Books

Sam Leith

Sara Wheeler: Glowing Still

41 min listen

On this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Sara Wheeler, who looks back on her travelling life in Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road. She tells me why it’s ‘a book about tits and toilets’, as well as a meditation on the past and future of travel writing and a lament for the books – in one case thanks to having children and the other to the modern fatwa on ‘cultural appropriation’ – she didn’t get to write. 

Sam Leith

Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander

48 min listen

On this week’s Book Club, I’m joined by the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli to talk about his new book Anaximander and the Nature of Science, in which he explains how a radical thinker two and a half centuries ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells me how Anaximander’s way of thinking still informs the work scientists do everywhere, how politics shapes scientific progress and how we can navigate the twin threats of religious dogma and postmodern relativism in search of truth.

Sam Leith

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: Metamorphosis

34 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. In his new book Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces, Robert describes how being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis plunged him from his comfortable life as an English literature professor at Oxford into a frightening and disorienting new world; and how literature itself helped him learn to navigate around it.

Sam Leith

Richard Bradford: Tough Guy

37 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the scholar and biographer Richard Bradford, whose new book Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer looks at the rackety life and uneven oeuvre of one of the big beasts of 20th-century American letters. Mailer, as Richard argues, thought his self-identified genius as a writer licensed any amount of personal bad behaviour – up to and including stabbing one of his wives. As the book makes clear Mailer was a racist, misogynist, homophobe, thug and a boor. But was he also, actually, any good? And will he last?

Sam Leith

Robert Kaplan: The Tragic Mind

29 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the American writer, reporter and foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, whose new book The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power argues that it’s in Greek tragedy that we can find the most important lessons in how to navigate the 21st century. He tells me how the reflections in the book arose from his remorse at having influenced the Bush administration with his support for the Iraq War, why it still makes sense to think about ‘fate’ in a world without gods and why George H W Bush was a paragon of the tragic mindset while his son George W Bush

Sam Leith

Tania Branigan: Red Memory

57 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to forget or ignore it, shapes the high politics and daily lives of the Chinese nation. She tells me why official amnesia on the subject is a surprisingly recent development, how 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests changed the course of the country, and why so

Sam Leith

Thomas Halliday: Otherlands

54 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn’t eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be a good time to do it, and gives a jaw-dropping sense of what the night sky looked like when the earth was young.

Sam Leith

Ashley Ward: Sensational

60 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses, which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle’s notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting their wives pick out the curtains, why we call ginger-haired people “redheads” and, oddly, how a pooping dog might do in a pinch as an aid to navigation. 

Sam Leith

A. E. Stallings: This Afterlife

38 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to be both Orpheus and Eurydice.

Sam Leith

Paul Pettitt: Homo Sapiens Rediscovered

65 min listen

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt – whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa – and along the way explains what’s so good about mammoths, how cutting-edge cognitive science explains Paleolithic art, why cavemen didn’t live in caves… and why you can draw a line from prehistoric Lascaux to Tony the Tiger.

Sam Leith

Matthew Hollis: The Waste Land

52 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Matthew Hollis, author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. In the tail end of this centenary year of the great monument of modernist poetry, Matthew tells me about the private agonies that went into the making of the poem. We discuss how not just Ezra Pound but Vivien Eliot had a hand in editing it, and why we misunderstand Eliot’s famous claim about the impersonality of poetry.

Sam Leith

Rupert Shortt: The Hardest Problem

52 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Rupert Shortt, whose stimulating new book The Hardest Problem addresses one of the oldest difficulties in theology: “the problem of evil”. Is this something the religious and the secular can even talk meaningfully about? What’s the great challenge Dostoevsky throws up? And what did Augustine get right that Richard Dawkins gets wrong? 

Sam Leith

Edward Mendelson: Complete Poems of W H Auden

41 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Edward Mendelson, who with the publication of the Complete Poems of W H Auden in two volumes now sets the crown on more than half a century of scholarship on the poet. There’s nobody on the planet who knows more about this towering figure in twentieth-century poetry. He tells me what he finds so inexhaustibly rewarding about Auden’s work, talks about the shape of the poet’s career, the personal encounters that set him on this path… and about sex, religion and semicolons.

Is the life of ‘the spare’ really so bad, Harry?

Three cheers for whoever came up with the title of the Duke of Sussex’s upcoming autobiography, Spare. It’s punchy – and it evokes a sense of sadness. Is this how Harry has always felt? Like a disposable spare part? The ‘heir and the spare’ describes the first in line to the throne and the ‘reserve’ monarch. It may sound cruel – and perhaps it is – but as soon as hereditary systems were established, queens and kings recognised that to ensure continuity and stability for their monarchy, it was necessary to have a healthy male heir and one in reserve should the eldest one die – which they often did. Spares