Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
38 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, whose new novel Howl emerges from his rage and despair at the response to the 7 October massacre. He tells me what the novel can do that journalism can’t, why being funny is essential even in the darkest times, and why Zack Polanski isn’t the man he used to be.
From our UK edition
Grade: A Lordy. The Resident Evil survival horror series is three decades old. It probably qualifies by now as Sitting Tenant Evil. Picture it snacking on flies in just the sort of dingy, hasn’t-been-tidied-for-30-years rent-controlled apartment that would make a good setting for a scene in the game. We’re still waiting for the instalment in which the Umbrella Corporation – a biotech firm that makes Purdue Pharma look like a model of caution and probity – faces a class-action lawsuit (X button to file an amicus brief; circle button to object in cross-examination), so for now here’s more of the glorious same. After all these years, it’s still capable of being ace.
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Reform’s Richard Tice has been the subject of what I fear is intended as a hit-piece in the Sunday Times. “The Deputy Leader of Reform UK avoided nearly £600,000 in corporation tax after obtaining a rare legal status for his company,” it reports. “Richard Tice then channeled the company’s dividends into an offshore trust and a string of dormant businesses. Several did not pay any tax during the relevant period.” They say all this, I regret to have to report, as if it’s a bad thing. Tice showed just the sort of entrepreneurial ambition we can hope for from a true Brexit believer At issue is the status of a property company majority-owned and controlled by Mr Tice called Quidnet Reit Ltd, between 2018 and 2021.
From our UK edition
38 min listen
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Lionel Shriver, whose new novel A Better Life offers among other things a savage send-up of liberal pieties on immigration. I asked Lionel what she was trying to do with the book (why make the argument, for instance, in a novel rather than an op-ed?), whether New York's immigration law really is as nutty as her story paints it, and how she reacts to the opprobrium that this sort of to-the-moment writing stirs up.
The social media video with which the White House has promoted its attack on Iran is, even by the standards we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration, grotesque on a level that still manages to be flabbergasting. Prefaced in the usual block capitals “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, with a flag and flame emoji of the sort favoured by pubescent boys rather than, usually, government agencies, it’s three quarters of a minute of pure brainrot. It isn’t a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome to consider this video obscene It begins with Tony Stark in front of a bank of computers saying “Wake up. Daddy’s home.
From our UK edition
45 min listen
My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Jane Rogoyska, whose new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War tells the bloody story of the Second World War through the lens of Paris's Hotel Lutetia – following a cast of exiled intellectuals through the febrile 1930s, the increasing horrors of the war and occupation, through to the devastating aftermath as waves of prisoners returned from the camps. She tells me how she came to this unusual approach, how the connections between her cast of characters proliferated, how close Samuel Beckett came to a concentration camp – and about falling a little bit in love with Walter Benjamin.
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So farewell then, Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m put in mind of Private Eye’s cover on the death of Hendrik Verwoerd. “A Nation Mourns” read the headline, under a photograph of four black Africans in ceremonial dress leaping joyfully in the air in a traditional dance. Nobody’s going to be sorry he’s gone. The received wisdom tends to skirt the possibility that some senior Nazis may have been quite cultured But reading his obituary, I confess to surprise and dismay. What was to be found there was not, at least at first, an austere and viciously power-hungry religious monomaniac. Here, from what we know, was somebody who at least in his younger years was disciplined, modest, intellectually curious, and artistically inclined.
From our UK edition
32 min listen
My guest this week is Francis Spufford, whose fabulous new novel Nonesuch is a fantasy adventure set during the Blitz containing magical Nazis, nerdy TV techs and honest-to-goodness angels. He tells me about fantasy world-building and historical research, the pleasures and pitfalls of writing a female protagonist, why C S Lewis is as influential as Tolkien — and supersizing Dr Manhattan. You can read Philip Hensher's review of Nonesuch here.
From our UK edition
So: is the game up? Looking at the former Prince Andrew’s slumped posture, corpse-grey face and thousand-yard stare in the snatched photographs of him leaving police custody, you might be tempted to think so. He looked like Ebenezer Scrooge confronted by the Ghost of Christmas Future. The future certainly doesn’t hold anything very uplifting for this wretched, silly specimen – but will he take the monarchy with him? The Firm gets away with being secretive in all sorts of ways – not least around money. That must change There are two separate cases here, I think. One is: does the former Prince’s disgrace present a rational case for the abolition of the monarchy?
From our UK edition
45 min listen
My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the philosophy professor Hanna Pickard, whose new book is What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. She tells me why we need a new approach to ‘the puzzle of addiction’. She says the idea that addicts are helplessly in thrall to the compulsions of a ‘broken brain’ is wrong, that we need to understand how sometimes using even if it's looks like killing you can make a sort of sense – and describes how her own one-off experience of morphine set her on the path of trying to change the way we think about drugs.
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Grade: A– A cairn, as readers will know, is a pile of stones often placed to mark a grave. Yikes. Not the most encouraging title to give to a videogame about someone trying to climb a mountain. Aava is a dedicated rock-climber determined to make the first solo ascent of Mount Kami, despite the countless lives it has already claimed. Equipped with chalk, rope, pitons, climbing tape and a limited supply of snacks and bottled water, not to mention a friendly robot that follows you around picking up your pitons and screening your calls, off you set. The heart of the game – though the story contains surprising emotional and thematic depth – is the climbing simulation. You position Aava’s limbs one by one, reading the rock-face to find holds and cracks that will take your weight.
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I’ve long had a theory – despite knowing many clever and nice people who work in the sector – that consultancy firms don’t have a scooby-doo what they’re doing. They radiate immense power and authority as brands, they are fluent in corporate bull-pucky, and they charge truly obscene fees but I suspect their main superpower is getting someone to the C-suite to spend a lot of the company’s money on telling the company what it wants to hear. I mean, in the first place, isn’t it the job of those people in the C-suite to manage stuff themselves? Aren’t they being paid, usually quite well, to be managers?
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In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Eric Schlosser, the investigative journalist whose Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is being reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic 25 years after its first publication. He tells me what’s changed and what hasn’t since he first published this groundbreaking exposé of fast food’s effects on so many aspects of American society, why he was destined to suffer the fate of Upton Sinclair, how Keir Starmer fits in – and how he proudly built a chapter around six vital words.
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There is (isn’t there always?) a crisis in nonfiction publishing. But this time it really is a crisis, or at least, it seems more of a crisis than the previous ones. The problem is: not enough people are buying the stuff anymore. Last year’s nonfiction sales were down fully six per cent on the 2024 figures, and the long-term graph gives a picture of consistent, rapid, decline. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who host the superb podcast The Rest Is History, are part of the problem as well as part of the solution Woe to the world. As someone who has skin in the game – not a lot of skin, admittedly; more like one of those sore bits you get when you’ve been chewing the corner of your thumb – this grieves me.
From our UK edition
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Caroline Moorehead, whose new book A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul tells the remarkable story of one of Italy’s best-known writers – who used the pulp detective novel to shine a light on the social and political rot of his native land.
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The parents of Lucy Letby, the nurse currently serving a sentence after being convicted of child murder, have complained to Netflix after seeing the trailer for a new documentary about their daughter’s case. In the first statement they have made publicly since her 2023 conviction, they say that the footage front and centre in the trailer – previously unreleased police video of Letby being arrested in her pyjamas in her bedroom at home – is a “complete invasion of privacy”.
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Andy Burnham's bid to stand as an MP – and Keir Starmer's decision to block him from doing just that, means this has been an exciting weekend for news about blokes in glasses. Only yesterday, one bloke in glasses (Starmer) stood accused of doing the dirty on another bloke in glasses (Burnham), because he suspected the second bloke in glasses of planning to do the dirty on him. On the face of it, though, these blokes in glasses are both very much on the same team, and want only the best for one another. As well as the glasses and the nondescript air, both these blokes in glasses have the same selling point Let me explain.
From our UK edition
41 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast deals with attention: what it is, why it is in crisis, how it came to be the biggest business in the world, and how we can resist the tech juggernaut that is destroying it. I am joined by two co-authors of the new book Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. They tell me why the ‘attention economy’ would be better termed ‘human fracking’, and how the problem is so much more than can be solved by a new year’s resolution or more restrictions on screen time.
From our UK edition
Grade: B– It’s a duck, except he’s a detective. Or a detective, except he’s a duck. Anyway he wears a fedora, seems depressed, quacks wise, and eats too much bread – so we can leave the rest to the philosophers. In this sequel to Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (who knew the world needed two such games?) this pleasingly drawn cartoon hero navigates a series of locations solving puzzles. Reminded me a lot of the 1990s. Fancy the funny-animal thing still going strong all these years after Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters I was about to write, but then I remembered Aesop. Likewise old-school point-and-click adventures, though now they’re swipe-and-tap adventures, so that’s progress of a sort. Anyway, it’s set on a campsite, or glampsite if you will.
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I am, as often, lost in admiration for my colleague Freddy Gray. Whenever Donald Trump does something that looks, on the face of it, like a toddler tantrum backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and announces said tantrum in an erratically capitalised screed on Truth Social – and when the world responds as one to this apparent tantrum with utter bewilderment – Freddy is there with one finger raised sagely. Let’s take a pause, he says. Let’s look at what this really means. And then he explains, in a wholly plausible and authoritative manner, that the president is actually doing something bold and well-calculated – albeit characteristically dramatic – to secure the long-term strategic interests of the United States. Trump knows exactly what he’s doing, Freddy says.
