The Book Club

In this week's books podcast, Sam is joined by Ursula Buchan - the author of a hugely involving new life of her late grandfather John Buchan. The book is called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (you can read Allan Massie's enthusiastic Spectator review of it here), and it does as the title promises. Buchan (or 'JB' to his family) is known, if he's known now at all, as the author of the pre-war thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, later filmed by Hitchcock. Yet here was a man of staggering range and energy - diplomat, historian, politician, propagandist, poet, barrister, publisher, and (most important of all) one-time assistant editor of The Spectator. He was a proud Scot who lived most of his life out of Scotland, and whose travels took him from Boer South Africa to the Governor-General's mansion in Canada. Here's John Buchan in the round - and a granddaughter talking about how and why she sought to make his memory her own.   

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by Bret Easton Ellis. The author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms is here to talk about his first nonfiction book White, and the savage critical response to it. They discuss censorious millennials, the fascination of actors, his problem with David Foster Wallace, 'coming out' as Patrick Bateman - and his own personal Ed Balls Day, when he posted what he thought was a text message ordering drugs to Twitter.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast, the guest is the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, architect of Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” and former chief economist at the World Bank. 

His new book People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent argues Trump’s economic boom is a “sugar-high”, and that the US economy is in a far, far worse state than anybody thinks. As a result, he says, we need to reevaluate our whole faith in free markets. The reason the "invisible hand" is invisible, he says, is because it isn’t there.  He talks about why thinks that, and what we need to do about it.

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by the journalist and (as one half of the crime writer Nicci French) novelist Nicci Gerrard to talk about her new book What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. The loss of her own father to dementia prompted Nicci to look at one of the most painful and pressing social problems of the age: how we care for, or fail to care for, those who have dementia — and the philosophical questions of what it means when the things that make you you start to fall away.

In this week's Books Podcast Sam is joined by Professor Cass Sunstein - best known here as co-author of the hugely influential 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which spawned a whole transatlantic movement in using behavioural psychology to influence public policy (not least over here in the Cabinet Office's celebrated "Nudge Unit"). Cass's new book is called How Change Happens -- and extends the arguments of his previous books to talk about the mechanisms that determine quite big, and quite abrupt shifts in politics and social attitudes.

Sam asks him how his ideas about nudging have changed over the last decade; about the limits and contradictions of "libertarian paternalism"; about the dangers of "group polarisation"; about how much we can or should trust to big tech and the mechanisms of the market; and about how the explosion in digital media has changed the democratic landscape for good.

Sam's guest for this week’s books podcast is Clare Carlisle, author of a new life of Soren Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart. Kierkegaard has a reputation for being forbidding, pious and difficult to pronounce - but Clare’s here to tell us why the work of this transformational thinker and writer speaks to every age about the difficulties and the vital importance of finding a way of living in the world. Plus, we learn about his very strange love-life, his mental health, and how he got monstered by Copenhagen’s equivalent of Private Eye. There ain’t nothing like a Dane.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast Sam is talking to Clare Mulley about The Woman Who Saved The Children, her biography of Eglantyne Jebb reissued to coincide with next week’s centenary of Save The Children, the charity that Jebb founded. Eglantyne was a fascinating and deeply unconventional figure — a nice young gel from the Shropshire squirearchy who refused to fit into the social, sexual or professional pigeonholes her background seemed to destine her for. Instead she found herself investigating war crimes in Macedonia, campaigning against the postwar economic blockade of Germany, revolutionising charity fundraising, clashing with the law and pioneering the concepts that would go on to become the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by one of the doyennes of crime writing, the brilliant Donna Leon. She talks about her latest Commissario Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given, about what Venice gives her as a setting, why she welcomes snobbery towards crime writers, and why she never lets her books be published in Italian.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast, Sam Leith is joined by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri. Someone whose own fiction has negotiated the cross-cultural territory of her Bengali-American identity, Jhumpa in the last few years has been negotiating a new crossing of cultures after settling in Rome with her family and starting to write fiction and memoir in Italian. She joins the podcast to discuss the Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, which she edited, and talk about what a new language gives a writer, how the war shaped Italian literature, and why - as a professor of creative writing at Princeton - she refuses to teach creative writing.

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by Owen Matthews to talk about the man many have claimed was the greatest spy of the 20th century, Richard Sorge, the subject of Owen’s riveting new book An Impeccable Spy (reviewed in the new issue of The Spectator by Nicholas Shakespeare). Sorge (he’s pronounced 'zorgey', by the way — not, as I introduce the podcast, idiot that I am, 'sawj'). Here was a man who supplied information that changed the course of the Second World War — and far from being the sort of glum duffelcoated figure who populates Le Carre’s “Circus” — he really did lead an existence of James Bondish extravagance. He played the Germans off against the Japanese, all for the benefit of the Russians — and did so while drinking like a fish, seducing every woman he crossed paths with, waving around samurai swords and roaring about on a motorbike. Owen has the low-down on this “bad man who became a great spy”.

In this week's books podcast Sam talks to Max Porter, former publisher at Granta and author of the prizewinning debut Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, about his brilliant new novel Lanny (reviewed by Andrew Motion here). He asks: why are we used to novels having 15 page boring bits? What does the Green Man myth, and myth in general, have to offer readers? How do you convey the white noise of a village's chatter on the page? And which Thomas brother is the best: Dylan or RS?

In this week’s books podcast Sam talks to Peter Stanford, author of Angels: A Visible and Invisible History. Why is it that, according to some polls, more people believe in angels than believe in God? Peter takes us on a tour through history, theology and literature to find how the winged cherubs on our Christmas cards got there, and why they look as they do. Along the way he addresses some of the vital questions. Do angels have wings — and if so, how many? What are they made of — light, or compressed air? Are they above or below humans in the hierarchy of creation? Which is the friendliest archangel: Michael, Gabriel or Raphael? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's Spectator Books, Sam talks to the American journalist David Wallace-Wells about his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. In it, he uses the best available scientific projections to underpin a picture of what the world would look like if it heats up by four degrees or more. Not pretty, is the conclusion he comes to. But what’s he trying to achieve with this book? Why, in his view, do we not take climate change seriously enough? And is this Project Fear — or Project Damn Well Pay Attention?

In this week's Spectator Books, Sam is joined by Deborah Lipstadt -- the historian who herself made a piece of history when she defeated the Holocaust denier David Irving in court. In her new book Antisemitism Now, Professor Lipstadt returns to the fray to look at the worldwide uptick of antisemitism in our own day and age. Sam asks her why she felt the need to write this book and frame it in the way she did, how antisemitism differs from other forms of prejudice, and what you can and can't say about Israel.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast I'm joined from Los Angeles by Andrew Morton -- the Royal writer who scooped the world with the inside story of Princess Diana's marriage. To coincide with the publication of a revised and expanded edition of Diana, Her True Story -- including new material recovered from the tapes they smuggled out of Kensington Palace -- he looks back on those days and that story, and discusses how Royal reportage has changed. Why didn't they call it "Diana: The True Story"? Does he worry that that sort of public exposure during a divorce battle was risking the happiness of the children caught up in it? And what was it like when -- before his source was known -- people were publicly calling for our man to be sent to the Tower of London?

Hosted by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast Sam is joined by Josh Cohen, author of the Not Working: Why We Have To Stop. Josh is a literary critic and a working psychoanalyst, and his book is a thoughtful and subtle discussion of the way in which work dominates not only our lives and identities but our leisure time too -- and a speculation about some of the ways we might set about changing that. His references range from Max Weber and Freud to Orson Welles, Andy Warhol, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace. Is it all the fault of "late capitalism"? Has the digital age made quiet contemplation impossible? And why, Sam queried, does his eccentric list of great idlers include some of the most insanely productive people in history?

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast, Sam's guest is Robert Alter - who has just published the fruits of decades of labour in the form of his complete new translation of the Hebrew Bible into English. Acclaimed for his Bible translations by Seamus Heaney, John Updike and Peter Ackroyd, Prof Alter explains how Biblical Hebrew really works, what can and cannot be preserved in translation - and why, as he sees it, nearly every modern translation of the Bible gets it catastrophically wrong.

Presented by Sam Leith, the Spectator's Literary Editor.

In this week's episode, Sam talks to investigative journalist Kajsa Norman about her book 'Sweden's Dark Soul'. In it, she turns her gaze on the oppressive forces at the heart of Sweden’s ‘model democracy’. The story begins with the cover-up of mass sexual assaults at a Stockholm music festival. The reason? The perpetrators were unaccompanied refugee minors.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s book’s podcast Sam's guest is Jonathan Ames, a writer who has produced everything from memoir (Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer) to TV writing (Bored To Death), graphic novels (The Alcoholic), pitch-black noir (You Were Never Really Here), Wodehouse hommage (Wake Up, Sir!) and now, in The Extra Man, a comic novel riffing on Henry James. We talk about why he calls so many of his characters “Jonathan Ames”, how he goes about his work, and whether — as a man who has become synonymous with “overshare” — he can ever quite retreat into the background.

In this week’s books podcast we’re going to the wars. Sam's guest is Ed Vulliamy, the veteran war correspondent who has written a fascinating memoir called When Words Fail: A Life With Music, War and Peace. In it, Ed talks about how his lifelong love of music — he saw Hendrix at the Isle of Wight — has threaded through his terrifying adventures in conflict zones from Bosnia to Iraq to the Mexican/American border; and of how music really can salve the soul when everything else is broken. He describes his own terrifying experiences with PTSD, snagging the last interview with BB King, and how playing “Kashmir” over and over again while roaring unembedded around a battle-zone led him to a friendship with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.

In this week’s books podcast Sam talks to Chris Kraus — author of the semi-autobiographical cult novel I Love Dick and the new essay collection Social Practices — about her strange and interesting life in the New York and LA art worlds, about taking Baudrillard to a “happening” in the desert, about ambition and fame, about how art and literature feed into one another — and about why we English should stop sneering at “theory” and learn to love its strangeness and beauty.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast Sam talks to the great trivia expert Mark Mason about his new The Book of Seconds: The Incredible Stories of the Ones Who Didn’t (Quite) Win. Here’s the Christmas present for all the Tory frontbenchers in your life. Who remembers the Christmas number two in the pop charts? Who got silver at the Olympics? Who was the second man to walk on the moon? Mark — my second choice of guest for this week’s podcast — masterfully pulls together the psychological and social implications of not quite cutting the mustard.

In this week's books podcast, Sam is speaking to the Pulitzer-prizewinning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about her new book Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times -- in which she describes what Lincoln, two Roosevelts and LBJ had in common, and didn't. Obviously, they talk a bit about that nice Mr Trump -- as well as hearing how Doris had perhaps history's classiest pyjama party at the White House with Hillary Clinton, and how as a young woman she worried at one point that she was going to be #metooed by Lyndon Johnson. Tune in, kids. Doris is remarkable.

According to which bit of hype you read, there’s a copy of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers sold somewhere in the world every four seconds, or every seven, or every nine. It’s a cute statistic and (as Child wryly notes), there’s an element of Barnum & Bailey hucksterism to it. Sam talks to Lee Child in this episode of Spectator Books and writes about it in this week's magazine.

In this week's books podcast Sam talks to Oxford's Professor of Global History Peter Frankopan about his follow-up to his bestselling history The Silk Roads. In The New Silk Roads, Peter brings his story up to date, and argues that with our Trump and Brexit obsessions, and a divided and fissiparous West still obsessed with itself, we are missing the bigger picture of what's going on in the world today. Once again, the Silk Roads -- those lines of connection between East and West running through what he calls the "heart of the world" -- are where the action is. In our conversation we look at the rise of China and asks what its vast "Belt and Road" programme means for the future shape of the world, at the deeply complex relations between the Gulf states and the nations with interests in them, at the forces at work in India, Pakistan and Iran -- and why our school curricula need to go a bit beyond the old diet of Black Death, Mary Seacole and the Second World War. Plus, Peter's (almost) diplomatic about the enduring madness of Turkmenistan.

Presented by Sam Leith.

Sam talks to Nora Krug about her remarkable graphic work Heimat - in which this German born writer and artist discusses how it has felt to grow up in Germany and later the US with the shadow of her homeland’s war guilt, how that has issued in art, literature and humour, and about her risky attempt to discover her own family’s wartime past.

Presented by Sam Leith.

With Geoff Dyer, one of our most wayward and wittiest writers, about his new book Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, a frame-by-frame discussion of the classic war movie Where Eagles Dare. Learn from Geoff about the importance of squinting in Clint Eastwood’s thespian toolbox, about the joy of snow-patrol Action Man, about why he shied away from plans for "Alistair MacLean: A Critical Reappraisal", and about why on earth Geoff would follow a learned book about Tarkovsky’s Stalker with a discussion of a piece of late-60s schlock. Plus: what happens when you get on the wrong side of Julian Barnes.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast Sam talks to Ben Schott. The author of Schott's Miscellany, Ben's literary productions have taken an unexpected turn with the publication this week of his first novel. Jeeves and the King of Clubs is a tribute or companion piece to P G Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, published with the authorisation of the Wodehouse estate. What the hell was he thinking? Ben comes clean -- and also talks about the joys of nerdiness, the difficulty of living up to Plum, and the Spectator's role in the whole story.

Presented by Sam Leith.

Sam Leith talks to the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin about his new book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, in which he argues that it’s not only height and weight and skin colour that are heritable, but intelligence, TV-watching habits and likelihood of getting divorced. They talk about the risks he takes publishing this book, the political third rail of race and eugenics, and what his discoveries mean for the future of our data and for medical care. You can read Kathryn Paige Harden’s review of Blueprint, meanwhile, in this week’s magazine.

Presented by Sam Leith.

Sam talks to the incomparable Sara Paretsky about her latest V. I. Warshawski novel Shell Game — which pits the original feminist gumshoe against art thieves, Russian mobsters and her fink of an ex-husband. They talk about keeping Vic young (skincare doesn’t come into it), chiming with MeToo and immigration anxieties in Trump’s America, whether she feels rivalrous with other female crime writers, spotting her own writerly tics, and making friends with Obama.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast, Sam talks to Andrew Roberts in front of an audience about his new biography on Winston Churchill. It charts the leader's powerful sense of personal destiny, his ambition and bravery as a soldier and a leader. The book interprets the events that defined Churchill, from the Dardanelles disaster of 1915, his years in the political wilderness, and his summoning to save his country in 1940. Sam and Andrew discuss Churchill's belief that he was 'walking with destiny', his prophesies of European disaster in the 1930s, as well as his drinking habits, the racist charges against him, and his singular ability to deliver some of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century.

Presented by Sam Leith at Daunt Books, Marylebone.

Political scientist William Davies talks to Sam Leith about his new book Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over The World. Here’s a deep dive into the parlous condition of our public discourse, drawing the line from Descartes and Hobbes to Trump and Generation Snowflake. Can speech be a form of violence? Will argues that our instincts on that may be wrong…

In this week's Spectator Books podcast, Sam Leith is talking to Adam Sisman about More Dashing -- his new selection from the remarkable correspondence of one of the 20th-century's most celebrated adventurers, spongers and men of letters, Paddy Leigh-Fermor. What did Paddy really feel about his most famous act of derring-do, when he kidnapped a Nazi general in occupied Crete? What really went on in his unconventional marriage? And were -- as Adam Sisman contends -- his letters really at the heart rather than the periphery of his literary achievement?

In this week’s books podcast, Sam talks to the former head honcho of the National Gallery and British Museum, Neil MacGregor, about his new book Living With The Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples. Neil tells the story of the world’s religions through objects — beginning with a 40,000-year-old carving that might be the first human representation of an entirely imaginary object. What do religions have in common? How do you represent icon-averse creeds through physical objects? Why should there be an evolutionary advantage in engaging with the intangible or imaginary? And what does the history of religion tell us about the common threads of humanity?

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast Sam talks to Helen Parr about her remarkable new book Our Boys: The Story of A Paratrooper, which blends memoir, social history and military history to tell the story of the paratroopers who fought in the Falklands War and what happened when they came home — or, as in the case of Parr’s 19-year-old uncle, didn’t. Helen talks about what civilians can and can’t know of the experience of men who kill and risk death in combat, about the history of the paratroop regiment, and the sea-change in Britain’s relationship with its serving soldiers and its veterans that took place from the 1980s onwards.

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast, Sam talks to Sebastian Faulks about his brilliant new novel Paris Echo, which describes the twined stories of a Moroccan teenager and an American academic in the French capital – and the way that the ghosts of the past, from the Occupation to the decolonisation of North Africa, still play out in the present. Sam and Sebastian talk about whether writing from the point of view of a 19-year-old Moroccan means he’s going to be chucked in the Lionel Shriver High Security Prison for “cultural appropriation”, whether Paris Echo is an excursion into Magic Realism, how his serious literary novels coexist with his writing James Bond or Jeeves and Wooster — and about this book’s very unusual dedicatee…

Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week’s books podcast, Sam Leith talks to Sir Ian Kershaw about his new book Rollercoaster: Europe 1950-2017. Here from one of our most distinguished historians, is a history of Europe that goes from the postwar period right up to the present. Is he aiming at a moving target? How can you meaningfully speak about “Europe” as one thing when for much of the period under discussion half of it was behind the iron curtain? Were the machinations of powerful individuals, or sheer chance, the great drivers of our history? And how was the raising of the Berlin Wall — from some perspectives — a good thing?

How are the subprime collapse in the US and the Eurozone crisis that came after linked? Why did a cartel of mega-wealthy businessmen do a good job at rescuing the US from disaster, and a group of well-intentioned political technocrats make such a hash of it in Europe? And how is the Balance of Financial Terror between the US and China holding up these days? Adam Tooze, author of 'Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed The World', joins Sam Leith

Among the biggest surprises of this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist was the inclusion, for the first time in the prize’s 50-year history, of a “graphic novel”. Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina — a chillingly claustrophobic account of the aftermath of a murder in post-truth America — is undoubtedly a brilliant example of its form. But does a comic belong in contention for a fiction prize? Sam didn’t think so (and wrote as much in the FT. In this week’s Books Podcast the Man Booker Prize’s Literary Director, Gaby Wood, argues otherwise — and raises in the process the possibility that, one day, the Man Booker prize could be won by a book that doesn’t contain any words at all. 

Presented by Sam Leith.