Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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
36 min listen
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
Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind. But perhaps it chimes with your experience. First time round — back in the days when we were all huddled indoors, leaving the house only to stand on the doorstep of a Thursday night to
36 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the historian James Holland to talk about his fascinating new book Brothers In Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment’s Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day. James’s story follows the Sherwood Rangers from El Alamein to the D-Day Landings, and on through the last push through Europe into
The speed with which tragedy turns into farce these days is quite something. Within minutes of Sir David Amess’s death being announced, social media was filled with sizzling hot takes. The back-and-forth centred on whether the decline in ‘civility’ and the use of dehumanising language in politics was to blame for the murder of an
38 min listen
In this week’s episode: Why are a growing number of people putting the planet before parenthood? Madeleine Kearns writes about this phenomenon in this week’s issue and thinks that some of these fears might be unfounded. Tom Woodman author of Future is one of these people that Madeleine’s piece talks about. Tom has very real
32 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Joan Bakewell, who talks to me about her new book The Tick Of Two Clocks: A Tale of Moving On. It describes how she made the decision to sell the house she lived in for half a century, and what it meant to her to face
A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism community should be expanded yet further. Speaking to a group of activists at party conference, Jonathan Gullis declared: “The term ‘white privilege’ is an extremist term. It should be reported to Prevent, because it is
35 min listen
In this week’s book club podcast, I’m joined by Kate Lister to talk about her new book Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale. Kate tells me about some of the most celebrated sex-workers in history (and pre-history), the attempts that have been made to regulate the ‘oldest profession’ – and where
If you were listening to the Prime Minister’s keynote address to party conference, you would not for a second have suspected that the country’s petrol stations were empty, its service industries hopelessly short of staff, its pigs being slaughtered on farms for want of abattoir workers and its Christmas turkeys on the line. You would
There is a picture book, by the excellent David McKee, of which my youngest child was very fond. It’s called Two Monsters, and its protagonists are, as promised, two monsters. The blue one lives on the west side of a mountain, and the red one lives on the east side of the mountain. They communicate
25 min listen
Chuck Palahniuk — best known as the author of Fight Club — has just announced that he’s publishing his next novel not with a mainstream publisher but through the online subscription service Substack. He joins me on this week’s Book Club podcast to tell me why; and to talk about how 9/11 changed literature, why
Don’t you wish Angela Rayner would come off the fence, just once in a while, and tell us what she really thinks? In a meeting of delegates to the Labour Conference, the heiress presumptive to the Labour leadership is reported to have said of the governing party: ‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch
Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a
37 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud’s Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who
40 min listen
This week, I’m joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – whose latest book is The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World. He tells me how 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition – served as a pivot in Dickens’s own life, and set him on the path to writing Bleak House.
40 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Oliver Burkeman. His new book 4,000 Weeks offers some bracing reflections on time: how much we have of it, how best to use it, and why ‘time management’ and productivity gurus have the whole thing upside down.
41 min listen
My guest on this week’s podcast is the biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Her biography of Tom Stoppard is newly out in paperback, and she tells me about the decade of work behind Sir Tom’s overnight success, his unexpected influences, and the challenge to a biographer of getting to the heart of this elusive genius.
31 min listen
Michael Bracewell’s new book Souvenir is a vivid and poetic evocation of London on the brink of the digital era – the neglected in-between times between 1979 and 1986. He joins me to talk about fine art and post-punk, T S Eliot and William Burroughs – and the dangerous lure of nostalgia.
35 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m talking to Michael Pye about his new book Antwerp: The Glory Years. For most of the 16th century, as he tells me, Antwerp was the most important town in the western world – a city in which, as never before, ideas, information, goods and money circulated free of
