Sam Leith

Diary

1 July 2017 9:00 am

Also in Sam Leith’s Diary: the best 18th-century novel since the 18th century and gossiping with David Miller

Diary

29 June 2017 1:00 pm

To Fortnum & Mason last week on the hottest evening of the year to present the Desmond Elliott Prize for…

Study of horses by Théodore Géricault

In praise of neigh-sayers

17 June 2017 9:00 am

Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book…

Magic lantern slides from the mid-19th century

The game of life

18 February 2017 9:00 am

In the introduction to his new book Steven Johnson starts out by describing the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices and…

Magic lantern slides from the mid-19th century

The game of life

16 February 2017 3:00 pm

In the introduction to his new book Steven Johnson starts out by describing the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices and…

A few good books

30 July 2016 9:00 am

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever ITV or the BBC decides — the latter usually with charter renewal…

Smashing stuff

30 July 2016 9:00 am

‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for…

Cervantes the seer

18 June 2016 9:00 am

William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60,…

A dispatch from a family of fooshers

2 April 2016 9:00 am

I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…

Diary

31 March 2016 2:00 pm

I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…

Why would the whole world’s book industry gather in booze-free Sharjah?

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Who goes to the Sharjah International Book Fair? Sam Leith, for one

(Photo: Getty)

Worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them

28 November 2015 9:00 am

We should worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them

The city became cacophonous with bells: a detail of Claes Visscher’s famous early 17th-century panorama shows old London Bridge and some of the 114 church steeples that constantly tolled the death knells of plague victims

Shakespeare's London: where all the world really was a stage

26 September 2015 8:00 am

Sam Leith on the year 1606, when plague and panic were rife — and all the world really was a stage

The Merchant (left) and the Physician from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales

A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world

17 January 2015 9:00 am

Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry

Two small children dying together in the gutter in the Chinese famine of 1946

How Hitler's dreams came true in 1946

11 October 2014 9:00 am

In 1946, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the world seemed a very dark place indeed, says Sam Leith

Tenements in the Gorbals area of Glasgow — considered some of the worst slums in Britain — are replaced by high-rise flats, c. 1960

Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began

13 September 2014 9:00 am

The only thing really swinging in early Sixties Britain, says Sam Leith, was the wrecking-ball

Charles Scott Moncrieff (left) had a deep personal affinity with Proust (right). His rendering of 'À La Recherche du Temps Perdu' is considered one of the greatest literary translations of all time

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime

‘There is nothin’ like a dame’ — nice songs, shame about the lighting: Mitzi Gaynor in ‘South Pacific’, 1958

Why movie musicals matter – to this author anyway

19 July 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith finds much to like in a companion to musical films, and concludes that they matter very much – to the author anyway

Aimé Tschiffely with Mancha and Gato. The strongest emotional bonds he formed on his epic journey were with his horses

A horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York? No problem!

14 June 2014 8:00 am

Sam Leith marvels at a lone horseman’s 10,000-mile ride, braving bandits, quicksands, vampire bats and revolution in search of ‘variety’

Odysseus and the Sirens

If you ever wanted a Homeric jump-start, this is your book

17 May 2014 9:00 am

Adam Nicolson plunges into Homer’s epic poetry and finds it inexhaustible. Sam Leith feels a touch of envy

Shooting prize-dispensing fish in literary barrels

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in…

Churchill reading in his library at Chartwell

Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

19 April 2014 9:00 am

The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith

Management consultancy! Sculpture park! Sports stadium! The many faces of the Delphic Oracle

22 March 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith finds the most sacred site of Ancient Greece still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

The Artist Formerly Known As Whistler

22 February 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith on the exasperating, charismatic painter who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee

Reviewing reviews of reviews — where will it all end? 

25 January 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith reviews the reviews of David Lodge — and wonders where it will all end