Sam Leith

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON As I noted last week, the dramatic climax of Henry IV, Part Two — that stew of rot and renewal — is reached when Prince Hal casts off the roguish companion of his younger years, ‘the tutor and the feeder of my riots’, Sir John Falstaff, on the way to his coronation in the final act. Falstaff is a parodic king, an anti-king. That is what gives much of the dramatic electricity to the clowning scenes in Part One where Falstaff play-acts King Henry. The King embodies the rule of law; and Falstaff holds it in contempt. The King embodies honour; and Falstaff delivers a celebrated soliloquy in which he mocks it as ‘a mere scutcheon’.

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by the journalist and (as one half of the crime writer Nicci French) novelist Nicci Gerrard to talk about her new book What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. The loss of her own father to dementia prompted Nicci to look at one of the most painful and pressing social problems of the age: how we care for, or fail to care for, those who have dementia — and the philosophical questions of what it means when the things that make you start to fall away.  https://audioboom.

In this week's Books Podcast I'm joined by Professor Cass Sunstein – best known here as co-author of the hugely influential 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which spawned a whole transatlantic movement in using behavioural psychology to influence public policy (not least in the Cabinet Office's celebrated 'Nudge Unit'). Cass's new book is called How Change Happens – and extends the arguments of his previous books to talk about the mechanisms that determine quite big, and quite abrupt shifts in politics and social attitudes.

My guest for this week’s books podcast is Clare Carlisle, author of a new life of Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart. Kierkegaard has a reputation for being forbidding, pious and difficult to pronounce - but Clare’s here to tell us why the work of this transformational thinker and writer speaks to every age about the difficulties and the vital importance of finding a way of living in the world. Plus, we learn about his very strange love-life, his mental health, and how he got monstered by Copenhagen’s equivalent of Private Eye. There ain’t nothing like a Dane.

In this week’s books podcast I’m talking to Clare Mulley about The Woman Who Saved The Children, her biography of Eglantyne Jebb reissued to coincide with next week’s centenary of Save The Children, the charity that Jebb founded. Eglantyne was a fascinating and deeply unconventional figure — a nice young gel from the Shropshire squirearchy who refused to fit into the social, sexual or professional pigeonholes her background seemed to destine her for. Instead she found herself investigating war crimes in Macedonia, campaigning against the postwar economic blockade of Germany, revolutionising charity fundraising, clashing with the law and pioneering the concepts that would go on to become the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by one of the doyennes of crime writing, the brilliant Donna Leon. She talks about her latest Commissario Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given, about what Venice gives her as a setting, why she welcomes snobbery towards crime writers, and why she never lets her books be published in Italian.

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON Last time in this space we were talking about Harry Hotspur’s role as a shadow-self for Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One. But nor, of course, can we ignore the other pole around which the play swings: the sack-swilling anti-Santa Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations — some, among them Orson Welles, who played the fat knight in The Chimes at Midnight, have said the greatest — and, perhaps even more than Romeo, Prospero and Hamlet, has escaped the play to take on the quality of a mythological figure. Henry IV, Part One — on from April 23 at the Globe — sees Sir John in his pomp. He is not (yet) pitiable.

In this week’s Spectator Books I’m talking to Peter Stanford, author of Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. Why is it that, according to some polls, more people believe in angels than believe in God? Peter takes us on a tour through history, theology and literature to find how the winged cherubs on our Christmas cards got there, and why they look as they do. Along the way he addresses some of the vital questions. Do angels have wings — and if so, how many? What are they made of — light, or compressed air? Are they above or below humans in the hierarchy of creation? Which is the friendliest archangel: Michael, Gabriel or Raphael? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON We’ve been looking at various aspects of Richard II, which has just opened at Shakespeare’s Globe. Now to turn our attention a little further into the future. Richard II was only the opener for the remarkable run of history plays that are the centrepiece of the theatre’s summer season this year. The second half of April will see openings for Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two and Henry V; and on ‘Trilogy Days’, theatregoers with especially resilient bottoms will have the chance to see all three in a single day.

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 were ‘Ruskin ceramics, Ruskin linen and lace products and Ruskin fireplaces’ available. In New Jersey, undismayed by the great man’s loathing of tobacco, there was a company that sold ‘John Ruskin’ premium cigars. Postmortem you could get Ruskin souvenir brassware or toasting forks and a scale model of the Ruskin monument near Keswick. But that, Hill also says, was about the peak of his fame.

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 day and age. I ask her why she felt the need to write this book and frame it in the way she did, how anti-Semitism differs from other forms of prejudice, and what you can and can't say about Israel.