The Book Club

Sam is joined by Daniel Markovits, the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In his new book The Meritocracy Trap Daniel advances an argument that will seem startling to partisans of Le...

6 Nov 201931min

In this week’s Spectator Books, Sam talks to the award-winning historian Thomas Penn about his new book The Brothers York: An English Tragedy — in which he argues that the 'Wars of the Roses' weren’t ...

30 Okt 201934min

This week the Books Podcast leaves its dank burrow and hits the road. Sam travelled to the southern Peloponnese to catch up with the Orange-prize winning novelist Madeline Miller, where she was hostin...

23 Okt 201928min

Sam's guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of 'post-truth politics' in his best...

16 Okt 201955min

In this week’s Spectator Books podcast Sam's guest is Jung Chang — whose latest book is the gripping story of three sisters whose political differences put the Mitford even the Johnson clans in perspe...

9 Okt 201936min

Sam's guest in this week’s books podcast is Benjamin Moser, author of an acclaimed new biography of one of America’s most celebrated (and controversial) intellectuals of the twentieth century: Sontag:...

2 Okt 201937min

This week’s podcast features the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, talking about his new collection of short stories Fly Already. Topics on the agenda: how an Israel writer can address the Holocaust, why on...

25 Sep 201930min

Sam's guest in this week’s podcast is the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, whose latest novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has just been shortlisted alongside Salman Rushdie and Margaret A...

18 Sep 201937min