menu_open Columnists
Sam Leith

Sam Leith

The Guardian

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

The AI industry has been given a taste of its own medicine

The AI industry has been given a taste of its own medicine
previous day 9

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Scrapping Oxford’s ‘traditional’ exams won’t make things fairer

Scrapping Oxford’s ‘traditional’ exams won’t make things fairer
27.01.2025 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Visual ingenuity and wit: Monument Valley 3 reviewed

Visual ingenuity and wit: Monument Valley 3 reviewed
23.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Deep state / The difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47

Deep state / The difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47
20.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The truth about Dominic Cummings and Elon Musk’s ‘sabotage plot’

13.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Auntie Hasina / Is it time to lay off Tulip Siddiq?

We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and...

06.01.2025 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Is it time to lay off Tulip Siddiq?

We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and...

06.01.2025 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The downside of charity

I blame Charles Dickens, personally: he of David Copperfield, Little Nell, Oliver Twist and, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s the father of what you might...

30.12.2024 7

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Should AI be allowed to train itself off this column?

If you’re a writer, should AI companies be allowed to use your work to train their models without your permission? This is a matter of concern for...

23.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The hypocrisy of Nick Candy

The property tycoon Nick Candy, interviewed in yesterday’s Sunday Times, appears to be hoping to position himself as a UK equivalent of Elon Musk...

16.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Why Gail’s triumphs

The bakery chain Gail’s, which opened its first branch in Hampstead less than 20 years ago, is reportedly touted for sale by Goldman Sachs with a...

02.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Lovingly designed, touching and immersive: Neva reviewed

Grade: A- There’s a very faint echo of Jeff VanderMeer’s unheimlich Southern Reach Series in the new indie side-scroller Neva. You’re plonked at...

28.11.2024 5

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Those signing the general election petition should know better

Every now and again, a newspaper will run – and portentously headline – a survey on the future of the monarchy. There was a fashion, a few years...

25.11.2024 2

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Elon Musk and the age of the troll

There has been a cheering new development in the struggle against scam phone callers. AI can now be used to automate the satisfying but tricky...

18.11.2024 2

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about...

11.11.2024 5

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Arts / Much more than just a game: World of Warcraft at 20

On 23 November, the video game World of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary. That’s no small thing. By most metrics, it is the most successful...

07.11.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Do we care that the King is rich?

For the first time, the true extent of the property held by the King and the Prince of Wales’s private estates, the Duchies of Lancaster and...

04.11.2024 4

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Why is Elon Musk obsessed with Diablo IV?

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even...

31.10.2024 2

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Keir Starmer, Karl Marx and the cant of ‘working people’

Labour has promised that, come what may, they will not be increasing taxes on ‘working people’. Well, jolly good. Those of us who work for a living...

28.10.2024 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Liam Payne / Is it time to ban the boy band?

It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that ‘if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are’. I read that to mean...

21.10.2024 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Modern usage / Why shouldn’t English teachers use video games?

English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating...

21.10.2024 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Labour were right to protect Taylor Swift

Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its first 100 days in office: to wit,...

14.10.2024 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Bad optics / Sue Gray had to go

‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha, said I. No. We most...

06.10.2024 4

The Spectator

Sam Leith

A stone-cold banger: Black Myth – Wukong reviewed

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence,...

03.10.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The tragedy of Philip Schofield

Robinson Crusoe on Mas a Tierra; Napoleon on Elba; Schofield on Nosy Ankarea. Island exile is an opportunity for man, that bare-forked thing, to...

30.09.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Trump could teach Starmer a thing or two about speeches

The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be quoted far and wide – will not...

24.09.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Why are you proud to be British?

Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose...

23.09.2024 40

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Freebies / Why do the Starmers need a personal shopper?

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer...

16.09.2024 4

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Justice for Grenfell is long overdue

I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure,...

09.09.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The Gamer / Charming and silly: Sam & Max – The Devil’s Playhouse reviewed

Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-...

06.09.2024 6

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The expensive business of quoting poetry

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a...

05.09.2024 40

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Starmer's crackdown / The war on smokers has gone too far

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after winning a giant mandate from the electorate and having not yet done anything to wick off the people who don’t...

02.09.2024 8

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Tickets, please / In defence of Kirstie Allsopp

The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed...

26.08.2024 8

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Books / Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?

Nicholas Jenkins takes, as a point to navigate by in this rich and ingenious study of the early Auden, a remark by the poet’s friend Hannah Arendt....

22.08.2024 4

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Can video games be funny?

Grade: B Games can be exciting, puzzling, scary, competitive and – occasionally – moving. Can they be funny? Not often. But this lovingly crafted...

08.08.2024 1

The Spectator

Sam Leith

What we didn’t learn from the Manchester Airport police ‘attack’

There’s a famous 1986 TV advert for the Guardian (remember when newspapers had TV adverts?) which shows you footage of a rough-looking skinhead...

29.07.2024 1

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The CrowdStrike crash was an act of God

CrowdStrike. What a name. It sounds, doesn’t it, like exactly what it’s meant to prevent? And a cloudstrike, in the sense of a bolt from the blue,...

22.07.2024 4

The Spectator

Sam Leith

It wasn’t just Trump who dodged a bullet. It was all of us

Hard not to think that that’s the election in the bag for The Donald. Surviving an assassination attempt was always going to be a bounce in the...

15.07.2024 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith