Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

Monday

Sam Leith

Elon Musk and the age of the troll

From our UK edition

There has been a cheering new development in the struggle against scam phone callers. AI can now be used to automate the satisfying but tricky business of ‘scambaiting’. I give you Daisy, the ‘AI granny’ – whose only purpose in life is to keep phone fraudsters on the line for hours that they would otherwise spend predating on real human victims. Scammers, as we know, play on human psychological weaknesses – the panic we feel when we’re told our accounts have been compromised, our deference to authority, our confusion about how technology works. Now, flip-flop: the AI plays on scammers’ psychological vulnerabilities – primarily, the idea that an old lady with a quavering voice will be an easy mark.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds

From our UK edition

43 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a 'new wave' of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he's determined never to lose his vulgarity.

Monday

Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

From our UK edition

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral.  The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to 'news' can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human interest: this was front-page stuff.

Thursday

Sam Leith

Trump’s comeback, Labour’s rural divide, and World of Warcraft

From our UK edition

37 min listen

This week: King of the HillYou can’t ignore what could be the political comeback of the century: Donald Trump’s remarkable win in this week’s US election. The magazine this week carries analysis about why Trump won, and why the Democrats lost, from Freddy Gray, Niall Ferguson and Yascha Mounk, amongst others. To make sense of how Trump became only the second President in history to win non-consecutive terms, we’re joined by the journalist Jacqueline Sweet and Cliff Young, president of polling at Ipsos (00:58).Next: is Labour blind to rural communities? The changes to inheritance tax for farmers are one of the measures from Labour’s budget that has attracted the most attention.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Much more than just a game: World of Warcraft at 20

From our UK edition

On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics, it is the most successful video game of its type in history. At its peak, it had more than 12 million active subscribers, and in its two-decade-and-counting lifetime it has made more than three times as much money as the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of all time. Yet many, if not most, of you will never have heard of it or will have only the dimmest idea what it is. As someone who has played this daft game for several hours a week for years, I commend it to your attention, then – because a) there’s much innocent joy to be had in playing it, and b) World of Warcraft and games like it are an unignorable part of the cultural landscape.

Sam Leith

100th anniversary of A A Milne and E H Shepard, with James Campbell

From our UK edition

36 min listen

On this week's Book Club podcast we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children's publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne's snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin... and how Pooh became Pooh.

Monday

Sam Leith

Do we care that the King is rich?

From our UK edition

For the first time, the true extent of the property held by the King and the Prince of Wales’s private estates, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall has been revealed, according to a splashy Sunday Times investigation. There are 5,410 separate properties up and down the country paying millions of pounds annually in rents and fees and charges. The NHS pays to warehouse its ambulances, the Navy pays for the use of jetties, charities rent London office blocks, and money rolls in for everything from the training of troops on Dartmoor to the housing of prisoners in a jail on His Maj’s land. 'Revealed,' the headline hoots, 'The property empires that make Charles and William millions.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Christopher Caldwell, Gus Carter, Ruaridh Nicoll, Tanya Gold, and Books of the Year I

From our UK edition

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Christopher Caldwell asks what a Trump victory could mean for Ukraine (1:07); Gus Carter argues that leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration system (8:29); Ruaridh Nicoll reads his letter from Havana (18:04); Tanya Gold provides her notes on toffee apples (23:51); and a selection of our books of the year from Jonathan Sumption, Hadley Freeman, Mark Mason, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith and Frances Wilson (27:08).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

The Book Club: John Suchet

From our UK edition

42 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is John Suchet whose new book In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey describes his lifelong passion for the composer. He tells me how the ‘Eroica’ was his soundtrack to the Lebanese Civil War, about the mysteries of Beethoven’s love-life and deafness, why he had reluctantly to accept that Beethoven was ‘ugly and half-mad’; and how even in the course of writing the book, new scholarship upended his assumptions about events in the composer’s life (from his meeting with Mozart to the circumstances of his death).

Sam Leith

Why is Elon Musk so obsessed with Diablo IV?

From our UK edition

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s not tweeting about the first two things, he’s tweeting clips of himself roaring through Diablo’s endgame content, slaying hordes of very high-level demons in timed dungeon runs. He’s good at this, and since it takes getting on for a solid week without eating or sleeping even to reach the endgame, he’s sinking a lot of time into it. ‘Finished faster after masterworking my rod three times,’ he tweets, proudly.

Monday

Sam Leith

Keir Starmer, Karl Marx and the cant of ‘working people’

From our UK edition

Labour has promised that, come what may, they will not be increasing taxes on ‘working people’. Well, jolly good. Those of us who work for a living will tend to welcome such a promise. So will hedge fund managers, who go to work every day, and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and the lawyers and accountants who manage vast offshore tax efficiency schemes. Working people all. ‘Working people’ is a cant phrase, which – as Bridget Phillipson was forced to admit when she struggled to say if small business owners counted – means nothing concrete at all. It has the advantage, as all such cant phrases do, of denoting an automatic good: it’s something nobody can possibly be against.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Rachel Clarke: The Story of a Heart

From our UK edition

48 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Rachel Clarke, author of the Baillie Gifford longlisted new book The Story of a Heart. Rachel tells me how she came so intimately to tell the story of 9-year-old Keira, whose death in a car accident and donation of her heart gave a chance at life to a dying stranger, Max. She describes the medical and conceptual changes that led up to that extraordinary possibility and explains how, as a medic, you have to be able to combine technical professionalism with a sense of the sanctity of the human beings you work with. And she catches us up on how Max is doing eight years on. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.

Monday

Sam Leith

Is it time to ban the boy band?

From our UK edition

It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that ‘if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are’. I read that to mean that if you get famous when you are young – get famous before you have a stable sense of yourself – then you are in trouble.   One Direction’s Liam Payne, who struggled with depression and addiction before falling to his death last week after what seems to have been his umpteenth relapse on drink and drugs, is only the latest in a long line of those who reached adulthood damaged beyond repair by fame.

Sam Leith

Why shouldn’t English teachers use video games?

From our UK edition

English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just throttles the supply of mournful Yeats-quoting burger-flippers but I think it’s a concern. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s worth studying English and only some of them are being able to quote Yeats. A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love In response to this crisis, there seems to be consensus among teachers that GCSEs need to change.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin

From our UK edition

41 min listen

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith’s guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man's unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC’ for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

Monday

Sam Leith

Labour were right to protect Taylor Swift

From our UK edition

Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its first 100 days in office: to wit, the police protection given to the pop singer Taylor Swift. File firmly under circuses, you might think, rather than bread. For those who need catching up, the American pop star was given a VVIP police escort around London during the UK leg of her Eras tour – a swishy blue-light motorcade of the sort usually reserved for members of the royal family and foreign heads of state, and the reassuring knowledge that should some loon seek to lob a brick at her, or worse, Tay-Tay could rely on London’s finest to pile in with their side-handled batons and/or firearms.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Alan Johnson: Harold Wilson, Twentieth Century Man

From our UK edition

34 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson’s rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what really went on with Marcia. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.

Sunday

Sam Leith

Sue Gray, Keir Starmer and the centre-left’s self-righteousness problem 

From our UK edition

‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha, said I. No. We most certainly are not there yet. And it is hard to conceive of any sequence of events, up to and including an asteroid strike on SW1 or a Day of the Triffids style mass blinding, which would leave us thinking that a return of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership would be a step in the right direction.  And yet and yet. Keir Starmer has been squandering at quite startling speed the goodwill of those of us (I know that will not be all Spectator readers) who had some goodwill towards him in the first place. The resignation of Sue Gray will be spun, no doubt, as Sir Keir showing ‘grip’ and ‘steel’.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

A stone-cold banger: Black Myth – Wukong reviewed

From our UK edition

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.   Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the young people call a stone-cold banger.

Sam Leith

Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point

From our UK edition

39 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.