Sam Leith | The Spectator columnists & writers

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

'When parents give Maus…to their little kids, I think it's child abuse. I wanna protect my kids!' Who do you imagine this quote is from? Some plaid-clad member of the moral majority at a town hall meeting in Tennessee – where the local board of education in McMinn County recently caused an outcry by removing Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust from the eighth-grade curriculum? Nope. It's a quote from, well, Art Spiegelman – in a 1997 comic he drew depicting a conversation he had with Maurice Sendak. This week he took a rather different view. Interviewed by CNN, he said that in contemplating the school board ruling he had 'moved past total bafflement to trying to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis… maybe?' I quote that line from his earlier comic not as a gotcha, or to try to paint Spiegelman as a hypocrite.

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

Pre-crime has arrived in China

Pre-crime has arrived in China

Pre-crime has arrived in China

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film based on it. Here was a vision of a shudderingly paranoiac technological dystopia in which you could be arrested for something you haven’t even done yet. Not so science-fictional as all that. ‘Pre-criminal’ is the phrase — apparently one in official currency — that’s used of the protagonist of the story with which Darren Byler begins his chilling short book. Vera Zhou was a student of Byler’s at the University of Washington. A member of the Chinese Muslim Hui population, she was walking through a crowded street in her home city of Kuitun, near the Kazakh border, in 2019 when she was pulled off the street by police.

Pre-crime has arrived in China

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Christopher Prendergast, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature at Cambridge and the author of the new book Living and Dying With Marcel Proust. In the centenary year of Proust's death (and the English publication of Swann's Way) he tells me (among other things) how the structure of A La Recherche is more straightforward than many think, why that madeleine was nearly a slice of toast, and about the great unsayable at the heart of Proust's great story.

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel Proust

Downflood: the Good Ship Boris is sinking

Downflood: the Good Ship Boris is sinking

Downflood: the Good Ship Boris is sinking

In Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm, there’s a near-matchless description of how big boats go to the bottom. 'The crisis curve starts out gradually and quickly becomes exponential,' Junger writes of a boat wallowing and taking on water in a big sea:The more trouble she’s in, the more trouble she’s likely to get in, and the less capable she is of getting out of it, which is an acceleration of catastrophe that is almost impossible to reverse... If there’s enough damage, flooding may overwhelm the pumps and short out the engine or gag its air intakes. With the engine gone, the boat has no steerageway at all and turns broadside to the seas. Broadsides exposes her to the full force of the breaking waves, and eventually a part of her deck or wheelhouse lets go.

Downflood: the Good Ship Boris is sinking

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

In this week’s episode: Will the Red Wall crush Boris Johnson? In this week’s Spectator, our political editor James Forsyth and our deputy political editor Katy Balls report on the plot to oust the Prime Minister by Red Wall MPs, and No.10’s battle to save Boris. They join the podcast to give their up to date diagnosis. (00:43)Also this week: How to save the BBC?This week Nadine Dorries announced that she is planning a licence fee freeze. In the Spectator this week Paul Wood, a veteran journalist of the BBC writes about his love-hate relationship with the broadcaster. He joins the podcast now along with Domonic Minghella, writer, producer and former showrunner of the BBC’s Robin Hood. (14:45) And finally: Is it moral to do good with bad money? The Sackler family - whose fortune was built on getting thousands of Americans addicted to OxyContin, contributing to the country’s devastating opioid crisis - are now returning to philanthropy in the UK.

The collapse: how Red Wall MPs turned on Boris

James Birch: Bacon in Moscow

James Birch: Bacon in Moscow

James Birch: Bacon in Moscow

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the gallerist James Birch - whose new book Bacon In Moscow describes how he achieved the seemingly impossible: taking an exhibition of Francis Bacon's work to Moscow in the late 1980s. James tells me how he negotiated between the volatile artist and the implacable Soviet bureaucracy with the help of a suave but menacing KGB middleman; and how, along the way, he nearly acquired an original Francis Bacon painting and nearly acquired a Russian wife.

James Birch: Bacon in Moscow

What Meccano taught me

What Meccano taught me

What Meccano taught me

Elsewhere in England this weekend, grimly sweating middle-aged men were planning Operation Save Big Dog, Operation Red Meat and Operation Decommission Shopping Trolley. In our house, though, the only game in town for grimly sweating middle-aged men was Operation Racing Car. My son Jonah had received his Covid-postponed eighth birthday present from his cousins and it was – retro! – a Meccano set. 'Dad, can you help me build it?' he asked, heteropatriarchonormatively. And of course I gladly forwent my planned afternoon doomscrolling Twitter to see how many new Downing Street parties would be unearthed. Because I had never done Meccano and I thought here was an opportunity to spend some quality bonding time with my son and heir and, besides, an opportunity to show off to him.

What Meccano taught me

Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere

Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere

Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere

This week's Book Club podcast addresses one of the most misunderstood and vilified concepts in the culture wars: postmodernism. How did this arcane theoretical position escape from academia to become a social media talking point? What the hell is it anyway? What does Jeff Koons have to do with Foucault? Is postmodernism out to destroy capitalism, or is it capitalism incarnate? And what comes after postmodernism? Stuart Jeffries - author of Everything, All The Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern - puts it all in quotes for us.

Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere

We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy

We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy

We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy

When the whole opioid crisis blew up, the Sackler family — whose fortune was substantially built on getting thousands of Americans debilitatingly addicted to OxyContin — withdrew for a period from their charitable giving. It was reported yesterday, though, that they're back in the philanthropy business, and last year gave £3.5 million to various British causes — among them the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, the Watermill Theatre, King’s College, London, the homelessness charity Amber Foundation, various churches, academies and conservation projects. 'The return of the Sacklers to philanthropy in the UK,' the report stated confidently, 'will cause outrage'. Really? I remember being similarly perplexed when green campaigners were protesting about the National Portrait Gallery being sponsored by BP.

We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy

Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild

Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild

Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Natalie Livingstone – whose new book The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty gives the distaff dish on the banking family's long history. She discovers that the Rothschild women have been just as remarkable as the men – from early modern matriarchs to jazz-club butterflies.

Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild

Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing

Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing

Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing

My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be sued for asking a question. It was in this spirit that he approached in his weekly column the story of a schoolteacher who had been acquitted for the third time in his career of sexually molesting young boys in his care. He did not for a moment doubt the man’s innocence, JJ wrote, but he wondered: would it not be prudent for this man to take up a line of work ‘that carries a less high risk of false accusation’? This formulation came into my mind as I read the latest news on the Duke of York’s fight against a lawsuit brought in the US by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims that she was trafficked as a teenager by Jeffrey Epstein and that Epstein’s friend Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her while she was 17 years old.

Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing

The modern economy is built on addiction

The modern economy is built on addiction

The modern economy is built on addiction

Two stories, side-by-side in the Sunday paper I was looking at online. The first — 'Strip Dame Dopesick of her title' — was a report that the families of victims of opioid addiction were campaigning for Dame Theresa Sackler, whose family profited unimaginably from marketing addictive legal painkillers, to be stripped of her title. The second was the story of how the writer and TV presenter Richard Osman had spoken on BBC Radio Four of struggling with an addiction to crisps, chocolate and biscuits for four decades. He compared his relationship with food to an alcoholic’s with booze: ‘The addiction is identical.’ There’s a school of thought that will see no connection between these stories; that thinks it ridiculous to compare a luminary of light-entertainment struggling to resist scoffing a four-pack of Mars Bars with a jonesing OxyContin addict or a long-haul alky shuddering into withdrawal in a locked ward.

The modern economy is built on addiction

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

I thought the police statement — bureaucratic, anonymised, bone-dry – got the tone just right. In confirming the arrest of Piers Corbyn on suspicion of encouragement to commit arson, a spokesman confirmed only that 'a man in his 70s' had been arrested in Southwark, south London on Sunday morning. This, for those who missed it, is understood to relate to Mr Corbyn’s fire-breathing (literally: he took his nylon-clad life in his hands with a stunt involving lighter-fluid) speech to an anti-vax rally in the capital. He told his audience, presumably once he’d had a Murray Mint to get the taste of the lighter fluid out of his mouth, that we needed to 'get a bit more physical' with those who support restrictions designed to reduce the number of people dying of Covid.

Is Piers Corbyn really dangerous?

Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others

Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others

Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Siri Hustvedt, whose latest book is a collection of essays: Mothers, Fathers and Others. She tells me what literary critics get wrong, why she has a rubber brain on her desk, how Ancient Greek misogyny is still with us, why the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle has yet to get her due – and how long it took her to stop smiling politely when people said her husband wrote her books…

Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others

My fight with Viagogo

My fight with Viagogo

My fight with Viagogo

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop act, apparently, m’lud) at Wembley. She sent me a link. Quick, quick, I thought: get them while they’re hot. I clicked through and bought three old-fashioned physical tickets. I sucked up the delivery fee because I imagined, sentimentally, my daughter looking back years later on those yellowing stubs and remembering her first ever gig. First mistake: the site I’d clicked on was the resale site Viagogo. I should have checked the venue’s own ticketing site but I was on my phone, I’d clicked on the link my wife had sent me, it looked legit and I was worried these things would sell out instantly. So I was paying double the face price.

My fight with Viagogo

How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

Perhaps the funniest of the many funny jokes in Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ is its protagonist’s struggle with Enid Blyton. Having turned the corner into adolescence, Adrian is mortified by the Blyton characters on the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom and sets about repainting the room in black, the better to represent his turbulent soul. And yet, though he slaps on coat after coat of black paint, the shiny yellow bells on Noddy’s cap continue to show through. He’s reduced to colouring them in one by one. (‘Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did 69 tonight, only 124 to go.’) Adrian Mole wasn’t the only critic ever to have wanted to paint Blyton out of existence; nor the only to have been frustrated by the determination of those bells to shine through.

How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint

Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint

Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Kevin Birmingham, whose new book The Sinner and The Saint: Dostoevsky, A Crime and its Punishment, tells the extraordinary story of how Dostoevsky came to write Crime and Punishment – and the underexplored story of the real-life murderer whose case inspired it. Physical agony, Siberian exile, vicious state censorship, old-school nihilists – and the astonishing personal resilience of one of Russia's greatest writers... it's all here.

Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint

Meghan woz right

Meghan woz right

Meghan woz right

The Duchess of Sussex’s legal ding-dong with the Mail on Sunday (which published her private correspondence with her father) has been one of those battles where you regret it’s not possible for both sides to lose. But one side did lose, and it deserved to. Meghan was in the right. I half wish she hadn’t been, if only so we didn’t have to read her statement after the court of appeal found in her favour. It managed the peculiar feat of crowing and simpering at the same time: ‘This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right. While this win is precedent setting, what matters most is that we are now collectively brave enough to reshape a tabloid industry that conditions people to be cruel, and profits from the lies and pain that they create.

Meghan woz right

Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers

Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers

Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers

This year Faber and Faber started the project of republishing the late Nobel Laureate William Golding's back catalogue -- starting with Pincher Martin, The Inheritors and The Spire. I'm joined by his daughter Judy Golding -- author of The Children of Lovers: A Memoir of William Golding By His Daughter -- to talk about Golding the writer and Golding the man. What were the deep fears that drove his work and were eased by drink? How did the war change his worldview? And what was the nature of the religious sensibility that underpinned his visionary allegories of folly and evil?

Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers

The forever ‘war on Christmas’

The forever ‘war on Christmas’

The forever ‘war on Christmas’

It seems to get earlier each year, doesn’t it? It's not yet even December, and the Mail on Sunday has splashed on 'NOW THE WOKE ‘BLOB’ TRIES TO BAN CHRISTMAS'. Lordy be. I say this every year and every year my woke comrades fail to learn. We have a leak, a chatty flake, I say. Someone’s feeding our plans to the Mail on Sunday, I say. We need a major overhaul of woke blob op-sec if we’re ever going to get this whole Christmas-banning thing done, I say. And do they listen? To be honest, I thought we were onto a good one this time. It was subtle. As the paper reports, our attempt to ban Christmas came in an innocuous guise. Comrades in the Cabinet Office vetoed a proposed public safety slogan – 'Don’t take Covid home for Christmas' – on the grounds that the campaign 'needs to be inclusive and some religions don't celebrate Christmas'.

The forever ‘war on Christmas’

What to get a gamer for Christmas

What to get a gamer for Christmas

What to get a gamer for Christmas

What to get a gamer for Christmas

Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp

Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp

Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp

On this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by one of the most distinguished poets in the language, Paul Muldoon, to talk about his new book Howdie-Skelp. He tells me of his unfashionable belief in inspiration; why he thinks poetry -- even his -- needn't be difficult just because it's difficult; how writing song lyrics differs from writing poetry; and how he came to work with Sir Paul McCartney.

Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp

Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls

Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls

Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Tessa Dunlop. Tessa's new book is Army Girls: The Secrets and Stories of Military Service from the Final Few Women Who Fought In World War Two. She tells me about how she gathered testimony and formed friendships with the nonagenarian veterans of the Second World War amid the Covid lockdown; about the class-ridden rivalries between the women's services; and how while still not officially in the front line, women during the war nevertheless found themselves in the thick of it.

Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will say: 'Wilbur who?' But I owe that man a debt of gratitude. He was one of the first 'grown-up' novelists I really got stuck into; along, of course, with Stephen King. Like Stephen King, he was grown-up in just the right way to appeal to children — really, a hop and a skip from Willard Price’s Adventure series, except with some real history in them and lashings of rumpty-pumpty. And the titles! The Sound of Thunder. The Angels Weep.

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Armando Iannucci – the satirist behind Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin. What many of his fans might not know is that he's also a devoted scholar of Milton – whose influence is to be found in his first published poem Pandemonium: Some Verses on the Current Predicament. Armando tells me what hurt him into verse, identifies the moment that led him to abandon an English Literature PhD for a career in comedy – and explains why there's as much sadness as savagery in his mock-epic description of the Covid epidemic.

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

The Bitcoin delusion

The Bitcoin delusion

The Bitcoin delusion

Cast your mind back a few years to last week – when there was much laughing and wailing at the collapse of Squid coin, a meme cryptocurrency launched to capitalise on the popular Netflix show. It had gone to market, had rocketed 23 million per cent in value to $28,000-odd a unit... and then plummeted to zero on Monday morning after the creators cashed out for real-world money. Yet like the battle-hardened protagonist of the show, amazingly, the currency is down but not out. Yesterday it was reported to have been the top gainer in the global crypto market, having rocketed more than 800 per cent in 24 hours to... $0.65. Not much consolation, I suppose, to those who bought the peak, but hope obviously springs eternal.

The Bitcoin delusion

Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells

Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells

Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Claire Tomalin. Claire’s new book, The Young H G Wells: Changing the World, tracks the extraordinary life and rocket-powered career of one of the most influential writers of the Edwardian age. She tells me how drapery’s loss was literature’s gain, why casting the goatish Wells as a #metoo villain isn’t quite right - and why we should all be reading Tono-Bungay.

Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells

Should we forgive Penelope Jackson?

Should we forgive Penelope Jackson?

Should we forgive Penelope Jackson?

The most poignant detail, I think, about the story of Penelope Jackson – jailed for 18 years for stabbing her husband to death – was the reaction of her late husband’s younger brother Alan. He said he intended to visit her in prison: 'I want to say to her, ‘What you’ve gone through I can quite imagine. I know what he was like towards me and my wife. You’re not on your own’.' Alan Jackson was estranged from his brother – whom he described as an 'arrogant bully' – and said: 'No one deserves to die the way he did but I can believe Penny would have been pushed to her limits.' That has the ring of truth. I absolutely believe coercive control is a real thing; that it can traumatise its victims and wreck their lives and their sense of selfhood.

Should we forgive Penelope Jackson?

Jane Ridley: George V

Jane Ridley: George V

Jane Ridley: George V

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam's guest is the historian Jane Ridley, talking about her new book George V: Never A Dull Moment. She tells him there’s so much more to the 'boring' monarch than shooting grouse and collecting stamps. Hear how he navigated some of the worst constitutional crises in memory, saved the British monarchy as the grand dynasties of Europe started toppling… and then inadvertently imperilled it again by his treatment of his son and heir.

Jane Ridley: George V