The Book Club

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the Argentine-born novelist Andrés Neuman, who was acclaimed by the late Roberto Bolano as the future of Spanish-language fiction. We talk about boundary-crossing in literature, historical trauma, multilingual jokes - and his dazzling new novel Fracture, which sees a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grappling with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Click...

In this week's books podcast I'm joined by Alan Johnson and Andrew Adonis to talk about the latter's new biography of a neglected great of British political history: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill . He was, in Andrew's estimation, the man who did most to save Europe from Stalin. So why has Bevin been so forgotten? In what way was he Churchillian? What would he have made of the current state of t...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the historian Rutger Bregman. In his new book Humankind , Rutger argues that practically every novelist, psychologist, economist and political theorist has got it all wrong: humans are naturally caring, sharing and altruistic... and far from being the one thing that stands in the way of a Hobbesian war of all against all, 'civilisation' is actually what...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the writer Susanna Moore. Best known for her pitch-black erotic thriller In The Cut, recently republished to huge acclaim, Susanna has just published a superb memoir of her young womanhood in Hawaii and Los Angeles - from shopgirl at Bergdorf's to model and actor, script reader for Warren Beatty and lover to Jack Nicholson - called Miss Aluminium . She...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the biographer Adam Begley. Adam's work includes biographies of John Updike and the Belle Epoque photographer, cartoonist and aeronaut Felix Tournachon, aka Nadar. In his new book he turns his attention to the great escapologist Harry Houdini. I asked him what it was that made Houdini special, what challenges a lifelong myth-maker (aka inveterate liar)...

Is there life, as David Bowie wondered, on Mars? In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the astrobiologist Kevin Peter Hand, author of a fascinating new book Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. Kevin explains how and where we're currently looking for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system - and why on the basis of sound science he's optimistic that we'll find it....

In this week's Book Club podcast we're talking about Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh's great novel is 75 years old this week, and I'm joined by our chief critic Philip Hensher, and by the novelist's grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press's complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh's career, what did it mean to the author and how did he revi...

My guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is the great Michael Frayn, talking about his new book of sketches Magic Mobile , lockdown life, the joys and perils of technology, adapting Spies for the screen - and how his muse has changed as he gets older. Click here to try four weeks of the Spectator for free and get a free wireless charger. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the writer and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands. His new book The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive describes his painstaking quest to track down the real story of a Nazi genocidaire who fled justice into the murky underground society of postwar Italy. Philippe tells me about the strange world of shifting allegiances he u...

In this week's books podcast I'm joined by Mark O'Connell, a writer whose latest book Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back sees him investigate doomsday preppers, wannabe Mars colonists, the Ayn Rand billionaires buying up New Zealand, and the tourist route through Chernobyl. Why, he asks, is the apocalypse something we seem to fantasise about as much as fe...

In this week's books podcast I'm joined from across the Atlantic by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro to talk about his new book Shakespeare in a Divided America , which discusses the myriad ways in which America has taken Britain's national playwright up as its own; and then used him as a lightning-rod for the deepest issues about its own national identity - issues of masculinity, race rela...

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis’, Sir Salman Rushdie said to Sam when they spoke in an interview for the Spectator's 10,000th edition. Sam met Salman in New York a few weeks ago, before coronavirus struck down the city. This episode is a recording of that interview, where they discuss everything from his latest book Quichotte , to his relationship with...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I talk to the reporter Toby Muse about the vast, blood-soaked and nihilistic shadow economy that links a banker's 'cheeky little line of coke' to the poorest peasants in Colombia. Toby's new book Kilo: Life and Death inside the Cocaine Cartels traces cocaine's journey from that unremarkable-looking shrub to its entry into a multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise...

My guest in this week's podcast is the multi-talented satirist Craig Brown, whose new book One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time is, I feel confident in guessing, the most entertaining book about the Fab Four ever written. Craig joins me to talk about how he goes about his jackdaw work picking out the most curious and striking details from the mass of information in his research, what attracts h...

This week's Book Club podcast features one of the great wise men of the literary world: Professor John Carey - emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford, author of authoritative books on Milton, Donne and Dickens as well as the subject-transforming broadside The Intellectuals and the Masses . (He's also lead book reviewer for a publication we shall call only the S****y T***s, but we pass over...

On this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam is joined by Blake Gopnik — the author of a monumental new biography of Andy Warhol. Blake tells Sam how everything — fame, money, and other human beings — were 'art supplies' to Warhol, but that underneath a succession of contrived personae Warhol could be warm, generous and even romantic; that the affectlessness of his art was not the expression of an affect...

Sam's guest on this week’s Book Club is the poet Don Paterson — whose new book Zonal finds him accessing a new, confessional mode, a longer line and a childhood interest in the spooky TV show The Twilight Zone. Don talks about the relationship between poetry and jazz, the split between 'page poetry' and spoken-word material, the shortcomings of Rupi Kaur, whether poems should include 'spoiler aler...

In this week’s Book Club, Sam's guest is the writer Hadley Freeman, whose new book House of Glass tells the story of 20th century jewry through the hidden history of her own family. The four Glahs siblings — one of them the writer’s grandmother — grew up in a Polish shtetl just a few miles from what was to become Auschwitz. They fled the postwar pogroms to Paris; and then had to contend with the r...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam's guest is the veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Christina’s new book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women is a deeply reported survey of rape as a weapon of war, described in the Spectator's pages by Antony Beevor as the most powerful and disturbing book he has ever read. From the fates of Yazidi and Rohingya woman at the hands of...

Don’t Panic! Next month marks the 42nd anniversary of the first radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . Joining Sam on this week’s podcast to discuss the genesis, genius and legacy of the show and the books it spawned are the literary scholar and science fiction writer Adam Roberts, and John Lloyd, the founder of QI and a close collaborator and lifelong friend of Douglas Adams. D...

This week Sam's guest on the Book Club podcast is the journalist Ed West, whose new book Small Men On The Wrong Side of History (published next month by Constable) asks whether the long and honourable history of conservative thought is doomed. Have liberals won the day? Why are their guys cooler than our guys? And how conservative is the current government anyway? Presented by Sam Leith. Become a...

Sam's guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Olivia Fane — who argues in her new book Why Sex Doesn’t Matter that, well, sex doesn’t matter. She says that the idea that sex and love are related is a damaging twentieth-century invention, and that if we could just recognise that sex was no more significant than scratching an itch we’d all be wiser and happier. They talk about how she reaches that...

This week's Book Club stars the food historian and broadcaster Annie Gray, whose new book Victory In The Kitchen excavates the life and world of Georgina Landemare - Winston Churchill's cook. From the shifting roles of household servants, and the insane food of the Edwardian rich - everything jellied and moulded and forced through sieves - to the inventive ways that haute cuisine responded to rati...

In this week’s podcast, 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 reality - is it possible to generalise, say, about 'black' experience? And can we or should we opt out...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam's guest is the novelist Samantha Harvey, whose new book — The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping — is an extraordinarily written, funny and terrifying account of her experience with insomnia. She talks to Sam about the strange contortions that the mind makes when the boundaries between conscious and unconscious thought start to fray, and how writing — as...