Podcast
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
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Claire Tomalin. Claire’s new book, The Young H G Wells: Changing the World, tracks the extraordinary life and rocket-powered career of one of the most influential writers of the Edwardian age. She tells me how drapery’s loss was literature’s gain, why casting the goatish Wells as
Play 25 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam’s guest is the historian Jane Ridley, talking about her new book George V: Never A Dull Moment. She tells him there’s so much more to the ‘boring’ monarch than shooting grouse and collecting stamps. Hear how he navigated some of the worst constitutional crises in memory, saved the
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the historian James Holland to talk about his fascinating new book Brothers In Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day. James’s story follows the Sherwood Rangers from El Alamein to the D-Day Landings, and on through the last push through Europe into
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Joan Bakewell, who talks to me about her new book The Tick Of Two Clocks: A Tale of Moving On. It describes how she made the decision to sell the house she lived in for half a century, and what it meant to her to face
Play 32 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s book club podcast, I’m joined by Kate Lister to talk about her new book Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale. Kate tells me about some of the most celebrated sex-workers in history (and pre-history), the attempts that have been made to regulate the ‘oldest profession’ – and where
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
Chuck Palahniuk — best known as the author of Fight Club — has just announced that he’s publishing his next novel not with a mainstream publisher but through the online subscription service Substack. He joins me on this week’s Book Club podcast to tell me why; and to talk about how 9/11 changed literature, why
Play 25 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who
Play 37 mins
The Book Club
This week, I’m joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – whose latest book is The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World. He tells me how 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition – served as a pivot in Dickens’s own life, and set him on the path to writing Bleak House.
Play 40 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Oliver Burkeman. His new book 4,000 Weeks offers some bracing reflections on time: how much we have of it, how best to use it, and why ‘time management’ and productivity gurus have the whole thing upside down.
Play 40 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s podcast is the biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Her biography of Tom Stoppard is newly out in paperback, and she tells me about the decade of work behind Sir Tom’s overnight success, his unexpected influences, and the challenge to a biographer of getting to the heart of this elusive genius.
Play 41 mins
The Book Club
Michael Bracewell’s new book Souvenir is a vivid and poetic evocation of London on the brink of the digital era – the neglected in-between times between 1979 and 1986. He joins me to talk about fine art and post-punk, T S Eliot and William Burroughs – and the dangerous lure of nostalgia.
Play 31 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m talking to Michael Pye about his new book Antwerp: The Glory Years. For most of the 16th century, as he tells me, Antwerp was the most important town in the western world – a city in which, as never before, ideas, information, goods and money circulated free of
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast we anticipate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Wall going up by talking to Iain MacGregor about his book Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth. He tells me how, and why, the Russians cut a city in half overnight; and
Play 53 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s books podcast is Mary Ann Sieghart, whose new book The Authority Gap accumulates data to show that so-called ‘mansplaining’ isn’t a minor irritation but the manifestation of something that goes all the way through society: women are taken less seriously than men, even by other women. She says it’s not
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the political journalist Marie Le Conte, whose new book isHonourable Misfits: A Brief History of Britain’s Weirdest, Unluckiest and Most Outrageous MPs. She introduces us to some of the dishonourable members of the past, and explains why – despite what we may think – in terms
Play 28 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s book club podcast is Frederick Forsyth, whose classic thriller The Day of the Jackal has been in print for 50 years this summer. He tells me about banging it out in a few weeks on a typewriter with a bullet hole in it, the shady characters who informed his research
Play 30 mins
The Book Club
Who is John Galt? This week’s Book Club podcast looks at the life, work and personality of Ayn Rand, probably the most influential writer you’ve never read. A favourite of our new Health Secretary, the author of Atlas Shrugged — and the most strident advocate of the idea that “greed is good” — continues to
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Anne Sebba – whose Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy tells the story of the first woman in US history to be executed for a crime other than murder. She tells me how attitudes to this notorious espionage case changed over the years; and why, while
Play 47 mins
The Book Club
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the chief librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden. In Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, he explores the long history and vital importance of libraries and archives — and the equally long history of their destruction in
Play 50 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Charles Spencer, whose book The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream is new out in paperback. He tells me why his story is like “Game of Thrones meets Titanic“, about the piety and the startling cruelty of medieval kings, the tantalising
Play 35 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is one of America’s foremost magazine journalists, the New Yorker‘s Lawrence Wright. His new book is The Plague Year: America In The Time of Covid. He tells me what a book brings to recent history that week-to-week journalism can’t, about the extraordinary happenstance that put him in
Play 36 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Lauren Hough – author of an outstanding new collection of autobiographical essays called Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing which describe a life that took her from growing up in the Children Of God cult via being discharged from the US Air Force and jobs as a
Play 29 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Julian Sancton, whose new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, documents the crew of men who were the first to experience an Antarctic winter trapped in the ice, in an attempt to reach the South Pole.
Play 43 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells me why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re celebrating the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan. My guests are the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, and Clinton Heylin, the Dylanologist’s Dylanologist and author most recently of The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless Hungry Feeling 1941-66. I ask what makes Dylan special, whether what he does
Play 40 mins
The Book Club
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and critic Ruth Scurr, whose new book marks today’s 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death to cast a fresh light on this most written-about of characters. In Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows, she finds an unexpected thread running through the life of this
Play 47 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Richard Dawkins to talk about his new book Books Do Furnish A Life: Reading and Writing Science. Richard tells me – among much else – what makes science writing (and science fiction) exciting; the questions science can (and can’t) answer; why he felt it necessary to
Play 44 mins
The Book Club
Hwaet! My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Maria Dahvana Headley, whose new book is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf. She talks to me about how she has produced what she bills as a “feminist translation” of this most macho of poems; about the poem’s braided history and complex language; and
Play 45 mins
The Book Club
In this week’s Book club podcast my guest is Roland Philipps – whose new book Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal tells the morally murky and humanly fascinating story of Mathilde Carre – a vital figure of the early days of resistance in occupied France. Roland’s story describes her heroic early work;
Play 30 mins
The Book Club
My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and it’s still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It’s a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality
Play 42 mins