Sam Leith

I’m joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him as a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the

In this week’s Spectator Book Club, my guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can

For this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In his new book The Meritocracy Trap Daniel advances an argument that will seem startling to partisans of Left and Right alike: that meritocracy isn’t the solution to our social and political discontents, but the central

This week the Books Podcast leaves its dank burrow and hits the road. I travelled to the southern Peloponnese to catch up with the Orange-prize winning novelist Madeline Miller, where she was hosting a reading weekend at the Costa Navarino resort. Madeline’s first novel, The Song of Achilles, retold the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of

My guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of ‘post-truth politics’ in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast my guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspective. In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Jung narrates the lives of the Soong Girls — one of whom was married to

My guest in this week’s books podcast is Benjamin Moser, author of an acclaimed new biography of one of America’s most celebrated (and controversial) intellectuals of the twentieth century: Sontag: Her Life. I asked Benjamin how he sorted fact from myth, about tracking down the inventor of that haircut, and about Annie Leibovitz’s take on

My guest in this week’s podcast is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, whose latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has just been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Elif talks to me about living in exile, writing in a second language, her relationship with

This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. My guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book – expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao – considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what

Eighty years on from the start of the Second World War, my guest in this week’s podcast is Ian Sansom — who’s talking about ‘September 1, 1939’, the Auden poem that marked the beginning of that war. Ian’s new book is a ‘biography’ of the poem, and he talks about how it showcases all that

My guest on this week’s Books Podcast is the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay. Lemn’s new memoir My Name Is Why describes his early life — given up for fostering in the late 1960s as the son of an unmarried Ethiopian mother — and his progress, when his foster family gave him up, through the

The spy writer Mick Herron’s Slough House series of comic thrillers has steadily established him as perhaps the most influential author in the genre since Le Carre. The latest in the series, Joe Country, is out now — and we thought to celebrate its publication with another opportunity to listen to my conversation last year

Even books editors have to go on holiday sometimes, so Spectator Books is taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. But so there’s not a gaping gap in your life where the podcast used to be, we’re bringing out some of our favourite episodes from our archive. This week, I am joined by the

In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. I’m joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s ‘footsteps’ approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit

The star New York Times columnist David Brooks has never been afraid to go beyond the usual remit of day-to-day politics. His new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to the Meaning of Life, somewhere between a spiritual autobiography and a manual for