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Sam Leith

Sam Leith

The Guardian

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The bluster and waffle of George Freeman

yesterday 7

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Humphrey / Does anyone really want AI civil servants?

16.06.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

State of democracy / Will Donald Trump’s defenders finally admit the truth?

09.06.2025 8

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Ridiculously enjoyable: Doom – The Dark Ages reviewed

05.06.2025 3

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Heal thyself / Why are NHS staff refusing to be vaccinated?

02.06.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Means-testing winter fuel was obviously correct

26.05.2025 40

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Starmer’s EU e-passport plan would be the ultimate Brexit win

19.05.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Clearspring / Congratulations to Graham King, the asylum billionaire

12.05.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

End of salad days / Gene-editing won’t save our fruit

06.05.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

End of salad days / Gene-editing won’t save our fruit

05.05.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Politics / How the EU youth mobility scheme could save Brexit

28.04.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Keir Starmer’s Easter message wasn’t offensive

21.04.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Schools should butt out of parent WhatsApp groups

14.04.2025 7

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Art attack / AI slop is flooding the zone

03.04.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The police raid on a Quaker meeting house is unforgivable

31.03.2025 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Ridiculously fun: Assassin’s Creed – Shadows reviewed

27.03.2025 5

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Why is Starmer pretending that he ‘likes and respects’ Donald Trump?

24.03.2025 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The arts / Is ‘good enough’ all we want from TV?

17.03.2025 30

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The moral shortcomings of Palestine Action

10.03.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The anti-genius of William McGonagall, history’s worst poet

06.03.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

The ‘goodies and baddies’ era of world politics is over

03.03.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

AI needs to be regulated

24.02.2025 20

The Spectator

Sam Leith

Education / Don’t blame WFH parents for absent school children

17.02.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

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

03.02.2025 9

The Spectator

Sam Leith

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

23.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Sam Leith

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 9

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 30

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

Shtick / The absurdities of a ‘meritocracy fund’

‘Go woke, go broke,’ runs the catchphrase. Now, at last, we are presented with the welcome opportunity to put this proposition to the test. A new...

09.12.2024 6

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 10

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 4

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 3

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 40

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 4

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 5

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