Episodios

  • Lamorna Ash: A New Generation's Search for Religion

    Lamorna Ash: A New Generation's Search for Religion
    Apr 23 2025
    My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion. She describes to me how a magazine piece about some young friends who made a dramatic conversion to Christianity turned into an investigation into the rise in faith among a generation that many assumed would be the most secular yet — and into a personal journey towards religious belief.
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    40 m
  • Philippe Sands: 38 Londres Street – On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia

    Philippe Sands: 38 Londres Street – On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia
    Apr 16 2025
    Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, whose new book 38 Londres Street describes the legal and diplomatic tussle over the potential extradition of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Philippe tells Sam why the case was such an important one in legal history, and presents new evidence suggesting that the General’s release to Chile on health grounds may have been part of a behind-the-scenes stitch-up between the UK and Chilean governments. He sets out some of that evidence and pushes back on our reviewer Jonathan Sumption’s scepticism about the case. Here’s an old case, but not yet a cold case.
    Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.
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    58 m
  • Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech?

    Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech?
    Apr 9 2025
    My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Fara Dabhoiwala, whose new book What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea looks not just at the origins of free speech as an idea, but also its uses and misuses. Fara tells me the bizarre story of how he found himself ‘cancelled’, gives us the scoop on who actually invented free speech and explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question – by tracing how we got into our current predicaments.
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    44 m
  • Joe Dunthorne: Children of Radium

    Joe Dunthorne: Children of Radium
    Apr 2 2025
    My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, who is here to talk about his new non-fiction book Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance. In it, he describes how he criss-crossed Europe in search of the truth about his great-grandfather, a Jewish scientist who found himself working on chemical weapons for the Nazis. Joe talks to me about historical guilt, the accidents of fate and human psychology – and making comedy out of tragedy.
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    40 m
  • Francesa Simon: Salka

    Francesa Simon: Salka
    Mar 26 2025
    My guest in this week’s Book Club is Francesca Simon. Best known for her Horrid Henry series of children’s books, Francesca has just published her first novel for grownups, a haunting reworking of a Welsh folk tale called Salka: Lady of the Lake. She tells me how she came to shift direction, what myths offer in terms of storytelling possibility – and why she never tired of her best-known creation.
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    32 m
  • Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis

    Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis
    Mar 19 2025
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the novelist and journalist John Lanchester, one of the contributors to Michael Lewis’s very timely new anthology of reportage on the United States federal government, Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Can the public learn to love a bureaucrat? John tells me why he thinks the workings of government are misunderstood and under appreciated, why we should marvel at the making of the consumer price index, and why he thinks Elon Musk has ‘the wrong handle of the shopping bag’.
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    40 m
  • Anthony Cheetham: A Publisher's Memoir

    Anthony Cheetham: A Publisher's Memoir
    Mar 12 2025
    My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the publisher Anthony Cheetham, one of the biggest figures in British publishing through the second half of the twentieth century and into this one. In his new book A Life in Fifty Books: A Publisher's Memoir, he looks back on his career. He tells me why he had a soft spot for Robert Maxwell; how he launched Ken Follett's career on the top deck of a bus; how losing a press-up competition changed the landscape of publishing (and upset his then wife); how publishing has changed – and how it hasn't; and why Confessions of a Window-Cleaner has a special place in his heart.
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    26 m
  • Michael Wolff: How Trump Recaptured America

    Michael Wolff: How Trump Recaptured America
    Mar 5 2025
    In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by Donald Trump's outstanding Boswell, the magazine writer Michael Wolff. Michael’s new book, All or Nothing:
    How Trump Recaptured America, takes Donald Trump and his colourful cast of hangers-on from the aftermath of the 6 January riots to his triumphal return to the White House.

    Michael tells me why he thinks people in Trumpworld are still talking to him, how the Donald has changed over the decade he has been reporting on him, why he’s confident American democracy will survive a second Trump presidency – and how world leaders, such as Keir Starmer, are best advised to handle this volatile and unpredictable character.
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    33 m
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