The Book Club

Sam's guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Francesca Wade, whose fascinating first book Square Haunting tells the intersecting stories of five eminent women who lived during the years of and betw...

15 Jan 202038min

In this week’s Book Club podcast, we’re talking about the life and loves of the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Professor John Haffenden joins Sam to discuss the impact of the opening of an ar...

8 Jan 202038min

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam talks to the 'demon dog' of American letters, James Ellroy — whose latest book is This Storm. In a wide-ranging and somewhat NSFW conversation, they talk about mi...

18 Dec 201941min

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam's guest is the children’s writer Piers Torday, author of the Last Wild trilogy and, most recently, The Frozen Sea. Why is winter such a powerful thing in children...

11 Dec 201937min

In this week's Book Club, Sam's guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cov...

4 Dec 201945min

Sam's guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly concei...

27 Nov 201931min

Sam is joined from beyond the grave on this week’s Spectator Book Club by the late Laurie Lee — to talk about Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley, the landscape that made him a writer. Acting as medium, so ...

20 Nov 201926min

In this week’s Spectator Book Club, Sam's guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties an...

13 Nov 201943min