Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

Monday

Sam Leith

The war on smokers has gone too far

From our UK edition

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t already hate him, our new Prime Minister might like to bask in a few weeks of good vibes. Things, after all, can only get worse from here. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like Mister Popular for a bit?  The original ban on smoking indoors was illiberal, but it was illiberal to a very legible purpose Sir Keir Starmer, it seems, has a stronger character than would to succumb to that temptation.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939, from the archives

From our UK edition

25 min listen

The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here’s an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom.  Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939, the W.H. Auden poem that marked the beginning of the war. Ian’s book is a 'biography' of the poem; they discuss how it showcases all that is best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and Osama Bin Laden.

Monday

Sam Leith

In defence of Kirstie Allsopp

From our UK edition

The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches intent not on minding the shop but on minding each-other’s business. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the news that Kirstie Allsopp has been reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to travel round Europe with a friend to celebrate the end of his GCSEs.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander, from the archives

From our UK edition

49 min listen

The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September with new episodes. Until then, here’s an episode from the archives with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Carlo joined Sam in March 2023 to discuss his book Anaximander and the Nature of Science and explain how a radical thinker two and a half millennia ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells Sam how Anaximander’s way of thinking still informs the work of scientists everywhere, how politics shapes scientific progress and how we can navigate the twin threats of religious dogma and postmodern relativism in search of truth.

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

From our UK edition

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have been getting at in the poems. And in Jenkins’s account, you can’t even trust what the poems think they’re getting at. Jenkins seeks to put Auden back in his own time, and embed the verse in his life. Auden said in public, for instance, that the first world war had little effect on him; and it’s seldom explicitly referenced in the verse. But in Jenkins’s version he’s a war poet.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Adam Higginbotham: Challenger

From our UK edition

50 min listen

Sam's guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Adam Higginbotham, whose new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space describes the 1986 space shuttle disaster that took the lives of seven astronauts and, arguably, inflicted America's greatest psychic scar since the assassination of JFK. He tells Sam about the extraordinary men and women who lost their lives that day, the astounding engineering involved in the spacecraft that America had started to take for granted, and the deep roots and long aftermath of the accident.

Thursday

Sam Leith

Can video games be funny?

From our UK edition

Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted indie cartoon adventure has a creditable bash at it. The protagonist is an oval-headed yellow homunculus in a shirt and tie, as if Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, Dilbert and a minor Simpsons character had been squished in a particle collider. He is dispatched to the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth by his boss to do... something. But the mayor won’t meet him so he finds himself wandering around the town. ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ say various townspeople in ee-bah-gum accents, before inviting you to help them out of some absurd pickle. It’s not clear why they’re so pleased to see you.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama

From our UK edition

35 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me from Jerusalem, Nathan tells me why he believes it's right to call Israel an 'apartheid state', how the bureaucracy of the Occupied Territories made the fatal crash 'an accident that wasn't an accident'; and what he thinks needs to change to bring hope of an end to the conflict.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

David Baddiel: My Family

From our UK edition

41 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and comedian David Baddiel, talking about his new book My Family: the Memoir. He talks about childhood trauma, what made him a comedian, and how describing in minute detail his mother’s decades long affair with a slightly crooked golfing memorabilia salesman is an act not of betrayal but of loving recuperation.

Monday

Sam Leith

What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’

From our UK edition

There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of a rough-looking skinhead pelting down the street and appearing to grab at the briefcase of a startled-looking city gent. Just as the viewer is digesting this scene and drawing the conclusion that suits his or her prejudices, the screen cut away to another, wider shot: the young man, as we discover, wasn’t trying to mug the older man, but was wrestling him out of the way of a pallet of bricks collapsing overhead. Despite the improbable, Wile E. Coyote quality of the imagined peril, it was a cute idea for an ad. We read into a snippet what we choose to read.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Neil Jordan: Amnesiac

From our UK edition

47 min listen

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club is the writer and film director Neil Jordan, who joins the podcast to discuss his new book Amnesiac: A Memoir. He talks, among other things, about writing for the page and the screen, the uses of myth, putting words into the mouths of historical figures, seeing ghosts in aeroplanes, being ripped off by Harvey Weinstein, and failing to persuade Marlon Brando to play King Lear.

Monday

Sam Leith

The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God

From our UK edition

CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue, is exactly what the company produced: millions and millions of Windows PCs simultaneously succumbed to the Blue Screen of Death, as a company whose whole raison d’etre is averting internet catastrophe caused one. The biggest, supposedly, in history.  Is it in bad taste to say that the great internet outage of July 2024 was, in some respects, just a little bit funny? Plainly, it wasn’t funny if you were trying to book a GP appointment, or trying to pass through an international airport, or had a lot of money in, say, CrowdStrike shares. But there was undeniably a sort of festival atmosphere amid all the chaos.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Roger McGough: Collected Poems 1959-2024

From our UK edition

35 min listen

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Roger McGough, whose new The Collected Poems: 1959-2024 anthologises a poetic career 65 years long and counting. Roger tells me about revisiting his old work and making it new, why he's 'not being serious' about the future of Poetry Please, and how he narrowly missed being on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

Monday

Sam Leith

It wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet. It was all of us

From our UK edition

Hard not to think that that’s the election in the bag for The Donald. Surviving an assassination attempt was always going to be a bounce in the polls, no question. Trump not only survived one but – improbably enough, given he’s a 78-year-old man and he was surrounded by a passel of burly, supposedly highly trained security guys whose only job was to put him on the deck and sit on his head till the fun was good and over – fought his way to his feet and had the presence of mind to raise a fist of defiance and shout ‘fight, fight, fight,’ to his supporters. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it might well have been the end of America as we know it Fair play to the man.

Thursday

Sam Leith

Completely batty: Vampire Therapist reviewed

From our UK edition

Grade: B+ Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships... Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again – and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and produces something completely batty.  Vampire Therapist is a comedic adventure-story therapy-simulation starring a vampire, except he’s also a cowboy, and he’s training to be a cognitive behavioural therapist in the backroom of a German nightclub under the tutelage of a 3,000-year-old bisexual vampire who was romantic with Marcus Aurelius back in the day.  Our hero was a bad vamp in the Wild West for many years, you see, but he fell in with the Transcendentalists and learned to ‘walk a better path’. Now he hopes to persuade others to do the same.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Michael Nott: Thom Gunn’s Cool Queer Life

From our UK edition

29 min listen

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Michael Nott, author of the new biography Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life. He tells me about the poet's early trauma, his transatlantic identity, his unconventional family and his compartmentalised life, part teaching and writing, part sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Monday

Sam Leith

Let’s give Keir a chance

From our UK edition

I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going to thrill and excite me did not; and the bits that I thought couldn’t thrill and excite anybody made me feel quite emotional. That is, I gave up on the live coverage at about half two in the morning. Not even the prospect of watching Liz Truss get her cards seemed as appealing as a few hours’ kip. The 1997-style jubilation I might have expected to feel, as a representative of those keen to give Labour a shot at governing, just wasn’t there.  But the following day, as announcements of ministerial and cabinet posts trickled out, I felt genuinely buoyed up. You may – we may – dislike the ideological slant of some of these appointments.

Friday

Sam Leith

Keir Starmer channeled Obama in his first Downing Street speech

From our UK edition

In his first speech from the Downing Street lectern, Sir Keir Starmer was setting out to reaffirm those qualities that won him the election. That was a relatively low bar to clear – he just had to give the impression that he was neither a crook nor a maniac – and he cleared it with ease. Here was a solid, sensible, ostentatiously humble speech delivered with persuasive but unshowy emotion.  Starmer was punctilious about showing grace in victory. Just a few days ago, he was deriding Rishi Sunak as a selfish chancer who had enriched himself 'betting against Britain' in his financial career; today, he was keen to 'pay tribute' to the outgoing PM’s 'dedication and hard work', and to the 'extra effort' that will have gone into earning a place as the first British-Asian PM.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Kathleen Jamie: Cairn

From our UK edition

24 min listen

In her new book Cairn, the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie sets a capstone of sorts on her trilogy of short prose collections Findings, Surfacing and Sightlines. She joins me on this week’s Book Club podcast to talk about why she hesitates to call herself a nature writer, how prose found her late in life, and why whale-watching isn’t what it used to be. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Monday

Sam Leith

Why is Putin really trying to interfere in the UK election?

From our UK edition

Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand as a rebuke that, even with everything else on his plate, Vladimir Putin still regards our elections as worth interfering in. And, what’s more, those elections are so important that the Aussies are taking enough of an interest in them to consider that Russian interference newsworthy.   Russia may be trying to influence our elections, which as I say is flattering and all, but they aren’t trying very hard At the same time as it’s heartening that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation considers this a big deal it’s also, I suppose, a little dismaying that our own Broadcasting Corporation didn’t seem to notice. But there we are.