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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

26:09

David Parker on Laurie Lee: Down In The Valley

The Book Club ·

2019/11/20

Sam is joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him a writer. Acting as medium, so to speak, is David Parker — whose 1990s interviews with Lee before his death provide the material for the new book Down In The Valley: A Writer’s Landscape — and who’s here to talk about the pleasures and difficulties of coaxing reminiscences out of this laureate of English rural life. Essential

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43:32

Christopher Tugendhat: A History of Britain Through...

The Book Club ·

2019/11/13

In this week’s Spectator Book Club, Sam's guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can get a special understanding the temper of a given time through the pivotal works of fiction and nonfiction that expressed it; books written

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31:38

Daniel Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap

The Book Club ·

2019/11/06

Sam is joined by Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In his new book The Meritocracy Trap Daniel advances an argument that will seem startling to partisans of Left and Right alike: that meritocracy isn’t the solution to our social and political discontents, but the central part of the problem. Our notion that hard work and proven ability should be the route to wealth and success has, he says, created a miserable underclass and a comparably miserable overclass —

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34:50

Thomas Penn: The Brothers York

The Book Club ·

2019/10/30

In this week’s Spectator Books, Sam talks to the award-winning historian Thomas Penn about his new book The Brothers York: An English Tragedy — in which he argues that the 'Wars of the Roses' weren’t determined by a struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster so much as by the catastrophic white-on-white conflict that cause the House of York to implode. He tells the story of three brothers — Edward IV; George, Duke of Clarence; and Richard III — and their extraordinary and ultimately

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28:53

Madeline Miller: Circe

The Book Club ·

2019/10/23

This week the Books Podcast leaves its dank burrow and hits the road. Sam travelled to the southern Peloponnese to catch up with the Orange-prize winning novelist Madeline Miller, where she was hosting a reading weekend at the Costa Navarino resort. Madeline’s first novel, The Song of Achilles, retold the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of view. Her second, Circe, takes on the great sorceress of the Odyssey. She talked about how — as a classicist as well as a novelist — she approached reworking these

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55:57

Peter Pomerantsev: This Is Not Propaganda

The Book Club ·

2019/10/16

Sam's guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of 'post-truth politics' in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, describes how Russia’s surreal new information politics turned out not to be a weird exception, but the harbinger of a worldwide phenomenon. In this

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36:14

Jung Chang: Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister

The Book Club ·

2019/10/09

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast Sam's guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspective. In Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, Jung narrates the lives of the Soong Girls — one of whom was married to Chiang Kai-shek, another of whom became one of the richest women in the world and helped run Chiang’s government; and the other one of whom (the widow of the founding father of modern

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37:48

Benjamin Moser: Sontag, Her Life

The Book Club ·

2019/10/02

Sam's guest in this week’s books podcast is Benjamin Moser, author of an acclaimed new biography of one of America’s most celebrated (and controversial) intellectuals of the twentieth century: Sontag: Her Life. Sam asked Benjamin how he sorted fact from myth, about tracking down the inventor of that haircut, and about Annie Leibovitz’s take on their stormy love affair. Why could someone as brave as Sontag never come out? Did she have a sense of humour? And what of her will last? Presented by Sam

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30:14

Etgar Keret: Fly Already

The Book Club ·

2019/09/25

This week’s podcast features the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, talking about his new collection of short stories Fly Already. Topics on the agenda: how an Israel writer can address the Holocaust, why one of Etgar’s stories caused a dear friend of his to have to change his name, whether writing stories is a useful thing to do, whether smoking dope is a help or a hindrance to creativity, and why — alas — Brits so far don’t seem to 'get' Etgar’s sense of humour. Presented by Sam Leith.

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37:01

Elif Shafak: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

The Book Club ·

2019/09/18

Sam's guest in this week’s podcast is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, whose latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has just been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Elif talks to Sam about living in exile, writing in a second language, her relationship with Istanbul, and how the West’s culture war over 'free speech' looks to someone from a country where free speech can get you thrown in jail or worse. Presented by Sam

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45:21

Frank Dikötter: How To Be A Dictator

The Book Club ·

2019/09/11

This week's books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. Sam's guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book - expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao - considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what unites and what divides the regimes of dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu. They about how these dictators were able to exert control, and what made them vulnerable;

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25:03

Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939

The Book Club ·

2019/09/04

Eighty years on from the start of the Second World War, Sam's guest in this week’s podcast is Ian Sansom — who’s talking about 'September 1, 1939', the Auden poem that marked the beginning of that war. Ian’s new book is a 'biography' of the poem, and he talks about how it showcases all that is both best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and Osama Bin Laden. Presented by Sam

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32:58

Lemn Sissay: My Name is Why

The Book Club ·

2019/08/28

My guest on this week’s Books Podcast is the poet and playwright Lemn Sissay. Lemn’s new memoir My Name Is Why describes his early life — given up for fostering in the late 1960s as the son of an unmarried Ethiopian mother — and his progress, when his foster family gave him up, through the care system and out the other side. It’s a powerfully affecting story, and Lemn joins me to fill in some of the gaps. How does he feel towards his foster parents now? Do the racism and institutional cruelty he

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16:46

Mick Herron on how to be a crap spy

The Book Club ·

2019/08/21

Even books editors have to go on holiday sometimes, so Spectator Books is taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. But so there's not a gaping gap in your life where the podcast used to be, we're bringing out some of our favourite episodes from our archive. This summer, Mick Herron has published the latest of his Jackson Lamb novels, Joe Country. It's a terrific read. So what better time to look back to the conversation Sam had with Mick Herron, a summer and a bit ago? Presented by Sam Leith.

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21:02

Books for the beach with Alex Clark and Damian Barr

The Book Club ·

2019/08/14

Even books editors have to go on holiday sometimes, so Spectator Books is taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. But so there's not a gaping gap in your life where the podcast used to be, we're bringing out some of our favourite episodes from our archive. Sam is joined by the critic Alex Clark and Damian Barr — memoirist and host of the Savoy’s Literary Salon — to talk about summer reading. What do you take? What do you regret taking? Kindle, dead-tree or — 19th-century-style — cabin trunk full of

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32:20

Adam Nicolson and Tom Hammick: The Making of Poetry

The Book Club ·

2019/08/07

In this week’s books podcast, we’re getting Romantic. Sam is joined by the writer Adam Nicolson and the artist Tom Hammick to talk about their new book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and their Year of Marvels. In it, Adam describes how — inspired by Richard Holmes’s 'footsteps' approach — he attempted to imaginatively inhabit the worlds of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the crucial year in the late 1790s when they lived near each-other in the Quantocks in Somerset. That meant, for him,

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15:14

David Brooks: The Second Mountain

The Book Club ·

2019/07/31

The star New York Times columnist David Brooks has never been afraid to go beyond the usual remit of day-to-day politics. His new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life is exactly what it sounds like: a guide to the Meaning of Life, somewhere between a spiritual autobiography and a manual for living. He joins Sam to explain how he’s changed his mind about the meaning of life since his previous book The Road To Character (he’s cagy about whether refunds are available), about how his own

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34:58

Jon Day: Homing

The Book Club ·

2019/07/24

Pigeons: revolting pests who can’t tell the difference between fag-butts and chips, right? Not so, according to Sam's latest podcast guest Jon Day, distinguished man of letters, critic, academic and… pigeon-fancier. Jon’s new book Homing describes how — suffering an early midlife crisis in young married life with fatherhood approaching — he took up racing pigeons. His book will make you look at pigeons in a new light — and also reflect on what these extraordinary birds have to tell us about the

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37:12

Oleg Gordievsky: the double agent who changed the...

The Book Club ·

2019/07/17

There’s nobody who writes true-life spy stories like Ben MacIntyre — and with his latest book The Spy and the Traitor out in paperback, Ben joins me to talk about the astonishing career of Oleg Gordievsky, a single spy who really did change the whole course of the Cold War. Ben tells Sam about Oleg's rise, his downfall, his daring escape from Moscow — and how he lives now and what he thinks of the situation between Russia and the West these days. Plus, the peculiar role in the whole tale of Dire

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30:45

Toby Faber: the Untold Story of Faber and Faber

The Book Club ·

2019/07/03

This year the publishers Faber & Faber celebrate their 90th birthday, and to honour the occasion Sam is joined by Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson and the author of a new history of the company called Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Most corporate histories are boring, but this one — told largely through the correspondence of that company’s astonishing cast of literary luminaries — is anything but. Toby talks about the company’s rackety start as a publisher of medical textbooks; about

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