Episodes

  • Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin

    Sue Prideaux: Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gaugin
    Oct 16 2024
    In this week's Book Club podcast Sam Leith’s guest is the great Sue Prideaux who, after her prize-winning biographies of Nietzsche, Munch and Strindberg, has turned her attention to Gauguin in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. She tells me about the great man's unexpected brief career as an investment banker, his highly unusual marriage and his late turn to anticolonial activism. Plus: why she starts with his teeth.

    Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Oscar Edmondson.
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    42 mins
  • Alan Johnson: Harold Wilson, Twentieth Century Man

    Alan Johnson: Harold Wilson, Twentieth Century Man
    Oct 9 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who joins me to talk about his new biography of Harold Wilson. He tells me about Wilson’s rocket-powered rise to the top, how he learned oratory on the hoof, why he might have been right to be paranoid… and what really went on with Marcia.

    This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator
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    34 mins
  • Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point

    Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point
    Oct 2 2024
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Malcolm Gladwell. Twenty-five years after he published The Tipping Point, Malcolm returns to the subject of his first book in Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering. He tells me about the 'magic third', why it's not just Covid that gave us superspreaders, and how what he calls an 'overstory' can have dramatic effects on human behaviour. He talks, too, about why counterintuitive discoveries are easy to find, and why we're all wrong about everything all the time.

    This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator
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    39 mins
  • Alan Garner: Powsels and Thrums

    Alan Garner: Powsels and Thrums
    Sep 25 2024
    My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Alan Garner whose new book of essays and poems is called Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life. Alan tells me about landscape and writing, science and magic, the unbearably spooky story behind his novel Thursbitch – and why, three weeks short of 90, he has no plans to retire.

    This podcast is in association with Serious Readers. Use offer code 'TBC' for £100 off any HD Light and free UK delivery. Go to: www.seriousreaders.com/spectator
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    40 mins
  • Lindsey Hilsum: I Brought The War With Me

    Lindsey Hilsum: I Brought The War With Me
    Sep 19 2024
    My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Channel 4's international editor Lindsey Hilsum. In her new book I Brought The War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line Lindsey intersperses her account of the many conflicts she has covered as a war reporter with the poems that have given her consolation and a wider sense of meaning as she travels through the dark places of the earth. She tells me what poets can do that reporters can't, how you put a human face on statistics, how new technology has changed her trade, and why she goes back and back into danger to bear witness.
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    43 mins
  • Craig Brown: A Voyage Around The Queen

    Craig Brown: A Voyage Around The Queen
    Sep 11 2024
    In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the satirist Craig Brown, talking about his brilliant new book A Voyage Round The Queen. Craig tells me what made him think there was something new to say about Elizabeth II, how he found himself in possession of the only scoop of his career and about his mortifying encounter with Her Maj.
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    32 mins
  • Amy Jeffs: Saints

    Amy Jeffs: Saints
    Sep 4 2024
    My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, artist and historian Amy Jeffs. Her new book Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic aims to recover and bring back to life the wild and fascinating world of medieval saints. She tells me what we lost with the Reformation (all the good swearing, among much else), what was the difference between magic and a miracle, and how what washes up on the Thames foreshore can give us the entry point to a whole vanished imaginarium.
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    46 mins
  • Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939, from the archives

    Ian Sansom: September 1, 1939, from the archives
    Aug 28 2024
    The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September. Until then, and ahead of the 85th anniversary of the start of World War Two, here’s an episode from the archives with the author Ian Sansom.

    Recorded ahead of the 80th anniversary in 2019, Sam Leith talks to Ian about September 1, 1939, the W.H. Auden poem that marked the beginning of the war. Ian’s book is a 'biography' of the poem; they discuss how it showcases all that is best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and Osama Bin Laden.
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    25 mins