Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the American journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. In it, he uses the best available scientific projections to underpin a picture of what the world would look like if it heats up by four degrees or more. Not
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At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living Victorian apart from Queen Victoria herself’. He was a landmark — more or less literally. You could visit Brantwood, where he had his Lake District home in later life, and buy postcards of him. There
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In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Deborah Lipstadt — the historian who herself made a piece of history when she defeated the Holocaust denier David Irving in court. In her new book Antisemitism: Here and Now, Professor Lipstadt returns to the fray to look at the worldwide uptick of anti-Semitism in our own
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In this week’s books podcast I’m joined from Los Angeles by Andrew Morton — the Royal writer who scooped the world with the inside story of Princess Diana’s marriage. To coincide with the publication of a revised and expanded edition of Diana, Her True Story — including new material recovered from the tapes they smuggled
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Though the new production of Richard II we’ve been discussing here is taking place at the Globe, it’s perhaps worth remembering that the original didn’t. The play precedes the building of the first theatre by half a decade or so. It
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In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Josh Cohen, author of the Not Working: Why We Have To Stop (reviewed here by Houman Barekat). Josh is a literary critic and a working psychoanalyst, and his book is a thoughtful and subtle discussion of the way in which work dominates not only our lives and identities
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON I quoted last week that rather Brexit-flavoured passage from John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II — noting how it chimed with the times. I didn’t mention that the Globe’s forthcoming production, opening at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 22
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In this week’s books podcast, my guest is Robert Alter – who has just published the fruits of decades of labour in the form of his complete new translation of the Hebrew Bible into English. Acclaimed for his Bible translations by Seamus Heaney, John Updike and Peter Ackroyd, Prof Alter tells me how Biblical Hebrew
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What do you think of when you think of Sweden? If, like me, the very name conjures fuzzy ideas of an enlightened and harmonious vision of social democracy, sexual liberation and ABBA tunes, the journalist Kajsa Norman has some news for you. In her gripping new book about her native land, Sweden’s Dark Soul: The
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON One of the things about Shakespeare that always makes you marvel is how insistently he speaks to the present moment — any present moment you choose. Academic literary critics wince when you start bandying around phrases like ‘eternal truths’, so let’s
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE The Globe was the occasion of drama before the first line was even spoken from its stage. In the snowy winter of 1598, three days after Christmas, Shakespeare and his colleague Burbage resolved a falling-out with the landlord of their then Shoreditch theatre in the
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In this week’s book’s podcast my guest is Jonathan Ames, a writer who has produced everything from memoir (Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer) to TV writing (Bored To Death), graphic novels (The Alcoholic), pitch-black noir (You Were Never Really Here), Wodehouse hommage (Wake Up, Sir!) and now, in The Extra Man, a comic
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In this week’s books podcast we’re going to the wars. My guest is Ed Vulliamy, the veteran war correspondent who has written a fascinating memoir called When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace. In it, Ed talks about how his lifelong love of music — he saw Hendrix at the Isle of
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In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Chris Kraus — author of the semi-autobiographical cult novel I Love Dick and the new essay collection Social Practices — about her strange and interesting life in the New York and LA art worlds, about taking Baudrillard to a “happening” in the desert, about ambition and fame,
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In this week’s books podcast I talk to the great trivia expert Mark Mason about his new The Book of Seconds: The Incredible Stories of the Ones Who Didn’t (Quite) Win. Here’s the Christmas present for all the Tory frontbenchers in your life. Who remembers the Christmas number two in the pop charts? Who got
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‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet in dactylic couplets of the surreal fates visited on a succession of blameless tots, is probably Edward Gorey’s best-known work — and that work forms a pretty coherent whole. Dozens and dozens of tiny
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In this week’s books podcast, I’m speaking to the Pulitzer-prizewinning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her new book Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times — in which she describes what Lincoln, two Roosevelts and LBJ had in common, and didn’t. Obviously, we talk a bit about that nice Mr Trump — as well as
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I got the sack the other day from the London Evening Standard, where I’ve been a weekly columnist for about a decade. ‘Belt-tightening’, I was told: Osbornean austerity claims another victim. As Fleet Street sinks giggling into the sea, a mini-tradition is emerging for long-serving hacks to grumble in the Spectator diary about losing regular
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According to which bit of hype you read, there’s a copy of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers sold somewhere in the world every four seconds, or every seven, or every nine. It’s a cute statistic and (as Child wryly notes), there’s an element of Barnum & Bailey hucksterism to it. But suffice to
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“I wondered what would happen if you made Goliath the hero…” In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to the thriller writer Lee Child about the latest in his phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, Past Tense. Lee tells me why you can’t have a knight-errant in Europe any more, about writing without knowing what happens
