Sam Leith



Profile:
Full name: Sam Leith

Area of interest: Culture, Society and the Arts

Journals/Organisation: Evening Standard | The Guardian

Email:

Personal website:

Website: Evening Standard | Guardian.co | Telegraph.co

Blog:

Representation: http://bloomsbury.com/Sam-Leith/authors/4198

Networks: http://twitter.com/#!/questingvole



Biography:
About: Former Literary Editor of the Telegraph, now writing most frequently for The Guardian and Evening Standard (regular column)

Education: Eton College; Magdalen College, Oxford

Career: Daily Mail: worked on the Ephraim Hardcastle column; joined the Daily Telegraph in 1999: worked Peterborough diary column, went on to edit the literary pages as well as writing a Saturday column in the comment section

Anounced in December that he is leaving the Telegraph...
 * How losing a job is like having a birthday says Sam Leith - It was 9.0 am on the morning of the first day of my exciting new life as a credit crunch statistic, and by golly there'd be no sitting around in my pants watching Trisha and, like, crying. On Tuesday, I was made redundant as the Daily Telegraph's literary editor. On Wednesday, I was going to make some sourdough bread, and suck up to the commissioning editors of other newspapers so hard my cheeks would turn inside out - The First Post, 4th December 2008

Current position/role: Columnist


 * also writes/written for: The Spectator, Readers Digest

Other roles/Main role: Author

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Other: Eldest son of writer/journalist Penny Junor; grandson of the late newspaper editor Sir John Junor



Books & Debate:

 * Dead Pets: Stuff Them, Eat Them, Love Them OCLC 61529506, 2005 (review by Jonathan Beckman)
 * Daddy, Is Timmy in Heaven Now? OCLC 195631671, 2006

Latest work: The Coincidence Engine

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Articles:

 * President Trump inauguration speech: a dismissal of history - The president stressed discontinuity and a break rather than part of the grand flow - 21st January 2017
 * Apologies: how getting them right makes you look good - Haldane was candid about a ‘Michael Fish moment’ — as a rhetorical device, it worked - 9th January 2017
 * 2016: the year of anger, Trump’s ‘word salad’ and anti-rhetoric - Emotive calls to action won over flaccid, verb-free slogans of the status quo - 15th December 2016



The Guardian:
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Articles: 2016

 * Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump nail the 'I'm-mad-as-hell' rhetorical style - Sanders’ style of delivery evokes the finger-jabbing of a hoarse New Yorker remonstrating with a taxi driver who has just run over his foot - 30th January



Articles: 2013

 * Ban on toyshop sexism won't end children's gender stereotyping - Removing 'Boys' and 'Girls' signs from the shelves is something we do for ourselves rather than for our children - 20th December
 * Sam Leith's most hated online abbreviations - From LOL to NSFW, they connote one thing, which is 'I am a douchebag' - 7th June
 * When Harry Styles met Alain de Botton - The One Direction singer and the philosopher like to hang out with Jemima Khan and chat about 'Plato, Aristotle, love and beauty', apparently. So which school of philosophy does each of these big thinkers follow? - 1st February



Articles: 2012

 * How to win arguments with bigots: a guide for Nick Clegg - Nick Clegg's proposed speech was not aimed at the people he called bigots because they require a far subtler approach - 13th September



Articles: 2009

 * a 'boy god' watch The Golden Child was bound to make him reject Buddhism'' - Torres was allowed to hang out only with reincarnated souls and Richard Gere - 4th June
 * can't tell whether the dinosaurs had necks like mine - they're all dead. And that's the beauty of it'' - Apart from tortoises, the hippy on The Young Ones and me, no living creature has a neck that sticks straight out in front - 28th May
 * tests at work? They're just a shabby trick by bosses who want to save on redundancy payments'' - It's perfectly reasonable to expect drug testing in certain lines of work. No one wants a nodding smackhead in charge of a crane - 21st May
 * hope that if they all rush in together and admit their sins, they will avoid individual blame'' - Is it illegal to call one house your second home for expenses purposes, and another one your second home for tax purposes? - 14th May (see: MPs' expense: summary)
 * this shock-jock from Britain risks turning a rabid blabbermouth into a beacon for free speech'' - The many people in Britain whom Jacqui Smith wants protected from Michael Savage's incoherent blowhardery are now far more familiar with it than they ever would have been otherwise - 7th May
 * Winslet says she's working-class. Whether it's true or not, why does it matter so much to her?'' - Everywhere, you see intelligent adults apologising for the accident of a privileged childhood or preening about having had a deprived one - 30th April
 * Sugar: you're fired. I have a new 'Sralan' in my life, and I don't know how I ever lived without him'' - Thanks to his emotional interview, the eccentric cricket-loving financier Sir Allen Stanford is now on my radar, and I don't really know how I did without him - 9th April
 * protest should be about more than having a nice day out and fighting some bankers'' - 2nd April
 * not let the security services spy on Twitter? It's not like they'll learn anything from it'' - Anyone who regards social networking sites as private needs their head read - 26th March
 * Dhabi is an odd place to visit amid global economic catastrophe: it feels like a high-water mark'' - If the cranes fall still and it becomes a ghost town, it will instantly qualify as one of the seven wonders of the world - 19th March
 * know it's bad when we feel nostalgic for 1976. The scary thing is - we really were better off then'' - I'm not the first person to notice that a major effect of this recession has been a great vertical gusher, a veritable oil-strike, of nostalgia - 12th March
 * it's official: the entire beauty industry is built on the peddling of pernicious nonsense'' - It sells products that don't really work to people who don't really need them at prices they can't really afford - 5th March
 * we're told there's an 'optimism gene'. Are we really just the helpless victims of our own brains?'' - Not only am I not in charge of my destiny, I'm not even in charge of how I feel about not being in charge of my destiny - 26th February
 * on a submarine is very dull. But you don't want to liven it up by crashing into another boat'' - The only things to do are eat, play boardgames and drink 20-30 cups of tea a day. As a result the crew are a tubby lot - 19th February
 * need a sensible debate about drugs - but that's impossible while ministers float above it all'' - The truth is that there are endless people trying to have grown-up conversations about drugs. Many of them, such as Professor David Nutt, are senior advisers to the government. It's just the government ministers themselves who are busy settling into a balloon-filled room and don't want any grown-ups, like, harshing their buzz - 12th February
 * Carol Thatcher was rightly criticised for her racist remark, yet plenty of ugly stereotypes are indulged - Golliwogs may have been removed from the jam jars - but Uncle Ben survives on rice and Aunt Jemima on pancake mix - 5th February
 * oratory'' - The rhetoric of the 44th president of the United States positions him as the inheritor of the oratorical and political traditions of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ - 18th January
 * loved working in an open-plan office. How else would I have snatched so much gossip - and cake?'' - Employees exhibit territorial anxiety by surrounding their desks with gonks, teddy bears and pictures of their jam-faced tots - 17th January
 * have learned to prolong life before learning to improve it. My grandmother's death proved that'' - 8th January



The Daily Telegraph:
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Remit/Info: Contemporary life and culture, social and political issues

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Role: Commentator / Literary editor

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Website: Telegraph.co / Sam Leith

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Day published: Saturday and Monday

Regularity: Weekly

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Articles:

 * Literary editor Sam Leith becomes latest Daily Telegraph redundancy - 2nd December 2008
 * plan to ban criminal memoirs is moronic'' - While we don't want vicious killlers ending up on the chat-show circuit, there is a place for criminal memoirs - 1st December 2008
 * if Heston Blumenthal gives the Little Chef snail porridge, but takes its soul?'' - 29th November 2008
 * 'liberal' about hacking the BNP?'' - "Naming and shaming" is one of those idiotic buzz phrases popular due to an accident of rhyme - 22nd November 2008
 * memoirs like Ugly by Constance Briscoe make pornography of personal pain'' - 19th November 2008
 * of Warcraft a waste of time?'' - Leave gamers alone: playing World of Warcraft is just as valid a pastime as reading, watching television or playing sport - 14th November 2008
 * charming with no clothes on'' - The Queen could not have got away with it, but Prince William's remark to a stammering 18-year-old girl to imagine him naked was charming - 8th November 2008
 * are evil: what a shame we love Tesco and Waitrose so'' - When discussing the evils of supermarkets, we should surely admit what everyone knows: that shopping in big supermarkets is heaven on earth - 1st November 2008
 * bicarb instead of cream of tartar is bad'' - It may have escaped your notice - what with the collapse of capitalism, the most exciting American election in memory, and the Osborne/Mandelson scorpion-and-frog act - that it is National Baking Week - 25th October 2008
 * Dr Rowan Williams, Half Man Half Biscuit have enriched our culture'' - 18th October 2008
 * sexism of high literature? Guilty'' - 11th October 2008
 * hail spatial analysis co-ordinators'' - this post, unique in human history, may be long overdue. After all, nobody had heard of a "fireman" before the first fire brigade came along - 4th October 2008
 * something to hate about ID cards'' - At last the libertarian and disciplinarian strands in our nation can unite in a fear and loathing of ID cards - 27th September 2008
 * Park stops short of Baroness Warnock on the 'duty to die''' - on the pamphlet a 'Duty to Die' - 20th September 2008
 * through eurobilge'' - The EU can insist on the use of their symbols, but they cannot manage the collective unconscious - 13th September 2008
 * time is up'' - Whether it's his fault or not, the Prime Minister is getting the blame for the economic mess we're in and he's all out of moves - 6th September 2008
 * should thank Salman Rushdie'' - in defence of the controversial and much-maligned author - 30th August 2008
 * all obey the tyranny of beauty'' - the irony of a cosmetics company being forced to deny allegations that it altered a woman's appearance - 9th August 2008
 * a fair cop. We're second best when it comes to police drama'' - Good British cop shows aren't really cop shows. They are detective dramas. They follow singular and eccentric heroes - 2nd August 2008


 * 'archive'



News & updates:

 * The disembowelling of the Daily Telegraph, Roy Greenslade, Guardian.co, 9th December 2008
 * Literary editor Sam Leith becomes latest Daily Telegraph redundancy - Guardian.co, 2nd December 2008
 * Media Downturn section, Guardian.co



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References:


Links:

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Leith