Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Is Enlightenment rationalism overrated? Do we spend too much time thinking and not enough time letting our conscious thoughts scatter to the winds? My guest in this week’s Books Podcast is the philosopher Jules Evans, who argues that we human beings have a deep need to get out of our heads. We talk about his
Following the publication of a new collection of the lost short stories of F Scott Fitzgerald (I’d Die For You and Other Lost Stories, Scribner UK, £16.99), I’m joined by two eminent Fitzgerald scholars to talk about the life, legacy and lasting greatness of the laureate of the Jazz Age. In this week’s podcast Anne
This week’s Books Podcast turns to perhaps the greatest work of the greatest writer in English history. Yup: it’s Hamlet time. Specifically, I’m talking to the former artistic director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, about his scheme to perform Hamlet in every country on the face of the earth – a two-year scheme whose rackety
In this week’s Books Podcast, I meet the poet Murray Lachlan Young. In the 1990s, Murray became notorious: the first and only poet in history to get a million-pound contract with a record label. Naturally, those living in the standard-issue garrets developed some envy issues. As he promotes his collected work, How Freakin’ Zeitgeist Are
“The happiest days of your life?” This week in the Books Podcast I ask the authors of two recent books about boarding schools whether the system that has formed the characters of the British ruling classes for several centuries is a blissful idyll or the Stanford Prison Experiment in cricket-whites. I’m joined by Ysenda Maxtone-Graham,
My guest in this week’s Spectator Books Podcast is Rob Newman. Listeners of a certain age (ie mine) will remember him as a tweedy professor on the spoof History Today upbraiding David Baddiel with the line: “That’s you, that is.” But here he arrives as a real scholar: the author of a provoking (and also funny) new
Back in October, I spoke to Hisham Matar — who has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography — about his book The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between. When Hisham was 19, his Libyan dissident father was abducted from exile by the Gadaffi regime and disappeared into Tripoli’s most notorious jail. The writer spent 20
On this week’s Books Podcast, I’m joined by the scholar Dennis Duncan to talk about a subject that’s very dear to both of our hearts: that neglected few pages at the back of any book — the Index. In the wake of last week’s National Indexing Day, we talk about the ancient history of indexes
A few years ago, Charlotte Rampling signed a contract to write her autobiography – and then, the project not long underway, called the whole thing off. But this month she publishes something quite out of the usual run of celebrity memoirs. Who I Am, co-written with the French man of letters Christophe Bataille, is a
In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to Erica Benner about her new Life of Machiavelli, Be Like The Fox. Professor Benner, a Yale expert in political science, offers a new and intriguing reading of the great theorist of statecraft — arguing that in the violent and unstable Florence of his time, he learned to
In this week’s books podcast we have an interview with the former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo in which he talks for the first time about his new project. Michael, in town for the London Book Fair, announces that he’s rewriting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Toto. He also talks about
Think positive. Listen to your inner voice. Strive to become the best version of yourself. The only way out is through. Don’t look back. That sort of go-getting mantra underpins a multi-million-pound industry in life-coaching and self-help. And it’s all horse-manure, says the Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann. His bracing new book Stand Firm: Resisting The Self-Improvement Craze asks
My guest in this week’s books podcast is the scholar Joanna Bourke, who’s talking about her new book on something we all have in common: suffering. In The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers she turns much of what we think we know about pain on its head. Here’s an experience that’s common to
In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the philosopher Daniel Dennett — whose new book takes on one of the biggest and most intriguing problems of all: consciousness itself. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Prof Dennett makes the case that consciousness itself is a sort of illusion — and that the same evolutionary
This week in the books podcast, I’m talking to Louise Doughty — the author of the novel behind the hit BBC thriller Apple Tree Yard. Louise talks about the slightly dizzying experience of seeing her work adapted for the screen, about being swarmed by crazed Sherlock fans, about why writers are like dancing badgers —
In the introduction to his new book Steven Johnson starts out by describing the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices and its successor, the 13th-century Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanisms by the Arab engineer al-Jazari. Here were books of extraordinarily advanced technology. The latter contained sketches of float valves that prefigure the design of
In this week’s podcast, I sit down with the Conservative MP, sometime diplomat and writer Rory Stewart to talk about his remarkable new book The Marches. Rory’s first book The Places In Between described a huge journey he took on foot across Afghanistan in the early noughties. His latest work sees him lace on his
Imagine if Dostoyevsky had spent a year or two knocking around Penge. Or if Balzac had sojourned in Stoke Poges. If those great European novelists seem out of place in a provincial English setting, you’ll get a flavour of the comedy and poignancy of Émile Zola: The Upper Norwood Years, as Michael Rosen’s new book
Imagine if Dostoyevsky had spent a year or two knocking around Penge. Or if Balzac had sojourned in Stoke Poges. If those great European novelists seem out of place in a provincial English setting, you’ll get a flavour of the comedy and poignancy of Émile Zola: The Upper Norwood Years, as Michael Rosen’s new book
This week in the books podcast, we’re taking on some big issues. John Hands, the author of Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution From The Origin of the Universe, is in the grand tradition of ambitious gentleman amateurs. His book attempts to answer the fundamental human questions – who are we, why are we here, and where are
