Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to a man who has spent more time on Air Force One than even Piers Morgan: President Obama’s former foreign policy speechwriter and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, author of new memoir The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House. What is it really like
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In this week’s Books podcast, we’re moonwalking back to the glory days of Michael Jackson with the brilliant Margo Jefferson, author of On Michael Jackson and the memoir Negroland. What was it that made Jackson so captivating? Can his artistic legacy ever be disentangled from the gruesome murk of the last years? And does it
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In this week’s Spectator books podcast I’m talking to the distinguished scholar of Japanese literature Jay Rubin, editor of the new Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Many of us in the West know little of Japanese literature beyond, perhaps, Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima and perhaps Banana Yoshimoto and Kenzaburo Oe. Jay fills in the blanks. Did you know
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s what I think. It says: ‘Here’s what I think, and, you know what? It’s what nobody except me dares to say in public.’ It says: I’m brave. It says: I speak truth to power. It
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This week’s books podcast is a family affair: I’m talking to the children’s writer and illustrator Judith Kerr (Mog The Forgetful Cat; When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit; and The Tiger Who Came To Tea), and her son the novelist and historian Matthew Kneale, author of English Passengers and Sweet Thames, and most recently, Rome: A
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This week’s Spectator Books Podcast asks: is LSD good for you? I’m joined by the author Michael Pollan, who talks about the fascinating lost history of psychedelic drugs, speculates on what they may tell us about the human mind and the universe, recalls his own mind-blowing encounter with toad venom, and reveals that serious scientific
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This week in the Spectator Books podcast I’m joined by William Dalrymple, co-author with Anita Anand of Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Famous Diamond (just out in paperback; David Crane reviewed the hardback for us here). He talks us through the blood-soaked history of the diamond, the ongoing controversy over who it really
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I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the US constitution, but what preoccupies me and the nation’s allotment-holders at the moment is news that the RHS is warning of a ‘bumper year for slugs’. The slimy little bastards not only ate every single
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It’s a first for the Spectator Books podcast this week: music! We’ve temporarily dispensed with our usual intro jingle to allow this week’s guest, Paul Kildea, to play us in. Paul’s new book Chopin’s Piano: A Journey Into Romanticism is a fascinating and unusual piece of non-fiction that sheds light on Chopin’s life and music,
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The Paul Daniels Magic Show, on a Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, was a straightforward enough proposition. A wand, a waistcoat and a wig; pick a card, any card….Here was Western conjuring as entertainment, in the music hall and variety tradition. Not much to connect it to gods and spirits; little in the way
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In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the journalist and comic novelist Carl Hiaasen about his latest book, a splenetic broadside against feelgood commencement speeches called Assume The Worst that serves as a joyous corrective to “you can be anything you want to be” boosterism. Our conversation ranges to his take on the state
Is the “American Dream”, as Donald Trump claims, dead? Is “America First” a policy of national pride or a dogwhistle to white supremacists? In this week’s books podcast we take the long view. My guest, Sarah Churchwell, excavates the long histories and surprisingly variable meanings of these two phrases in her new book Behold, America:
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The Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft last night won the £50,000 Man Booker International Prize for the novel Flights (published here by the excellent and discriminating small press Fitzcarraldo Editions). The judging panel was chaired by Lisa Appignanesi and consisted of Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Tim Martin and Helen Oyeyemi. Ms
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In this week’s Spectator Books, I talk to the military historian Antony Beevor about his latest book, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944. Beevor’s special brilliance as a writer is the way that — as General Sir Mike Jackson writes in this week’s magazine — he captures the “human factor” in armed conflict. This book
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‘Not funny. Try Punch.’ This, unkindly, used to be the boilerplate rejection letter from Private Eye to those who submitted jokes to the magazine. And the UK’s only prize for comic fiction, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, has just doled out the equivalent of five dozen such notes – its judges having decided that not
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In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m joined by the historian Richard Overy to talk about his new book The Birth of the RAF, 1918. 100 years ago this spring, the Royal Air Force took to the skies for the first time. Now, it’s one of the most important planks of our military power in the
When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. He may, according to the American journalist Michael Pollan’s fiercely interesting new book, have been on to something. Acid has a bad name these days: either a threat to the sanity of your children,
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In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the brilliant Carlo Rovelli — who with the publication of his million-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics in 2014— took his place with Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman as one of the great popularisers of modern theoretical physics. We’re talking today about one of the most difficult
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In this week’s Books Podcast I’m joined by Stig Abell — editor of the Times Literary Supplement, sometime LBC talk radio host, former managing editor of the Sun and (once) the youngest ever director of the Press Complaints Commission — to talk about his new book How Britain Really Works: Understanding the Ideas and Institutions of a Nation. Stig talks about Britain’s magnificently
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The BBC’s decision to re-broadcast Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech in its entirety this week has excited just the shouting match that was to be expected. On the one hand, there has been liberal fury at the honour supposedly paid to a speech that endorsed and encouraged racial hatred. On the other, the
