Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Pigeons: revolting pests who can’t tell the difference between fag-butts and chips, right? Not so, according to my latest podcast guest Jon Day, distinguished man of letters, critic, academic and… pigeon-fancier. Jon’s new book Homing describes how — suffering an early midlife crisis in young married life with fatherhood approaching — he took up racing
There’s nobody who writes true-life spy stories like Ben MacIntyre — and with his latest book The Spy and the Traitor out in paperback, Ben joins me to talk about the astonishing career of Oleg Gordievsky, a single spy who really did change the whole course of the Cold War. Ben tells me about Oleg’s
My guest on this week’s podcast is Caroline Crampton — whose fine and lyrical new book The Way To The Sea twines travelogue and memoir to pay tribute to the neglected mystery and beauty of the downriver portions of the Thames. Evoking Joseph Conrad and Dickens, ranging from prehistory to the sunken wrecks (and still live explosives!)
Every prime minister is a sociologist. Theresa May drew a distinction between citizens of somewhere and ‘citizens of nowhere’, a sort of riff on David Goodhart’s distinction between Somewheres (rooted, provincial, less well off) and Anywheres (snooty, international, at home on planes and in the corridors of power). Now Boris Johnson segments the country in a
This year the publishers Faber & Faber celebrate their 90th birthday, and to honour the occasion I’m joined by Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson and the author of a new history of the company called Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Most corporate histories are boring, but this one — told largely through the correspondence
People say cricket is the quintessential English game. Those people are wrong. Cricket may have a longer pedigree, but it’s too boring, too democratic and too honourable to qualify: croquet is the game that truly captures what it is to be English. As any pub quizzer will tell you, Wimbledon started its life in 1868
In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Benjamin Dreyer — whose name is pronounced, as I discover live on air, ‘Dryer’ rather than ‘Drayer’. That seems an apt way to be introduced to a man who, as Random House US’s Copy Chief, makes his living correcting errors. His new book Dreyer’s English is a
In this week’s books podcast Kit de Waal is here to talk about her new anthology of working-class memoir, Common People. First a guest on this podcast a couple of years ago talking about her Desmond-Elliott-shortlisted debut My Name Is Leon, Kit explains why she thought an anthology of working-class writing was necessary, about if
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend
This week’s books podcast promises to be a trip. I’m joined by Mike Jay to talk about the history of mescaline — a psychedelic drug whose influence goes from the earliest South American civilisations through the 19th-century Indian Wars up to W B Yeats, Aleister Crowley and (of course) Aldous Huxley and Hunter S Thompson.
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON This column concludes my brief series about Shakespeare and the Globe, linked to the summer season of history plays — from Richard II to Henry V — sponsored by Merian. It’s been a pleasure to write. And one of the special pleasures
In this week’s books podcast we’re talking about why the Father of English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, at least half belongs in a French, Latin and Italian tradition. Marion Turner’s magnificently scholarly Chaucer: A European Life sets the great writer in his own times — one of a hinge between feudal and early modern ideas about selfhood,
In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What
Rory Stewart is the back-of-field Tory leadership candidate who’s catching most attention at the moment; popping up all over London inviting all comers to talk to him about policy and ideas. He’s a politician with real hinterland- and you can get a flavour of that hinterland in the conversation we had when he came to
I am so, so sad to hear about the death of Judith Kerr. I last saw her only a month or two ago, at an Oldie Literary Lunch, where she was in fine form and did not stint herself on a glass or two of wine. She seems to have been constitutionally a merry person,
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON ‘Small Latin and less Greek’ was Ben Jonson’s verdict on Shakespeare the linguist. But as Henry V (the latest play in the Globe’s Merian-sponsored summer season) shows, he knew a bit of French, too. As well as all that blood-and-thunder stuff on
In this week’s books podcast my guest is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, who’s talking about her new book This Is Shakespeare. What is it that makes Shakespeare special — and is it defensible that, as even in university curricula, we talk about Shakespeare apart from and above the whole
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for readers of Cari Mora is that Hannibal is here in spirit if not in person. This is a very
In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Ursula Buchan – the author of a hugely involving new life of her late grandfather John Buchan. The book is called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (you can read Allan Massie’s enthusiastic Spectator review of it here), and it does as the title promises. Buchan (or ‘JB’ to
