Sam Leith

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”.

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 talk to me about his last book, The Marches. It’s at once the tale of a meandering journey he made along the Anglo-Scottish border around the time of the Scottish independence referendum (Rory is MP for Penrith and the Borders), and a tender account of his relationship with his father Brian.

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, and a modest one. Among the greatest privileges of doing our books podcast was meeting Judith at her house in Barnes, where we recorded our interview with her and her son Matthew Kneale. What made it really special was that – thanks to one of my routine childcare emergencies – I had my then four-year-old son Jonah in tow. I have a photograph, therefore – which I hope will be a lifelong treasure for him – of Jonah, aged four, sitting with Judith, aged 94.

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 of the rest of literature? How did he think about genre? Why is Act Four always a bit boring? Is the Tempest an autumnal masterpiece or the thin work of a writer of dwindling powers? And how filthy is A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

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 peculiar book, lavishly ridiculous in almost every respect and fully committed to the gothic extremes of human cruelty: just camp enough to skirt charges of outright porno-sadism. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it is. But, as I say, it’s also mad as a badger. The way I found myself describing it to a friend is as Dr Fischer of Geneva retold by Carl Hiaasen and shot by Tobe Hooper. A character with a walk-on part eats a human kidney, for instance, just because it’s there.

    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.