The Book Club

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the historian, novelist and former Army officer Allan Mallinson. He introduces his new book The Shape of Battle: Six Campaigns from Hastings to Helmand, and tells me why everyone should take an interest in warfare - as being the most complex of all human interactions; whether war is always 'hell' for everyone involved; and how while the technology may c...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Kavita Puri, whose book Partition Voices excavates the often traumatic memories of the last generation to remember first-hand the mass migration and bloody violence of the partition of India. She tells me why the story has been so shrouded in silence – there isn’t a memorial to Partition, she says, anywhere on earth – and yet how it has shaped the UK’s...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Lindsey Fitzharris – whose new book is The Facemaker: One Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I . At its centre is the compelling figure of Harold Gillies – ace golfer, practical joker, and pioneer of the whole field of plastic surgery. Lindsey tells me about the extraordinary advances he made and the will and skill that drove...

My guest in this week’s book club podcast is Simon Jenkins. His new book The Celts: A Sceptical History tells the story of a race of people who, contrary to what many of us were taught in school, never existed at all. He tells me how and why “celts” were invented, what it has meant and continues to mean for the nations of the Union, and where he thinks we need to go next… Become a Spectator subscr...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Philip Mansel. We talk about his new biography King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV. He tells me what really drove the great megalomaniac, whether he was a feminist avant la lettre, how his depredations in the Rhineland anticipated Putin’s in Ukraine – and why, if he hadn’t revoked the Edict of Nantes, the first man on the moon might...

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the New York Times 's Andrea Elliott, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City. She tells me how she came to spend seven years reporting on a single, homeless family in Brooklyn, how she negotiated her duty to observe rather than participate – and what their telenovela- like experiences tell...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the writer China Miéville to talk about his new book A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto . China makes the case for why this 1848 document deserves our attention in the 21st century, why even its critics would benefit from reading it more closely and sympathetically, and why - in his view - the gamble of a revolutionary abolition of capit...

My guests in this week's Book Club podcast are Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, co-authors (with Cass R Sunstein) of Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgment . Augmenting the work on psychological bias that won Prof Kahneman a Nobel Prize, this investigation exposes a more invisible and often more impactful way in which human judgments go awry: the random-seeming variability which statisticians call noi...

My guest in the Book Club podcast this week is my namesake (but no relation) William Leith – whose new book The Cut That Wouldn't Heal: Finding My Father describes the death of his father and the way it caused him to revisit and re-evaluate his childhood. We talk about the perils and possibilities of autobiography, the difficulty of looking death in the face, and an awkward moment with Karl Ove Kn...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm talking to Wendy K Pirsig – widow of Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , the bestselling book of philosophy of all time. Wendy tells me about her late husband's big idea – the 'Metaphysics of Quality', as set out in a new collection of his writings, On Quality, which she has edited – how fame (and bereavement) changed him, an...

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is Caroline Frost, author of the new Carry On Regardless: Getting to the Bottom of Britain's Favourite Comedy Films. She tells me what those movies tell us about British social history, makes the case for their feminism, argues that their special magic belongs to a British sensibility that no longer exists – and explains why it took twenty or more attempt...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Kuper, whose new book – Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK – argues that to understand the social and psychological dynamics of our present government, you need to understand the Oxford University of the 1980s, where so many of those now in power first met. He argues that the PM's love of winging it was nurtured i...

In this week's Book Club podcast, our subject is the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima - whose novel Beautiful Star is being published in English for the first time this month. My guest is its translator Stephen Dodd, who explains the novel's peculiar mixture of profound seriousness and humour, and its mixture of high literary seriousness with, well, flying saucers. He tells me about Mishima's shelter...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the FT’s foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. In his new book The Age of the Strongman, he takes a global look at the rise of personality-cult autocrats. He tells me what they have in common, what’s new about this generation of strongman leaders - and why his book places Boris Johnson in a cast including Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro and Duterte. Become...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, my guest is the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. 500 years after Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition circumnavigated the globe, Felipe’s gripping new book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan goes back to the original sources to discover that almost everything we think we know about this hero of the great age of exploration is wrong. Become a Spectator subscriber t...

In this week's Book Club podcast, we ask: did the chroniclers of the early Church cover up evidence that the disciples and evangelists of Christ were as often women as men? My guests are the scholars Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, authors of Women Remembered: Jesus' Female Disciples . They pick out the hints and clues that, they say, indicate that women were doing more than just cooking, mourning and...

In this week’s Book Club podcast I’m joined by Francis Fukuyama to talk about his new book Liberalism and its Discontents . He tells me 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 Ukraine. Become a Spectator subscribe...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Colm Toibin. Best known as a novelist, Colm’s new book is his first collection of poetry, Vinegar Hill . He tells me about coming late to poetry, the freedoms and austerities it offers, and why writing isn’t fun. Plus: surviving cancer and outstaying his St Patrick’s Day welcome at the White House… Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podc...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm talking to the investigative reporter Tom Burgis – just days after the High Court threw out an attempt from a London-based company run by eastern European oligarchs to suppress his book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World . Tom tells me how massacres in Kazakhstan connect to the City of London, how western legal frameworks struggle to cope with...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the historian Christopher de Bellaigue to talk about The Lion House , his scintillating and idiosyncratic new book about the great Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. It’s all here: massacres, sieges, over-mighty viziers, Venetian perfidy, and… true love? Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/a...

In this week's Book Club podcast, we're going back 100 years to 1922 – the year which is usually seen as heralding the birth of literary Modernism. My guests are Richard Davenport-Hines, author of A Night At The Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party , and the scholar and critic Merve Emre, who has worked extensively on Joyce and Woolf. I asked them how much Modernism really did rep...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Anna Keay. In her new book The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown she describes the short but traumatic period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy. She tells me about the religious turmoil, the explosion of the newspaper industry, the sympathetic side of Oliver Cromwell... and parallels with our o...

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. As Penguin publishes a lavish new edition of On The Road to mark the occasion, I'm joined by two Kerouac scholars. Holly George-Warren is working on the definitive biography of Kerouac (her previous work includes Lives of Gene Autry and Janis Joplin), and Simon Warner co-edited Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack and runs Rock and th...

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Philip Oltermann, whose new book The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War , unearths one of the most unexpected corners of East German history. At the height of the Cold War, members of the GDR's notorious secret police got together regularly to workshop their poems. Was this a surveillance exercise, a training...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Christopher Prendergast, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature at Cambridge and the author of the new book Living and Dying With Marcel Proust . In the centenary year of Proust's death (and the English publication of  Swann's Way ) he tells me (among other things) how the structure of A La Recherche is more straightforward than many think, w...