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The Book Club — Arts
The Book Club

Literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented weekly by Sam Leith.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Latest Episodes:

Judith Flanders: A Place For Everything Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

My guest in this week’s books podcast is the historian Judith Flanders, whose A Place For Everything tells the story of a vital but little considered part of intellectual history: alphabetical order. Judith tells me how this innovation both reflected and enabled the movement from oral to written culture, from a dogmatic to a secular worldview, and made possible the modern administrative state. And we touch on, among other things, prototypes of the Post-It note, the contribution of the French Revolution to indexing, the bizarre British Library shelfmark for Gawain and the Green Knight, and why Dewey, of decimal fame, was an utter rotter.

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Toby Ord: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity Feb 10, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s books podcast, I’m joined by the philosopher Toby Ord to talk about the cheering subject of planetary catastrophe. In his book The Precipice, new in paperback, Toby argues that we’re at a crucial point in human history - and that if we don’t start thinking seriously about extinction risks our species may not make it through the next few centuries. Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear immolation, killer AI, engineered pandemics... Toby weighs up the risks of each, and tells us why we should care.

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Shalom Auslander: Mother for Dinner Feb 03, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by one of the funniest writers working today. Shalom Auslander’s new novel is Mother For Dinner, which is set in perhaps the most oppressed minority community in the world. He talks to me about cannibalism, identity politics, his beef with tragedy... and an extremely high-risk prayer at the Wailing Wall.

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Simon Winchester: Land Jan 27, 2021

Show notes

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the writer Simon Winchester, whose new book takes on one of the biggest subjects on earth: earth. Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Made The Modern World starts from the author's own little corner of New England - what he proudly calculates at a bit more than three billionths of the earth's surface that he can call his own - and roams worldwide and through time and from the first prehistoric boundary lines to the modern age. He asks whether capitalism is possible without land rights, whether climate change will alter our relationship to property, why the pioneering map makers of the nineteenth century are now barely heard of - and just what the Dutch are up to.

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Catherine Mayer and Anne Mayer Bird: Good Grief Jan 20, 2021

Show notes

My guests on this week's Book Club podcast are the writer and Women's Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer, and her mother, the arts publicist Anne Mayer Bird. They are mother and daughter -- but a year ago they became 'sister widows', as both lost their husbands within a few weeks of one another. Their new book is called Good Grief: Embracing life at a time of death, and they join me to talk about grief in the time of Covid, how social perceptions of widowhood put pressure on the bereaved, and what they think needs to change at a societal and personal level with regards to how we treat death and bereavement.

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What would Orwell be without Nineteen Eighty-Four? Jan 13, 2021

Show notes

In the first Book Club podcast of the year, we’re marking the moment that George Orwell comes out of copyright. I’m joined by two distinguished Orwellians — D. J. Taylor and Dorian Lynskey — to talk about how the left’s favourite Old Etonian speaks to us now, and how his reputation has weathered. Was he secretly a conservative? Was he a McCarthyite snitch? How would he be remembered had he died before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four? And does 'Orwellian' mean anything much at all?

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Laura Thompson: Life in a Cold Climate Dec 23, 2020

Show notes

This week's Book Club podcast celebrates the 75th anniversary of the publication of Nancy Mitford's breakthrough novel The Pursuit of Love. Laura Thompson, author of the biography Life In A Cold Climate, joins me to talk about the way the book was written, how it helped create the Mitford myth - and how it shaped an enduringly ambivalent story of familial happiness and 'true love' from the sometimes heartrending materials of the author's own life.

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Nicholas Shakespeare: remembering John Le Carre Dec 16, 2020

Show notes

In this week's Book Club podcast, we remember the great John Le Carre. I'm joined by one of the late writer's longest standing friends, the novelist Nicholas Shakespeare. He tells me about Le Carre's disdain for - and debt to - Ian Fleming, his intensely secretive and controlling personality, his magnetic charm, his thwarted hopes of the Nobel Prize... and why at the end of his life he acquired an Irish passport.

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Ed Caesar: The Moth and The Mountain Dec 09, 2020

Show notes

In this week's Book Club podcast, my guest is the journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book The Moth and the Mountain tells the story of a now forgotten solo assault on Everest that ended in disaster. But as Ed argues, the heroic failure can be a richer and more resonant story than any triumph -- and as he painstakingly excavated the story of Maurice Wilson, it was just such a rich and resonant story he discovered: of a character who became fixated on the mountain as a means of redeeming wartime trauma and a chequered and at times disgraceful romantic history, of getting his own back on hated authority figures, and -- just possibly -- of finding a safe space for his darkest secret of all.

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Douglas Stuart: Shuggie Bain Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart. His first novel, Shuggie Bain, tells the story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. It's a story close to the author's own. He joins me from the States to tell me about the ten years he spent writing the book and the dozens of rejections he had from publishers, how moving to the States made him see Glasgow more clearly - and how he went from growing up in a house without books to winning the Booker prize for his first novel.

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