Spectator Books

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Geoff Dyer, who's talking about his memoir Homework, in which he describes growing up as an only child in suburban Cheltenham, and how the eleven-plus and the postwar settlement irrevocably changed his life – propelling him away from the timid and unfulfilled world of his working-class parents. Geoff, in this new book, bids fair to be the Proust of Airfix models and prog rock.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, activist and Spectator contributor Julie Bindel. In her new book Lesbians: Where Are We Now?, Julie asks why lesbian liberation seems – as she sees it – to have taken one step forward and two steps back. She traces the history of lesbian activism, explains why we're wrong to assume that lesbians and gay men are natural allies, confronts the ‘progressive' misogyny she identifies in a younger generation – and tells me whether she thinks the Supreme Court's recent decision marks an end to the trans wars.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Daniel Swift. Daniel's new book, The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, tells the fascinating story of a theatrical innovation that transformed Elizabethan drama – and set the stage, as it were, for the rise of our greatest playwright.

My guest on this week's podcast is the historian Anne Sebba. In her new book The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival, Anne tells the story of how a ragtag group of women musicians formed in the shadow of Auschwitz's crematoria. She tells me about the moral trade-offs, the friendships and enmities that formed, and what it meant to try to create music in a situation of unrelenting horror.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Lamorna Ash, author of Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion. She describes to me how a magazine piece about some young friends who made a dramatic conversion to Christianity turned into an investigation into the rise in faith among a generation that many assumed would be the most secular yet — and into a personal journey towards religious belief.

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, whose new book 38 Londres Street describes the legal and diplomatic tussle over the potential extradition of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Philippe tells Sam why the case was such an important one in legal history, and presents new evidence suggesting that the General's release to Chile on health grounds may have been part of a behind-the-scenes stitch-up between the UK and Chilean governments. He sets out some of that evidence and pushes back on our reviewer Jonathan Sumption's scepticism about the case. Here's an old case, but not yet a cold case. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Fara Dabhoiwala, whose new book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea looks not just at the origins of free speech as an idea, but also its uses and misuses. Fara tells me the bizarre story of how he found himself ‘cancelled', gives us the scoop on who actually invented free speech and explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question – by tracing how we got into our current predicaments.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, who is here to talk about his new non-fiction book Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance. In it, he describes how he criss-crossed Europe in search of the truth about his great-grandfather, a Jewish scientist who found himself working on chemical weapons for the Nazis. Joe talks to me about historical guilt, the accidents of fate and human psychology – and making comedy out of tragedy.

My guest in this week's Book Club is Francesca Simon. Best known for her Horrid Henry series of children's books, Francesca has just published her first novel for grownups, a haunting reworking of a Welsh folk tale called Salka: Lady of the Lake. She tells me how she came to shift direction, what myths offer in terms of storytelling possibility – and why she never tired of her best-known creation.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and journalist John Lanchester, one of the contributors to Michael Lewis's very timely new anthology of reportage on the United States federal government, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can the public learn to love a bureaucrat? John tells me why he thinks the workings of government are misunderstood and under appreciated, why we should marvel at the making of the consumer price index, and why he thinks Elon Musk has ‘the wrong handle of the shopping bag'.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the publisher Anthony Cheetham, one of the biggest figures in British publishing through the second half of the twentieth century and into this one. In his new book A Life in Fifty Books: A Publisher's Memoir, he looks back on his career. He tells me why he had a soft spot for Robert Maxwell; how he launched Ken Follett's career on the top deck of a bus; how losing a press-up competition changed the landscape of publishing (and upset his then wife); how publishing has changed – and how it hasn't; and why Confessions of a Window-Cleaner has a special place in his heart.

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Donald Trump's outstanding Boswell, the magazine writer Michael Wolff. Michael's new book, All or Nothing:  How Trump Recaptured America, takes Donald Trump and his colourful cast of hangers-on from the aftermath of the 6 January riots to his triumphal return to the White House. Michael tells me why he thinks people in Trumpworld are still talking to him, how the Donald has changed over the decade he has been reporting on him, why he's confident American democracy will survive a second Trump presidency – and how world leaders, such as Keir Starmer, are best advised to handle this volatile and unpredictable character.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the Assyriologist Selena Wisnom, author of The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History. Selena tells me about the vast and strange world of cuneiform culture, as evidenced by the life and reign of the scholar-king Ashurbanipal and the library – pre-dating that of Alexandria – that he left to the world. She describes the cruelty and brilliance of the Ancient Near East, the uses of lamentation, the capricious Babylonian gods, the ways in which we can recognise ourselves in our ancestors there – plus, what The Exorcist got wrong about Sumerian demons.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and critic James Bradley whose new book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean. He tells me how we need to rethink our relationship with the sea and the life it contains, why fish are much more intelligent than we are used to imagining, and why – amid planetary doom – there's still room for hope.

Sam's guest on today's Book Club podcast is the musician, writer and photographer Colin Greenwood, who joins me to discuss his new book of photographs and memoir How To Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead. Colin tells me about the band's Mr Benn journey, photographing what you want to see… and what it takes to make Radiohead open a gig with 'Creep'. Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Philip Marsden, whose new book Under A Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder looks in thrilling and surprising detail at the wonders that are to be found beneath our feet. On the podcast he takes me through the meanings that rocks and metals have had through human history, from the bronze age, via the alchemist's quest for the philosopher's stone, to the present day.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist Lissa Evans, talking about her previous life as the producer of the sitcom Father Ted – as described in her new book Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted. She tells me about the collaborative genius of Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, the unusual experience of having to cut laughter out of episodes because there was simply too much of it, and sending a sheep to make-up. 

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're contemplating the astounding achievement of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in its 100th year. My guest is Professor Sarah Churchwell, author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Making of The Great Gatsby, as well as the introduction to Cambridge University Press's new edition of the novel. Sarah tells me what we get wrong about this Jazz Age classic, why Fitzgerald's antisemitism shouldn't necessarily get him cancelled, and how Fitzgerald's great novel traces the arc that leads from 1925 to Donald Trump's second inauguration.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Orlando Reade, whose book What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost describes the life and afterlife of one of the greatest poems in the language. Orlando tells me how Milton's epic has been read with – and against – the grain over the centuries; how it went from being a totem of English exceptionalism to being an encouragement to postcolonial revolutionaries and political thinkers from Malcolm X to C. L. R. James; how the modernists wrestled with Milton… and how Jordan Peterson gets it wrong.

In this week's Books podcast, I am joined by Rachel Cooke, who edits the new book The Virago Book of Friendship. Rachel unpacks the intense, often enigmatic dynamics of female friendships in a spry and very dip-in-and-out-able anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms, from high culture to low. There are many gems to cackle over, including: an incomparably tender and exact description of Hannah Arendt by Mary McCarthy; a wonderful, worm-turning character assassination of the ghastly Susan Sontag by her former disciple, Terry Castle; and the revelation that Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore were boon companions for two whole years before they stopped calling each other ‘Miss Bishop' and ‘Miss Moore'.

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk to talk about the publication of Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks. Right up to early adulthood, Orhan had imagined he was destined to be a painter, but then his life took another turn. In these illustrated notebooks he marries words and images in an elliptical sort-of diary. He tells me about what he puts in and what he leaves out, how his imagination works, the artists and writers he admires, what fame has given him, and why he wishes he didn't have to talk about politics.  

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Chris Ware — author of Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories and Rusty Brown, and a man widely regarded as one of the greatest living cartoonists. Chris's new book, The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, opens his sketchbooks for public consumption: a potentially painful move for an artist as self-conscious and perfectionist as Ware. He tells me a bit about the relationship between cartooning and architecture, what he's trying to do with his graphic novels, the importance of R Crumb and Art Spiegelman to his work, and what gave him the confidence to turn his back on fine art.  

In this week's Books podcast, I am joined by the writer Daniel Tammet, whose new book Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum is a pen portrait of nine lives of people on the autism spectrum. On the podcast, he tells me how he happened upon these nine lives, whether ‘spectrum' is a helpful term when understanding autism and Asperger's syndrome, and how popular culture's most famous depiction of autism – Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man – is based on an individual who wasn't autistic at all.

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Jonathan Coe, talking about cosy crime, the tug of nostalgia, the joys of satire, and his brilliant new novel, The Proof of My Innocence.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist Nick Harkaway, whose new book Karla's Choice sees him pick up the mantle of his late father, John le Carré, in writing a new novel set in the world of George Smiley. He tells me why, having spent a career trying to put clear blue water between his own work and that of his father, he's now steering in the opposite direction; about growing up with Smiley; about his relationship with the man so many outsiders have seen as secretive and opaque; about seeking advice from Stephen King's son, Joe Hill; and why moving from his own style to that of his dad is just a ‘turn on the dial'.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen. With anger seemingly the default condition of our time, Josh's new book All The Rage: Why Anger Drives the World seeks to unpick where anger comes from, what it does to us, and how it might function in the human psyche as a dark twin of the impulses we think of as love. Photo credit: Charlotte Speechley

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a 'new wave' of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he's determined never to lose his vulgarity.   

On this week's Book Club podcast we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children's publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne's snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin... and how Pooh became Pooh. 

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is John Suchet whose new book In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey describes his lifelong passion for the composer. He tells me how the ‘Eroica' was his soundtrack to the Lebanese Civil War, about the mysteries of Beethoven's love-life and deafness, why he had reluctantly to accept that Beethoven was ‘ugly and half-mad'; and how even in the course of writing the book, new scholarship upended his assumptions about events in the composer's life (from his meeting with Mozart to the circumstances of his death).

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Rachel Clarke, author of the Baillie Gifford longlisted new book The Story of a Heart. Rachel tells me how she came so intimately to tell the story of 9-year-old Keira, whose death in a car accident and donation of her heart gave a chance at life to a dying stranger, Max. She describes the medical and conceptual changes that led up to that extraordinary possibility and explains how, as a medic, you have to be able to combine technical professionalism with a sense of the sanctity of the human beings you work with. And she catches us up on how Max is doing eight years on. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith's guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man's unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code ‘TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson's rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what really went on with Marcia. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Alan Garner whose new book of essays and poems is called Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life. Alan tells me about landscape and writing, science and magic, the unbearably spooky story behind his novel Thursbitch – and why, three weeks short of 90, he has no plans to retire. This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Channel 4's international editor Lindsey Hilsum. In her new book I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line Lindsey intersperses her account of the many conflicts she has covered as a war reporter with the poems that have given her consolation and a wider sense of meaning as she travels through the dark places of the earth. She tells me what poets can do that reporters can't, how you put a human face on statistics, how new technology has changed her trade, and why she goes back and back into danger to bear witness.

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round The Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying encounter with Her Maj. 

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, artist and historian Amy Jeffs. Her new book Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic aims to recover and bring back to life the wild and fascinating world of medieval saints. She tells me what we lost with the Reformation (all the good swearing, among much else), what was the difference between magic and a miracle, and how what washes up on the Thames foreshore can give us the entry point to a whole vanished imaginarium. 

The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here's an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom.  Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939, the W.H. Auden poem that marked the beginning of the war. Ian's book is a 'biography' of the poem; they discuss how it showcases all that is 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. 

The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September with new episodes. Until then, here's an episode from the archives with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Carlo joined Sam in March 2023 to discuss his book Anaximander and the Nature of Science and explain how a radical thinker two and a half centuries ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells Sam how Anaximander's way of thinking still informs the work of scientists everywhere, how politics shapes scientific progress and how we can navigate the twin threats of religious dogma and postmodern relativism in search of truth. 

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Adam Higginbotham, whose new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space describes the 1986 space shuttle disaster that took the lives of seven astronauts and, arguably, inflicted America's greatest psychic scar since the assassination of JFK. He tells me about the extraordinary men and women who lost their lives that day, the astounding engineering involved in the spacecraft that America had started to take for granted, and the deep roots and long aftermath of the accident.   

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me from Jerusalem, Nathan tells me why he believes it's right to call Israel an 'apartheid state', how the bureaucracy of the Occupied Territories made the fatal crash 'an accident that wasn't an accident'; and what he thinks needs to change to bring hope of an end to the conflict.