The Book Club

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.   

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.