Sam Leith

Who is John Galt? This week’s Book Club podcast looks at the life, work and personality of Ayn Rand, probably the most influential writer you’ve never read. A favourite of our new Health Secretary, the author of Atlas Shrugged — and the most strident advocate of the idea that “greed is good” — continues to

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Anne Sebba – whose Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy tells the story of the first woman in US history to be executed for a crime other than murder. She tells me how attitudes to this notorious espionage case changed over the years; and why, while

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the chief librarian of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Richard Ovenden. In Burning The Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, he explores the long history and vital importance of libraries and archives — and the equally long history of their destruction in

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Charles Spencer, whose book The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream is new out in paperback. He tells me why his story is like “Game of Thrones meets Titanic“, about the piety and the startling cruelty of medieval kings, the tantalising

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is one of America’s foremost magazine journalists, the New Yorker‘s Lawrence Wright. His new book is The Plague Year: America In The Time of Covid. He tells me what a book brings to recent history that week-to-week journalism can’t, about the extraordinary happenstance that put him in

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Lauren Hough – author of an outstanding new collection of autobiographical essays called Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing which describe a life that took her from growing up in the Children Of God cult via being discharged from the US Air Force and jobs as a

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Julian Sancton, whose new book Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night, documents the crew of men who were the first to experience an Antarctic winter trapped in the ice, in an attempt to reach the South Pole.

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells me why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and critic Ruth Scurr, whose new book marks today’s 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death to cast a fresh light on this most written-about of characters. In Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows, she finds an unexpected thread running through the life of this

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Richard Dawkins to talk about his new book Books Do Furnish A Life: Reading and Writing Science. Richard tells me – among much else – what makes science writing (and science fiction) exciting; the questions science can (and can’t) answer; why he felt it necessary to

Hwaet! My guest in this week’s Book Club Podcast is Maria Dahvana Headley, whose new book is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic Beowulf. She talks to me about how she has produced what she bills as a “feminist translation” of this most macho of poems; about the poem’s braided history and complex language; and

In this week’s Book club podcast my guest is Roland Philipps – whose new book Victoire: A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal tells the morally murky and humanly fascinating story of Mathilde Carre – a vital figure of the early days of resistance in occupied France. Roland’s story describes her heroic early work;

My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and it’s still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It’s a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality

My guest this week is crime queen Lynda La Plante – talking about her new novel Judas Horse, and three decades of her most famous creation, Prime Suspect‘s Jane Tennison. She tells me how she wrote her way out of acting, why so much crime drama now turns her off, why she thinks it’s so

This week on the Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the veteran foreign correspondent Michela Wrong to talk about her new book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. While Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame has basked in the approval of Western donors, Michela argues, his burnished image