Sam Leith

How to win four Nobel Prizes in literature

21 October 2023 9:00 am

‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial…

Can we be honest about Israel and Palestine?

16 October 2023 6:40 pm

Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the…

How Elon Musk killed Twitter/ X

10 October 2023 5:00 pm

Twitter was a newswire. That, at least at first, was the point of it. Something that came with all the…

It is time to rethink the age of consent

25 September 2023 6:29 pm

In 1983 Samantha Fox was sixteen years old when she first appeared topless on Page Three of the Sun. That…

The ‘naive cynicism’ of Russell Brand’s hasty defenders

18 September 2023 5:10 pm

I can’t imagine that Channel 4’s investigative slot Dispatches has had such an audience in living memory. On Saturday evening, many…

There’s not much we can do about China spying

11 September 2023 6:07 pm

A parliamentary researcher has just been arrested on suspicion of espionage. A man in his late twenties, with reported links…

Silicon Valley’s curious obsession with building old-fashioned communities

4 September 2023 6:36 pm

It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could…

Why not house refugees on barges?

7 August 2023 4:15 pm

‘By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of…

Passports out of hell

5 August 2023 9:00 am

Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible

Ancient worms and the problem with climate politics

31 July 2023 9:39 pm

The poet Elizabeth Bishop, when she was feeling blue (which she often was), used to find comfort in thinking in…

Immigration and a government in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion

24 July 2023 7:15 pm

Hurrah! The government, it was reported yesterday, is working on getting some more migrants. To plug a million-strong post-Brexit labour shortage in…

YouTube and the final state of total Kippleization

17 July 2023 5:01 pm

When I look back over my life, a decade or two from now, when I finally succumb to the strontium…

Trans activists don’t help themselves

10 July 2023 8:41 pm

I’ve tried to stay out of the trans-rights conversation, honestly I have. There are a number of reasons for this,…

The unedifying Yilin Wang vs British Museum row

4 July 2023 12:05 am

If you visited the British Museum’s new exhibition China’s Hidden Century a fortnight ago, you’d have seen a substantial section on the revolutionary woman…

Why is it so difficult to find MPs who aren’t useless?

26 June 2023 11:29 pm

It’s a sign, possibly, of my increasing age and bad temper that I find myself harking back to an imaginary past in…

The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert

19 June 2023 4:00 pm

At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet…

Is Boris Johnson a great man of history?

12 June 2023 4:00 pm

Boris Johnson has always been an enthusiastic proponent of the long unfashionable ‘great man’ theory of history. As he argued…

The Schofield story is not a matter of national concern

5 June 2023 4:00 pm

I’d kind of hoped, until recently, that Phillip Schofield would not trouble my consciousness in any big way again. I had…

The price others pay for our next-day deliveries

23 May 2023 4:54 pm

When I was not more than nine or ten years old, I sent off in the post for a free poster…

Martin Amis: 1949-2023

21 May 2023 9:57 am

Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’…

Academic publishing is lazy and unethical

15 May 2023 9:44 pm

Last week witnessed the first tremors of what could be a welcome revolution: the resignation en masse of the 40-strong editorial board of NeuroImage magazine – regarded…

The glumness of King Charles

8 May 2023 3:48 pm

A detail much noted in the commentary on Saturday‘s coronation was that His Majesty decided against making his first trip…

Why don’t the Tories want to help genuine asylum seekers?

1 May 2023 5:49 pm

It’s not the genuine asylum seekers that Suella Braverman and her crew are determined to prevent reaching our shores, we are…

‘Everything is going to be turned upside down’: Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing

29 April 2023 9:00 am

Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing

How I found friendship through online Scrabble

22 April 2023 9:00 am

How I found friendship through online Scrabble