The TLS Podcast

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...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, to discuss the new Arden 3 edition of ‘Measure for Measure’, one of the "problem plays" (word-bothers, en garde); the poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic marks 200 years since the birth of Charles Baudelaire, whose extraordinary work seems bizarrely neglected; plus...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita of English at Princeton University, to discuss Blake Bailey’s keenly anticipated ‘Philip Roth: The biography’; and Alexandra Harris, the author of ‘Weatherland: Artist and writers under English skies’, considers a twenty-first century perspective on Joseph Wright of Derby, an eighteenth-century painter who...

This week, Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig are joined by Mary Norris, a New Yorker and editor at - what else? - the New Yorker magazine, to discuss the changing life of the city and its inhabitants; Yoojin Grace Wuertz talks us through a film garlanded with Oscar nominations, Minari, which casts a new light on the immigrant story and the American Dream; plus, the week's fiction reviews New Yorke...

Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the historian Mark Mazower, who presents new approaches to the battle for Greek independence in 1821; Noreen Masud reviews a performance of Stevie Smith’s poems that conveys the unsettling power of her presence; plus, Paul Muldoon marks 400 years since the birth of Andrew Marvell with a new poem, ‘The Glow-Worm to the Mower’.   Stevie Smith: Black...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the critic and novelist Claire Lowdon to consider Vivian Gornick, an American writer of essays – on literature, politics, the self – that demonstrate a rare “ability to stand back and look at the world in which she finds herself, and then set it down calmly on paper”; the TLS’s poetry editor Camille Ralphs explores the fantasy role-playing g...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Ann Pettifor, the economist and author of ‘The Case for the Green New Deal’, to discuss some inconvenient but incontrovertible truths left out of Bill Gates’s vision of the fight against climate change; Anna Aslanyan on a freewheeling account of the unpredictable life of the twentieth-century German writer Hasso Grabner; plus, re-reading Phi...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Edmund Gordon to review 'Klara and the Sun', Kazuo Ishiguro’s surprisingly hopeful new novel about an Artificial Friend; the world’s first poem about Superman (perhaps) was written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1942 but not published until now, in this week’s TLS – we discuss; and the medievalist Hetta Howes reviews two new translations of 'Beowulf...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Joyce Carol Oates to talk about the minimalist beauty in the photographs of Walker Evans, and his austere approach to his art. Colin Grant discusses the new film Nomadland, a blend of fact and fiction about US citizens who take to the road when they realize they cannot afford to grow old...and we look through a science fiction dictionary and...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, to discuss the rise of Bellingcat, an investigative body, started in one man’s bedroom in 2014, now able to get to the bottom of even the murkiest global events; Dante, Dante, Dante…. and Anne Weber’s epic of Annette Beaumanoir; and who was Keats’s mysterious Mrs Jones? The biographer Jonathan...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Cal Revely-Calder, who finds that, in Samuel Beckett Studies, jargon and certainty too often crowd out impressions of the work and the importance of ‘knowing what you don’t know’; Alice Wadsworth brings snippets of interest from this week’s TLS, including ‘women who wouldn’t wait’ and Borges in Inverness; and Ruth Scurr on the history of the...

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Avril Horner, author of a biography of Barbara Comyns whose quirky, menace-laced novels, long championed by Graham Greene, are finding their way back to us; a new poem by John Kinsella, 'Villanelle of Star-Picket-Hopping Red-Capped Robin'; and En Liang Khong describes the powerful pull – particularly difficult to resist during lockdown – of...