Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
A detail much noted in the commentary on Saturday‘s coronation was that His Majesty decided against making his first trip to the Abbey in the Gold State Coach. Who can blame him? His mother described riding in that particular wagon as ‘horrible’, and even Queen Victoria had as little to do with it as she
38 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Shehan Karunatilaka, author of last year’s Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Shehan tells me about writing a novel whose protagonist is dead on page one, about putting the chaos of Sri Lanka’s long civil war on the page, and about the importance of
It’s not the genuine asylum seekers that Suella Braverman and her crew are determined to prevent reaching our shores, we are often told. It’s the illegals. With our traditional British values of tolerance and fair play, we are one of the most welcoming nations on earth to those in real need. The issue is, we hear again and again,
I can remember exactly where I was when I first fell in love with Tetris. It was the student bar of Oriel College, Oxford, in the very early 1990s. I’d gone to visit my friend Ed, and we bunged a few 10ps into the sticky arcade cabinet in the corner of the bar while we chatted and drank our
If you’ve ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we are from a working teleportation device, Michio Kaku is your man. In books such as Physics of the Impossible, Physics of the Future and Parallel
57 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. In his new book Quantum Supremacy, Prof Kaku explains how – as he sees it – the advent of quantum computers is going to turn the world as we know it on its head. He explains the extraordinary possibilities and perils of the
It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You
23 min listen
This week: Sam Leith explains how he’s been keeping up friendships by playing online scrabble (00:55), Lionel Shriver questions Nike and Bud Light’s recent marketing strategy (06:52) and Angus Colwell reads his review of the V&A Dundee’s tartan exhibition (15:24).
The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It’s a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook – original use-case: posting family snaps for your gran – ends up incubating armed insurrection and spreading 5G conspiracy theories. But what if there was some corner of it
40 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Luke Jennings, the veteran reporter and novelist whose Codename Villanelle trilogy gave rise to the hit TV series Killing Eve. As his new thriller #PANIC is published he tells me how he found its inspiration after being drawn into the online fandom for Killing Eve, where he clashed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge… and
Some survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, it was reported yesterday, have taken grave exception to some new dramatisations of the disaster. It seems to me that historical events belong to history: and that means that they are available to news reporters to write about and dramatists to make art about A petition urging the BBC to
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the poet and artist Frieda Hughes, whose new book George: A Magpie Memoir tells the story of what caring for a foundling baby magpie taught her about life. She tells me about chaos, head-bouncing, magpie-poop, and how she managed to write about corvids without imagining her father Ted
Anyone who has ever published a book and been dismayed by an anonymous review online will have cheered inwardly at the story of David Wilson. Professor Wilson is a criminologist and historian who has published several books. Each of his books has received a scathing one-star review on Amazon from a pseudonymous critic calling himself ‘Junius’. The
50 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Katja Hoyer, whose new book Beyond The Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 tells the story of four decades which are vital to understanding modern Germany, but which tend to be quietly relegated to a footnote in history. Born in the GDR herself, Katja tells me how much
45 min listen
On this week’s Book Club podcast my guests are the former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby and his wife and co-author Jemima Lewis, to talk about their new book Ravenous: How To Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape. They tell me about the perils and pleasures of working with your spouse, why exercise doesn’t make
There are some genres of newspaper story that never die. Among them are sightings of Lord Lucan, public moralists discovered in adultery – and foolish MPs being caught out offering themselves for hire to undercover hacks. A fine example of the third of these broke yesterday thanks to the situationist campaigning group Led By Donkeys, who started out
46 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Victoria Smith, whose new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women explains why one of the oldest forms of misogyny is seeing a vicious resurgence in our own age. She says some of the worst of it now comes from young women. She tells me why
Jeremy Bentham, thou shouldst be alive and doing a ton through the Mickleham Bends at this hour. Bentham’s great contribution to carceral theory, as most readers will know, was the panopticon. He imagined a prison where the cells were arranged in a rotunda so a guard in the middle could watch every prisoner without having to clop round
49 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and editor Ian Buruma, to talk about his new book Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War Two. A Chinese princess who climbed into bed with Japanese nationalist gangsters; an observant Jew who sold his co-religionists to the Nazis; and Himmler’s
Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I
