Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
‘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
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,
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
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
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
It always seems to be the way that when attempts are made to promote the life of the mind, they end up being particularly dumb. An instance, today, comes with the publication of a clickbaity list of the ‘Top Twenty Books By Women That Changed The World’, a promotional stunt ahead of Academic Book Week
In this week’s books podcast, we’re using the occasion of the Man Booker International Prize shortlist to talk about the pleasures and perils of literature in translation. I’m joined by Boyd Tonkin, a former chair of the International Booker and author of the forthcoming The 100 Best Novels In Translation, and Frank Wynne, whose translation
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to the historian Lisa Hilton about the latest in her series of what she calls “filthy books” — the raunchy art-world thrillers she writes as L.S. Hilton. The third in the trilogy that began with Maestra (described as “like Lee Child, but with sex instead of punching”), Ultima
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to Richard Holloway about his new book Waiting For The Last Bus. Richard is famous for having, as some would think rather inconveniently, “lost his faith” while serving as Bishop of Edinburgh. He talks to me about how it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and about how
Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries have been reluctant to allow it more than a toehold in their collections. Things are changing. Take MoMA’s visit to Paris last year. Alongside the Picassos and Pollocks was a very popular final room, made
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the Telegraph’s former parliamentary sketch writer Andrew Gimson, and the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson, to discuss their latest superhero-style team-up: Gimson’s Prime Ministers. The book is a complete set of brief lives of every occupant of Number Ten from Walpole to May — illustrated by Martin’s distinctive caricatures.
In this week’s Books Podcast, I’m talking to N. T. Wright, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the theology of St Paul, about a new book — Paul: A Biography — in which he takes an approach to the man. He tells me what Paul was really like, how our understanding of him is
The first book that Tomas Venclova read in English was Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not a bad start in the language, given his future career. Venclova is less well-known in the West than his late friends Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, but he’s something like their Baltic equivalent: a dissident poet of international standing, who spent many
The longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction – judged by a very impressive panel headed by Lisa Appignanesi and including Michael Hofmann, Hari Kunzru, Helen Oyeyemi and our own Tim Martin – is out. Special props to super-translator Frank Wynne, who has translated not one but two of the thirteen books on
In this week’s Books podcast, I’m joined by the great Wendy Cope, whose new collection Anecdotal Evidence is just out. I talk to her about why she’s funniest when she’s most serious, the fascination of writing in form, the disappearance of Jake Strugnell, the recent row over whether the spoken-word work of Hollie McNish and Kate Tempest
Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at any point in human history, only a stone-cold idiot would choose any time other than the present. On average, humans are by orders of magnitude healthier, wealthier, nicer, happier, longer lived, more free and better
I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter. Since we had a truly belting shortlist for this prize, I thought
In this week’s books podcast, I’m talking to Jay Heinrichs about his new book How To Argue With A Cat: A Human’s Guide to the Art of Persuasion. Jay is one of the US’s foremost advocates of the ancient art of rhetoric — and in this book he turns it on Mr Tiddles. But he
This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that – despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at
