Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
43 min listen
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Conn Iggulden, probably the best selling author of historical fiction of our day. This week Conn publishes Nero, the first in a new trilogy about the notorious Roman emperor. He tells me about how he learned to write historical fiction, his years-long path to overnight success, and the advantages (and disadvantages) of having an audience comprised of men who can't seem to stop thinking about the Roman Empire.
If the basic job of a work of art is to be interesting, as I think it is, then Jonathan Yeo’s new portrait of the King accomplished that admirably. No sooner had an image of this big canvas been released to the public than it sparked a million memes. What did it mean, people wondered, that His Majesty’s face emerged from a great abstract field of rose and crimson? Was it a nod to the blood-soaked legacy of empire? A secret signal of some sort of satanic conspiracy theory? A portentous meditation on the blood royal? An anxious reflection on the King’s recent illness? Was it a nod to the blood-soaked legacy of empire? It has been, to say the least, controversial. Monarchists and republicans alike have taken a close and lively interest in it.
Grade: A ‘God games’, as they used to be called, have a storied history. SimCity, Civilisation and the excellently sadistic Dungeon Keeper have all been responsible for many a PhD thesis being delivered late. The Almighty seems to have smiled on the latest iteration of the genre. The product of a one-man-band independent developer, Greg Styczen, its current pre-release version scored a million downloads on the first day it was available. You can see why. It’s made with such care and love. You take the role of a medieval lord of the manor – choose a surly avatar and a coat of arms – who starts with a handful of peasant families in a tented encampment in a drizzly forest. Zoom down and watch them as they drag timber about with their mangy ox.
33 min listen
A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Olivia Laing to talk about her new book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Olivia explores what it is we do when we make a garden, through her own experience of restoring the beautiful garden in her now home. She tells me about what gardens have meant in literary history and myth, how they have occluded certain real-world injustices even as they stand in for utopias, and why Candide's injunction cultiver notre jardin will always be an ambiguous one.
Nadhim Zahawi’s latest resignation letter was one of the all-time classics of the genre: unctuous, preening and pretentious even by the high standard of unctuousness, preeningness and pretentiousness set by his predecessors (including him). 'Greatest honour of my life,' he wrote. 'Best country on earth…it was where I built a Great [capitalisation sic] British business, YouGov, and it was where I raised my wonderful family. And it was the nation to which I was proud to return such a favour when I led the world-leading coronavirus vaccine roll-out […] called upon to serve my country […] I kept schools open [...] I ensured [...] I was given the unique responsibility...' On he burbled.
The defection of Natalie Elphicke to Labour was, no doubt about it, a political coup de theatre. What wasn’t immediately clear, but is becoming clearer now the curtain is up and the players are stumbling around the footlights yelping and tripping over bits of the set, is what sort of theatre: farce. Elphicke looks like the gift nobody wants to find under their Christmas tree Natalie Elphicke was delivered to Keir Starmer, that sobersides opponent of what he calls ‘gimmicks’, in the manner of a gift-wrapped present. He and his team, in the least gimmicky way imaginable, timed the opening of this present deliberately to ambush the Prime Minister ahead of PMQs. More fool him.
40 min listen
This week, my guest on the Book Club podcast is the poet Jackie Kay, whose magnificent new book May Day combines elegy and celebration. She tells me about her adoptive parents – a communist trade unionist and a leading figure in CND – and growing up in a household where teenage rebellion could mean going to church. We also discuss her beginnings as a poet, her debt to Robbie Burns and Angela Davis and how grief itself can be a form of protest.
Did Suella Braverman run her latest op-ed by No. 10 for approval? That was the question asked at the end of last year when the then Home Secretary wrote an inflammatory article accusing the Met of being biased towards left-wing protesters. The answer then was that she hadn’t, and she lost her job (for a second time). This time round, nobody needs to bother to ask the question. She doesn't have a job. No. 10 will have been dismayed but probably unsurprised to read her article in the Telegraph yesterday in which she blamed the Prime Minister for the catastrophic local election results.
34 min listen
This week: Survival plan: is Rishi ready for the rebels? Ever since his election, Rishi Sunak has been preparing for this weekend – where the most likely scenario is that dire local election results are slow-released, leaving him at a moment of maximum vulnerability. He has his defences ready against his regicidal party, says Katy Balls: the Rwanda plan, a welfare reform agenda and a 4p NI cut (with hints of 2p more to come). And while the rebels have a (published) agenda they do not – yet – have a candidate. Katy joins the podcast alongside Stephen Bush, associate editor of the Financial Times. (02:12) Next: Lara and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine, including Damian Thompson's Life column, and Joel Golby’s notes on ⅓ pints.
35 min listen
On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ariane Bankes, whose mother Celia was one of the great beauties of the early twentieth century. Ariane's new book The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century tells the story of the defiantly bohemian lives of Celia and her twin sister Mamaine, whose love affairs and friendships with Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Edmund Wilson and Freddie Ayer put them at the centre of the political and intellectual ferment of their age.
I read the news today, oh boy. Four thousand holes in Blackpool, Lancashire. Well, in fact, not quite as many as 4,000. The number of holes in the Lancashire town that the Beatles didn’t sing about was a very precise 2,628 – or, translated into another scale, just over half an Albert Hall’s worth. That’s how many potholes Blackpool Council has filled in over the last year alone. In a world where every other bulletin is of swirling climate catastrophe, economic precarity, hot wars, riots, migrant drownings, gusts of online hate and all the jollity of the day-to-day news cycle, this local council has been getting on, patiently and methodically, with the work of filling little holes in the road.
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the author and historian Kathryn Hughes, whose new book Catland tells the story of how we learned to love pusskins. Content warning: contains Kipling, Edward Lear, some stinking carts of offal, and the troubled life and weird art of the extraordinary Louis Wain.
Why was it that when I read a big interview with Tony Blair over the weekend – the ostensible premise being to wonder if he’d be pulling the strings of a Starmer government – I found myself humming something from T.S. Eliot by way of Andrew Lloyd Webber? ‘You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air – / But I tell you once and once again, / It’s Tony bloody Blair.’ Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat, of course, is a dyed-in-the-wool criminal who breaks laws up to and including the law of gravity, whereas our former prime minister is as upright and law-abiding figure as you will find in possession of business cards reading ‘Tony Blair’. But they share the ability to be everywhere and nowhere. He’s in and out of the White House.
35 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: In light of the help Israel received, Svitlana Morenets issues a challenge to the West to help Ukraine (1:15); Mary Wakefield questions the slow response to the Ministry of Defence being daubed in paint (7:33); Max Jeffery discusses the aims and tactics of the group responsible for the protest, Youth Demand (13:25); Sam Leith reviews Salman Rushdie's new book (18:59); and Richard Bratby pays tribute to Michael Tanner, The Spectator critic who died earlier this month (27:34). Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.
31 min listen
This week: the usual targets First: Trump is on trial again – and America is bored rather than scandalised. This is his 91st criminal charge and his supporters see this as politicised prosecution. As an American, Kate Andrews has seen how the law can be used as a political weapon – so why, she asks, is Britain importing the same system? In less than 18 months, the police have been sent to investigate Rishi Sunak for his seat-belt, Nicola Sturgeon for campaign funds, and Angela Rayner over her electoral registry: each time, the complainant is political and the process is the punishment. Kate joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson to discuss. (01:34) Then: Confessions of a defecting Starmtrooper.
Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it flicking through a set of worry beads or making a cat’s cradle with a ball of string. The unexpected sleeper hit House Flipper (2018) was one such. It was boring, but in a good way. Its sleeker, prettier sequel has had the wisdom not to depart far from the formula. The premise is that you travel around a breezy seaside town sprucing up properties for profit. You start small.
23 min listen
On this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Percival Everett, who has followed up his Booker-shortlisted The Trees with James, a novel that reimagines the story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the fugitive slave Jim. Percival tells me what he learned from Mark Twain, how being funny doesn’t make him a comic novelist, and why Black resistance to racism is a matter of language itself.
Salman Rushdie has long hated and struggled against the idea that the 1989 fatwa pronounced on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses should define his career or his life. It was, as he frequently pointed out, a book he published only a quarter of the way through his career. He wanted the life of a writer, and for his books – even ‘that book’ – to be read as books rather than as footnotes to an episode in his biography or tokens in some pre-digital culture wars. Two nights before the reading, Rushdie dreamt he was attacked by a man with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre He thought he had managed that. The only people who ever asked him about the fatwa, he told me when we met in 2020, were journalists: ‘to be dragged back into the late 1980s is boring.
Most of us are, I think, temperamentally opposed to the idea of a society in which we are surveilled 24/7. We look at the proliferation of Ring doorbells, the thickets of CCTV cameras that capture our every trip to the shop from multiple angles, the algorithmic harvesting of our data by every website we use to shop, to exchange messages with friends, or to scour the wisdom of the internet for information, and we give a slight shudder of revulsion. We are put in mind of the grim grey men in headphones listening in on bugged conversations for the Stasi in the grim grey film The Lives of Others. We look down the road to China, with its sinister social credit systems and its enthusiasm for biometrics. We think: yuk.
When you’re playing a word game, don't you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of word game be, like, collaborative – so that players helped each-other to celebrate their diversity rather than competing to, ugh, ‘win’? This upside-down is a game which will bear the same relationship to Scrabble that tennis does to Junior Bake-Off Mattel has you covered. The company has announced that Scrabble sets will now have double-sided boards.
