Sam Leith

Is anti-Etonian prejudice really OK?

27 September 2021 3:10 am

Don’t you wish Angela Rayner would come off the fence, just once in a while, and tell us what she…

Keir Starmer’s essay is a cliché-ridden disaster

23 September 2021 9:48 pm

Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about…

The true cost of the convenience economy

24 July 2021 9:00 am

‘Where’s the car?’ said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. ‘It’s where you left it,’ I…

How to kill the English language

20 March 2021 9:00 am

Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the…

Why Doc Martens are the only footwear you need

30 January 2021 9:00 am

Doc Martens are one of those quintessentially British things that, like the royal family and lorries queuing on the M20,…

‘People confuse sadness with darkness’: the complicated world of Mary Gaitskill

19 December 2020 9:00 am

An interview with the American novelist Mary Gaitskill

The serious business of graphic novels

12 December 2020 9:00 am

One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…

The texture of our country is changing before our eyes

5 December 2020 9:00 am

On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…

Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith

How moral is it to refuse a vaccine?

21 November 2020 9:00 am

Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series…

The Hay festival’s uneasy dance with the UAE

24 October 2020 9:00 am

The Hay Festival, memorably described by Bill Clinton as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, has, over the past couple of…

A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history

3 October 2020 9:00 am

Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…

In defence of wokeness

3 October 2020 9:00 am

We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of…

Today’s undergraduates are customers – and the customer is always right

22 August 2020 9:00 am

If you’re looking for a sign of the academic times, you could do worse than consider the image, published in…

She was just a damn cat – and I loved her

18 July 2020 9:00 am

I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…

anarchy

How do you enforce anarchy?

12 June 2020 1:48 am

I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so…

Salman Rushdie: ‘The implausible has become everyday’

25 April 2020 9:00 am

Salman Rushdie on writing in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen

Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all

11 April 2020 9:00 am

‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your…

There’s no sign of apocalypse in East Finchley – yet

14 March 2020 9:00 am

I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the…

The internet is taking the joy out of quotations

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

The internet is taking the joy out of citations

The real Calamity Jane was distressingly unlike her legend

7 February 2020 10:00 pm

Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different

‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed

21 December 2019 9:00 am

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon…

Who are today’s fictional heroes?

21 December 2019 9:00 am

What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality:…

Remembering the genius of Clive James

7 December 2019 9:00 am

‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian…

‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend

30 November 2019 9:00 am

When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend,…