Sam Leith

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast, we’re talking about tomorrow night’s big announcement: the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This year’s prize — like every year’s, it seems — has caused controversy. What is the prize for? Is it good for the literary culture? And how does the shortlist stand up?

In the latest Spectator Books podcast, I talk to Hisham Matar — newly shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction prize, the Baillie Gifford — about his new 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 years not knowing what had really happened. He talks here about his long struggle to find out, and his first trip back after the regime had fallen…. You can listen to our conversation here: and please subscribe on iTunes to get our weekly episodes.

Today we’re proud to launch the Spectator’s Books Podcast, a literary younger sibling of our popular weekly podcast on politics and current affairs. Each week I’ll be hosting a discussion about the most interesting recent books and the literary talking-points of the day. Books contain every subject known to man – and rather than focusing narrowly on fiction or literary biography, we want to take full advantage of their range. We want to roam as widely as the written word itself. In the coming weeks I’ll be talking to the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, recently longlisted for the country’s most prestigious non-fiction prize for his exquisite memoir of his dissident father’s abduction by the Gadaffi regime.

So, the 2016 longlist – aka the Man Booker Dozen – is out. It invites a cavalcade of instant commentary, almost all of which – as I wrote when I was helping judge the prize myself last year – is unavoidably incredibly stupid. Nobody other than the judges will have read all 150-odd of the books submitted, so in deploring this omission or groaning at that inclusion you say nothing much at all. That Graham Swift or Jonathan Safran Foer don’t appear this year doesn’t necessarily mean their books were bad. It means that the judges thought others were better. Have you read the others? No? Well, quite.

William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60, on his way to the printers with his new manuscript. On a hot August day in 1604, a man walked through the dusty streets of Valladolid, Spain, clutching in his right hand a heavy package. In the absence of any authentic portraits, we must trust his own words to know that he was brown-haired and silver-bearded, with an aquiline (but well-proportioned, he adds) nose and cheerful eyes partly hidden behind a pair of smeared spectacles resembling, in the words of one of his literary rivals, badly fried eggs. By the time Cervantes published Don Quixote, he’d done a lot of living.

My last contact with George Weidenfeld was when I asked him to review a book for The Spectator: a life of Stefan Zweig, who has been enjoying a bit of a moment lately. George didn’t fancy it, but I received – very courteous and friendly, as his communications always were – a postcard declining. You could see why I asked, though: George was the one of the last people alive who actually lived in Zweig’s world – that cultured and cosmopolitan Mitteleuropean moment at the tail end of the Habsburg Empire, smashed up irrevocably by the Nazis. I first met him a couple of years ago when I was sent to interview him by Tatler. I’ve seldom been so in awe of an interviewee. He arrived in London with a postal order for sixteen shillings and sixpence.

The row over Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes is hotting up. Professor Bate originally embarked on the book with the blessing of the Hughes estate, but that blessing – along with permission to quote from the poet’s writings – was withdrawn. Now the Hughes estate has issued a press release claiming to have identified a number of errors in the book – 18 in an 16 page sample – and requesting that the book be corrected and an apology made to Carol Hughes. You can read it below. The estate say that they have not yet had a response from Professor Bate or his publishers. I’ve emailed him for comment and will update this post as and when I hear back.

We don’t usually pay all that much attention, as James Shapiro points out, to the Jacobean Shakespeare. We’re in the habit of thinking of him as an Elizabethan playwright: look in most cradle-to-grave biographies for ‘what Shakespeare was doing after James came to the throne in 1603 and there usually aren’t many pages left to read’. That’s to scant his decade-long engagement with the dawning of the Stuart era. Also to ignore that, as Shapiro argues, only three cultural artefacts created during the first decade of King James’s reign still matter 400 years later: the King James Bible, the mythology of the Gunpowder Plot, and Shakespeare’s late plays. Shakespeare, as 1606 began, was 41.

Proust had his cork-lined bedroom; Emily Dickinson her Amherst hidey-hole; Mark Twain a gazebo with magnificent views of New York City. Where, then, did the father of English poetry do his work? From 1374 till 1386, while employed supervising the collection of wool-duties, Chaucer was billeted in a grace-and-favour bachelor pad in the tower directly above Aldgate, the main eastern point of entry to the walled city of London. ‘Grace and favour’ makes it sound grander than it was.

I liked Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (William Collins, £25) so much that — if I had had the first idea how to operate in a betting shop — I would have put a pony on it to win the Samuel Johnson prize. In the event, my incompetence saved me £25. But Nicolson was robbed. Here is a book bursting with enthusiasm, erudition and eccentricity: a travelogue, a memoir, a work of literary criticism and, at bottom, an archaeology of the western imagination. I found it completely thrilling. Also, in John Berryman’s centenary year I was delighted to see Farrar, Straus and Giroux reissuing his work in some gorgeous new editions.