Sam Leith

Much more than just a game: World of Warcraft at 20

9 November 2024 9:00 am

On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics,…

Do we care that the King is rich?

4 November 2024 5:58 pm

For the first time, the true extent of the property held by the King and the Prince of Wales’s private…

Why is Elon Musk obsessed with Diablo IV?

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo…

Keir Starmer, Karl Marx and the cant of ‘working people’

28 October 2024 5:32 pm

Labour has promised that, come what may, they will not be increasing taxes on ‘working people’. Well, jolly good. Those…

Is it time to ban the boy band?

21 October 2024 5:56 pm

It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that ‘if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it…

Labour were right to protect Taylor Swift

14 October 2024 5:00 pm

Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its…

Sue Gray, Keir Starmer and the centre-left’s self-righteousness problem

7 October 2024 3:47 am

‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha,…

The tragedy of Phillip Schofield

30 September 2024 4:00 pm

Robinson Crusoe on Mas a Tierra; Napoleon on Elba; Schofield on Nosy Ankarea. Island exile is an opportunity for man,…

Trump could teach Starmer a thing or two about speeches

25 September 2024 2:42 am

The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be…

Why are you proud to be British?

23 September 2024 4:49 pm

Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose…

Why do the Starmers need a personal shopper?

16 September 2024 3:40 pm

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that…

We should hunt down the companies responsible for Grenfell

9 September 2024 4:00 pm

I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath…

The expensive business of quoting poetry

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…

Charming and silly: Sam & Max – The Devil’s Playhouse reviewed

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the…

The war on smokers has gone too far

2 September 2024 4:53 pm

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to…

In defence of Kirstie Allsopp

26 August 2024 6:45 pm

The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment.…

Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English

Can video games be funny?

10 August 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B+ Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often.…

What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’

29 July 2024 8:35 pm

There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of…

The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God

22 July 2024 9:44 pm

CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the…

It wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet. It was all of us

15 July 2024 4:38 pm

Hard not to think that that’s the election in the bag for The Donald. Surviving an assassination attempt was always…

Let’s give Keir a chance

8 July 2024 4:49 pm

I don’t know about you, but I had an odd sort of election. The bits that I thought were going…

Keir Starmer channeled Obama in his first Downing Street speech

6 July 2024 12:37 am

In his first speech from the Downing Street lectern, Sir Keir Starmer was setting out to reaffirm those qualities that…