Sam Leith

Let’s turn on SafeSearch for the Houses of Parliament

2 May 2022 5:43 pm

It really is quite easy to click on internet pornography by accident. There’s a persuasive argument that the whole of…

It sucks to be a Christian who doesn’t believe

18 April 2022 5:18 pm

Easter Sunday. I went to church for the first time in ages. The little parish church has stood for 900…

Bono's 'poem' was an insult to the craft of verse

21 March 2022 6:00 pm

‘Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm…

Britain's shameful response to the Ukraine crisis

14 March 2022 6:00 pm

Perhaps you’re of the opinion that Ukrainian refugees aren’t our problem, that the world has always been full of foreigners…

Remember the Russians who will really suffer from sanctions

7 March 2022 8:05 pm

When I was in Russia in the very early 1990s, there was a generic figure who seemed to stand at…

Has Putin resurrected the West?

28 February 2022 6:00 pm

I think Putin will have been surprised. I mean: I was surprised. Weren’t you? Not, necessarily, that Ukraine should have…

What if we aren’t ready to live with Covid?

21 February 2022 11:13 pm

Quite the constitutional twist, yesterday. Just as what Walter Bagehot called the efficient side of our ruling set-up was merrily…

Politics isn’t a branch of the entertainment industry

7 February 2022 6:40 pm

Rudy Giuliani has had quite the trajectory in public life. Those of us who remember the days after 9/11 will…

Eugenics will never work — thankfully

5 February 2022 9:00 am

The creation of a master race is an ancient idea which, thankfully, can never work, says Sam Leith

You can’t really ‘cancel’ anything

31 January 2022 7:30 pm

‘When parents give Maus…to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse. I wanna protect my kids!’ Who do you…

Pre-crime has arrived in China

29 January 2022 9:00 am

The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…

Downflood: the Good Ship Boris is sinking

24 January 2022 6:00 pm

In Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm, there’s a near-matchless description of how big boats go to the bottom. ‘The crisis…

What Meccano taught me

17 January 2022 6:31 pm

Elsewhere in England this weekend, grimly sweating middle-aged men were planning Operation Save Big Dog, Operation Red Meat and Operation…

We should be thankful for the Sackler family's philanthropy

10 January 2022 9:20 pm

When the whole opioid crisis blew up, the Sackler family — whose fortune was substantially built on getting thousands of…

Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing

4 January 2022 2:30 am

My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be…

The modern economy is built on addiction

27 December 2021 8:23 pm

Two stories, side-by-side in theSunday paper I was looking at online. The first — ‘Strip Dame Dopesick ofher title’ —…

My fight with Viagogo

14 December 2021 2:45 am

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop…

How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world

11 December 2021 9:00 am

Love her or loathe her, Enid Blyton and the safe, sunny world she cleverly marketed will remain a publishing phenomenon, says Sam Leith

Meghan woz right

6 December 2021 9:01 am

The Duchess of Sussex’s legal ding-dong with the Mail on Sunday (which published her private correspondence with her father) has…

The forever ‘war on Christmas’

29 November 2021 5:45 pm

It seems to get earlier each year, doesn’t it? It’s not yet even December, and the Mail on Sunday has…

The paradoxical integrity of our dodgy honours system

22 November 2021 9:25 pm

We are told that the Prince of Wales had no idea at the time that his underlings were offering to sell…

Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith

15 November 2021 6:40 pm

A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries…

The Bitcoin delusion

8 November 2021 5:58 pm

Cast your mind back a few years to last week – when there was much laughing and wailing at the…

Why did we decide that Covid was over?

25 October 2021 12:45 pm

Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind.…

No, the term ‘white privilege’ is not extremist

10 October 2021 11:42 pm

A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism…