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,…
A dispatch from a family of fooshers
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…
Why would the whole world’s book industry gather in booze-free Sharjah?
Who goes to the Sharjah International Book Fair? Sam Leith, for one
Worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them
We should worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them
Shakespeare's London: where all the world really was a stage
Sam Leith on the year 1606, when plague and panic were rife — and all the world really was a stage
A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
How Hitler's dreams came true in 1946
In 1946, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the world seemed a very dark place indeed, says Sam Leith
Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began
The only thing really swinging in early Sixties Britain, says Sam Leith, was the wrecking-ball
Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Why movie musicals matter – to this author anyway
Sam Leith finds much to like in a companion to musical films, and concludes that they matter very much – to the author anyway
