Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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The Sunday Times’s literary editor Andrew Holgate recently tweeted the news that Robert Harris’s latest thriller had entered the bestseller list at No. 2: ‘Pipped to the post by Ken Follett.’ Harris retweeted it: ‘Well done Ken. You bastard.’ Pipped to the post only by Follett. That’s the level Harris is at now. Even before it
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In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the journalist and historian Simon Heffer, author of the magisterial new The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880-1914. The second part in his trilogy of books about the Victorian and Edwardian ages, it works to explode the myth that the pre-war years were an endless Merchant Ivory Summer’s afternoon. Join
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In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to the Pulitzer Prize winning historian (and former Spectator deputy editor) Anne Applebaum about her devastating new book Red Famine. The early 1930s in Ukraine saw a famine that killed around five million people. But fierce arguments continue to this day whether the “Holodomor” was a natural disaster, or
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In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the comedian and writer Robert Webb — whose moving and funny new book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls “The Trick”: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his
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Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we observe it has never been the easiest of things. But heaven knows, people did try. Well enough known, I suppose, is the work of the 17th-century Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who totted up all
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The Man Booker shortlist is out. My colleague Philip Hensher isn’t convinced. He today tweeted ‘Booker shortlist – McGregor, Z Smith, Whitehead, Roy, Barry, Shamsie. Oh wait – those were the ones they left off. Baffling.’ But you can make your own mind up. Or, be guided by our critics. Here (with the exception, alas,
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The Baillie Gifford longlist – consisting of contenders for the country’s most prestigious nonfiction prize – is out today. A very good list it is, too. For readers’ ease, I’m affixing some links here to the Spectator’s reviews of the longlisted titles. We missed Souad Mekhennet (sorry); and a couple of them – Applebaum, Schama
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A N Wilson’s new biography of Darwin was acclaimed in these pages by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst for having a ‘scientist’s forensic skill and a novelist’s imaginative touch’; but, he warned, it was likely to ‘put the felis catus among the columbidae’ with its portrait of the great man as a publicity-hungry plagiarist who got the science wrong. It certainly has done
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This week, in the books podcast, I talk to Harriett Gilbert – who has a good claim to be the voice of books on radio. With the 15th anniversary of the BBC World Service’s World Book Club (nine Nobel and 17 Booker winners have been guests to date), which she’s presented from its first episode
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In this week’s Books podcast I speak to Clive James. Since he was diagnosed with leukaemia, Clive has been as it were on borrowed time. But what use he has made of that time: the last couple of years have seen a great late outpouring of poetry, most recently the wittily and wanly titled collection
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‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of coffee in his airy open-plan kitchen. ‘This is a bone I have been waiting to pick for, oh, 35 years. That bloody maze!’ Livingstone chuckles. ‘That was Steve’s. He’s the sadist.’ That maze, in a
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For this week’s podcast, in celebration of Robert Lowell’s centenary year, I’m joined by the critic and writer Jonathan Raban — who not only knew this titan among American poets of the last century, but lived in his basement, and found himself contributing to literary history when Lowell took to consulting him, on the hoof,
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We live in an age when sequels to, and re-imaginings of, the classics, seem to be a larger part of the literary landscape than ever before. We’re seeing a steady stream of new Ian Fleming, new Agatha Christie, new Robert Ludlum, new Jane Austen, even new PG Wodehouse. What’s the attraction of these books? And
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How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the
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This summer saw 20 years since the publication of the first Harry Potter novel. Love them or hate them, the adventures of JK Rowling’s boy wizard are now a huge part of the literary landscape. In the wake of a Harry Potter conference organised by the Spectator’s own Nick Hilton, I’m joined for this week’s
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This week’s Books Podcast is all about love. Can we have too much of it? How long does it last? And is the hot new thing, polyamory, the solution to al our problems? I’m joined by the writer and comedian Rosie Wilby — author of the new book Is Monogamy Dead? — to discuss the future of
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This year’s Man Booker longlist is a good one, I think. Lots of variety; big names and small ones; and an impressive geographical spread. Leans towards the experimental – and no harm in that. I’m pleased/relieved to say that The Spectator reviewed all but three of these books when they came out (Kamila Shamsie is forthcoming)
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This week, with the holidays approaching, I’m joined by the critic Alex Clark and Damian Barr — memoirist and host of the Savoy’s Literary Salon — to talk about summer reading. What do you take? What do you regret taking? Kindle, dead-tree or — 19th-century-style — cabin trunk full of books sent on ahead? Our
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In this week’s Spectator Books podcast I’m joined by Naomi Klein, the activist journalist who gave articulate voice to the anti-globalisation movement in books such as No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. In her latest work, No Is Not Enough: Defeating The New Shock Politics, she gives an urgent account of how — as she
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It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be the biggest hot-air balloon the world has ever seen. Adoring crowds gather to watch the launch. He rises rapidly and sails off towards the clouds — but in due course the whole thing goes arse-up