![Spilling ink: Lee Child [AXEL DUPEUX]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Sam_Leith_feature.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Lee Child: How to write – and get revenge
According to which bit of hype you read, there’s a copy of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers sold…
Conservatives are wrong about free speech
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s…
It’s the Year of the Slug and I’m at war with the slimy little bastards
I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the…
Was the Indian Rope Trick a myth?
The Paul Daniels Magic Show, on a Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, was a straightforward enough proposition. A wand,…
Might LSD be good for you?
When Peregrine Worsthorne was on Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of…
The artist who creates digital life forms that bite & self-harm. Sam Leith meets him (and them)
Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries…
The extraordinary life and times of Lithuania’s greatest poet
The first book that Tomas Venclova read in English was Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not a bad start in the language, given…
Only an idiot would choose to live at any other time than the present
Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at…
Truth in fiction
Robert Harris on fake facts, his new novel – and why totalitarianism is in the air again
The journey of Adam and Eve
Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we…
The dice men
‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of…
How I write
How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Diary
Also in Sam Leith’s Diary: the best 18th-century novel since the 18th century and gossiping with David Miller
Diary
To Fortnum & Mason last week on the hottest evening of the year to present the Desmond Elliott Prize for…
In praise of neigh-sayers
Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book…
The game of life
In the introduction to his new book Steven Johnson starts out by describing the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices and…
The game of life
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
It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever ITV or the BBC decides — the latter usually with charter renewal…
Smashing stuff
‘Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for…
Cervantes the seer
William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60,…
Diary
I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…
Diary
I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the…
United Arab Emirates: Leaves in the desert
Who goes to the Sharjah International Book Fair? Sam Leith, for one
‘They pull a gun, you pull a hashtag’ – the ridiculous debate over what to call Isil
We should worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them
