The Book Club

In the first Book Club podcast of the year, we’re marking the moment that George Orwell comes out of copyright. I’m joined by two distinguished Orwellians — D. J. Taylor and Dorian Lynskey — to talk about how the left’s favourite Old Etonian speaks to us now, and how his reputation has weathered. Was he secretly a conservative? Was he a McCarthyite snitch? How would he be remembered had he died be...

This week's Book Club podcast celebrates the 75th anniversary of the publication of Nancy Mitford's breakthrough novel The Pursuit of Love. Laura Thompson, author of the biography Life In A Cold Climate , joins me to talk about the way the book was written, how it helped create the Mitford myth - and how it shaped an enduringly ambivalent story of familial happiness and 'true love' from the someti...

In this week's Book Club podcast, we remember the great John Le Carre. I'm joined by one of the late writer's longest standing friends, the novelist Nicholas Shakespeare. He tells me about Le Carre's disdain for - and debt to - Ian Fleming, his intensely secretive and controlling personality, his magnetic charm, his thwarted hopes of the Nobel Prize... and why at the end of his life he acquired an...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book The Moth and the Mountain tells the story of a now forgotten solo assault on Everest that ended in disaster. But as Ed argues, the heroic failure can be a richer and more resonant story than any triumph -- and as he painstakingly excavated the story of Maurice Wilson, it was just such a rich and resonant story h...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart. His first novel, Shuggie Bain , tells the story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. It's a story close to the author's own. He joins me from the States to tell me about the ten years he spent writing the book and the dozens of rejections he had from publish...

Sam Leith is joined by Patrick Barwise and Peter York to talk about their new book  The War Against the BBC . They discuss investment in the arts, claims of excessive spending, and Rupert Murdoch's view of the broadcasting ecology. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more. For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator....

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is James Hawes. The bestselling author of The Shortest History of Germany turns his attention in his latest book to our own Island Story: The Shortest History of England . He tells me why he thinks there's real value in so brief an overview of our history, how Jurassic rock formations doomed our politics, why we never got over the Conquest, how the break-u...

In this week's books podcast, I'm joined by the sculptor Antony Gormley and the art critic Martin Gayford to talk about their new book Shaping The World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now. They talk about the special place sculpture occupies in the arts, the lines of connection between its ancient origins and the avant-garde, and their views on the new fashion for tearing down statues. Plus, Antony...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the publisher and historian Carmen Callil, whose new book Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times , tells the story of how her 18th-century ancestors were transported to Australia. She uses their story as a window into a densely imagined account of English and Aussie social history, and of the darker side of empire. She tells me why the Industrial Rev...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes, whose new book Pandora's Jar: Women In The Greek Myths investigates how the myths portrayed women from Pandora to Medea, and how those images have been repurposed in the retellings of subsequent generations. She tells me why Theseus isn't quite the hero we imagine him, how Erasmus's mistranslation of a single...

In this week's books podcast, I'm joined by the irrepressible Gyles Brandreth - whose latest book is the fruit of a lifelong love of the theatre. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes is a doorstopping compendium of missed cues, bitchy put-downs and drunken mishaps involving everyone from Donald Wolfit to Donald Sinden. Gyles explains how he always wanted to be Danny Kaye but also the Home Secre...

In this week’s edition of the Book Club podcast I’m joined by two guests. One is Rowland White, whose new book, Harrier 809: Britain’s Legendary Jump Jet and the Untold Story of the Falklands War, tells the story of the air war in the Falklands from the frantic logistical scrambling when 'the balloon went up', via spy shenanigans in South America, to the decisive action in theatre. The other is Ti...

If you know the name of Christiaan Huygens at all, it'll probably be as the man who gave his name to a space probe. But Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of Dutch Light: Christaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe, joins this week's Book Club podcast to argues that this half-forgotten figure was the most important scientist between Galileo and Newton. He tells a remarkable story of advances...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the distinguished Irish historian Roy Foster, talking about his new book On Seamus Heaney . He tells me how 'Famous Seamus'’s darkness has been under-recognised, how he negotiated with the shade of Yeats and the explosive politics of Ireland to find an independent space to write from, and just how 'certus' the man who signed himself 'Incertus' really wa...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Kate Summerscale, here to talk about her latest book The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story . Kate uses the true story of an eruption of poltergeist activity in 1930s Croydon to give what turns into a thoughtful and poignant look at the mental weather of interwar Britain, and the shifting meanings of the occult in light of new ideas about ph...

In this week's books podcast my guest is the writer Ysenda Maxtone Graham, whose new book casts a rosy look back at the way children used to spend their summer holidays. British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980 is a work of oral history that covers everything from damp sandwiches and cruelty to animals to tree-climbing, messing about in boats or endless games of Monopoly; i...

My guest in this week's books podcast is the former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Along with the economist and former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Julia has written a new book called Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons , which includes interviews with women who've reached the top roles in global institutions, from Christine Lagarde and Joyce Banda to Michell...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Annie Nightingale - Britain’s first female DJ, occasional Spectator contributor, and longest serving presenter of Radio One. Ahead of the publication of her new book Hey Hi Hello , Annie tells me about the Beatles’ secrets, BBC sexism, getting into rave culture, the John Peel she knew - and how when most people never get past the music they love in the...

In this week's Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare - which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets', and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of what the form meant to our greatest poet-dramatist. They tell me what sonnets me...

In this week's books podcast, my guest is that man of parts Loyd Grossman. Loyd's new book is An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope, and the Making of the Eternal City , which explores the titanic influence of Bernini on the Rome we see today, and his partnership with Pope Alexander VII. Loyd tells me why you couldn't bring Italian Baroque home to meet your parents, about Bernini's far from conge...

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the philosopher, scientist and broadcaster Sam Harris - host of the hugely popular Making Sense podcast. Sam's new book is a selection of edited transcripts of the very best of his conversations from that podcast with intellectual eminences from Daniel Kahneman to David Deutsch, and explores some of the issues that preoccupy him most: to do with consc...

In this week’s podcast, we're replaying an episode that first aired earlier this year, but seems more relevant now than ever. Sam is joined by two writers to talk about the perennially fraught issue of race. There’s a wide consensus that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong; but what actually *is* race? Does it map onto a meaningful genetic or scientific taxonomy? Does it map onto a lived...

In this week's books podcast my guest is Kate Teltscher, who tells the fascinating story of one of the greatest showpieces of Victorian Britain: the Palm House in Kew Gardens. Though the gardens and their glassy centrepiece are now a fixture of London's tourist map, as her new book Palace of Palms reveals, they very nearly weren't. She tells me how a team of brilliant mavericks used cutting-edge s...

On this week's books podcast, my guess is Oxford University's Professor of European Archaeology, Chris Gosden. Chris's new book The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present. opens up what he sees as a side of human history that has been occluded by propaganda from science and religion. Accordingly, he delves back to evidence from the earliest human settlements...

This week's Book Club podcast is brought to you rather later than we'd planned. In spring this year, the explorer and writer Robin Hanbury-Tenison was due to be talking to me about his new book Taming The Four Horsemen: Radical Solutions to Defeat Pandemics, War, Famine and the Death of the Planet. We'd been excited to have him on, not least because his book's interest in pandemic disease was star...