Sam Leith

The spy writer Mick Herron’s Slough House series of comic thrillers has steadily established him as perhaps the most influential author in the genre since Le Carre. The latest in the series, Joe Country, is out now — and we thought to celebrate its publication with another opportunity to listen to my conversation last year with Mick — when London Rules came out -- about Slough House, slow horses and his unkillable, curry-stained antihero Jackson Lamb. Normal post-holiday service will be resumed next week with a box-fresh podcast featuring Lemn Sissay.

Even books editors have to go on holiday sometimes, so Spectator Books is taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. But so there's not a gaping gap in your life where the podcast used to be, we're bringing out some of our favourite episodes from our archive. This week, I am joined by the critic Alex Clark and Damian Barr — memoirist and host of the Savoy’s Literary Salon — to talk about summer reading. What do you take? What do you regret taking? Kindle, dead-tree or — 19th-century-style — cabin trunk full of books sent on ahead? Our discussion yielded a host of recommendations — from the brand new to the reliable old friends — that we hope will help you plan your own travelling library.

In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. I’m joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s 'footsteps' approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit the worlds of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the crucial year in the late 1790s when they lived near each-other in the Quantocks in Somerset. That meant, for him, living in the same landscape, walking the same paths, reliving the struggles with lines of verse in manuscript.

The star New York Times columnist David Brooks has never been afraid to go beyond the usual remit of day-to-day politics. His new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to the Meaning of Life, somewhere between a spiritual autobiography and a manual for living. He joins me to explain how he’s changed his mind about the meaning of life since his previous book The Road To Character (he’s cagy about whether refunds are available), about how his own humbling after the breakdown of his marriage made him a wiser and better person, and about whether a new-found appreciation for altruism could make him a socialist.

Pigeons: revolting pests who can’t tell the difference between fag-butts and chips, right? Not so, according to my latest podcast guest Jon Day, distinguished man of letters, critic, academic and… pigeon-fancier. Jon’s new book Homing describes how — suffering an early midlife crisis in young married life with fatherhood approaching — he took up racing pigeons. His book will make you look at pigeons in a new light — and also reflect on what these extraordinary birds have to tell us about the relationship between humans and animals and about the idea of home.

My guest on this week’s podcast is Caroline Crampton — whose fine and lyrical new book The Way To The Sea twines travelogue and memoir to pay tribute to the neglected mystery and beauty of the downriver portions of the Thames. Evoking Joseph Conrad and Dickens, ranging from prehistory to the sunken wrecks (and still live explosives!) of wartime ships that foundered on its shoals, from the 18th-century maritime madness to the modern day rejuvenation or social cleansing of the London docklands, Caroline tells a remarkable and fascinating story.

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 compendium of useful tricks of the trade, sharp opinions and authoritative rulings on everything to do with language and style. We talk transatlantic language differences, angry pedants, and punctuation nitty-gritty, with special reference to Steven Pinker, the New Yorker and Guns N’ Roses.

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 and how the pendulum has swung since previous booms in working-class writing, what still needs to change in publishing, and how, as an editor, she avoided falling victim to Four Yorkshiremen Of The Apocalypse Syndrome.

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 it has offered is the chance to explore what Oxford’s Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Emma Smith, identifies in her book This Is Shakespeare as the Stratford man’s outstanding quality: what she calls his ‘gappiness’. That is what academics more usually call indeterminacy. (I can see why she prefers ‘gappiness’.

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 would that mean? (Nothing good, is the answer.) He helps us sort our neutralinos from our neutrinos, tells us about the real existential threats we face, and explains why he’s drawn to so-called “hard sf”.