Episodes

  • 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
  • Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander, from the archives

    Carlo Rovelli: Anaximander, from the archives
    Aug 21 2024
    The Book Club has taken a short summer break and will return in September with new episodes. Until then, here’s an episode from the archives with the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

    Carlo joined Sam in March 2023 to discuss his book Anaximander and the Nature of Science and explain how a radical thinker two and a half millennia ago was the first human to intuit that the earth is floating in space. He tells Sam how Anaximander’s way of thinking still informs the work of scientists everywhere, how politics shapes scientific progress and how we can navigate the twin threats of religious dogma and postmodern relativism in search of truth.
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    48 mins
  • Adam Higginbotham: Challenger

    Adam Higginbotham: Challenger
    Aug 14 2024
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Adam Higginbotham, whose new book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space describes the 1986 space shuttle disaster that took the lives of seven astronauts and, arguably, inflicted America's greatest psychic scar since the assassination of JFK. He tells me about the extraordinary men and women who lost their lives that day, the astounding engineering involved in the spacecraft that America had started to take for granted, and the deep roots and long aftermath of the accident.
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    50 mins
  • Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama

    Nathan Thrall: A Day In The Life of Abed Salama
    Aug 7 2024
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is Nathan Thrall, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Day In The Life of Abed Salama – which uses the story of a terrible bus crash in the West Bank to describe in ground-up detail the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Speaking to me from Jerusalem, Nathan tells me why he believes it's right to call Israel an 'apartheid state', how the bureaucracy of the Occupied Territories made the fatal crash 'an accident that wasn't an accident'; and what he thinks needs to change to bring hope of an end to the conflict.
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    35 mins
  • David Baddiel: My Family

    David Baddiel: My Family
    Jul 31 2024
    My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the writer and comedian David Baddiel, talking about his new book My Family: the Memoir. He talks about childhood trauma, what made him a comedian, and how describing in minute detail his mother’s decades long affair with a slightly crooked golfing memorabilia salesman is an act not of betrayal but of loving recuperation.
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    41 mins
  • Neil Jordan: Amnesiac

    Neil Jordan: Amnesiac
    Jul 24 2024
    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 King Lear.
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    43 mins