The critic and novelist Elizabeth Lowry joins Thea Lenarduzzi and Toby Lichtig to discuss the Italian Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi, the subject of a major exhibition at the National Gallery in London, a painter whose Life is as dramatic and moving as her art; and Toby reviews new fiction steeped in dread, paranoia and failure, including a short work by Don DeLillo and the debut novel from the Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman Artemisia – National Gallery, London, until January 2...
Oct 22, 2020•49 min
From a ballet stream to Homer's wine-dark sea. Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the historian and critic Judith Flanders to review the return of dance with new offerings from the Akram Khan Company and the Royal Ballet, and the novelist and poet Will Eaves returns to the Odyssey to explore the nature of memory. Back on Stage – The Royal Ballet, available online until November 8th The Silent Burn Project – Akram Khan Company Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer – Barbican, until January 2021...
Oct 15, 2020•49 min
From a carvery lunch in Howards End to emotional Eurocrats. Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Norma Clarke to discuss the role in literary creation of food and its increasingly fraught means of production, and Russell Williams reports on the bookshops of Paris during lockdown and reviews the new novel by a totemic figure in French literature, Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The Literature of Food: An introduction from 1830 to present by Nicola Humble Farm to Form: Modernist literature and e...
Oct 08, 2020•49 min
From Ovid to the "Black Spartacus". Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the TLS's classics editor Mary Beard to pick apart the story of "seduction", ancient and modern, the poet Fiona Benson reads her latest work, and the TLS's history editor David Horspool explores two accounts of America's domestic slave trade and a new biography of Toussaint Louverture. Strange Antics: A history of seduction by Clement Knox Williams’ Gang: A notorious slave trader and his cargo of Black convicts by ...
Oct 01, 2020•49 min
From Poirot on the River Nile to Verdi's take on the infamous Scottish play. Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas talk to writer Laura Thompson about the work of Agatha Christie and how she managed to move with the times, and Professor Larry Wolff joins us from Florence to discuss the tentative return of live opera in Italy with Verdi's Macbeth at the Parma Verdi Festival. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sep 24, 2020•48 min
Toby Lichtig talks us through this year's Booker shortlisted novels, plus a couple of others, and Lucy Dallas reports on the French scene (where real life and fiction blur...); finally, we explore the situation in Israel and Palestine from three rather different perspectives. An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defence Forces made a nation by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine campus debate by Kenneth S. Stern The new peace? – Israel’s unexpected ray of ...
Sep 16, 2020•37 min
In 1405, Christine de Pisan took up the pen in defense of her maligned sex, imagining a 'City of Ladies' in which the most virtuous female leaders of history might be preserved from the distortions of misogyny. Six hundred years later, with Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine the Great as her guides, the novelist and historian Lisa Hilton revisits the City to shake the foundations of the way we write about power Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 09, 2020•24 min
Throughout August, we are revisiting our books roundups from previous years, and today we’re returning to last year’s suggestions. In 2019, our contributor Diana Darke said in the paper: "A lot of things need saving this summer – tangible things like bees, Notre-Dame, water … and intangible things like democracy, humanitarian ideals, community". Among the many subjects under discussion here are Oulipo, impeachment, and climate change. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. U...
Aug 26, 2020•45 min
Throughout August, we are revisiting our books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance to catch up on books you might have missed. Today we are sauntering back to the summer of 2018, and an episode in which we learnt which books our contributors – including Bernardine Evaristo, Claire Lowdon and Carlo Rovelli – were looking forward to. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine. Host...
Aug 19, 2020•36 min
Throughout August, we are revisiting books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance once again to hear recommendations from our writers and editors, on subjects like Marcel Proust’s letters, tech-ensnared science fiction and Euripides. In this episode, from 2017, there is also an interview with that year’s Man Booker International Prize Winner, David Grossman, and his translator Jessica Cohen. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website –...
Aug 12, 2020•57 min
Throughout August, we are revisiting books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance to catch up on all that good stuff. Today we’re skipping back to 2016’s books of the year recommendations. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Aug 05, 2020•39 min
Gabrielle Walker talks us through three unhelpful attitudes to global warming, as exemplified in the Michael Moore-produced film Planet of the Humans; Sudhir Hazareesingh discusses the complex relationship between charisma and celebrity in the age of Revolution (spoiler: it helps to have a horse) Planet of the Humans - YouTube Men on Horseback by David Bell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jul 29, 2020•44 min
What style of life did an ancient Roman emperor lead? How did he actually spend his time? Mary Beard fills us in; Frances Wilson on literary couples (and their pet names) and what they can, and can’t, tell us about marriage; Mika Ross-Southall on how gentrification works and who it works for The Emperor in the Roman World by Fergus Millar Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and intimacy by Janine Utell Parallel Lives: Five Victorian marriages by Phyllis Rose Newcomers: Gent...
Jul 22, 2020•57 min
Geoff Dyer on why Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove was one of the most memorable reading experiences of his life (a taster from his essay: “There was no book and no reader. There was just this world, this huge landscape and its magnificently peopled emptiness”); In April 1939, the black contralto Marian Anderson stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and performed to a crowd of 75,000 people. Carol J. Oja sheds light on the twists and turns behind a moment when the history of Civil Rights in...
Jul 15, 2020•46 min
Min Wild on recent attempts to get to grips with that most slippery of beasts, the history of the novel (expect a lively cast, including Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne and Jane Porter); Declan Ryan on where writing overlaps with boxing and the story of the eighteenth-century boxer Daniel Mendoza, known as The Fighting Jew, who made of the sport an art form Books Without the Novel: Romance and the history of prose fiction by Scott Black Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Author...
Jul 08, 2020•43 min
Lynsey Hanley on the Pet Shop Boys and how a music duo that has always refused to play the pop game just keeps winning; The TLS’s history editor David Horspool talks us through a selection of articles on medieval history, including a compelling account of Henry III, a pious and peculiar king, who, against the odds, reigned for more than half a century ‘Pet Shop Boys, Literally’ and ‘Pet Shop Boys Versus America’, both by Chris Heath Blood Royal: Dynastic politics in medieval Europe by Robert Bar...
Jul 01, 2020•30 min
When, last year the writer and activist Bernardine Evaristo, won the Booker Prize for fiction – becoming in fact, the first black British person to do so – we at the TLS were not surprised. Evaristo has written for us for some years now, and ‘Girl, Woman, Other’, the novel for which the prize was awarded, was only the latest in a run of novels full of life and questions and challenges. And the recognition keeps coming. This week brought two more prizes at the British Book Awards; 'Girl, Woman, O...
Jul 01, 2020•25 min
TLS editors pick through the books some of our writers will be reading this summer, and share their own selections. Visit the-TLS.co.uk to read the 'Summer Books' feature in full Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 24, 2020•49 min
The death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith certainly can’t, especially as this week should have seen Edward Earl Johnson turn sixty. Instead, in 1987, he was executed at the Mississippi State Penitentiary for a crime nobody thinks he committed; Harry Sidebottom considers the ancients’ view on the plague, a serious outbreak of which occurred somewhere around the Mediterranean every ten to twenty years; “If oil is the blood of the global economy, shipping is the circulatory system”, say Tom Stevens...
Jun 17, 2020•56 min
What art have we been enjoying in lockdown? What are we most missing? And what is the future of art institutions? The TLS's arts editor Lucy Dallas joins us to discuss; Edith Hall tells us about Artemidorus, the author of an ancient dream manual now finally available in English; David Bromwich on democracy and the rise of the strongman A symposium on art in lockdown by the TLS , plus commentary by Nicholas Kenyon The Interpretation of Dreams by Artemidorus, translated by Martin Hammond An Ancien...
Jun 10, 2020•58 min
Colin Grant on several hundred years of Jamaican excellence and dysfunction; fifty years since the death of E. M. Forster, Michael Caines considers Forster’s legacy as a novelist and critic; the poet A. E. Stallings on an Athens slowly emerging from lockdown The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the postcolonial predicament by Orlando Patterson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 03, 2020•56 min
The poet and novelist Adam Foulds on the evolution of loneliness and its traditionally privileged cousin, solitude; Sam Leith on thrills, spills and racism in Willard Price’s children’s Adventure series; Molly Guinness dips into 300-odd years of children’s books and finds leaden instruction, radical ideas and pure nonsense A History of Solitude by David Vincent A Biography of Loneliness: The history of an emotion by Fay Bound Alberti Discovering Children’s Books, the British Library online Briti...
May 27, 2020•57 min
Hirsh Sawhney files a lockdown dispatch from New Haven, Connecticut, the uneasy home of Yale University; Arin Keeble talks us through the tricksy, rewarding and under-known work of Percival Everett; Lauren Kassel on the history of astrology, one of the oldest, most complex, intellectually powerful – and controversial – sciences Telephone by Percival Everett A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the birth of science by Alexander Boxer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 20, 2020•57 min
The TLS’s philosophy editor Tim Crane guides us through a selection of reviews and essays from this week’s issue, including on the future of AI and what Thomas Hobbes, Susan Sontag, Montaigne and the trolley problem can tell us about our present predicament; the novelist Will Eaves re-reads Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, “a caravan of episodes, made up of people going through the same horror in different ways”, and ponders a big-screen adaptation… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pri...
May 13, 2020•53 min
Ian Buruma on the twentieth-century Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, a fascist and a fabulist with a hunger for war and a remarkable way of capturing it; Sue Stuart-Smith on gardening in the trenches of the First World War and the concept of horticultural therapy; to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the TLS's history editor David Horspool talks us through a range of books, articles and essays covering the Second World War Selected books Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, by Curzio Malaparte, tra...
May 06, 2020•1 hr
James Waddell on the disorderly history of alphabetic order; Beejay Silcox, who fled Cairo for Western Australia as the coronavirus spread, tells a tale of star-crossed lovers; Jordan Sand gives a short cultural history of mask-wearing A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order by Judith Flanders Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 29, 2020•56 min
Lawrence Douglas, in Massachusetts, on the presidential past, present and future of Donald Trump; Irina Dumitrescu, in Germany, on books as escape (attempt) and reading the plague into plague-free books; Lucy Dallas presents this month’s round-up of audio / visual offerings A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s testing of America, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig Unmaking The Presidency: Donald Trump’s war on the world’s most powerful office, by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes American Carn...
Apr 22, 2020•55 min
William Shakespeare, the writer who – above all others, perhaps – keeps giving and giving. Michael Caines takes us through the latest research, theories and discoveries (or not, as the case may be); Why do women read more fiction than men? Lucy Scholes returns to the age-old conundrum Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, stabbings and broken hearts by Kathryn Harkup Untimely Death in Renaissance Drama by Andrew Griffin Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro Shakespeare and Trump by Jeffr...
Apr 15, 2020•46 min
Today an edition of our new daily podcast - Stories of our times. Our new free daily news podcast takes you to the heart of the stories that matter, with exclusive access and reporting. Published for the start of your day, it is hosted by Manveen Rana and David Aaronovitch. If you want to hear more please search for Stories of our times and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. With reading on the rise under the lockdown, TLS editor Stig Abell suggests three books for a little escapism durin...
Apr 13, 2020•31 min
Ellen Crowell investigates an early-twentieth-century tale of doomed lesbian romance, decadent cryptography, morphine-induced suicide and more; Richard Smyth on the joys of bird-watching during lockdown; Michael Caines reads his poem “Decadence” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 08, 2020•52 min
