The Book Club

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the reporter Tania Branigan, whose experience as a correspondent in China led her to believe that the trauma of the Cultural Revolution was the story behind the story that made sense of modern China. In her new book Red Memory: Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution , she explores how the memory of that bloody decade, and the drive to fo...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands: A World In The Making takes us on an extraordinary journey through the whole history of life on earth. Thomas tells me why tyrannosaurus rex didn't eat diplodocus, why if you had to live in a swamp the carboniferous might be a good time to do it, and gives a jaw-dropping sense of what the night...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Ashley Ward, author of Sensational: A New Story of our Senses , which takes us on a cultural, historical and neurobiological tour of the sensorium. Along the way he tells me why Aristotle's notion of five senses is a convenient but cockeyed idea, why men are best letting their wives pick out the curtains, why we call ginger-haired people "redheads" and,...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings, whose new selected poems This Afterlife marks her first UK publication in book form. She tells me why the idea that formal verse is stuffy is wrong, how she thinks Greek myth is a living tradition, and why women poets have to be both Orpheus and Eurydice. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the palaeoarchaeologist Paul Pettitt - whose new book Homo Sapiens Rediscovered explains how new scientific techniques have transformed the way we understand the deep past. He described to me the long and hazardous journey of H. Sap out of Africa - and along the way explains what's so good about mammoths, how cutting-edge cognitive science explains Pale...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Matthew Hollis, author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem . In the tail end of this centenary year of the great monument of modernist poetry, Matthew tells me about the private agonies that went into the making of the poem. We discuss how not just Ezra Pound but Vivien Eliot had a hand in editing it, and why we misunderstand Eliot’s famous claim a...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Rupert Shortt, whose stimulating new book The Hardest Problem addresses one of the oldest difficulties in theology: "the problem of evil". Is this something the religious and the secular can even talk meaningfully about? What's the great challenge Dostoevsky throws up? And what did Augustine get right that Richard Dawkins gets wrong?  Become a Spectator...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m talking to two of the brave souls who turn recent political dramas into the sort of quickly written books we might call the second draft of history. I’m joined by the FT ’s Sebastian Payne, author of The Fall of Boris Johnson , and our own James Heale, co-author of a Liz Truss biography, Out Of The Blue , which notoriously was so rapidly overtaken by events th...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Edward Mendelson, who with the publication of the Complete Poems of W H Auden in two volumes now sets the crown on more than half a century of scholarship on the poet. There’s nobody on the planet who knows more about this towering figure in twentieth-century poetry. He tells me what he finds so inexhaustibly rewarding about Auden’s work, talks about th...

My guest in this week's Book Club Podcast is Christopher de Hamel, author of the new The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club . He tells me about the enduring fascination of illuminated manuscripts, and the fraternity over more than a millennium of those who have loved, coveted, collected, sold, illustrated and – in one case – forged them.  Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this p...

This week’s Book Club podcast is a live special, recorded at this year’s inaugural Braemar Literary Festival. I’m talking to Sir Ian Rankin, in an exclusive pre-publication event, about his new Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. You can see images from the event and more details of the festival at https://www.braemarliteraryfestival.co.uk Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this pod...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov – who has this year become one of the most articulate ambassadors to the West for the situation in his homeland. As a book of his recent writings, Diary of an Invasion, is published in English, he tells me about the experience of trading fiction for the "duty" of a public intellectual in wartime. As an ethnic Russian...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art historian Dr Matt Lodder, whose new book is Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos. He tells me how much more there is to the history of painting on the body than we commonly suppose; and how over the years the history of tattooing (and public attitudes to it) have been shaped by religion, imperialism, class and fashion. Plus, we discover the on...

My guest on this week's podcast is best known as a stand-up comic, and co-host of the hit second world war podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Now Al Murray has produced a book –  Command: How The Allies Learned To Win the Second World War  – in which he looks at the progress of the war through case studies of the men who, one way and another, made a difference to it. He tells me how we turne...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Peter Stothard, whose new book Crassus: The First Tycoon tells the story of the third man in Rome’s great triumvirate: landlord, power-broker, Spartacus’s nemesis and leader of a hubristic expedition to the east that was to see his glorious career end in bitter failure. Image © Teri Pengilley Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast wi...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the doyen of war studies, Lawrence Freedman. His new book Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine takes a fascinating look at the interplay between politics and conflict in the post-war era. He tells me why dictators make bad generals, how soldiers are always playing politics, how the nuclear age has changed the calculus of co...

On this week’s Book Club podcast we’re talking about the best crime writer you’ve (probably) never heard of. As Penguin reissues three of Josephine Tey’s classic Golden Age novels, I’m joined by Nicola Upson, whose own detective stories (most recently Dear Little Corpses ) feature Tey as a central character. She tells me about the unique character of Tey’s writing, her discreet private life, and a...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is A. M. Homes. She talks about her new novel The Unfolding , which imagines a conspiracy of angry Republicans forming after John McCain’s 2008 election defeat in the hopes of taking their America back. She talks about her history of prescience, about the deep weirdness of the Washington she grew up in, and why there’s more than one 'deep state'. Become a...

My guest in this week’s Book Club is Ian McEwan – whose latest novel Lessons draws on his own biography to imagine an 'alternative life' for himself. He tells me about what drew him, in his late career, to using autobiography; about why there’s no contradiction in combining realism with metafiction; about the importance of sex; the rise of cancel culture – and why literary fiction by 'comfortable...

This week we spotlight our most popular episode of the last year, Sam's conversation with Francis Fukuyama about his book Liberalism and its Discontents . He tells Sam how a system that has built peace and prosperity since the Enlightenment has come under attack from the neoliberal right and the identitarian left; and how Vladimir Putin may end up being the unwitting founding father of a new Ukrai...

This week we revisit Sam Leith's conversation with Sir Salman Rushdie, recorded just before the pandemic. ‘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. They discuss everything from his latest book Quichotte , to his relationship with his father, who we learn made u...

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones – whose new book A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA looks at the real-life story behind one of the most mythologised agencies of American power. How does the world's first democratically answerable spy agency actually work? Were all those dirty tricks, extra-legal shenanigans and attempted assassinations – sorry: "healt...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Andrea Wulf to talk about the birth of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century. Her new book Magnificent Rebels tells the story of the "Jena set" -- a staggering assemblage of the superstars of German literature and philosophy who gathered in a small town and collectively came up with a whole new way of looking at the world. Goethe, Schiller, Fich...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the critic, novelist and art historian Chloë Ashby. In her new book Colours of Art: The Story of Art in 80 Palettes she takes a look at how the history of colour - how it was made, how much it cost, what it was understood to mean - has shaped the history of painting. She tells me about the age-old disagreement between the primacy of drawing and colour i...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Anne Weber, author of Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale . She tells me how she came to uncover the remarkable story of Annette Beaumanoir, heroine of the French Resistance, partisan of the Algerian independence struggle, jailbird, exile and survivor – and why when she came to write that story down she chose to do it in verse… Become a Spectator subscriber...