Sam Leith

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're celebrating 50 years of a unique classic – Richard Adams's Watership Down – and its forthcoming adaptation in graphic novel form. I'm joined by Richard Adams's two daughters Juliet and Rosamund, who tell me how a story that their dad started telling them to beguile a long car journey became one of the best selling children's books of all time, how that changed their father's life, and how Fiver's prophesy, alas, is finally coming true.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Caspar Henderson, whose new book A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous really is a journey into sound. He tells me why the music of the spheres – at least in this solar system – is a terrible racket, what we can learn from whale earwax, and why bat-squeaks are, in fact, very very loud indeed.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, broadcaster and academic Mary Beard. In her new book, Emperor of Rome, she explores what we can and can’t know about the men who ruled the Roman Empire, and what the lurid stories about so many of them tell us about the anxieties and fantasies of Rome’s ordinary citizens and the remarkable resilience of the regime. We also discuss, among other things: decapitated ostriches, fatal rose petals, and Mary’s robust reappraisal of Marcus Aurelius’s 'sub-Stoic' maundering.

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Sarah Ogilvie about the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, as told in her new The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. She tells me why the OED was different in kind from any previous English dictionary, how crowdsourcing made it 'the Wikipedia of its day', and how – as she discovered – quite so many cranks, murderers, perverts and foreigners took such an interest in it.

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Francesca Peacock to talk about the remarkable life and extraordinary work of Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle. Famous in her own day for her bizarre public appearances and nicknamed 'Mad Madge', the author of The Blazing World has been marginalised by posterity as an eccentric dilettante. But in her new book Pure Wit, Francesca sets out to reclaim her as a serious feminist writer before feminism was generally thought of, and as a radical thinker in natural philosophy.

The Book Club podcast returns next week. In the meantime, here's another from the archives, and one which looks more timely now even than it was when we recorded it in 2017. Here's perhaps Russia's most prominent dissident writer, Masha Gessen, talking about their book The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

As Sam is still away, we've dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and an account of the myriad ways – many of them invisible to us – that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It’s a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means?

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the journalist and author Celia Brayfield whose new book Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the story of animal rights, takes us back to the 19th century. Celia describes how Anna Sewell's writing of the Black Beauty book ultimately led to the kinder treatment of horses, and we both recall fondly the popular TV adaptation with its soaringly emotive theme tune.