Sam Leith

“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, whose Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979, is a shrewd history of the fluctuating jollity of hockey sticks, and by Alex Renton, who in Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class argues that British boarding schools have for many years been incubators and enablers of sexual and psychological abuse, and have psychologically damaged whole generations of their alumni.

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 book called Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. With wild claims being made for the ability of brain science and magnetic imaging to locate the "language organ" or the "seat of wisdom", and with human consciousness being reduced to a collection of chemical accidents, Rob discusses the way in which old myths have crept back in in the guise of hard science.

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 and indexing, their vital importance to scholars, the surprising role they have had in the intellectual dogfighting of the Enlightenment... and where you might find an entry for "Peterhouse: shocking goings-on there, 85, 87-9, 107-8; four revolting fellows of, 109; main source of perverts, 103"... It's a fascinating if obscure part of the book-world, and one well worth your attention.

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 slender, riddling approach to the actor's inner life - not a catalogue of film anecdotes but rather a hesitant return to the child she was. She joins me to talk about why she's done things this way, about the legacy of her Olympic medalist father, and about the terrible tragedy that defined her young womanhood. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new podcast every Thursday.

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 conceal his real meanings in layers of irony and satire. We ask, in essence, just how Machiavellian Machiavelli really was…. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 why children's books need to be more adult, the wartime childhood that fuels his work, and why the movies ruined Robin Hood. We're not in Kansas anymore... You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 us to think negative, sack our life-coaches, ignore our inner voices and learn to say, politely but firmly: no. I spoke to him this week about the joys of self-non-improvement... You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 mechanisms that gave us opposable thumbs can account for our ability to do maths, compose music, wonder what would have happened had Germany won the Second World War, and think about the idea of thinking. This superbly lucid explicator tells us, too, about how "post-truth" is not just a political fad, but a threat to the basis of civilisation itself. You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for a new episode every Thursday.

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 — and, in rather forthright terms — why she thinks Lionel Shriver has it all wrong about “cultural appropriation”. Listen here: And if you enjoyed that episode, please subscribe on iTunes for a fresh podcast every Thursday.

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 could have been called but wasn’t.

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 could have been called bit wasn’t.

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 we going? In doing so he considers everything from the origins of the universe to evolutionary theory. The answers he arrives at fly in the face both of Darwinian orthodoxy and the Standard Model of theoretical physics. Yet he argues that, as an outsider, he’s better placed to weigh the arguments than those labouring in narrow disciplinary trenches.