The Book Club

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer and film director Neil Jordan, who joins me to discuss his new book Amnesiac: A Memoir. He talks, among other things, about writing for the page and the screen, the uses of myth, putting words into the mouths of historical figures, seeing ghosts in aeroplanes, being ripped off by Harvey Weinstein, and failing to persuade Marlon Brando to play...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Roger McGough, whose new The Collected Poems: 1959-2024 anthologises a poetic career 65 years long and counting. Roger tells me about revisiting his old work and making it new, why he's 'not being serious' about the future of Poetry Please,  and how he narrowly missed being on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to acc...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Michael Nott, author of the new biography Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life . He tells me about the poet's early trauma, his transatlantic identity, his unconventional family and his compartmentalised life, part teaching and writing, part sex, drugs and rock and roll.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectato...

In her new book Cairn, the Scots poet Kathleen Jamie sets a capstone of sorts on her trilogy of short prose collections Findings, Surfacing and Sightlines. She joins Sam on this week’s Book Club podcast to talk about why she hesitates to call herself a nature writer, how prose found her late in life, and why whale-watching isn’t what it used to be. Produced by Patrick Gibbons. Become a Spectator s...

My guest for this week's Book Club is the journalist and author Åsne Seierstad. She tells me about her new book The Afghans: Three Lives Through War, Love and Revolt ; how and why she constructed a novelistic narrative about real-life people and events, and what her encounters with human rights activist Jamila, Taliban commander Bashir and thwarted student Ariana can tell us about the past, presen...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Mark Bostridge. In his new book In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter , Mark describes his quest to uncover the traces of Adele Hugo and the doomed love affair which cost her her sanity. He tells me how Adele’s story chimed in poignant ways with his own life and what it taught him about the unstable emotional contract between biograp...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Marlon James, who ten years ago published his Booker Prize winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings . He tells me how that remarkable book came about, how he feared it would be 'my Satanic Verses', what genre means to him, the importance of myth, and what he learned from the X-Men. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast withou...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan, talking about his extraordinary new book Question 7 . It weaves together memoir, reportage and the imaginative work of fiction. Flanagan collides his relationship with his war-traumatised father and his own near-death experience with the lives of H G Wells and Leo Szilard, the Tasmanian genocide and t...

June 3rd marks the centenary of Franz Kafka's death. To talk about this great writer's peculiar style and lasting legacy, I'm joined by two of the world's foremost Kafka scholars. Mark Harman has just translated, edited and annotated a new edition of Kafka's Selected Stories , while Ross Benjamin is the translator of the first unexpurgated edition of Kafka's Diaries . They tell me what they unders...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Conn Iggulden, probably the best selling author of historical fiction of our day. This week Conn publishes Nero, the first in a new trilogy about the notorious Roman emperor. He tells me about how he learned to write historical fiction, his years-long path to overnight success, and the advantages (and disadvantages) of having an audience comprised of me...

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Olivia Laing to talk about her new book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise . Olivia explores what it is we do when we make a garden, through her own experience of restoring the beautiful garden in her now home. She tells me about what gardens have meant in literary history and myth, how they...

This week, my guest on the Book Club podcast is the poet Jackie Kay, whose magnificent new book May Day combines elegy and celebration. She tells me about her adoptive parents – a communist trade unionist and a leading figure in CND – and growing up in a household where teenage rebellion could mean going to church. We also discuss her beginnings as a poet, her debt to Robbie Burns and Angela Davis...

On this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by Ariane Bankes, whose mother Celia was one of the great beauties of the early twentieth century. Ariane's new book The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century tells the story of the defiantly bohemian lives of Celia and her twin sister Mamaine, whose love affairs and friendships with Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Edmun...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the author and historian Kathryn Hughes, whose new book Catland tells the story of how we learned to love pusskins. Content warning: contains Kipling, Edward Lear, some stinking carts of offal, and the troubled life and weird art of the extraordinary Louis Wain. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator....

On this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Percival Everett, who has followed up his Booker-shortlisted The Trees with James , a novel that reimagines the story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the fugitive slave Jim. Percival tells me what he learned from Mark Twain, how being funny doesn’t make him a comic novelist, and why Black resistance to racism is a matte...

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Dorian Lynskey. In his new book Everything Must Go , Dorian looks at the way humans have imagined the end of the world from the Book of Revelations to the present day. He tells me how old fears find new forms, why Dr Strangelove divides critics, and why there’s always a few people who anticipate global annihilation with something that looks like longing...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, whose hair-raising new book Nuclear War: A Scenari o imagines – minute by minute – what would unfold if the nuclear balloon went up. But rather than a work of fantasy, this is based on meticulously sourced reporting about the effects of nuclear weapons and the structures and policies that govern them. We all kn...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the Pulitzer prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose new book is the memoir A Man of Two Faces. He tells me about the value of trauma to literature, learning about his history through Hollywood, falling asleep in class... and the rotten manners of Oliver Stone.     Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to...

My guest in this week's Book Club is Joel Morris, an award-winning comedy writer whose credits run from co-creating Philomena Cunk to writing gags for Viz and punching up the script for Paddington 2 . In his new book Be Funny Or Die , he sets out to analyse how and why comedy works. He tells me why there are only three keys on the clown keyboard, what laughter does for us in neurological terms, an...

This week's Book Club podcast sees me speaking to the critic and novelist Lauren Oyler about her first collection of essays, No Judgment: On Being Critical . Lauren and I talked about the freedoms and affordances of the essay form; about how making and criticising art has been changed – and hasn't – by the advent of the digital age; why it's weird we all still treat the internet as if it's a new t...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter's new book How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler tells the story of Sefton Delmer, the great genius of twentieth-century propaganda. Peter tells me about Delmer's remarkable life, compromised ethics, and the lessons he still has to offer us.   Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podc...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the award-winning novelist Colum McCann, whose new book takes him out of the territory of fiction and into something slightly different. American Mother is written in collaboration with Diane Foley, mother of Jim Foley, the journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014. He tells me how he came to reinvent himself as (not quite) a ghostwriter, why he thinks...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Tom Chatfield, whose new book is Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are. He tells me what we get wrong about technology, what Douglas Adams got right, and why we can't rely on Elon Musk and people like him to save the world.   Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find o...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Chris Bryant, who tells me about his new book James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder. In it, he seeks to tell what can be known of the lives, world and fatal luck of the last two men executed for homosexuality in Britain.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without ad...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Paula Byrne. In her new book Hardy Women: Mothers, Sisters, Wives, Muses , she investigates the women in the life and work of the great poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. She talks to me about Hardy's romantic life, the torture he inflicted on the women he fell for, and how – in the bitter words of his first wife Emma – 'he understands only the women he in...