Podcast

The Book Club

Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith.

Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith.

The Book Club

Craig Brown on the kaleidoscopic Beatles

My guest in this week’s podcast is the multi-talented satirist Craig Brown, whose new book One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time is, I feel confident in guessing, the most entertaining book about the Fab Four ever written. Craig joins me to talk about how he goes about his jackdaw work picking out the

Play 35 mins

The Book Club

A history of poetry with Professor John Carey

This week’s Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey – emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses. (He’s also lead book reviewer for a publication

Play 35 mins

The Book Club

The warm, generous side of Andy Warhol

On this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Blake Gopnik — the author of a monumental new biography of Andy Warhol. Blake tells me how everything — fame, money, and other human beings — were ‘art supplies’ to Warhol, but that underneath a succession of contrived personae Warhol could be warm, generous and even

Play 33 mins

The Book Club

The Twilight Zone inspired confessions of a poet

My guest on this week’s Book Club is the poet Don Paterson — whose new book Zonal finds him accessing a new, confessional mode, a longer line and a childhood interest in the spooky TV show The Twilight Zone. Don talks about the relationship between poetry and jazz, the split between ‘page poetry’ and spoken-word

Play 27 mins

The Book Club

Hadley Freeman: tracing my family’s escape from Europe

In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the writer Hadley Freeman, whose new book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles

Play 34 mins

The Book Club

Christina Lamb: how rape is used as a weapon of war

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Christina’s new book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women is a deeply reported survey of rape as a weapon of war, described in our pages by Antony Beevor as the most powerful and disturbing book he has

Play 38 mins

The Book Club

Why 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

Don’t Panic! Next month marks the 42nd anniversary of the first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Joining me on this week’s podcast to discuss the genesis, genius and legacy of the show and the books it spawned are the literary scholar and science fiction writer Adam Roberts, and John Lloyd, the

Play 30 mins

The Book Club

Does sex matter?

 

Play 30 mins

The Book Club

The Book Club podcast: did Churchill’s cook help him win the war?

This week’s Book Club stars the food historian and broadcaster Annie Gray, whose new book Victory In The Kitchen excavates the life and world of Georgina Landemare – Winston Churchill’s cook. From the shifting roles of household servants, and the insane food of the Edwardian rich – everything jellied and moulded and forced through sieves

Play 32 mins