Episodes

  • Nick Harkaway: Karla's Choice

    Nick Harkaway: Karla's Choice
    Nov 27 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Nick Harkaway, whose new book Karla's Choice sees him pick up the mantle of his late father, John le Carré, in writing a new novel set in the world of George Smiley. He tells me why, having spent a career trying to put clear blue water between his own work and that of his father, he’s now steering in the opposite direction; about growing up with Smiley; about his relationship with the man so many outsiders have seen as secretive and opaque; about seeking advice from Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill; and why moving from his own style to that of his dad is just a ‘turn on the dial’.
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    32 mins
  • Josh Cohen: All The Rage

    Josh Cohen: All The Rage
    Nov 20 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the psychoanalyst and writer Josh Cohen. With anger seemingly the default condition of our time, Josh’s new book All The Rage: Why Anger Drives the World seeks to unpick where anger comes from, what it does to us, and how it might function in the human psyche as a dark twin of the impulses we think of as love.

    Photo credit: Charlotte Speechley
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    38 mins
  • Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds

    Michael Moorcock: celebrating 60 years of New Worlds
    Nov 13 2024
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the writer, musician and editor Michael Moorcock, whose editorship of New Worlds magazine is widely credited with ushering in a 'new wave' of science fiction and developing the careers of writers like J G Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M Disch and M John Harrison. With the release of a special edition of New Worlds, honouring the 60th anniversary of his editorship, Mike tells me about how he set out to marry the best of literary fiction with the best of the pulp tradition, how he fought off obscenity charges over Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, about his friendship with Ballard and his enmity with Kingsley Amis – and why he's determined never to lose his vulgarity.
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    43 mins
  • 100th anniversary of A A Milne and E H Shepard, with James Campbell

    100th anniversary of A A Milne and E H Shepard, with James Campbell
    Nov 6 2024
    On this week's Book Club podcast we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children's publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne's snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin... and how Pooh became Pooh.
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    36 mins
  • John Suchet: In Search of Beethoven

    John Suchet: In Search of Beethoven
    Oct 30 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is John Suchet whose new book In Search of Beethoven: A Personal Journey describes his lifelong passion for the composer. He tells me how the ‘Eroica’ was his soundtrack to the Lebanese Civil War, about the mysteries of Beethoven’s love-life and deafness, why he had reluctantly to accept that Beethoven was ‘ugly and half-mad’; and how even in the course of writing the book, new scholarship upended his assumptions about events in the composer’s life (from his meeting with Mozart to the circumstances of his death).
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    43 mins
  • Rachel Clarke: The Story of a Heart

    Rachel Clarke: The Story of a Heart
    Oct 23 2024
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Rachel Clarke, author of the Baillie Gifford longlisted new book The Story of a Heart. Rachel tells me how she came so intimately to tell the story of 9-year-old Keira, whose death in a car accident and donation of her heart gave a chance at life to a dying stranger, Max. She describes the medical and conceptual changes that led up to that extraordinary possibility and explains how, as a medic, you have to be able to combine technical professionalism with a sense of the sanctity of the human beings you work with. And she catches us up on how Max is doing eight years on.

    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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    48 mins
  • 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.

    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

    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