Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
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
When you’re playing a word game, don’t you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of
40 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Dorian Lynskey. In his new book Everything Must Go, Dorian looks at the way humans have imagined the end of the world from the Book of Revelations to the present day. He tells me how old fears find new forms, why Dr Strangelove divides critics, and why
Roald Dahl Goes Woke: Part Two in what promises to be a very long and funny and ignominious series. Not three days after Puffin Books announced that they were to publish a series of specially commissioned new stories set in Roald Dahl’s fictional universes, a lead author of the continuation editions has had to issue
45 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, whose hair-raising new book Nuclear War: A Scenario imagines – minute by minute – what would unfold if the nuclear balloon went up. But rather than a work of fantasy, this is based on meticulously sourced reporting about the effects of nuclear weapons
43 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the Pulitzer prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose new book is the memoir A Man of Two Faces. He tells me about the value of trauma to literature, learning about his history through Hollywood, falling asleep in class… and the rotten manners of Oliver Stone.
Remember when Friends Reunited was a thing? Twenty-something years ago, before Facebook even existed, this primaeval social networking site connecting people with their old schoolmates was the most searched thing on the UK internet. It is, now, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. In fact, the only truly memorable thing it achieved was to inspire
Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles… Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil.
50 min listen
My guest in this week’s Book Club is Joel Morris, an award-winning comedy writer whose credits run from co-creating Philomena Cunk to writing gags for Viz and punching up the script for Paddington 2. In his new book Be Funny Or Die, he sets out to analyse how and why comedy works. He tells me why there are only
When Photogate, or Kategate, or whatever we end up calling it, first became news, I remember taking one look at social media and thinking: you people have lost your damn minds. An anodyne photograph of the Princess of Wales and her children was issued to the press agencies by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day.
My kids, at our local comprehensive, go on school trips to Leigh-on-Sea. I went to a much fancier school, so I went on school trips to Leningrad and Moscow. The first time must have been in 1990. We were all going through dramatic changes; and so was Russia – not that as cossetted, self-absorbed 16-year-olds
40 min listen
This week’s Book Club podcast sees me speaking to the critic and novelist Lauren Oyler about her first collection of essays, No Judgment: On Being Critical. Lauren and I talked about the freedoms and affordances of the essay form; about how making and criticising art has been changed – and hasn’t – by the advent of
One of the agreeable surprises in the Spring Budget was Jeremy Hunt’s late conversion to the idea of abolishing ‘non-dom’ status. ‘Those with the broadest shoulders,’ he said, ‘should pay their fair share.’ The non-dom loophole, where you can live here but not pay UK taxes on your overseas earnings, has long been a bugbear
44 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter’s new book How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler tells the story of Sefton Delmer, the great genius of twentieth-century propaganda. Peter tells me about Delmer’s remarkable life, compromised ethics, and the lessons he still has to offer us.
This week’s unexpected public smackdown is… vicars versus wedding photographers. What a time to be alive! The latter have hoisted a petition on the website change.org, which has already attracted more than 900 signatories, demanding that vicars be nicer to them. ‘Not all church leaders are problematic, but a LOT are – and those
35 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, whose new book takes him out of the territory of fiction and into something slightly different. American Mother is written in collaboration with Diane Foley, mother of Jim Foley, the journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014. He tells me how he
There’s a lot of talk in the papers about the importance of banning smartphones from schools. Quite right too. The privacy issues, the cyber-bullying, the airdropping of dickpics, the kids filming themselves taking ketamine in morning break… all those dismaying differences from the conkers and ink pellets and innocent tuck-shop japes we remember from our
Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady – the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured into it, and a lot of time (the release date was much delayed). The premise is a winner, too: the Suicide Squad –
47 min listen
My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Tom Chatfield, whose new book is Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are. He tells me what we get wrong about technology, what Douglas Adams got right, and why we can’t rely on Elon Musk and people like him to save the world.
Lord Cameron, bless him, is back striding the world stage. He wrote an article last week in Washington’s inside-beltway website the Hill, urging Congress to vote for more aid for Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary’s tone in that article was forthright in a way that, I expect, he imagined to be the tough talk of a
