Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know isn’t even out yet, and already someone has spotted a goof. In response to an early review in a Sunday paper – which reports that McEwan’s novel is set in a world where a Russian hydrogen bomb has missed its target in the United States, exploded in
From our UK edition
48 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the Albanian-born political philosopher Lea Ypi, whose new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined reconstructs the story of her grandmother’s early life amid the turbulence of the early and mid twentieth century. She talks to me about using the techniques of fiction to supply the gaps in the archive,
From our UK edition
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That perennial funeral favourite, 1 Corinthians 13, has a lot to answer for. Generations of so-called grown-ups have, whether through the fear of God or
From our UK edition
43 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast marks the 80th anniversary this year of the publication of Brideshead Revisited. This conversation is from the archives, originally recorded in 2020 to mark its 75th anniversary. To discuss Evelyn Waugh’s great novel, Sam Leith is joined by literary critic and author Philip Hensher, and by the novelist’s grandson (and
From our UK edition
Angela Rayner, it’s reported, has bought a ‘third home’. The three-bedroom seaside flat on the south coast that she has just acquired for a sum slightly more than £700,000 adds, the Mail on Sunday reports excitedly, to her ‘burgeoning property empire’. Pre-burgeoning, be it noted, her property empire consisted of a single house in her
From our UK edition
32 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is Max Hastings. Max joined Sam earlier this year for a live recording to discuss his new book Sword: D-Day, trial by battle, which tells the story of the individual stories who risked their lives as part of Operation Overlord. The discussion was arranged to mark
From our UK edition
36 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is Joanna Pocock, whose new book Greyhound describes two trips she took across America by Greyhound bus in 2006 and 2023. They talk about the literature of the road, that distinctively American and usually distinctively male genre, and the meaning of travel – and Joanna tells Sam how
From our UK edition
27 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Nicola Barker, talking about her new book TonyInterruptor — about how a man who interrupts a free jazz concert becomes a viral sensation on social media. Nicola tells Sam why some of her books are bouts of the flu and some are sneezes, how hard she works on her apparently spontaneous
From our UK edition
Grade: B+ Tony Hawk is an old guy these days. The most famous sk8r boi ever to have lived is now 57. A sk8r geezer, if you will; and the video games celebrating his glory days are of an age too. Gamer-geezers who remember losing hours to the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will
From our UK edition
35 min listen
Sam Leith is joined for this week’s Book Club podcast by Gary Shteyngart — whose new novel Vera, or Faith is set in a near-future America whose politics seems to be less science-fictional by the day. It tells the unexpectedly tender story of a bright but lonely ten-year-old girl contending with her parents’ failing marriage and navigating
From our UK edition
At the time of writing, I am not more than a few hours away from leaving this dismal hell-hole and hightailing it for the South of France in a battered Skoda Octavia. And there, I shall settle down for a fortnight, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of 1970s camping – the blue gas-bottles; the nylon
From our UK edition
44 min listen
First up: how private equity is ruining Britain Gus Carter writes in the magazine this week about how foreign private equity (PE) is hollowing out Britain – PE now owns everything from a Pret a Manger to a Dorset village, and even the number of children’s homes owned by PE has doubled in the last
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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the biographer Frances Wilson, whose new book Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark was recently lauded in these pages as “mesmerising” and “a revolutionary book”. She tells me how she immersed herself in the spooky life and peerless art of the great novelist, and why a conventional
From our UK edition
The moment I heard that there’d been a backlash against James Gunn’s reboot of the Superman franchise on the grounds that he’d ruined this great American icon by turning the Man of Steel ‘woke’, I thought, sign me up! Until then, I hadn’t been planning to go. Even as a longtime enthusiast for all things
From our UK edition
34 min listen
My guest this week is Irvine Welsh – who, three decades after his era-defining hit Trainspotting, returns with a direct sequel, Men In Love. Irvine tells me what Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie mean to him, why his new book hopes to encourage a new generation to discover Romantic verse and shagging, and why
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When we’re debating the introduction of a new law – ban this, ban that, crack down on the other – most of the energy in the public conversation goes into the question of whether this, that, or the other is something that deserves to be cracked down on. It seems to be after the event,
From our UK edition
34 min listen
My guest this week is the writer M. John Harrison, who joins me to talk about the rerelease of his 1992 novel The Course of the Heart – a deeply strange and riddling story of grief, friendship, memory and occult magic. We talk about why this book is so personal to him, what he learned
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Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a
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Grade: D– There’s some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. ‘Grinding’ – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious
From our UK edition
36 min listen
Sam Leith’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is one of the most popular living thriller writers. Karin Slaughter has made her native Georgia her fictional territory, and she joins Sam as she launches a new series set in a whole new county, with the book We Are All Guilty Here. They talk ‘planning
