Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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Why do so many people think poetry is important, and so few of them read it? And why does what might pass unnoticed as a minority activity, like — say — tiddliwinks or sniffing bicycle seats, arouse such strong views in the public at large? The award-winning American writer Ben Lerner has a theory. In
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In this week’s Spectator podcast I talk to Andrew Solomon. Though he’s best known for his work on depression (The Noonday Demon) and identity (Far From the Tree, which I reviewed here), his new book looks not inward but out. Far & Away: How Travel Can Change The World collects essays from three decades of
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In this week’s Spectator Books podcast, we’re talking about tomorrow night’s big announcement: the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This year’s prize — like every year’s, it seems — has caused controversy. What is the prize for? Is it good for the literary culture? And how does the shortlist stand up? Paul Beatty (US) – The
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In the latest Spectator Books podcast, I talk to Hisham Matar — newly shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction prize, the Baillie Gifford — about his new book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. When Hisham was 19, his Libyan dissident father was abducted from exile by the Gadaffi regime and
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We hear a lot about a “crisis of masculinity” these days, but nobody seems to be in agreement about what it consists of. On the one hand, we hear of “rape culture”, absent fathers and everyday sexism; on the other, complaints of the feminisation of society, political correctness and the disappearance of traditional male role-models.
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Today we’re proud to launch the Spectator’s Books Podcast, a literary younger sibling of our popular weekly podcast on politics and current affairs. Each week I’ll be hosting a discussion about the most interesting recent books and the literary talking-points of the day. Books contain every subject known to man – and rather than focusing
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever ITV or the BBC decides — the latter usually with charter renewal in the near or middle distance — that it needs to make some of that World-Class Drama it’s so proud of, its thoughts turn to regency frocks, scruffy urchins, pea-soupy London, agreeable country houses and
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‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking.’ Life is always cheap in noir fiction — but it takes it that step further when the protagonist’s homicidal impulses extend to himself. The hero of this fast-moving, agreeably violent
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So, the 2016 longlist – aka the Man Booker Dozen – is out. It invites a cavalcade of instant commentary, almost all of which – as I wrote when I was helping judge the prize myself last year – is unavoidably incredibly stupid. Nobody other than the judges will have read all 150-odd of the
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William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60, on his way to the printers with his new manuscript. On a hot August day in 1604, a man walked through the dusty streets of Valladolid, Spain, clutching in his right hand a heavy package.
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I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the sort of party to which they’ll never be invited. Unfortunately, I’m never invited to those parties either; and even had I got the last-minute invitation to scoff Creme Eggs at Henry Kissinger’s Easter shindig, I’d
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My last contact with George Weidenfeld was when I asked him to review a book for The Spectator: a life of Stefan Zweig, who has been enjoying a bit of a moment lately. George didn’t fancy it, but I received – very courteous and friendly, as his communications always were – a postcard declining. You could
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It’s not so much the volume of deals done in the agents’ enclosure, the number of exhibitors or the size of the conference hall it takes place in. It’s not even — though this can be a key indicator — that the local sex workers take the week off. Nope: you know your book fair
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Today in the Commons the Tory backbencher Rehman Chishti asked: “Will the Prime Minister join me in urging the BBC to review their bizarre policy; when they wrote to me to say that they can’t use the word Daesh because it would breach their impartiality rules? We are at war with terrorists, Prime Minister. We
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‘They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He shends one of yoursh to the hospital, you shend one of hish to the morgue.’ Thus Sean Connery in The Untouchables, explaining how you fight a war ‘Chicago-style’. How would you adapt that, do we think, for our collective response to the Paris attacks? ‘They pull
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The row over Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes is hotting up. Professor Bate originally embarked on the book with the blessing of the Hughes estate, but that blessing – along with permission to quote from the poet’s writings – was withdrawn. Now the Hughes estate has issued a press release claiming to have
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We don’t usually pay all that much attention, as James Shapiro points out, to the Jacobean Shakespeare. We’re in the habit of thinking of him as an Elizabethan playwright: look in most cradle-to-grave biographies for ‘what Shakespeare was doing after James came to the throne in 1603 and there usually aren’t many pages left to
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Perhaps the most teachable moment in the BBC’s coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to the TUC came around the 38 second mark in the video here. Corbyn is reaching an emotional climax. He’s already delivered his big line: ‘They call us [smacks lips] deficit deniers… but then they spend billions cutting taxes for the richest
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Proust had his cork-lined bedroom; Emily Dickinson her Amherst hidey-hole; Mark Twain a gazebo with magnificent views of New York City. Where, then, did the father of English poetry do his work? From 1374 till 1386, while employed supervising the collection of wool-duties, Chaucer was billeted in a grace-and-favour bachelor pad in the tower directly
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It’s the private messages Mark Zuckerberg will have sent early in the new year that I’d really like to see. The one to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for instance, which I imagine reading along the lines of: ‘Jeff UO me 1 lol. ;).’ Or to Oprah Winfrey: ‘Yo, O-dawg! BURNNN!!’ Or to Zoella: ‘@zozeebo: Book selling
