewinning author of The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. His remarkable new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, tells a story of three generations of a family from the Second World War to the present day. We talk about agonising over prose,
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The Sunday Times’s literary editor Andrew Holgate recently tweeted the news that Robert Harris’s latest thriller had entered the bestseller list at No. 2: ‘Pipped to the post by Ken Follett.’ Harris retweeted it: ‘Well done Ken. You bastard.’ Pipped to the post only by Follett. That’s the level Harris is at now. Even before it