Sam Leith

Cites rhetoric's ubiquitous presence in virtually all aspects of life, tracing the history of the art of persuasion while revealing how inspirational language has been used by famous individuals.

Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

Words Like Loaded Pistols

Rhetoric is what gives words power. It's nothing to be afraid of. It isn't the exclusive preserve of politicians: it's everywhere, from your argument with the insurance company to your plea to the waitress for a table near the window. It convicts criminals (and then frees them on appeal). It causes governments to rise and fall, best men to be shunned by brides, and people to march with steady purpose towards machine guns.In this highly entertaining (and persuasive) book, Sam Leith examines how people have taught, practised and thought about rhetoric from its Attic origins to its twenty-first century apotheosis. Along the way, he tells the stories of its heroes and villains, from Cicero and Erasmus, to Hitler, Obama - and Gyles Brandreth.

You Talkin' to Me?

Can you remember the first time you fell in love with a book?

The stories we read as children matter. The best ones are indelible in our memories; reaching far beyond our childhoods, they are a window into our deepest hopes, joys and anxieties. They reveal our past – collective and individual, remembered and imagined – and invite us to dream up different futures.

In a pioneering history of the children’s literary canon, The Haunted Wood reveals the magic of childhood reading, from the ancient tales of Aesop, through the Victorian and Edwardian golden age to new classics. Excavating the complex lives of our most beloved writers, Sam Leith offers a humane portrait of a genre and celebrates the power of books to inspire and console entire generations.

A History of Childhood Reading

The Haunted Wood

Good writers follow the rules. Great writers know the rules—and follow their instincts! Finding the right words, in the right order, matters—whether you’re a student embarking on an essay, a job applicant drafting your cover letter, an employee composing an email . . . even a (hopeful) lover writing a text. Do it wrong and you just might get an F, miss the interview, lose a client, or spoil your chance at a second date. Do it right, and the world is yours. In Write to the Point, accomplished author and literary critic Sam Leith kicks the age-old lists of dos and don’ts to the curb. Yes, he covers the nuts and bolts we need to be in complete command of the language: grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, and other subjects half-remembered from grade school. But more importantly, he charts a commonsense course between the “Armies of Correctness” and the “Descriptivist Irregulars.” For Leith, knowing not just the rules but also how and when to ignore them—developing an ear for what works best in context—is everything. In this master class, Leith teaches us a skill of paramount importance in this smartphone age, when we all carry a keyboard in our pockets: to write clearly and persuasively for any purpose—to write to the point.

A Master Class on the Fundamentals of Writing for Any Purpose

Write to the Point

A hurricane sweeps off the Gulf of Mexico and in the back-country of Alabama, assembles a passenger jet out of old bean-cans and junkyard waste. An eccentric mathematician - last heard of investigating the physics of free will and ranting about the devil - vanishes in the French Pyrenees.

And the thuggish operatives of a multinational arms conglomerate are closing in on Alex Smart - a harmless Cambridge postgraduate who has set off with hope in his heart and a ring in his pocket to ask his American girlfriend to marry him.

At the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable - an organisation so secret that many of its operatives aren't 100 per cent sure it exists -- Red Queen takes an interest. What ensues is a chaotic chase across an imaginary America, haunted by madness, murder, mistaken identity, and a very large number of unhealthy but delicious snacks. The Coincidence Engine exists. And it has started to work.

The Coincidence Engine

Rhetoric from Aristotle to Trump and Beyond ...

You Talkin' To Me?

Morgan Robertson

Once seen as a prediction of the sinking of the Titanic, The Wreck of the Titan was written fourteen years before that ill-fated event of 1912. Now, on the centenary anniversary of the sinking, the striking similarities between the fate of the Titan and Titanic can be examined again in this new edition. In this 1898 novella, John Rowland, a disgraced former Royal Navy lieutenant, has taken employment as a lowly deck hand aboard the largest ship ever to have sailed, the Titan. One night in deep fog in the North Atlantic, the Titan strikes a gigantic iceberg and sinks almost immediately. The foreword is by Sam Leith, who has examined chance and coincidence in his novel, The Coincidence Machine.

The Wreck of the Titan

To every explorer with his map upside down, to every air-traffic controller suddenly receiving Magic FM through his headphones, to every astronomer whose new planet turns out to be a bit of bran-flake on the eyepiece of his telescope, Sod’s Law says: you are not alone. Sam Leith tells the hilarious—and painful—stories of the unsinkable boat that sunk, the unbeatable horse that lost, and the fireproof theater that burned to the ground. Sod's Law demonstrates that the entire universe is actually set up to ensure that your toast always lands butter side down and, what's more, that it lands precisely where the cat has shed hair all over the carpet. In this age of doubt, fewer and fewer of us are able to believe that a higher power takes an interest in our fate. This book reassures us that indeed it does—and that that higher power is hell bent on buggering things up. Only by laughing heartlessly at the misfortunes of others can we make ourselves feel better. Sod's Law enables us to do just that.

Why Life Always Lands Butter Side Down

Sod's Law

A parliament of fools, or a confederacy of dunces? Blethering celebrities and blundering politicians, royal babies and right royal cock-ups, milkshake madness and vegan sausage rolls - and, of course, the long and winding road to Brexit. If ever the times were ripe for a return to the high days of Augustan satire, it's now - and the Spectator's literary editor Sam Leith provides it. Our Times in Rhymes is a waspish, affectionate and very funny look at the state of our nation as it - let's be even-handed - teeters on the cliff-edge of a marvellous opportunity. Here is all the insanity and inanity of 2019, month by cherishable month, rendered in galloping comic verse and paired with satirical drawings by the brilliant cartoonist Edith Pritchett. It makes the perfect Christmas stocking filler for anyone who needs a good laugh at the damnable times we live in.

Being a Prosodical Chronicle of Our Damnable Age

Our Times in Rhymes

"An entertaining history of great oratory" and a primer to rhetoric's key techniques(The New Yorker). In Words Like Loaded Pistols, Sam Leith traces the art of persuasion, beginning in ancient Syracuse and taking us up to the Twitterverse. Along the way, he follows detours as varied and fascinating as Elizabethan England, Milton's Satanic realm, the Springfield of Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield of Homer Simpson. He explains how language has been used by the great heroes of rhetoric (such as Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr.), as well as some villains (like Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon.) You'll find out how to build your own memory-palace; you'll be introduced to the Three Musketeers: Ethos, Pathos and Logos; and you'll learn how to use chiasmus with confidence and occultation without thinking about it. Most importantly of all, you will discover that rhetoric is useful, relevant -- and something you can master.

A parliament of fools, or a confederacy of dunces? Blethering celebrities and blundering politicians, royal babies and right royal cock-ups, milkshake madness and vegan sausage rolls - and, of course, the long and winding road to Brexit. If ever the times were ripe for a return to the high days of Augustan satire, it’s now – and the Spectator’s literary editor Sam Leith provides it. Our Times in Rhymes is a waspish, affectionate and very funny look at the state of our nation as it – let's be even-handed - teeters on the cliff-edge of a marvellous opportunity. Here is all the insanity and inanity of 2019, month by cherishable month, rendered in galloping comic verse and paired with satirical drawings by the brilliant cartoonist Edith Pritchett. It makes the perfect Christmas stocking filler for anyone who needs a good laugh at the damnable times we live in.

Sam Leith

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