Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Quite the constitutional twist, yesterday. Just as what Walter Bagehot called the efficient side of our ruling set-up was merrily announcing a final bonfire of the Covid regulations, the dignified side (aka her Majesty the Queen) was letting it be known that she has contracted Covid. Not what you’d call perfect timing. Taking the wide
38 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Anna Keay. In her new book The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown she describes the short but traumatic period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy. She tells me about the religious turmoil, the explosion of the newspaper
42 min listen
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. As Penguin publishes a lavish new edition of On The Road to mark the occasion, I’m joined by two Kerouac scholars. Holly George-Warren is working on the definitive biography of Kerouac (her previous work includes Lives of Gene Autry and Janis Joplin), and Simon
Rudy Giuliani has had quite the trajectory in public life. Those of us who remember the days after 9/11 will still have a picture of a man who emerged from that disaster as a credit to his city and a credit to his office. If you only picked up the Rudy Show midway through season
In his most recent book, How to Argue With a Racist, the geneticist Adam Rutherford set out a lucid account of how the basis for many widely held and apparently commonsensical ideas about race are pseudoscientific; and he lightly sketched, along the way, the historical context in which they arose and the ideological prejudices that
39 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Philip Oltermann, whose new book The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War, unearths one of the most unexpected corners of East German history. At the height of the Cold War, members of the GDR’s notorious secret police got
‘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
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
34 min listen
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
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,
39 min listen
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
26 min listen
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
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
41 min listen
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
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
46 min listen
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
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
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
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,
47 min listen
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
