The Book Club

My guest this week is Irvine Welsh – who, three decades after his era-defining hit Trainspotting , returns with a direct sequel, Men In Love . Irvine tells me what Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie mean to him, why his new book hopes to encourage a new generation to discover Romantic verse and shagging, and why MDMA deserves more credit for the Good Friday Agreement than Tony Blair. Become a Spect...

My guest this week is the writer M. John Harrison, who joins me to talk about the rerelease of his 1992 novel The Course of the Heart – a deeply strange and riddling story of grief, friendship, memory and occult magic. We talk about why this book is so personal to him, what he learned from Charles Williams and Arthur Machen, turning his back on science fiction/fantasy and returning to it – as well...

Sam Leith's guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is one of the most popular living thriller writers. Karin Slaughter has made her native Georgia her fictional territory, and she joins Sam as she launches a new series set in a whole new county, with the book We Are All Guilty Here . They talk 'planning versus pantsing', what it means to write violence against women as a woman and how becoming the...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is science writer Carl Zimmer, whose new book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe explores the invisible world of the aerobiome – the trillions of microbes and particles we inhale every day. He tells me how Louis Pasteur's glacier experiments kicked off a forgotten scientific journey; how Cold War fears turned airborne research into a biow...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian William Dalrymple, whose bestselling account of ancient India’s cultural and economic influence, The Golden Road , is newly out in paperback. He tells me why the ‘Silk Road’ is a myth, how Arabic numerals are really Indian – and how he responds to being Narendra Modi’s new favourite author. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access thi...

In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by Lucy Mangan, author of Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives . She tells me what teenagers did before they had Young Adult books to read, the bizarre demise of the author of Goodnight Moon , and the wisdom of forsaking the busy world for an armchair and a good book. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spe...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian Alice Loxton, whose new book Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives is just out in paperback. In it, she tells the story of the early lives of individuals as disparate as the Venerable Bede and Vivienne Westwood. On the podcast, Alice tells me about Geoffrey Chaucer’s racy past, what Bede was like before he was venerable, and why...

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. Become a Spectator su...

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 Air...

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...

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. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts...

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 h...

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 jour...

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 h...

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 a...

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...

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 appr...

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 bu...

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 t...

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...

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. Become a Spectator subscriber today to acces...

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 Wonde r 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 philoso...

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 the...