Sam Leith

Sam Leith

Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.

Completely batty: Vampire Therapist reviewed

Grade: B+ Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships… Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again – and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and produces something completely batty.  Vampire Therapist is a comedic adventure-story therapy-simulation starring a vampire, except he’s also a cowboy, and

Let’s give Keir a chance

I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going to thrill and excite me did not; and the bits that I thought couldn’t thrill and excite anybody made me feel quite emotional. That is, I gave up on the live coverage at about half

Why is Putin really trying to interfere in the UK election?

Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand as a rebuke that, even with everything else on his plate, Vladimir Putin still regards our elections as worth interfering in. And, what’s more, those elections are so important that the Aussies are taking enough

The terrible consequences of the Hay Festival grandstanding

Just three weeks ago, I wrote about Hay Festival sacking their main sponsor Baillie Gifford after pressure from the campaign group Fossil Free Books, which claimed the investment fund was profiting from the destruction of the planet and ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Whatever their merits of these charges (not much, as it happens), I argued, the sacking

I’ve finally shaken my Candy Crush addiction

Most of us, once we pass the age when we wash our own underpants, don’t play games on a PC or a console. We think ‘Twitch’ is what you get when your spouse stacks the dishwasher and ‘Discord’ is what comes next. But you bet we play Candy Crush on the commute. Mobile gaming is

Keir Starmer is treating the House of Lords with contempt

We have different approaches to tidying up, my wife and I. It bothers her very much that the house we share with three chaotic children is so untidy. Over the years unsightly, useless, out-of-date items accumulate in every room: incomplete jigsaws, dried-out paints, barely-played boardgames, broken furniture, too-small and obscurely stained clothes, collections of shells

The grandstanding against the Hay Festival is short-sighted 

When the country’s largest literary festival parts ways with its main sponsor, it is not usually a cause for rejoicing among writers, performers, and the sorts of people who like to go to literary festivals. It is usually a disaster for the festival. Yet when on Friday the Hay Festival sacked (yes, it was that way round) the investment fund Baillie Gifford

Sunak’s election speech was embarrassingly bad

Let’s be fair. It wasn’t Rishi Sunak’s fault it was raining. But it was, a bit, his fault that as someone who has ‘never been prouder to be British’, and so is presumably familiar with the way weather works in this country, he didn’t take one look at the lead-grey sky and make a contingency

In defence of Jonathan Yeo

If the basic job of a work of art is to be interesting, as I think it is, then Jonathan Yeo’s new portrait of the King accomplished that admirably. No sooner had an image of this big canvas been released to the public than it sparked a million memes. What did it mean, people wondered,

Gorgeous and deeply absorbing: Manor Lords reviewed

Grade: A ‘God games’, as they used to be called, have a storied history. SimCity, Civilisation and the excellently sadistic Dungeon Keeper have all been responsible for many a PhD thesis being delivered late. The Almighty seems to have smiled on the latest iteration of the genre. The product of a one-man-band independent developer, Greg

Farewell Nadhim Zahawi, you won’t be missed

Nadhim Zahawi’s latest resignation letter was one of the all-time classics of the genre: unctuous, preening and pretentious even by the high standard of unctuousness, preeningness and pretentiousness set by his predecessors (including him).  ‘Greatest honour of my life,’ he wrote. ‘Best country on earth…it was where I built a Great [capitalisation sic] British business,

The Elphicke affair has made Starmer look incompetent and unprincipled

The defection of Natalie Elphicke to Labour was, no doubt about it, a political coup de theatre. What wasn’t immediately clear, but is becoming clearer now the curtain is up and the players are stumbling around the footlights yelping and tripping over bits of the set, is what sort of theatre: farce.  Elphicke looks like the gift nobody wants to find under their Christmas tree Natalie Elphicke was delivered

Suella Braverman has made herself look silly

Did Suella Braverman run her latest op-ed by No. 10 for approval? That was the question asked at the end of last year when the then Home Secretary wrote an inflammatory article accusing the Met of being biased towards left-wing protesters. The answer then was that she hadn’t, and she lost her job (for a second

The parable of Blackpool’s potholes

I read the news today, oh boy. Four thousand holes in Blackpool, Lancashire. Well, in fact, not quite as many as 4,000. The number of holes in the Lancashire town that the Beatles didn’t sing about was a very precise 2,628 – or, translated into another scale, just over half an Albert Hall’s worth. That’s

Tony Blair is a post-democratic product

Why was it that when I read a big interview with Tony Blair over the weekend – the ostensible premise being to wonder if he’d be pulling the strings of a Starmer government – I found myself humming something from T.S. Eliot by way of Andrew Lloyd Webber? ‘You may seek him in the basement,

Entirely pointless and extremely pleasant: House Flipper 2 reviewed

Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty curves and the calming pleasure, instead, of a mildly absorbing repetitive task which whiles away the idle hour in the way you might pass it

Long live the litter lout snitches!

Most of us are, I think, temperamentally opposed to the idea of a society in which we are surveilled 24/7. We look at the proliferation of Ring doorbells, the thickets of CCTV cameras that capture our every trip to the shop from multiple angles, the algorithmic harvesting of our data by every website we use