Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
30 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to Wendy K Pirsig – widow of Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bestselling book of philosophy of all time. Wendy tells me about her late husband’s big idea – the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’, as set out in a new
The online PE teacher Joe Wicks has announced, in a fit of self-reproach coinciding with the launch of his new television programme, that he considers himself addicted to his smartphone. He says he forced himself to take a whole five days off social media in order to be more ‘present’ for his children, and that
43 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Caroline Frost, author of the new Carry On Regardless: Getting to the Bottom of Britain’s Favourite Comedy Films. She tells me what those movies tell us about British social history, makes the case for their feminism, argues that their special magic belongs to a British sensibility
It looks on the face of things as if Sir Keir Starmer is coming unstuck over that blurry photograph of him with beer in hand after a day campaigning in Durham during lockdown. His claim that no rules were breached on that occasion – like the earlier claims that Angela Rayner wasn’t there and that
40 min listen
In this week’s episode: Is Boris Johnson planning to tear up Britain’s deal with the EU? James Forsyth says in his Spectator cover story this week that Boris Johnson plans to reignite the Brexit voter base by taking on the EU again over Northern Ireland. He joins the podcast along with Denis Staunton, the London
46 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Kuper, whose new book – Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK – argues that to understand the social and psychological dynamics of our present government, you need to understand the Oxford University of the 1980s, where so
It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident. There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of the modern world, as shaped by the internet, is an accidental by-product of the insatiable global market for new, easier, cheaper, faster and more private ways of looking at bare boobies. The clean and useful
38 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, our subject is the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima – whose novel Beautiful Star is being published in English for the first time this month. My guest is its translator Stephen Dodd, who explains the novel’s peculiar mixture of profound seriousness and humour, and its mixture of high literary seriousness
45 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the FT’s foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. In his new book The Age of the Strongman, he takes a global look at the rise of personality-cult autocrats. He tells me what they have in common, what’s new about this generation of strongman leaders – and why
Easter Sunday. I went to church for the first time in ages. The little parish church has stood for 900 years in a village near where my parents live. It’s where my father James, who died last week aged 75, will be buried. It was a friendly, pomp-free service of the pragmatic sort – dogs
36 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we ask: did the chroniclers of the early Church cover up evidence that the disciples and evangelists of Christ were as often women as men? My guests are the scholars Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, authors of Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples. They pick out the hints and clues
37 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Francis Fukuyama to talk about his new book Liberalism and its Discontents. He tells me how a system that has built peace and prosperity since the Enlightenment has come under attack from the neoliberal right and the identitarian left; and how Vladimir Putin may end up
Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm Tóibín, speaking in our current Book Club podcast, talks about publishing his fine first poetry collection Vinegar Hill – decades of international acclaim as a novelist notwithstanding. Poetry is a high-status artform, perhaps the highest.
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Colm Toibin. Best known as a novelist, Colm’s new book is his first collection of poetry, Vinegar Hill. He tells me about coming late to poetry, the freedoms and austerities it offers, and why writing isn’t fun. Plus: surviving cancer and outstaying his St Patrick’s Day
Perhaps you’re of the opinion that Ukrainian refugees aren’t our problem, that the world has always been full of foreigners doing ghastly things to each-other, and we can’t be expected to change the settled migration policy of our country just because of a war. Perhaps you wonder why, if we’ve been talking about using gunboats
53 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to the investigative reporter Tom Burgis – just days after the High Court threw out an attempt from a London-based company run by eastern European oligarchs to suppress his book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. Tom tells me how massacres in Kazakhstan connect to
When I was in Russia in the very early 1990s, there was a generic figure who seemed to stand at the entrance to every metro station: an ancient babushka in a headscarf and tatty coat, face creased with age and weather, holding out a flimsy plastic bag rolled into a little triangle, begging for kopeks.
39 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the historian Christopher de Bellaigue to talk about The Lion House, his scintillating and idiosyncratic new book about the great Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. It’s all here: massacres, sieges, over-mighty viziers, Venetian perfidy, and… true love?
I think Putin will have been surprised. I mean: I was surprised. Weren’t you? Not, necessarily, that Ukraine should have been resisting as valiantly as it is; nor even that Russia’s supposedly unstoppable war machine should have found itself out of petrol on a chilly highway from which the road signs have been removed. But
43 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re going back 100 years to 1922 – the year which is usually seen as heralding the birth of literary Modernism. My guests are Richard Davenport-Hines, author of A Night At The Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party, and the scholar and critic Merve Emre, who has
