Sam Leith

Quote Unquote Writing; feat. Geoffrey Pullum, Philip Hensher, General Patton, and an imaginary Beastie Boy

New Substack: a print-out-and-keep guide to making quotation marks play nice with full stops and commas

Pissed-off Hillary is the best Hillary. I’m going to spend the next 48 hours just watching different videos of her eye-rolling Lauren Boebert. I think I’m in love.

This 'correction' from @lewisgoodall.com regarding accusations from Reform and the Conservatives that the Greens engaged in sectarianism, deserves to be widely read.

#c4news

Thank you!

Dishing It Out, Taking It Writing and Reading

New newsletter, in which I consider stinky book reviews and overlong speeches

There's a grace period, but nobody knows how long it is, and to be able to avail yourself of it you need to (a) have an expired passport handy, and (b) place your travel plans wholly at the whim of Marysia on the LOT check-in desk in Warsaw. That, apparently, is taking back control of the UK border.

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard

Hanna Pickard

Hanna Pickard’s What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? explores the philosophy of addiction and asks readers to think beyond traditional models of understanding it. Listen to her interview with @questingvole.bsky.social for @thespectator1828.bsky.social podcast: buff.ly/Qweycq8

It’s a kink at this point. She gets some sort of thrill from being humiliated by the free market.

You should write a book about how crazy the UK is

the actual story of what happened at the National Endowment for the Humanities last year is even more infuriating than we thought

Thank you. I think Luke is very interesting. Hope you enjoy the newsletter. I’m feeling my way. It won’t *all* be addiction stuff, I promise!

The Pharmakon | Sam Leith | Substack Sam Leith on Reading, Writing, Re-Reading, Rhetoric and Recovery. Click to read The Pharmakon, by Sam Leith, a Substack publication. Launched a few seconds ago.

I've started a Substack for bits and pieces. First post asks the pressing question of our times: What Would You Do Alone In A Cage With Nothing But Cocaine?

😒

Dead on. For a moment I thought I had a column to write tomorrow and was, like: oh shit

Laughing at all the pompous idiots starting posts with BREAKING then telling you what they read on the BBC

crumbs

It is SO close to the surface with these fuckers, isn’t it?

And The New Dark Ages now has a cover! Bitter years of book reviewing have taught me not to get excited and that most books are fated to be ignored. But I am finding it hard to stay entirely jaded in this instance…

Labour Together, Apco and the hell of consultancy firms With a certain amount of head-shaking that I read reports yesterday of Labour’s obscene dirty-tricks campaign against two Sunday Times hacks.

On the Labour Together thing

My 14 year old son has been in a black, foul-mouthed, chair-throwing rage for twelve hours and counting because… he’s had suboptimal haircut (it looks, to my eye, exactly like the old one).

Nigel Farage in answering Nick Robinson's question about why he believes Britain is broken gave an analysis of falling net migration that is demonstrably factually inaccurate. "It is so broken and its declining so quickly that anybody with a dispassionate view can see it. It is quite interesting. Just look at the net migration numbers. 'Oh isn't it good net migration is coming down?' But do you know why? It is because there is an exodus. There is now an exodus.Those who are of a situation and a financial position to have a choice are now fleeing the country in numbers". This is factually incorrect. Net migration fell year on year by 465,00 in the most recent Official of National Statisitcs figures: the year to June 2025. This was not because of an "exodus" (an increase in emigration). It is because immigration fell by 401,000 (to 898,000 from 1.299 million the previous year). That accounts for 90% of the big drop in net migration. The increase in emigration by 41,000 was a minor component. Most of the increase in emigration was of non-EU nationals. British citizens made up a third of emigrants, but there was no significant increasse in British emigration, which was at very similar levels in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025: it is not a significant cause of the drop in net migration. Nick Robinson did tell Mr Farage that he was exaggerating the number of people who don't speak English - and BBC Verify did produce an analysis showing that was a five-fold exaggeration. But this central incorrect claim about immigration and net migration was not caught in the programme, or before broadcast. It should at least be scrutinised and corrected afterwards - so that an accurate account of why net migration fell (primarily a reduction in immigration visas to the UK) can be communicated to the audience.

I have asked the BBC to scrutinise + correct the factually inaccurate claims made by Mr Nigel Farage about why net migration fell in 'Political Thinking with Nick Robinson'

Here is the link if you want to do something like this.
www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comp...

If you want to know what Reform would be like in power, look at how it threatened Bangor University | Gaby Hinsliff A debating society didn’t want to invite two figures connected to the party to speak. Cue an authoritarian response, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff

I read three student newspapers in the course of writing this & on the off chance any student journalists at York, Exeter or Cambridge are reading this; God you’re all so much better than student journalism was in my day www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🫩

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

1/

Rupert Murdoch’s warped vision of family When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she would not give any story ideas to the writers of Succession. Frankly he need not have bo...

Also, for instance, Lynn Barber on Murdoch spectator.com/article/rupe... and Genevieve Gaunt being funny about love spectator.com/article/sear...

The books pages mostly do. There’s a lot more to the magazine than politics.

Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him ...

Sometimes I love my job. Got Rowan Williams writing on Leonard Cohen this week.

More people should listen to @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

When people say AI is inevitable, let them know the future isn’t settled.

sigh