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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

39:12

Paul Muldoon: Howdie-Skelp

The Book Club ·

2021/11/24

On this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by one of the most distinguished poets in the language, Paul Muldoon, to talk about his new book Howdie-Skelp. He tells me of his unfashionable belief in inspiration; why he thinks poetry -- even his -- needn't be difficult just because it's difficult; how writing song lyrics differs from writing poetry; and how he came to work with Sir Paul McCartney.

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47:21

Tessa Dunlop: Army Girls

The Book Club ·

2021/11/17

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Tessa Dunlop. Tessa's new book is Army Girls: The Secrets and Stories of Military Service from the Final Few Women Who Fought In World War Two. She tells me about how she gathered testimony and formed friendships with the nonagenarian veterans of the Second World War amid the Covid lockdown; about the class-ridden rivalries between the women's services; and how while still not officially in the front line, women during the war nevertheless

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24:50

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

The Book Club ·

2021/11/10

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Armando Iannucci – the satirist behind Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin. What many of his fans might not know is that he's also a devoted scholar of Milton – whose influence is to be found in his first published poem Pandemonium: Some Verses on the Current Predicament. Armando tells me what hurt him into verse, identifies the moment that led him to abandon an English Literature PhD for a career in comedy – and explains why

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25:08

Claire Tomalin: The Young H G Wells

The Book Club ·

2021/11/03

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is Claire Tomalin. Claire’s new book, The Young H G Wells: Changing the World, tracks the extraordinary life and rocket-powered career of one of the most influential writers of the Edwardian age. She tells me how drapery’s loss was literature’s gain, why casting the goatish Wells as a #metoo villain isn’t quite right - and why we should all be reading Tono-Bungay. Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift

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35:30

Jane Ridley: George V

The Book Club ·

2021/10/27

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Jane Ridley, talking about her new book George V: Never A Dull Moment. She tells me there’s so much more to the 'boring' monarch than shooting grouse and collecting stamps. Hear how he navigated some of the worst constitutional crises in memory, saved the British monarchy as the grand dynasties of Europe started toppling… and then inadvertently imperilled it again by his treatment of his son and heir.

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36:02

James Holland: Brothers In Arms

The Book Club ·

2021/10/20

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the historian James Holland to talk about his fascinating new book Brothers In Arms: One Legendary Tank Regiment's Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day. James's story follows the Sherwood Rangers from El Alamein to the D-Day Landings, and on through the last push through Europe into Germany. He tells me how he put together this richly detailed account and what it was like, hour by hour and day by day, for the men who fought in tanks.

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33:04

Joan Bakewell: The Tick of Two Clocks

The Book Club ·

2021/10/13

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Joan Bakewell, who talks to me about her new book The Tick Of Two Clocks: A Tale of Moving On. It describes how she made the decision to sell the house she lived in for half a century, and what it meant to her to face up to old age, and take stock of the past.

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35:01

Kate Lister: Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts

The Book Club ·

2021/10/06

In this week’s book club podcast, I’m joined by Kate Lister to talk about her new book Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale. Kate tells me about some of the most celebrated sex-workers in history (and pre-history), the attempts that have been made to regulate the “oldest profession” - and where she stands on an issue that still bitterly divides modern feminists…

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25:20

Chuck Palahniuk: Greener Pastures

The Book Club ·

2021/09/29

Chuck Palahniuk -- best known as the author of Fight Club -- has just announced that he's publishing his next novel not with a mainstream publisher but through the online subscription service Substack. He joins me on this week's Book Club podcast to tell me why; and to talk about how 9/11 changed literature, why he never tires of making his audience feel sick, and how he thinks David Foster Wallace might be alive today if he'd taken some time out to write a few Spider-Man comics.

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36:47

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Freud's Patients

The Book Club ·

2021/09/22

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who submitted to analysis on the great man's original couch. What he discovered is startling. Mikkel tells me how Freud falsified the data to fit his theories, kept incurable

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40:33

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: A Year That Changed Dickens...

The Book Club ·

2021/09/15

This week, I’m joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst - whose latest book is The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World. He tells me how 1851 - the year of the Great Exhibition - served as a pivot in Dickens’s own life, and set him on the path to writing Bleak House.

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39:53

Oliver Burkeman: 4,000 Weeks

The Book Club ·

2021/09/08

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer Oliver Burkeman. His new book 4,000 Weeks offers some bracing reflections on time: how much we have of it, how best to use it, and why “time management” and productivity gurus have the whole thing upside down.

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41:27

Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life

The Book Club ·

2021/09/01

My guest on this week’s podcast is the biographer and critic Hermione Lee. Her biography of Tom Stoppard is newly out in paperback, and she tells me about the decade of work behind Sir Tom’s overnight success, his unexpected influences, and the challenge to a biographer of getting to the heart of this elusive genius.

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31:03

Michael Bracewell: Souvenir

The Book Club ·

2021/08/25

Michael Bracewell’s new book Souvenir is a vivid and poetic evocation of London on the brink of the digital era - the neglected in-between times between 1979 and 1986. He joins me to talk about fine art and post-punk, T S Eliot and William Burroughs - and the dangerous lure of nostalgia.

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34:37

Michael Pye: Antwerp

The Book Club ·

2021/08/18

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm talking to Michael Pye about his new book Antwerp: The Glory Years. For most of the 16th century, as he tells me, Antwerp was the most important town in the western world – a city in which, as never before, ideas, information, goods and money circulated free of almost any authority. It was a time of extraordinary excitement – here are Bruegel, Thomas More and William Tyndale – and enormous danger and corruption. Michael tells me how it came about, what lessons it

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54:10

Iain MacGregor: Checkpoint Charlie

The Book Club ·

2021/08/04

In this week's Book Club podcast we anticipate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Wall going up by talking to Iain MacGregor about his book Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth. He tells me how, and why, the Russians cut a city in half overnight; and why we let them. He describes how events in Tiananmen Square reached Friedrichstrasse. And how, as the Wall came down, a single British soldier did something that the Red Army never forgot.

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36:29

Mary Ann Sieghart: The Authority Gap

The Book Club ·

2021/07/28

My guest in this week’s books podcast is Mary Ann Sieghart, whose new book The Authority Gap accumulates data to show that so-called 'mansplaining' isn’t a minor irritation but the manifestation of something that goes all the way through society: women are taken less seriously than men, even by other women. She says it’s not just 'wokery' to point it out, and she makes the case for how she thinks it came to be, what we can do to change it, and why we should take the trouble.

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30:08

Marie Le Conte: Honourable Misfits

The Book Club ·

2021/07/21

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the political journalist Marie Le Conte, whose new book is Honourable Misfits: A Brief History of Britain's Weirdest, Unluckiest and Most Outrageous MPs. She introduces us to some of the dishonourable members of the past, and explains why - despite what we may think - in terms of our present day crop of MPs we may, actually, never have had it so good…

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30:01

Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal at 50

The Book Club ·

2021/07/14

My guest in this week’s book club podcast is Frederick Forsyth, whose classic thriller The Day of the Jackal has been in print for 50 years this summer. He tells me about banging it out in a few weeks on a typewriter with a bullet hole in it, the shady characters who informed his research - and how he never realised that, for much of its readers, The Jackal would be the hero…

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41:24

Adam Roberts & Lisa Duggan on Ayn Rand

The Book Club ·

2021/07/07

Who is John Galt? This week's Book Club podcast looks at the life, work and personality of Ayn Rand, probably the most influential writer you've never read. A favourite of our new Health Secretary, the author of Atlas Shrugged -- and the most strident advocate of the idea that "greed is good" -- continues to be revered and reviled four decades after her death. What was it that made her work speak so powerfully to so many? Does her philosophical system add up? How was she shaped -- first by the

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