Sam Leith

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 in to help write the memoir of a man who scammed Australia’s banks and public institutions out of millions. I talk to Richard about fiction and lies, what it means to be an Aussie writer now, post-Booker madness, Flaubert’s despair… and why North American writing really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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 Alexander Solzhenitsyn can keep you going when things look grim. Can Russia's gallery of madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — with their canon of work about madmen, drunks, suicides and exiles — really be corralled into the self-help genre? If anyone can make the case, it’s Viv — who offers an enlightening, funny and quietly erudite tour of Russian literary history.

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 the King James Version and seeped everywhere into the language of Shakespeare. Melvyn talks about why Tyndale never quite got his due — and why Thomas More wasn’t nearly as nice a chap as posterity tends to think. You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more like this every Thursday.

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 — how her biography of Matisse bears on her work on Powell. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 fantasy, the uses of Spenser, why he isn’t a literary outrider of New Atheism, and why first-person narrators — everywhere now — really turn him off. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 in fine prose. She talks about the sexism of old Fleet Street, the unexpected liberation of widowhood, her renunciation of poetry, and the extraordinary satisfaction, in literary biography, of finding her calling. And why being married to Michael Frayn keeps her from writing plays… You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for more discussion like this, every Thursday.

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, whether there's any such thing as literary fiction, and why nearly everyone in his books seems to be gay. You can listen here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the journalist and historian Simon Heffer, author of the magisterial new The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880-1914. The second part in his trilogy of books about the Victorian and Edwardian ages, it works to explode the myth that the pre-war years were an endless Merchant Ivory Summer's afternoon. Join us as we talk about imperial decline, savage industrial unrest and aristocratic complacency… and how one writes a history of the years before 1914 without talking about the roots of the First World War. You can listen to our conversation below and do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the comedian and writer Robert Webb — whose moving and funny new book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls “The Trick”: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to lives of inarticulacy, shagging, fighting and drinking — giving pain and fear their only outlet in anger? Sounds good to me — but Webb thinks there might be a better way… You can listen to our conversation here: And do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

The Man Booker shortlist is out. My colleague Philip Hensher isn’t convinced. He today tweeted 'Booker shortlist – McGregor, Z Smith, Whitehead, Roy, Barry, Shamsie. Oh wait – those were the ones they left off. Baffling.' But you can make your own mind up. Or, be guided by our critics.

The Baillie Gifford longlist – consisting of contenders for the country’s most prestigious nonfiction prize – is out today. A very good list it is, too. For readers’ ease, I’m affixing some links here to the Spectator’s reviews of the longlisted titles. We missed Souad Mekhennet (sorry); and a couple of them – Applebaum, Schama and Uglow – are forthcoming so will be reviewed in the next few weeks. Expect a review of Allan Jenkins’s allotment memoir when we consider gardening books at Christmas.