Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Dave Eggers, talking about his new book Contrapposto. Dave tells me why, after years of writing tech-saturated satire, he returned to the world of art; how a novel 20 years in the making became a love story about talent, ambition and the mystery of making beauty; and why he thinks art ends when theory begins.
Among my many unpopular and unpatriotic opinions is that, in most of the ways that matter, the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks won. With less than half an hour’s work, and at a cost (to them) of less than twenty lives, Osama bin Laden’s mob of maniacs changed the course of history and cost the economies of the West an unimaginable amount.
Grade: B+ Why do elephants paint their balls red? So they can hide in cherry trees, of course. The principle behind this playground joke is the animating principle of the brand-new online indie game currently going viral among the under-15s. Finger on the pulse, me. Actually, I only know about this game because my 12-year-old son Jonah started begging to be allowed to download it, which made a pleasant change from begging to be allowed to download Fortnite. Basically, it’s multiplayer hide-and-seek but with paint. You know it’s one of those games kids like because the lobbies have that jittery Roblox/Gorilla Tag vibe – all migraineous colour-clashes and old-school neon gamertags.
45 min listen
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, talking about his new book All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches. Ben tells me why a debate between two visions of what makes the US special has been playing out since the nation's conception, what Frederick Douglass has to say to the America of the 21st century, and why Ben Franklin didn't think the constitution was sacred.
“Why don’t you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham? Give him a chance, sort of thing?” This seemed, on the face of it, an admirably charitable and fair-minded suggestion. Amid the projectile-vomiting epidemic of demented negativity and hysterical loathing which, as I remarked in this space last week, is the daily stuff of our politics, I thought for a moment, he’s asking me to do something a little bit different.
45 min listen
In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli to discuss his new book 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist's Argument Against Rearmament, where in imitation of Einstein and Bertrand Russell, he uses his platform as a public intellectual to speak against the logic of nuclear escalation. He tells me what the Nazis got right and the US got wrong in the later years of the Second World War, why physicists have a bad conscience about the bomb – and why the threat to civilisation has never been greater. Produced by Oscar Edmondson. Edited by Ed Parker.
It’s possible, though not popular, to feel a bat-squeak of sympathy for Sir Keir Starmer on a human level these days. It can’t be much fun being him. It’s also possible, though not popular, to hold in your head at the same time the ideas that a) he’s been a pretty useless Prime Minister and b) he isn’t an actual monster. He has, where he has made any decisions, made terrible decisions. He has led from the back, thrown his colleagues merrily under a whole succession of Number 37s when things have gone wrong, switched tack at the first whiff of cordite, been serially economical with the truth and stubborn in his refusal to recognise reality. None of this redounds to his credit. Is this loathing, we should ask, strictly proportionate? Is it, y’know, sane?
33 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the Children’s Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, whose new book, A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now, describes what he discovered from the travels he undertook during his work with BookTrust and the Laureateship. He tells me what he learned about what really happens when a parent reads to a child, why the crisis in childhood reading is down to much more than the rise of screens – and how Heidi can save your life.
Today, with much fanfare, HM Government is rolling out its new policy to protect young people from online harms. Here is a political/legal move for which I am the target audience. I have three teenagers, and for those not so afflicted, let me tell you that keeping them from spending all day, every day goggling at one piece of tech or another is an infernal game of whack-a-mole. Item: Child One, Instagram. Very, very occasionally, she forgets to delete her browser history and CTRL-H yields page after page after page, hour after hour, of Instagram hits. If you restrict or remove the phone app, it will be re-downloaded or the site opened instead in a browser window.
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrea Wulf, talking about her fascinating new book, The Traveller: George Forster and the Search for Humanity. Andrea tells me about the now-forgotten adventurer who sailed with Captain Cook, toured Europe as an intellectual celebrity and sparred with Kant and Rousseau over race and human civilisation – before throwing his lot in with the French Revolution.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed. We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe This is the business model that now dominates the digital age. Neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism: it gets called all sorts of things, but the basic idea it has in common is that the rules of property ownership, as we have tended to understand them for most of the history of capitalism, are shifting under our feet. We think we’re buying products.
Grade: A– He may not know how to make a drinkable martini, but James Bond makes a great videogame. GoldenEye on the Nintento 64 was the first; but there’s always been potential there for more. After all, the character has all the stuff that the medium excels at. He has car chases, he fights, he shoots people, he blows things up, and he appeals strongly to adolescent boys. In 007: First Light, he gets ample opportunity to do all those things, sometimes in very quick succession. Our man here is not yet a wintry Daniel Craig, a suave Sean Connery or a campy Roger Moore: when we first encounter him in the mandatory pre-credits sequence he’s not even a spy.
41 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.
They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison. Is he a hypnotist? Is there a point at which incuriosity becomes a superpower?
39 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Siri Hustvedt, talking about her new book, Ghost Stories, a memoir of her long and loving marriage to the novelist Paul Auster, and of his death from cancer. Siri tells me why this book ‘needed’ to be written, what their relationship was like, how ‘horrible things’ came to this literary golden couple, and how she explains the experience of being visited, three days after his death, by her husband’s ghost.
‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime’ is the can-do attitude attributed to Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. There’s more than a flavour of that attitude, I think, in Thames Valley Police’s investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Two days ago, the news was led by a story, briefed by the police, that the scope of the investigation into the former Duke of York for possible Misconduct in Public Office was being widened to include questions of sexual misbehaviour.
52 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Edmund Richardson, author of a new biography of Alexander the Great called Alexander: God, King, Man. Edmund tells me why there is still a fresh story to tell about this most storied of historical figures, why his empire collapsed as soon as it came into being yet nevertheless changed history – and how Alexander conquered the world by mistake.
‘Polished and confident, with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line, Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority.’ So said Sharma Taylor, regional judge for the Caribbean winner of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, The Serpent in the Grove. AI is very good at producing, at scale, exactly the sort of stuff that such critics will affect to like. Portentous cadences, look-at-me adjectives, solemnly poetic similes, the sort of thing that people produce when they’re trying to produce ‘fine writing’ But did it? Did it pulse with a voice of restraint and quiet authority? Really?
Remember when Sir Keir Starmer was sold to us as, effectively, the anti-Boris? Where Boris was slapdash, Keir would be methodical; where Boris fibbed as easily as breathing, Keir would be truthful as a boy-scout; where Boris was boastful, Keir would be modest; where Boris exuded ambition, Keir would exude dutifulness; where Boris was charismatic, Keir would bore the pants off us; where Boris mumbled schoolroom Latin, Keir would mumble courtroom Latin. The thing about Boris is that you sort of knew what you were getting For those of us who thought Boris Johnson – like him personally though we might – ill-suited to being put in charge of so much as a round of drinks, let alone the country, Keir Starmer looked like an agreeable alternative. Well.
60 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Jeffrey Winters, whose new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies makes the case that democracy as it functions now isn’t, as many of us imagine, the only thing keeping the robber barons in check – it is, in fact, the very system that has enabled them to thrive. He tells me how the wealth gap in the US is now many multiples of that in ancient Rome, how extreme wealth translates into political power, and how reforming campaign finance laws is only a tiny part of the solution we need.
