Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
The cliché is that it’s scandals about sex that tend to do for Tories, and scandals about money that do for their counterparts on the opposite benches. To give credit to the current generation of Tories, though, the last decade or so has seen, in this department, a feat of triangulation quite undreamed of by
60 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses, which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle’s notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting
Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me. All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from
38 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to
Watching Prince Harry being interviewed by Tom Bradby, one thing was clear: the man is in deadly earnest. He is a true believer. And that, I think, makes him very dangerous to the monarchy indeed. He came across well: modest, steely, scrupulously honest by his own lights, unshakably coherent in his view of the world and in
Children’s writing has been having a bit of a moment over the past couple of weeks, after a conversation on social media between children’s authors gathered into a sort of cri de coeur about the public neglect of their craft. Children’s books, they said, are barely covered in newspaper review pages or on the radio these
65 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt – whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa – and along the way explains what’s so
Two weeks ago, like most people, I hadn’t so much as heard of ChatGPT. By last week, I was hearing of practically nothing but. After OpenAI released its large-language model chatbot for the public to play with, it passed a million users in five days flat. Hype poured in. Columnists asked it to write the opening paragraphs of their columns about ChatGPT –
Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: ‘Do you want to reinvent yourself?’ Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: ‘I can’t reinvent myself.’ ‘Do you wanna?’ ‘I don’t want to either. I think the rock star’s gotta be someone you can see from a
52 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Matthew Hollis, author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. In the tail end of this centenary year of the great monument of modernist poetry, Matthew tells me about the private agonies that went into the making of the poem. We discuss how not just
‘Standing in my kitchen in Suffolk after a quiet New Year’s Eve, I scanned my newspaper for clues as to what might be lurking around the corner.’ So run the opening words of yesterday’s first extract of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. 1 January. New Year’s Day. And
52 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Rupert Shortt, whose stimulating new book The Hardest Problem addresses one of the oldest difficulties in theology: “the problem of evil”. Is this something the religious and the secular can even talk meaningfully about? What’s the great challenge Dostoevsky throws up? And what did Augustine get right that
The disappearance of rural bus routes is one of the small tragedies of our time. It isn’t, alas, a very glamorous tragedy. It affects older people, poorer people, people who live in unfashionable parts of the country. You seldom see Twitter storms about rural bus routes. You don’t see footballers campaigning on the issue with moist eye, bent knee and clenched fist.
41 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to two of the brave souls who turn recent political dramas into the sort of quickly written books we might call the second draft of history. I’m joined by the FT’s Sebastian Payne, author of The Fall of Boris Johnson, and our own James Heale, co-author of a Liz
The Cursed Ratio strikes again. Twitter users have voted 52-48 in favour of Elon Musk allowing the return of Donald Trump to the website, causing the gnashing of a great many progressive teeth in the airless no-space of the internet. The kicker to this is that – psych! – the former president almost immediately announced that he had no
41 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Edward Mendelson, who with the publication of the Complete Poems of W H Auden in two volumes now sets the crown on more than half a century of scholarship on the poet. There’s nobody on the planet who knows more about this towering figure in twentieth-century poetry. He
‘Politics,’ as the old quip has it, ‘is showbusiness for ugly people.’ That quote was minted in the good old days when there was, at least implicitly, some clear blue water between the two things: it intended to draw an arch point of comparison between two quite different spheres of activity. Politics was momentous, solemn,
41 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club. He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case –
As Home Secretary, on the whole, you’ll want to stay on the right side of the law, right? I mean, you’re in charge of the police, the prisons, national security, immigration and all that sort of thing. Your portfolio is definitely what might be termed law-adjacent or, on Tinder, ‘law-curious’. On the principle of leading by example, you might be expected to
39 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast is a live special, recorded at this year’s inaugural Braemar Literary Festival. I’m talking to Sir Ian Rankin, in an exclusive pre-publication event, about his new Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. You can see images from the event and more details of the festival at https://www.braemarliteraryfestival.co.uk
