Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be quoted far and wide – will not have been what he planned. With his most serious, most pained expression, Sir Keir called for ‘an immediate ceasefire in Gaza’ and… ‘the return of the sausages’. He
Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in
43 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum. In her new book I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line Lindsey intersperses her account of the many conflicts she has covered as a war reporter with the poems that have given her consolation and a
Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics. I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made ‘hard decisions’ that nobody liked – it would
32 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round the Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying
I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure, mind. It is all too easy to imagine how failures of regulation, of maintenance, of oversight, contributed to the Grenfell catastrophe. It’s easy to see how, here
32 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Thomson reflects on his childhood home following the death of his sister (1:20); Andrew Watts argues that the public see MPs as accountable for everything though they’re responsible for little (7:40); Sam Leith reveals the surprising problem of poetical copyright (13:47); Helen Barrett reviews Will Noble’s book Croydonopolis and explores the
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers? You’re allowed
46 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer, artist and historian Amy Jeffs. Her new book Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic aims to recover and bring back to life the wild and fascinating world of medieval saints. She tells me what we lost with the Reformation (all the good swearing,
Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t already hate him, our new Prime Minister might like to bask in a few weeks of good vibes. Things, after all, can only get worse from here. Wouldn’t it
25 min listen
The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here’s an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom. Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939,
The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches
49 min listen
The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September with new episodes. Until then, here’s an episode from the archives with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Carlo joined Sam in March 2023 to discuss his book Anaximander and the Nature of Science and explain how a radical thinker two and a half
Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt. Auden, she said, had ‘the necessary secretiveness of the great poet’. You can’t always trust what Auden, in his prose and in his later interviews, claimed to have
50 min listen
Sam’s guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Adam Higginbotham, whose new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space describes the 1986 space shuttle disaster that took the lives of seven astronauts and, arguably, inflicted America’s greatest psychic scar since the assassination of JFK. He tells Sam about the
Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted indie cartoon adventure has a creditable bash at it. The protagonist is an oval-headed yellow homunculus in a shirt and tie, as if Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, Dilbert and a minor
35 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me
41 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and comedian David Baddiel, talking about his new book My Family: the Memoir. He talks about childhood trauma, what made him a comedian, and how describing in minute detail his mother’s decades long affair with a slightly crooked golfing memorabilia salesman is an act not
There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of a rough-looking skinhead pelting down the street and appearing to grab at the briefcase of a startled-looking city gent. Just as the viewer is digesting this scene and drawing the conclusion that suits his or
