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PODCAST

The Book Club

Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented weekly by Sam Leith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

arts books

All Episodes

46:28

Simon Kuper: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took...

The Book Club ·

2022/05/04

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Kuper, whose new book – Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK – argues that to understand the social and psychological dynamics of our present government, you need to understand the Oxford University of the 1980s, where so many of those now in power first met. He argues that the PM's love of winging it was nurtured in the tutorial culture of his Balliol days, that the dynamics of Tory leadership contests are throwbacks

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38:22

Stephen Dodd: Beautiful Star – Yukio Mishima

The Book Club ·

2022/04/27

In this week's Book Club podcast, our subject is the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima - whose novel Beautiful Star is being published in English for the first time this month. My guest is its translator Stephen Dodd, who explains the novel's peculiar mixture of profound seriousness and humour, and its mixture of high literary seriousness with, well, flying saucers. He tells me about Mishima's sheltered life and shocking death, his place in Japanese literary culture, and the way the hydrogen bomb hangs

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45:29

Gideon Rachman: The Age of the Strongman

The Book Club ·

2022/04/20

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the FT’s foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. In his new book The Age of the Strongman, he takes a global look at the rise of personality-cult autocrats. He tells me what they have in common, what’s new about this generation of strongman leaders - and why his book places Boris Johnson in a cast including Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro and Duterte.

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47:09

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

The Book Club ·

2022/04/06

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe, Felipe’s gripping new book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan goes back to the original sources to discover that almost everything we think we know about this hero of the great age of exploration is wrong.

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36:28

Helen Bond and Joan Taylor: Women Remembered

The Book Club ·

2022/03/30

In this week's Book Club podcast, we ask: did the chroniclers of the early Church cover up evidence that the disciples and evangelists of Christ were as often women as men? My guests are the scholars Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, authors of Women Remembered: Jesus' Female Disciples. They pick out the hints and clues that, they say, indicate that women were doing more than just cooking, mourning and anointing in first-century Judaea – despite the difficulties of keeping track of all those Marys and

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37:09

Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and its Discontents

The Book Club ·

2022/03/21

In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Francis Fukuyama to talk about his new book Liberalism and its Discontents. He tells me how a system that has built peace and prosperity since the Enlightenment has come under attack from the neoliberal right and the identitarian left; and how Vladimir Putin may end up being the unwitting founding father of a new Ukraine.

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39:46

Colm Toibin: Vinegar Hill

The Book Club ·

2022/03/16

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Colm Toibin. Best known as a novelist, Colm’s new book is his first collection of poetry, Vinegar Hill. He tells me about coming late to poetry, the freedoms and austerities it offers, and why writing isn’t fun. Plus: surviving cancer and outstaying his St Patrick’s Day welcome at the White House…

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53:13

Tom Burgis: Kleptopia

The Book Club ·

2022/03/09

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm talking to the investigative reporter Tom Burgis – just days after the High Court threw out an attempt from a London-based company run by eastern European oligarchs to suppress his book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. Tom tells me how massacres in Kazakhstan connect to the City of London, how western legal frameworks struggle to cope with international crime, how international kidnapping can be perfectly legal, why Tony Blair helped launder

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39:05

Christopher de Bellaigue: The Lion House

The Book Club ·

2022/03/02

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the historian Christopher de Bellaigue to talk about The Lion House, his scintillating and idiosyncratic new book about the great Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. It’s all here: massacres, sieges, over-mighty viziers, Venetian perfidy, and… true love?

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43:06

The centenary of literary Modernism

The Book Club ·

2022/02/23

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're going back 100 years to 1922 – the year which is usually seen as heralding the birth of literary Modernism. My guests are Richard Davenport-Hines, author of A Night At The Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party, and the scholar and critic Merve Emre, who has worked extensively on Joyce and Woolf. I asked them how much Modernism really did represent a break with the past, and how much it looked like a coherent movement at the time. Along the way

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37:34

Anna Keay: The Restless Republic

The Book Club ·

2022/02/16

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Anna Keay. In her new book The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown she describes the short but traumatic period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy. She tells me about the religious turmoil, the explosion of the newspaper industry, the sympathetic side of Oliver Cromwell... and parallels with our own age of constitutional upheaval and viral propaganda.

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41:40

The centenary of Kerouac

The Book Club ·

2022/02/09

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. As Penguin publishes a lavish new edition of On The Road to mark the occasion, I'm joined by two Kerouac scholars. Holly George-Warren is working on the definitive biography of Kerouac (her previous work includes Lives of Gene Autry and Janis Joplin), and Simon Warner co-edited Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack and runs Rock and the Beat Generation. They tell me how On The Road came to be written, how it stands up now, and what made

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39:12

Philip Oltermann: The Stasi Poetry Circle

The Book Club ·

2022/02/02

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Philip Oltermann, whose new book The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War, unearths one of the most unexpected corners of East German history. At the height of the Cold War, members of the GDR's notorious secret police got together regularly to workshop their poems. Was this a surveillance exercise, a training module for propagandists – or something stranger than either? And were their poems any good? Philip tells

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34:21

Christopher Prendergast: Living and Dying With Marcel...

The Book Club ·

2022/01/26

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Christopher Prendergast, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature at Cambridge and the author of the new book Living and Dying With Marcel Proust. In the centenary year of Proust's death (and the English publication of Swann's Way) he tells me (among other things) how the structure of A La Recherche is more straightforward than many think, why that madeleine was nearly a slice of toast, and about the great unsayable at the heart of Proust's great

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25:44

James Birch: Bacon in Moscow

The Book Club ·

2022/01/19

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the gallerist James Birch - whose new book Bacon In Moscow describes how he achieved the seemingly impossible: taking an exhibition of Francis Bacon's work to Moscow in the late 1980s. James tells me how he negotiated between the volatile artist and the implacable Soviet bureaucracy with the help of a suave but menacing KGB middleman; and how, along the way, he nearly acquired an original Francis Bacon painting and nearly acquired a Russian

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41:07

Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All The Time, Everywhere

The Book Club ·

2022/01/12

This week's Book Club podcast addresses one of the most misunderstood and vilified concepts in the culture wars: postmodernism. How did this arcane theoretical position escape from academia to become a social media talking point? What the hell is it anyway? What does Jeff Koons have to do with Foucault? Is postmodernism out to destroy capitalism, or is it capitalism incarnate? And what comes after postmodernism? Stuart Jeffries - author of Everything, All The Time, Everywhere: How We Became

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45:42

Natalie Livingstone: The Women of Rothschild

The Book Club ·

2022/01/05

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Natalie Livingstone – whose new book The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World's Most Famous Dynasty gives the distaff dish on the banking family's long history. She discovers that the Rothschild women have been just as remarkable as the men – from early modern matriarchs to jazz-club butterflies.

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46:53

Siri Hustvedt: Mothers, Fathers and Others

The Book Club ·

2021/12/15

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Siri Hustvedt, whose latest book is a collection of essays: Mothers, Fathers and Others. She tells me what literary critics get wrong, why she has a rubber brain on her desk, how Ancient Greek misogyny is still with us, why the 17th-century Duchess of Newcastle has yet to get her due – and how long it took her to stop smiling politely when people said her husband wrote her books…

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39:12

Kevin Birmingham: The Sinner and The Saint

The Book Club ·

2021/12/08

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Kevin Birmingham, whose new book The Sinner and The Saint: Dostoevsky, A Crime and its Punishment, tells the extraordinary story of how Dostoevsky came to write Crime and Punishment – and the under-explored story of the real-life murderer whose case inspired it. Physical agony, Siberian exile, vicious state censorship, old-school nihilists – and the astonishing personal resilience of one of Russia's greatest writers... it's all here.

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35:27

Judy Golding: The Children of Lovers

The Book Club ·

2021/12/01

This year Faber and Faber started the project of republishing the late Nobel Laureate William Golding's back catalogue -- starting with Pincher Martin, The Inheritors and The Spire. I'm joined by his daughter Judy Golding -- author of The Children of Lovers: A Memoir of William Golding By His Daughter -- to talk about Golding the writer and Golding the man. What were the deep fears that drove his work and were eased by drink? How did the war change his worldview? And what was the nature of the

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