Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
When I say goodbye to Sir Salman Rushdie in his offices at New York University in Lower Manhattan in early March, we bump elbows. Not that it’s much more than a gesture, by this stage: we shook hands unthinkingly on first meeting, and we’d just shaken hands again. It’s a novelty, still halfway to being
61 min listen
‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis’, Sir Salman Rushdie said to Sam when they spoke in an interview for the Spectator’s 10,000th edition. Sam met Salman in New York a few weeks ago, before coronavirus struck down the city. This episode is a recording of that interview, where
41 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I talk to the reporter Toby Muse about the vast, blood-soaked and nihilistic shadow economy that links a banker’s ‘cheeky little line of coke’ to the poorest peasants in Colombia. Toby’s new book Kilo: Life and Death inside the Cocaine Cartels traces cocaine’s journey from that unremarkable-looking shrub to
‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, labouring over their times tables and number bonds. It was my complaint as I struggled to tell median from mean, or sine from cosine. Well. Now
35 min listen
My guest in this week’s podcast is the multi-talented satirist Craig Brown, whose new book One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time is, I feel confident in guessing, the most entertaining book about the Fab Four ever written. Craig joins me to talk about how he goes about his jackdaw work picking out the
35 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey – emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses. (He’s also lead book reviewer for a publication
33 min listen
On this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Blake Gopnik — the author of a monumental new biography of Andy Warhol. Blake tells me how everything — fame, money, and other human beings — were ‘art supplies’ to Warhol, but that underneath a succession of contrived personae Warhol could be warm, generous and even
27 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club is the poet Don Paterson — whose new book Zonal finds him accessing a new, confessional mode, a longer line and a childhood interest in the spooky TV show The Twilight Zone. Don talks about the relationship between poetry and jazz, the split between ‘page poetry’ and spoken-word
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the coronavirus. It wasn’t the prospect of one person in 50 dying, I said — or not just that. It was more, I said sagely, the knock-on effects. You know, if everyone self-isolates, you’re only about
34 min listen
In this week’s Book Club, my guest is the writer Hadley Freeman, whose new book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles
38 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Christina’s new book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women is a deeply reported survey of rape as a weapon of war, described in our pages by Antony Beevor as the most powerful and disturbing book he has
30 min listen
Don’t Panic! Next month marks the 42nd anniversary of the first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Joining me on this week’s podcast to discuss the genesis, genius and legacy of the show and the books it spawned are the literary scholar and science fiction writer Adam Roberts, and John Lloyd, the
‘Quotation (n.) — The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.’ Ambrose Bierce said that, or at least wrote it in the Devil’s Dictionary. That was in 1906, and those are words for the ages. In his Rhetoric, centuries before the birth of Christ, Aristotle identified one of the most common and effective ways
30 min listen
‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ This is very much the advice that has applied to Calamity Jane over the years. She was the lover of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, avenged herself on his killer and bore his secret
32 min listen
This week’s Book Club stars the food historian and broadcaster Annie Gray, whose new book Victory In The Kitchen excavates the life and world of Georgina Landemare – Winston Churchill’s cook. From the shifting roles of household servants, and the insane food of the Edwardian rich – everything jellied and moulded and forced through sieves
There is mourning in my household, as in many households, this morning at the news that Lee Child – the bestselling thriller writer, from whom we have been able to expect a new Jack Reacher novel every autumn – is laying down his pen. You can well see why he might. He has all the
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about the life and loves of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Professor John Haffenden joins me to discuss the impact of the opening of an archive of more than 1,000 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale — his Harvard sweetheart and the woman who for
James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon dog of American letters’ has no hesitation in affirming it when he arrives in The Spectator’s London offices to record a podcast. ‘Oh yes, I think that’s been proven,’ he says matter-of-factly. Has he always
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I talk to the ‘demon dog’ of American letters, James Ellroy — whose latest book is This Storm. In a wide-ranging and somewhat NSFW conversation, we talk about misquoting Auden, why Ellroy hates Orson Welles, how he maps out the byzantine plots of his novels, why as a recovering