Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
We are told that the Prince of Wales had no idea at the time that his underlings were offering to sell honours to random zillionaires. That’s lucky. Instead of being tarred by the sticky brush of corruption, then, he emerges from this minor scandal as a benign old nitwit, shovelled from one place to another by
47 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Tessa Dunlop. Tessa’s new book is Army Girls: The Secrets and Stories of Military Service from the Final Few Women Who Fought In World War Two. She tells me about how she gathered testimony and formed friendships with the nonagenarian veterans of the Second
A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will
25 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Armando Iannucci – the satirist behind Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin. What many of his fans might not know is that he’s also a devoted scholar of Milton – whose influence is to be found in his first published
Cast your mind back a few years to last week – when there was much laughing and wailing at the collapse of Squid coin, a meme cryptocurrency launched to capitalise on the popular Netflix show. It had gone to market, had rocketed 23 million per cent in value to $28,000-odd a unit… and then plummeted
25 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Claire Tomalin. Claire’s new book, The Young H G Wells: Changing the World, tracks the extraordinary life and rocket-powered career of one of the most influential writers of the Edwardian age. She tells me how drapery’s loss was literature’s gain, why casting the goatish Wells as
The most poignant detail, I think, about the story of Penelope Jackson – jailed for 18 years for stabbing her husband to death – was the reaction of her late husband’s younger brother Alan. He said he intended to visit her in prison: ‘I want to say to her, ‘What you’ve gone through I can
36 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam’s guest is the historian Jane Ridley, talking about her new book George V: Never A Dull Moment. She tells him there’s so much more to the ‘boring’ monarch than shooting grouse and collecting stamps. Hear how he navigated some of the worst constitutional crises in memory, saved the
Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind. But perhaps it chimes with your experience. First time round — back in the days when we were all huddled indoors, leaving the house only to stand on the doorstep of a Thursday night to
36 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the historian James Holland to talk about his fascinating new book Brothers In Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day. James’s story follows the Sherwood Rangers from El Alamein to the D-Day Landings, and on through the last push through Europe into
The speed with which tragedy turns into farce these days is quite something. Within minutes of Sir David Amess’s death being announced, social media was filled with sizzling hot takes. The back-and-forth centred on whether the decline in ‘civility’ and the use of dehumanising language in politics was to blame for the murder of an
38 min listen
In this week’s episode: Why are a growing number of people putting the planet before parenthood? Madeleine Kearns writes about this phenomenon in this week’s issue and thinks that some of these fears might be unfounded. Tom Woodman author of Future is one of these people that Madeleine’s piece talks about. Tom has very real
32 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Joan Bakewell, who talks to me about her new book The Tick Of Two Clocks: A Tale of Moving On. It describes how she made the decision to sell the house she lived in for half a century, and what it meant to her to face
A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism community should be expanded yet further. Speaking to a group of activists at party conference, Jonathan Gullis declared: “The term ‘white privilege’ is an extremist term. It should be reported to Prevent, because it is
35 min listen
In this week’s book club podcast, I’m joined by Kate Lister to talk about her new book Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale. Kate tells me about some of the most celebrated sex-workers in history (and pre-history), the attempts that have been made to regulate the ‘oldest profession’ – and where
If you were listening to the Prime Minister’s keynote address to party conference, you would not for a second have suspected that the country’s petrol stations were empty, its service industries hopelessly short of staff, its pigs being slaughtered on farms for want of abattoir workers and its Christmas turkeys on the line. You would
There is a picture book, by the excellent David McKee, of which my youngest child was very fond. It’s called Two Monsters, and its protagonists are, as promised, two monsters. The blue one lives on the west side of a mountain, and the red one lives on the east side of the mountain. They communicate
25 min listen
Chuck Palahniuk — best known as the author of Fight Club — has just announced that he’s publishing his next novel not with a mainstream publisher but through the online subscription service Substack. He joins me on this week’s Book Club podcast to tell me why; and to talk about how 9/11 changed literature, why
Don’t you wish Angela Rayner would come off the fence, just once in a while, and tell us what she really thinks? In a meeting of delegates to the Labour Conference, the heiress presumptive to the Labour leadership is reported to have said of the governing party: ‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch
Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a
