Spectator Books

My guest in this week's books podcast is the former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Along with the economist and former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Julia has written a new book called Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons, which includes interviews with women who've reached the top roles in global institutions, from Christine Lagarde and Joyce Banda to Michelle Bachelet and Theresa May. I asked her about her own time in politics, what she'd have done differently, whether Australia is more sexist than the UK, and her notorious 'misogyny' speech - plus, what she thinks her old sparring partner Tony Abbott has to offer the UK as a trade adviser.  

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is Annie Nightingale - Britain’s first female DJ, occasional Spectator contributor, and longest serving presenter of Radio One. Ahead of the publication of her new book Hey Hi Hello, Annie tells me about the Beatles’ secrets, BBC sexism, getting into rave culture, the John Peel she knew - and how when most people never get past the music they love in their teens, she’s never lost her drive to hear tunes she’s never heard before.

In this week's Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare - which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets', and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of what the form meant to our greatest poet-dramatist. They tell me what sonnets meant to Elizabethans, why so much of what has been said about 'the sonnets' has been wrong - they're not a sequence, and it's vain to look for a Dark Lady or Fair Youth in these candidly bisexual poems - and how they provide perhaps the most intensely inward view of the poet we have.

In this week's books podcast, my guest is that man of parts Loyd Grossman. Loyd's new book is An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope, and the Making of the Eternal City, which explores the titanic influence of Bernini on the Rome we see today, and his partnership with Pope Alexander VII. Loyd tells me why you couldn't bring Italian Baroque home to meet your parents, about Bernini's far from congenial character - and why you'd stick an obelisk on top of an elephant anyway.

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the philosopher, scientist and broadcaster Sam Harris - host of the hugely popular Making Sense podcast. Sam's new book is a selection of edited transcripts of the very best of his conversations from that podcast with intellectual eminences from Daniel Kahneman to David Deutsch, and explores some of the issues that preoccupy him most: to do with consciousness, human cognition, artificial intelligence and the political spaces in which these subjects come to bear. He tells me why civilised conversation is what the world needs now more than ever, why 'cancel culture' is real and J.K. Rowling's trans-rights-activist opponents are 'insane', how 'bad philosophy' has ruined the social sciences, the circumstances under which totalitarianism might be okay - and why, as a liberal, he thinks the left is in danger of destroying America.

In this week’s podcast, we're replaying an episode that first aired earlier this year, but seems more relevant now than ever. Sam is joined by two writers to talk about the perennially fraught issue of race. There’s a wide consensus that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong; but what actually *is* race? Does it map onto a meaningful genetic or scientific taxonomy? Does it map onto a lived reality - is it possible to generalise, say, about 'black' experience? And can we or should we opt out of or ignore it? Adam Rutherford and Thomas Chatterton Williams approach these issues from very different angles: the former, in How To Argue With A Racist, brings genetic science to bear on the myths and realities of population differences; while the latter describes in Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race how after half a lifetime strongly attached to the idea of his own blackness, the arrival of his blonde haired and blue eyed daughter made him rethink his worldview. Subscribe to the Spectator's fi

In this week's books podcast my guest is Kate Teltscher, who tells the fascinating story of one of the greatest showpieces of Victorian Britain: the Palm House in Kew Gardens. Though the gardens and their glassy centrepiece are now a fixture of London's tourist map, as her new book Palace of Palms reveals, they very nearly weren't. She tells me how a team of brilliant mavericks used cutting-edge science and engineering to build one of the greatest constructions of its era... in just the wrong place. With walk-on parts for Darwin, Humboldt and Alfred Russel Wallace, she reveals the way in which Victorian botany extended its tendrils through the whole Empire, shows how the palm was seen as the "prince of plants", and describes the quest for the palm of all palms, the elusive coco-de-mer. Subscribe to the Spectator's first podcast newsletter here and get each week's podcast highlights in your inbox every Tuesday.

On this week's books podcast, my guess is Oxford University's Professor of European Archaeology, Chris Gosden. Chris's new book The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present. opens up what he sees as a side of human history that has been occluded by propaganda from science and religion. Accordingly, he delves back to evidence from the earliest human settlements all over the world to learn about our magical past -- one thread in what he calls the "triple-helix" of our cultural history. He tells me why John Dee got a bad rap, where magic wands came from -- and why, unusually as an academic, he argues that magic isn't just an anthropological curiosity but might, in fact, have something useful to teach us. Subscribe to the Spectator's first podcast newsletter here and get each week's podcast highlights in your inbox every Tuesday.

This week's Book Club podcast is brought to you rather later than we'd planned. In spring this year, the explorer and writer Robin Hanbury-Tenison was due to be talking to me about his new book Taming The Four Horsemen: Radical Solutions to Defeat Pandemics, War, Famine and the Death of the Planet. We'd been excited to have him on, not least because his book's interest in pandemic disease was starting to seem strangely prescient. The day before we were due to record, Robin emailed me to say that he had developed a terrible cough that would make recording impossible so we agreed to postpone our conversation. The next I heard was from Robin's son Merlin: Robin had been taken into hospital with Covid and the prognosis was grim. He'd been given only a 20 per cent chance of survival. But survive he did -- and once his health permitted we finally had our encounter. Listen to Robin talk about what the collapse of ancient civilisations can teach us about our own, how he sees the future of agriculture and medicine...

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the Argentine-born novelist Andrés Neuman, who was acclaimed by the late Roberto Bolano as the future of Spanish-language fiction. We talk about boundary-crossing in literature, historical trauma, multilingual jokes - and his dazzling new novel Fracture, which sees a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grappling with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Click here to try 12 weeks of the Spectator for £12 and get a free £20 Amazon gift voucher.

In this week's books podcast I'm joined by Alan Johnson and Andrew Adonis to talk about the latter's new biography of a neglected great of British political history: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill. He was, in Andrew's estimation, the man who did most to save Europe from Stalin. So why has Bevin been so forgotten? In what way was he Churchillian? What would he have made of the current state of the Labour party? And will we ever see his like again? Click here to try 12 weeks of the Spectator for £12 and get a free £20 Amazon gift voucher.

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the historian Rutger Bregman. In his new book Humankind, Rutger argues that practically every novelist, psychologist, economist and political theorist has got it all wrong: humans are naturally caring, sharing and altruistic... and far from being the one thing that stands in the way of a Hobbesian war of all against all, 'civilisation' is actually what makes us behave badly. You’re probably thinking: 'Come off it, hippy.' Why not see if he can change your mind? Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the writer Susanna Moore. Best known for her pitch-black erotic thriller In The Cut, recently republished to huge acclaim, Susanna has just published a superb memoir of her young womanhood in Hawaii and Los Angeles - from shopgirl at Bergdorf's to model and actor, script reader for Warren Beatty and lover to Jack Nicholson - called Miss Aluminium. She talks about writing the past, sexual violence, the rage that inspired In The Cut, the young Roman Polanski - and why clothes matter. Click here to try 12 weeks of the Spectator for £12 and get a free £20 Amazon gift voucher.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the biographer Adam Begley. Adam's work includes biographies of John Updike and the Belle Epoque photographer, cartoonist and aeronaut Felix Tournachon, aka Nadar. In his new book he turns his attention to the great escapologist Harry Houdini. I asked him what it was that made Houdini special, what challenges a lifelong myth-maker (aka inveterate liar) poses to the biographer, and how Adam tends to get on with his subjects. As Adam describes in our talk, you can watch a video of Houdini in action here. Presented by Sam Leith. Get a subscription to The Spectator as well as a copy of Lionel Shriver's book, all for free here.

Is there life, as David Bowie wondered, on Mars? In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is the astrobiologist Kevin Peter Hand, author of a fascinating new book Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. Kevin explains how and where we're currently looking for extraterrestrial life in our own solar system - and why on the basis of sound science he's optimistic that we'll find it. He tells us about the brilliantly ingenious scientific deduction that has established that there exist oceans of liquid water deep under the icy shells of moons of Saturn and Jupiter, why it's quite possible to suppose that aliens might be living in those oceans - and how we can even speculate about what those aliens might look like. And if Kevin's old schoolmate Elon Musk is listening, he has a favour to ask... Get a month's free trial of The Spectator and a free wireless charger here.

In this week's Book Club podcast we're talking about Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh's great novel is 75 years old this week, and I'm joined by our chief critic Philip Hensher, and by the novelist's grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press's complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh's career, what did it mean to the author and how did he revise it -- and why have generations of readers, effectively, misread it? Get a month's free trial of The Spectator and a free wireless charger here.

My guest for this week’s Book Club podcast is the great Michael Frayn, talking about his new book of sketches Magic Mobile, lockdown life, the joys and perils of technology, adapting Spies for the screen - and how his muse has changed as he gets older. Click here to try four weeks of the Spectator for free and get a free wireless charger.

In this week’s Book Club podcast my guest is the writer and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands. His new book The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive describes his painstaking quest to track down the real story of a Nazi genocidaire who fled justice into the murky underground society of postwar Italy. Philippe tells me about the strange world of shifting allegiances he uncovered, and his own no less shifting relationship with his subject’s son - who continued against all the evidence to believe his father was a good man.

In this week's books podcast I'm joined by Mark O'Connell, a writer whose latest book Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back sees him investigate doomsday preppers, wannabe Mars colonists, the Ayn Rand billionaires buying up New Zealand, and the tourist route through Chernobyl. Why, he asks, is the apocalypse something we seem to fantasise about as much as fear? Presented by Sam Leith.

In this week's books podcast I'm joined from across the Atlantic by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro to talk about his new book Shakespeare in a Divided America, which discusses the myriad ways in which America has taken Britain's national playwright up as its own; and then used him as a lightning-rod for the deepest issues about its own national identity - issues of masculinity, race relations, immigration and assassination. Jim talks about why a country founded by theatre-hating, Brit-hating Puritans fell in love with a British playwright; how Lincoln was the greatest reader of Shakespeare in American history; about whether America is the purest repository of Shakespeare's language; about how a beef between two Shakespeare actors once led to light artillery being deployed in downtown Manhattan - and how Ulysses S Grant may have been the greatest Desdemona the theatre never quite had. Presented by Sam Leith.