Sam Leith
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@spectator lit ed. My new book The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading is now out in paperback: bit.ly/TheHauntedWood
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Articles by Sam Leith
Why aren’t all executions public?
There is a boring, snooty, self-righteous school of thought that the judicial killing of a human being is a grave and dignified sacrament of the state. It says that where the law provides for the government to take a life, that is about as serious a decision as, in peacetime, it gets.
Marvel’s Wolverine just doesn’t work
Grade: B If you’re the sort of person for whom ‘SNIKT’ – the sound-effect that, by ancient tradition, accompanies the unsheathing of Wolverine’s adamantium claws – is music to the ears, you may have been looking forward to Marvel’s Wolverine. You may, even, have perked up as you saw a poster for it sail by on the side of a bus. Alas, I’m here to report that it is, if not exactly a dog, not quite a wolverine either.
Book Club Turns Ten
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The real reason kids are giving up reading
Another day, another dispiriting survey about the crisis in childhood reading. Parents who earn more than £100,000 a year are the least likely of all social groups surveyed to read aloud every night to their children. So much for the sharp-elbowed middle classes. Even when we factor in the possibility that the cash-rich and time-poor are outsourcing bedtime stories to nanny, it’s a less than encouraging finding.
The King and Charles Spencer are both victims
Is it possible to avoid taking sides in the latest skirmish of the forever wars about the late Diana, Princess of Wales? I’d like to hope it is, though I appreciate it might be seen as a bit counter-journalistic to do so. Suppose the King is a flawed man, but not a monster? Suppose Earl Spencer is also a flawed man, but not a monster? Suppose the King is a flawed man, but not a monster? Suppose Earl Spencer is also a flawed man, but not a monster?
At last, a cool use for AI
I was just writing in the Spectator this week about the latest wave of AI doomers, and en passant I made a far from exhaustive catalogue of a few of the negative things that AI had given us: The nature of the universe being as it is, a day or so later a story popped up that made me, well, not love AI, but see something worth having in it. It was this one. Turns out, you see, that AI agents have taken to jibber-jabbering at each-other like purple minions or Gremlins after a midnight feed.
The real reason AI is so frightening
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the anxious Colonel Cathcart is in the habit of compiling little lists of recent events. He draws these lists up under two headings: “Black Eyes” and “Feathers In My Cap.” Into the former, he puts everything that seems to damage his chances of preferment – bombing his own runway again, and so forth – and in the latter, everything that will redound to his credit. I like to imagine Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, and his fellow AI overlords doing something similar.
The biggest of all the delusions about Reform
If public life contains a very high-profile, very vulnerable fantasist with an inexhaustible appetite for money and publicity, what is the duty of care that we all owe them? It’s a question that seems to arise repeatedly in the so-called post-truth era. Of course, anybody’s lies and delusions are, to a substantial extent, their own responsibility. But these situations always exist in a context.
I’m not convinced keeping PC Harper’s killers in jail is justified
Just in time to meet his self-imposed deadline of early September, the Prime Minister has found a way of preventing two cop-killers from returning to the streets. The method of keeping the killers of PC Andrew Harper, convicted of manslaughter in the 2019 killing, behind bars is to block all those convicted of any form of manslaughter – along with grooming, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child – from eligibility for the early release scheme.
Does it matter that Jason Arday's memoir is made up?
Bloomsbury's former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on the Today programme this week to argue that Jason Arday's publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unfortunate Things . The argument she made raised a lot of eyebrows and has precipitated a lot of self-righteous ridicule online. ‘I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone's life,' she told listeners.
Does it matter that Jason Arday’s memoir is made up?
Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on British television this week to argue that the late Jason Arday’s publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unfortunate Things. The argument she made raised a lot of eyebrows and has precipitated a lot of self-righteous ridicule online.
An agreeable new 2D fighter
Grade: B The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, who’s called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is up front about his philosophy. ‘Actions are worth more than any word,’ he says. ‘And the greatest action is… to fight!’ Well, that’s Proust told, the big biscuit-dunking jessie. Here’s a very competently made, agreeably hectic new entry in the lineage of that most apparently basic of computer games, the 2D fighter.
The truth about Andy Burnham’s tea-drinking habit
The Times, the newspaper of record, has been invited to witness proceedings in No. 10 North – which is Andy Burnham’s Mancunian analogue, I suppose, of Donald Trump’s ‘Winter White House’. They witnessed, as you’d expect, some blethering on about planning permission and mayoral powers, a joke by Angela Rayner and a humorous cardboard cut-out of Larry the cat.
Agrippa by Robert Harris review – persuasive portrait of rivalry in ancient Rome
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Agrippa by Robert Harris review – persuasive portrait of rivalry in ancient Rome
If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus.
Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason review – a witty story of infatuation set in the literary world
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Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason review – a witty story of infatuation set in the literary world
The protagonist of Meg Mason’s new book, the follow-up to the 2020 tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, is an invisible woman. She might well be standing there but you won’t notice her. She’s a techie at literary festivals – the person who shuffles up to a famous writer a few minutes before their event and apologetically slides a microphone cable down their shirt while they’re making small talk with the chair or accepting a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from an anxious publicist.
Who cares if Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is nothing like the book?
You could think of it as a Venn diagram. One circle would contain all the people who have read Homer’s Odyssey (it would contain a much, much smaller circle of people who have read it in the original Greek). The other circle would contain all the people who have seen Christopher Nolan’s film. The second of those two circles would contain all the people whose opinion on the movie was remotely worth listening to.
George Cottrell and the troubling incuriosity of Nigel Farage
I wrote in this space not long ago, in the context of Nicola Sturgeon, about how incuriosity can, when taken to extremes, be a sort of superpower. So it appears to be, too, with Nigel Farage. First there was this crypto zillionaire stuffing the pockets of his red corduroy trousers with cash. Did Nigel at no point wonder whether there was any agenda beyond rewarding him personally for being a smashing chap and a real laugh to have a pint with?
The EES border check debacle is the EU at its worst
Among my many unpopular and unpatriotic opinions is that, in most of the ways that matter, the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks won. With less than half an hour’s work, and at a cost (to them) of less than twenty lives, Osama bin Laden’s mob of maniacs changed the course of history and cost the economies of the West an unimaginable amount.
If you’re 12, you’ll love this game
Grade: B+ Why do elephants paint their balls red? So they can hide in cherry trees, of course. The principle behind this playground joke is the animating principle of the brand-new online indie game currently going viral among the under-15s. Finger on the pulse, me. Actually, I only know about this game because my 12-year-old son Jonah started begging to be allowed to download it, which made a pleasant change from begging to be allowed to download Fortnite.
Must we give Andy Burnham a chance?
“Why don’t you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham? Give him a chance, sort of thing?” This seemed, on the face of it, an admirably charitable and fair-minded suggestion. Amid the projectile-vomiting epidemic of demented negativity and hysterical loathing which, as I remarked in this space last week, is the daily stuff of our politics, I thought for a moment, he’s asking me to do something a little bit different.
Keir and loathing: the hatred of Starmer has gone too far
It’s possible, though not popular, to feel a bat-squeak of sympathy for Sir Keir Starmer on a human level these days. It can’t be much fun being him. It’s also possible, though not popular, to hold in your head at the same time the ideas that a) he’s been a pretty useless Prime Minister and b) he isn’t an actual monster. He has, where he has made any decisions, made terrible decisions.
Will Keir Starmer's under-16 social media ban actually work?
Today, with much fanfare, HM Government is rolling out its new policy to protect young people from online harms. Here is a political/legal move for which I am the target audience. I have three teenagers, and for those not so afflicted, let me tell you that keeping them from spending all day, every day goggling at one piece of tech or another is an infernal game of whack-a-mole. Item: Child One, Instagram.
Who really owns your iPhone?
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed. We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe This is the business model that now dominates the digital age.
The Children by Melissa Albert review – intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers
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The Children by Melissa Albert review – intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers
Melissa Albert.Photograph: Laura Etheredge (Photograph: Laura Etheredge) Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. And, as AS Byatt put it crisply when talking about her 2009 novel The Children’s Book: “Writing children’s books isn’t good for the writer’s own children.” Think of Christopher Milne, raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett, dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame, lying down on train tracks.
Bond makes a great video game
Grade: A– He may not know how to make a drinkable martini, but James Bond makes a great videogame. GoldenEye on the Nintento 64 was the first; but there’s always been potential there for more. After all, the character has all the stuff that the medium excels at. He has car chases, he fights, he shoots people, he blows things up, and he appeals strongly to adolescent boys. In 007: First Light, he gets ample opportunity to do all those things, sometimes in very quick succession.
Nicola Sturgeon is no victim
They should make a film about Peter Murrell, shouldn’t they? Starring, possibly, Leonardo DiCaprio. Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband is not only a crook of shameless proportions, but for a decade or so, he somehow spent like a sailor on shore leave without anyone around him raising so much as an eyebrow. Not for him the discreet Swiss bank account or the mattress stuffed with bearer-bonds. Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale Jr, Macavity the Mystery Cat: these figures are cautious amateurs by comparison.
The Andrew investigation is looking increasingly desperate
‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime’ is the can-do attitude attributed to Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. There’s more than a flavour of that attitude, I think, in Thames Valley Police’s investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Two days ago, the news was led by a story, briefed by the police, that the scope of the investigation into the former Duke of York for possible Misconduct in Public Office was being widened to include questions of sexual misbehaviour.
AI paranoia has come for fiction
‘Polished and confident, with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line, Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority.’ So said Sharma Taylor, regional judge for the Caribbean winner of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize, The Serpent in the Grove. AI is very good at producing, at scale, exactly the sort of stuff that such critics will affect to like.
I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder review – romance for the terminally online
‘Under the surface this is a warm and quite an old-fashioned sort of novel’ … I Want You to Be Happy. Photograph: Dimensions/Getty Images The opening section of I Want You to Be Happy is an excellently droll and surefooted description of a man and a woman meeting in a bar, trying to make conversation over the music and flirting vaguely. They establish that she is 23 and that he is 35.
Keir Starmer is an even worse PM than Boris Johnson
Remember when Sir Keir Starmer was sold to us as, effectively, the anti-Boris? Where Boris was slapdash, Keir would be methodical; where Boris fibbed as easily as breathing, Keir would be truthful as a boy-scout; where Boris was boastful, Keir would be modest; where Boris exuded ambition, Keir would exude dutifulness; where Boris was charismatic, Keir would bore the pants off us; where Boris mumbled schoolroom Latin, Keir would mumble courtroom Latin.
TV doesn’t ruin childhood, but phones might
When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?” Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations of children sat on the sofa gormlessly drinking Um Bongo while we watched the show’s cast demonstrate all the wholesome arts-and-crafts activities we could have been doing instead of watching TV.
Solace House by Will Maclean review – immensely fun gothic horror with a psychedelic twist
Mind-mangling realms … Will Maclean.Photograph: PR (Photograph: PR) “Man,” says one of Will Maclean’s characters on catching sight for the first time of the titular Solace House. “Gothic always tries too hard.” Here, perhaps, is a self-deprecating wink in a novel full of them – a novel that throws the (ancient, sinister, rusted taps coughing a disquieting red-brown liquid) kitchen sink at the problem of writing a good old-fashioned piece of gothic-flavoured weird fiction.
Potholes could pave the way to victory for Reform
When I was young and green and working as a gossip columnist, I learned much from the energy and enthusiasm of my colleague Lady Olga Maitland. Long before Boris Johnson decided he could be an MP at the same time as editing this magazine, Olga – she was always ahead of the curve – combined her duties as a gossip reporter with serving as the Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam. And my goodness, she was interested in bins.
Three Books: An old one and two new ones
Presidential assassination attempts are becoming kind of a routine occurrence, aren’t they? I’m not saying that the kerfuffle at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner didn’t lead the news, but it didn’t last much more than about 12 hours at the top of the agenda. Ho hum, another whacko. A few op-eds, then on to the next thing. Difficult second album syndrome.
Britain has a Prime Minister problem
I wrote not all that long ago about this disconcerting situation we’re in where the only news story the Prime Minister seems capable of generating is a news story about the likelihood of his losing his job. Let’s just say, things haven’t exactly changed.
The perfect game for any thwarted sadist
Grade: B+ Some of us lost a lot of our early twenties to a god-game called Dungeon Keeper, in which you built and maintained a dungeon and filled it with tricks, traps and monsters to kill the goody-two-shoes heroes who periodically tried to invade it. Minos is a descendant of that game, and a welcome one. Similar isometric projection, similar vibe, similar moral outlook.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and the dangerous truth about alcohol
There’s something, I think, very heartening and touching in reading Andrew Lloyd Webber talk about joining Alcoholics Anonymous at the ripe old age of 78. He told the Sunday Times’s Melissa Denes: “I am a recovering alcoholic. Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” He waxes lyrical about his delight in going to AA meetings every day. There may be some grumbling in AA circles about Lord L-W’s candour Bloody good on him.
London hasn’t fallen
“London Has Fallen.” Little did I imagine, when I sat on the sofa with my friend Tanya gorging on Quality Street and enjoying the latest instalment of Gerard Butler’s heroically average action-movie series, that the film’s title would come to sum up a major strand of global political propaganda.
From Peepo! to Middlemarch: 25 books to read before you turn 25
default The news about reading in general, and childhood reading in particular, is not good. Last year a National Literacy Trust survey of more than 100,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 18 discovered that the number of children who read for pleasure is the lowest since records of this sort began. Only about a third of children say they actively enjoy reading, and the number who report reading daily in their free time is has halved over the last two decades.
Why Artemis II matters
Weren’t those images beamed back from the Artemis II mission something to catch the breath in the throat? If something in you wasn’t stirred by the sight of Earth, glimpsed through the window of the space capsule past the silhouetted face of the astronaut Christina Koch, I don’t think you can be fully alive.
The illusion and delusion of Matt Goodwin
Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it’s going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave.
The case for cloning the Queen’s corgis
‘Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,’ was the verdict of the late Lord Charteris on Sarah Ferguson. He did not, I think, mean it as a compliment. But her subsequent career has shown quite how liberating such a disposition of character can be. Combine a complete lack of class or taste with a resoundingly innocent love of money, and there’s really nothing you can’t do. Or won’t, perhaps.
My Back Pages No.1
I’ve been toying with a “My Back Pages” slot as a feature for this newsletter. The premise would be to grab a book from the shelves of my library, and maybe post a photograph if it’s interestingly inscribed or marked up, or shows signs of having been eaten by a dog, clawed by a cat or dropped in the bath.
Glorious: Resident Evil – Requiem reviewed
Grade: A Lordy. The Resident Evil survival horror series is three decades old. It probably qualifies by now as Sitting Tenant Evil. Picture it snacking on flies in just the sort of dingy, hasn’t-been-tidied-for-30-years rent-controlled apartment that would make a good setting for a scene in the game.
Richard Tice’s tax trickery shows he is a true patriot
Reform’s Richard Tice has been the subject of what I fear is intended as a hit-piece in the Sunday Times. “The Deputy Leader of Reform UK avoided nearly £600,000 in corporation tax after obtaining a rare legal status for his company,” it reports. “Richard Tice then channeled the company’s dividends into an offshore trust and a string of dormant businesses. Several did not pay any tax during the relevant period.” They say all this, I regret to have to report, as if it’s a bad thing.
Poems, Unread; Mary Beard's Homework; Lovely Swedes
So, Venn diagrams. I saw a Substack note this week from Alexander Fayne where he said: “I’m increasingly starting to worry that the venn diagram between People Who Write Poetry and People Who Read Poetry is just a circle.” I replied saying that I thought the situation was worse: it’s a circle of “people who write poetry” containing a much much smaller circle of “people who read poetry”. I say this from bitter experience.
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