The TLS Podcast

Throughout the summer, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year. In this episode - it's movie week; the author Colin Grant discusses Steve McQueen's Small Axe and the Academy Award-winning Nomadland starring Frances McDormand, Yoojin Grace Wuertz talks us through the Korean American Dream film Minari, and Clifford Thompson reviews Regina King's directorial debut One...

Throughout August, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year. In this episode; the comedian David Baddiel joins Toby Lichtig to talk about his book 'Jews Don't Count' which explores the insidious, pervasive, exclusionary nature of ‘progressive’ antisemitism, Éadaoín Lynch remembers fully and truthfully the relationship between the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon,...

In this bonus TLS long read, the writer and author of Mind the Gap, Ferdinand Mount, asks - how much is too much meritocracy? www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-aristocracy-of-talent-adrian-wooldridge-book-review-ferdinand-mount If you would like to listen to more audio articles from The TLS, you can do so on The TLS website or the News Over Audio app. A special subscription offer for TLS podcast list...

Throughout August, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year. In this episode; the TLS's Classics editor Mary Beard emphasizes the importance of teaching Classics in context, the medievalist Hetta Howes reviews a female take on 'Beowulf', and Ruth Scurr reveals the true history of the secretive Freemasons. A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tl...

Throughout August, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year. In this episode; the TLS's fiction editor Toby Lichtig talks to Douglas Stuart about his 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain, the writer Laura Thompson joins Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas to discuss the work of Agatha Christie and how she has managed to move with the times, and Edmund Gordon to...

In a special bonus podcast we bring you an episode of Secrets of the Side Hustle that we think you might enjoy. Host Laura Jackson speaks with Alighieri Jewellery founder, Rosh Mahtani, about her business journey, the importance of connecting with your customers and why a 14th century epic poem makes the perfect inspiration for a 21st century business... Visit the Alighieri Jewellery website Follo...

In this bonus TLS long read, Michele Pridmore-Brown, researcher at The University of California - Berkeley, discusses what science can tell us about manliness. www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-better-half-sharon-moalem-are-men-animals-matthew-guttmann-guynecology-rene-almeling-review-michelle-pridmore-brown If you would like to listen to more audio articles from The TLS, you can do so on The TL...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Thomas Morris, the author of 'The Matter of the Heart: A history of the heart in eleven operations', to discuss the extraordinary life and influence of the Nobel prize-winning Jewish biochemist Otto Warburg, whose research into cancer, as well as his audacious character, helped him to survive Nazi Germany; the art critic and historian France...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, to discuss William Blake, who saw wonders everywhere (including a tree on Peckham Rye), and communicated them urgently in art and poetry – what does he have to tell us now?; the critic and writer Michael Kerrigan guides us through the ‘improbably enthralling...

In this bonus TLS long read, the writer Joan C. Williams discusses how Amazon’s business practices harm America. www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/fulfillment-alec-macgillis-review-joan-c-williams-amazon If you would like to listen to more audio articles from The TLS, you can do so on The TLS website or the News Over Audio app. A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas as joined by Keith Hopper, a critic of film and literature, to revisit the film ‘Midnight Cowboy’ (1969), a 'dark, difficult masterpiece' starring Jon Voight as an aspirant sex worker and Dustin Hoffman as his friend, an ailing con man; before it’s available in English, the journalist Henri Astier delves into the 'secret' diary of Michel Barnier...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Noo Saro-Wiwa, the author of ‘Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria’, to discuss developments in travel writing; Alice Kelly, the author of ‘Commemorative Modernisms: Women writers, death and the First World War’, considers how conflict permeates American culture; plus, a new poem by André Naffis-Sahely, ‘At the Graves of Labour’s...

In this bonus TLS long read, the writer Joyce Carol Oates explores the quintessential American minimalism of Walker Evans. www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/walker-evans-svetlana-alpers-review-joyce-carol-oates If you would like to listen to more audio articles from The TLS, you can do so on The TLS website or the News Over Audio app. A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Adam Watt, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, to mark 150 years since the birth of Marcel Proust, whose legacy seems stronger than ever; Sarah Lonsdale, the author of 'Rebel Women Between the Wars', re-considers ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’, a funny novel about interwar life in deepest Devon whose dar...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the novelist Margaret Drabble to consider the ‘curiously free-floating reputation’ of Russell Hoban, whose adult novels, including ‘Riddley Walker’, now appear as Penguin Modern Classics; as twin exhibitions mark the centenary of the birth of the English sculptor, painter, writer, designer and illustrator Michael Ayrton, the critic...

This week: How far off is a world in which robots do most of our jobs? Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Benjamin Schneider, a DPhil Candidate in Economic and Social History at Merton College, Oxford, to explore Artificial Intelligence, societal change, real and imagined, and the future of work; what will our writers, from Andrew Motion to Joyce Carol Oates, be reading this summer?; pl...

This week, Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig are joined by Paul Griffiths to discuss the beauty and grace of Mozart, the untortured genius; David Edgerton talks us through the decline and fall of British coal mining and its relationship with the Labour Party; plus, new discoveries about Locke and  Leviathan , obituary codes and the Buddha's wife 'La Clemenza di Tito' by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 'Mo...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Rosinka Chaudhuri, the author of ‘The Literary Thing: History, poetry and the making of a modern cultural sphere’, to discuss Rabindranath Tagore, who, in 1913, became the first non-white and non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – since which he has been largely overlooked; Kate Kennedy, the author of ‘Dweller in the S...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Michael Caines are joined by the critic and literary scholar Marjorie Perloff to discuss an encyclopedic work that sets out to tackle ‘Art and thought in the Cold War’, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Elvis Presley; the English professor and literary critic Rohan Maitzen explores the meticulously observed world of Olivia Manning’s Balkan novels; plus, the unhappy story of a...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Gerri Kimber to discuss a bold new biography of D. H. Lawrence, 'the most judged writer of his age'; twenty-odd writers share their formative encounters with nature, including the novelists Maaza Mengiste and Ali Smith; plus, reviews of the television adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s 'The Pursuit of Love' and 'Harm', a new play about lonel...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of ‘The Making of Jane Austen’, to discuss new research into the Austen family’s ties with slavery; Colin Grant, critic and writer, introduces Writers Mosaic, a new platform for writing and recordings; and Mary Beard considers the Roman love of temple-bui...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, to consider the work of Angela Thirkell, a kind of (but not really...) Anthony Trollope for the twentieth-century; the writer and audio documentarist Maria Margaronis considers the transformation of London’s Royal Court Theatre into a radical and moving “living news...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Ann Hallamore Caesar to mark 100 years since the première of the modernist masterpiece ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, considering it in the context of Luigi Pirandello’s life and work; Alexander Leissle reviews ‘Promises’, an intoxicating intergenerational collaboration between a jazz saxophonist and an electro producer; plus, a ne...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Patricia Craig, a writer and critic from Northern Ireland, who relates a sad and murky case of accidental killings, which took place during the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s; the TLS’s politics editor Toby Lichtig reviews a handful of recent films – works of documentary and fiction – with political stories, mostly atrocities, at their h...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Patricia J. Williams to discuss ‘Giving a Damn: Racism, romance and Gone with the Wind’, Williams’s deeply researched, and deeply felt, essay on the roots and legacy of racial injustice in the United States; Douglas Field considers a novel about a 'human mole' by Richard Wright, the African American writer best known for 'Native Son', which...