Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
Are exams… racist? Are exams snobs? If a report in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph is to be credited, academics at Oxford and Cambridge are taking this question seriously. In the hopes of closing the ‘achievement gap’ between white middle-class students (who scoop more of the firsts and 2.1s) and students from disadvantaged backgrounds or other ethnicities,
Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated
43 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re contemplating the astounding achievement of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in its 100th year. My guest is Professor Sarah Churchwell, author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Making of The Great Gatsby, as well as the introduction to Cambridge University Press’s new edition of the novel. Sarah tells me
Him again? Donald Trump’s back in the White House. Those who thought his first term in office was an aberration – a dismaying blip in the long arc of history towards liberal democracy, properly corrected by Biden’s 2020 victory – have been proven wrong in the most painful possible way. He wasn’t some brainfart of
36 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Orlando Reade, whose book What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost describes the life and afterlife of one of the greatest poems in the language. Orlando tells me how Milton’s epic has been read with – and against – the grain over the centuries;
A few centuries ago, when I worked on the Daily Telegraph under the editorship of the now Lord Moore, there was a very sensible item in the style book. It said (I paraphrase) that when a story sounded too good to be true, you should pause, give your head a wobble and apply a bit
43 min listen
In this week’s Books podcast, I am joined by Rachel Cooke, who edits the new book The Virago Book of Friendship. Rachel unpacks the intense, often enigmatic dynamics of female friendships in a spry and very dip-in-and-out-able anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms, from high culture to low.
With Christmas only just gone, I hope it’s not too late to recommend Ingvild Rishoi’s bittersweet seasonal novella – a bestseller in Norway which now comes into English in Caroline Waight’s crisp and fluent prose. Here’s a child’s-eye story about adult griefs and troubles which uses dramatic irony to consistent effect; a skinny little narrative
We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and working as a slave for Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review magazine. I can’t count the number of family dinners in the years since where I’ve had second helpings pressed on me
32 min listen
This week: composer James MacMillan reads his diary on the beautiful music of football (01:11); Sebastian Morello tells us about the deep connection between hunting and Christianity (07:17); Amy Wilentz explains how Vodou fuels Haiti’s gang culture (16:14); The Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith reviews The Virago Book of Friendship (22:38); and – from the arts pages – The Spectator’s theatre
37 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by the Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk to talk about the publication of Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks. Right up to early adulthood, Orhan had imagined he was destined to be a painter, but then his life took another turn. In these illustrated notebooks he marries words
I blame Charles Dickens, personally: he of David Copperfield, Little Nell, Oliver Twist and, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s the father of what you might call the orphan-industrial complex, which is to say, the discovery that there is a fantastic amount of money to be made out of the sentimental feelings aroused in the well-heeled
‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the
If you’re a writer, should AI companies be allowed to use your work to train their models without your permission? This is a matter of concern for many writers – as it is for artists, musicians, and anyone whose work is being harvested by the industry and spewed out as AI glop. It’s not just
39 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Chris Ware — author of Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories and Rusty Brown, and a man widely regarded as one of the greatest living cartoonists. Chris’s new book, The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, opens his sketchbooks for public consumption: a potentially painful move for an artist as self-conscious and perfectionist as Ware. He
The property tycoon Nick Candy, interviewed in yesterday’s Sunday Times, appears to be hoping to position himself as a UK equivalent of Elon Musk – a billionaire political kingmaker for Nigel Farage just as Musk was for Donald Trump. Newly anointed as the treasurer of Reform UK, he has pledged a ‘seven-figure’ sum to the party
38 min listen
In this week’s Books podcast, I am joined by the writer Daniel Tammet, whose new book Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum is a pen portrait of nine lives of people on the autism spectrum. On the podcast, he tells me how he happened upon these nine lives, whether ‘spectrum’ is a helpful term when understanding autism and
‘Go woke, go broke,’ runs the catchphrase. Now, at last, we are presented with the welcome opportunity to put this proposition to the test. A new exchange-traded fund has been launched in the US whose unique selling point is that it will refuse to invest in companies which use Diversity Equity and Inclusion criteria in
33 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Jonathan Coe, talking about cosy crime, the tug of nostalgia, the joys of satire, and his brilliant new novel, The Proof of My Innocence.
The bakery chain Gail’s, which opened its first branch in Hampstead less than 20 years ago, is reportedly touted for sale by Goldman Sachs with a half billion pound price tag. There are 152 outlets in the UK, all of them in relatively prosperous areas, and it has ambitious plans for expansion. But Gail’s is
