The baffling oratory of Jared Kushner
From our US edition
Safe to say his speech in Bahrain will not solve Israel-Palestine
Sam Leith
Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Friday
Thursday
Croquet
People say cricket is the quintessential English game. Those people are wrong. Cricket may have a longer pedigree, but it’s too boring, too democratic and too honourable to qualify: croquet is the game that truly captures what it is to be English. As any pub quizzer will tell you, Wimbledon started its life in 1868
Wednesday
The Books Podcast: the right way to write with Benjamin Dreyer
In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Benjamin Dreyer — whose name is pronounced, as I discover live on air, ‘Dryer’ rather than ‘Drayer’. That seems an apt way to be introduced to a man who, as Random House US’s Copy Chief, makes his living correcting errors. His new book Dreyer’s English is a
Wednesday
Books Podcast: writings of the working class
In this week’s books podcast Kit de Waal is here to talk about her new anthology of working-class memoir, Common People. First a guest on this podcast a couple of years ago talking about her Desmond-Elliott-shortlisted debut My Name Is Leon, Kit explains why she thought an anthology of working-class writing was necessary, about if
Sunday
Common sense is the real generation gap – just ask John Cleese
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend
Thursday
Twitter: no country for old men
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend
Wednesday
Books Podcast: does tripping balls tell us anything profound about human consciousness?
This week’s books podcast promises to be a trip. I’m joined by Mike Jay to talk about the history of mescaline — a psychedelic drug whose influence goes from the earliest South American civilisations through the 19th-century Indian Wars up to W B Yeats, Aleister Crowley and (of course) Aldous Huxley and Hunter S Thompson.
Thursday
Life at the Globe | 6 June 2019
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON This column concludes my brief series about Shakespeare and the Globe, linked to the summer season of history plays — from Richard II to Henry V — sponsored by Merian. It’s been a pleasure to write. And one of the special pleasures
Wednesday
Books Podcast: Chaucer's European roots
In this week’s books podcast we’re talking about why the Father of English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, at least half belongs in a French, Latin and Italian tradition. Marion Turner’s magnificently scholarly Chaucer: A European Life sets the great writer in his own times — one of a hinge between feudal and early modern ideas about selfhood,
Wednesday
The Books Podcast: science fiction from Jim Al-Khalili
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What
Tuesday
The Books Podcast: Rory Stewart in conversation with Sam Leith
Rory Stewart is the back-of-field Tory leadership candidate who’s catching most attention at the moment; popping up all over London inviting all comers to talk to him about policy and ideas. He’s a politician with real hinterland- and you can get a flavour of that hinterland in the conversation we had when he came to
Thursday
Rest in peace, Judith Kerr
I am so, so sad to hear about the death of Judith Kerr. I last saw her only a month or two ago, at an Oldie Literary Lunch, where she was in fine form and did not stint herself on a glass or two of wine. She seems to have been constitutionally a merry person,
Life at the Globe | 23 May 2019
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON ‘Small Latin and less Greek’ was Ben Jonson’s verdict on Shakespeare the linguist. But as Henry V (the latest play in the Globe’s Merian-sponsored summer season) shows, he knew a bit of French, too. As well as all that blood-and-thunder stuff on
Wednesday
The Books Podcast: what makes Shakespeare special?
In this week’s books podcast my guest is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, who’s talking about her new book This Is Shakespeare. What is it that makes Shakespeare special — and is it defensible that, as even in university curricula, we talk about Shakespeare apart from and above the whole
Thursday
Pass the sick bag | 16 May 2019
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for readers of Cari Mora is that Hannibal is here in spirit if not in person. This is a very
Wednesday
Books Podcast: Ursula Buchan on her grandfather, John Buchan
In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Ursula Buchan – the author of a hugely involving new life of her late grandfather John Buchan. The book is called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (you can read Allan Massie’s enthusiastic Spectator review of it here), and it does as the title promises. Buchan (or ‘JB’ to
Thursday
‘Come on: cancel me’
‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of a joke. I never really imagined that was on the cards for me.
Life at the Globe: good golly, Henry V has some thumping lines
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/ Or close the wall up with our English dead…’ Good golly, Henry V has some thumping lines, doesn’t it? The final play in this summer’s Henriad at the Globe — partnered with Merian —
Wednesday
The Books Podcast: Bret Easton Ellis on coming out as Patrick Bateman
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Bret Easton Ellis. The author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms is here to talk about his first nonfiction book White, and the savage critical response to it. We discuss censorious millennials, the fascination of actors, his problem with David Foster Wallace, ‘coming out’
Thursday
Books Podcast: Joseph Stiglitz on the EU's big economic mistake
In this week’s books podcast, my guest is the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, architect of Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” and former chief economist at the World Bank. His new book People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent argues Trump’s economic boom is a “sugar-high”, and that the US economy is
