The TLS Podcast

An end-of-year edition, bringing together some of our favourite bits from the past twelve months: Kathryn Hughes on whether and where Charlotte Brontë meets Jane Eyre; Margaret Drabble reviews the life and work of Muriel Spark, whose centenary we marked this year; David Baddiel discusses whether Jewishness is inherently funny; Clare Pettitt revisits the history of the Peterloo massacre of 181...

TLS editors discuss some memorable arts events from the past twelve months; plus, food and drink in literature and a preview of the TLS's Christmas double issue, including how to do German food, M. F. K. Fisher, French food slang, pub stories, and a deconstruction of the traditional British Christmas dinner  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lucy Atkins charts our changing relationship with Orcinus orca, from "demon dolphin" to cuddly icon; Ruth Scurr on the lives and unlikely friendship of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn  Books Orca: How we came to know and love the ocean’s greatest predator by Jason M. Colby John Evelyn: A life of domesticity by John Dixon Hunt  The Curious World of Samuel Pepys...

Michael Caines on the little-known romantic William Gilbert, a “man of fine genius” (according to William Wordsworth) who had “unfortunately received a few rays of supernatural light through a crack in his upper story”; Daniel Beer tells the tale of the Gulag at Solovki, a converted monastery known as “the Paris of the Northern concentration camps”, a place of brutality but also of resistant cultu...

Forty years since the controversial Spanish constitution of 1978, Rupert Shortt, Hispanic editor at the TLS, discusses the painful evolution of democracy in Spain; Siobhan Magee considers our problematic relationship with farmed animals, namely dairy cows, and crops, such as palm oil; Dwight Garner, a literary critic at the New York Times, offers glimpses into his commonplace book, in wh...

A handful of TLS editors gather for the yearly process of picking through contributors' Books of the Year selections, and nominate their own books to remember; Serhii Plokhy, the winner of this year's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for 'Chernobyl: The history of a nuclear catastrophe', speaks to the TLS's History editor David Horspool Selected books The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey...

Mary Beard joins us to answer the question: Is it accurate to call Donald Trump a fascist?, while the TLS's fiction and politics editor Toby Lichtig discusses how the President is presented, in books and on film; and Julia Bell looks back on her Oxford entrance interview - with no fondness - and wonders: "Was it a trap or a test?" Books Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward The Fifth...

To mark the centenary of the end of the First World War, the TLS's History editor David Horspool talks us through books, exhibitions and events that commemorate cataclysmic slaughter and scars that endure to this day; it’s easy to think of privacy invasion as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, but it has its own history dating back to the American Civil War – Sarah Igo tells us mo...

As Mike Leigh's film of the Peterloo massacre of 1819 is released, Clare Pettitt revisits the history; Marina Benjamin offers a personal and literary account of the threshold between sleep and wakefulness; following the publication of a second volume of Sylvia Plath's letters, Hannah Sullivan looks for fresh insights into the poet's work, life and death; finally, Sam Riviere reads his new poem, "S...

Are authors, reviewers and publicists wasting their time on book coverage? The contemporary conversation about books and ideas goes way beyond traditional features and interviews. Book groups, academic seminars, Amazon user reviews, Goodreads, the press, radio, podcasts, and sometimes even TV: the form, tone and quality of coverage has infinite variety. But how much does any of it help the books b...

Elaine Showalter on a history of obscenity and censorship and the largely futile efforts of a US Postal Inspector; Ladee Hubbard on five years of Black Lives Matter and the myth of an egalitarian, post-racial America; Kassia St Clair on women, weaving and the rewriting of history Books Lust on Trial: Censorship and the rise of obscenity in the age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel ...

Keith Miller joins us to discuss everybody's favourite Renaissance man; the TLS's Fiction editor Toby Lichtig meets Anna Burns, the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel  Milkman;  this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, meanwhile, remains suspended following charges of serious sexual misconduct and cronyism – Richard Orange reports on the mess that has en...

Mary Beard reflects on the peculiarities of Homer's best-loved, many-sided epic; Neel Mukherjee on the scandalous survival of the Indian caste system; following the recent party conferences, James O'Brien offers a wry overview of Britain's political mess Books:  The Measure of Homer: The ancient reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey  by Richard Hunter Ants Among Elephants: An...

Michael Caines joins us to discuss female liberation in genteel Cheltenham; we look ahead to an Odyssey extravaganza, with Ted Hodgkinson from the Southbank centre; Paul Muldoon brings a salutary note of optimism to US politics and history with his new poem "With Joseph Brant in Canajoharie" Books Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds by Sue Jones The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilso...

In this bonus episode, the TLS's History editor David Horspool discusses Thomas Cromwell with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the author of a new, definitive biography. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lorna Scott Fox joins us to discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Mexico's Tlatelolco of 1968, a travesty still shrouded in obfuscation; the TLS's History editor David Horspool discusses Thomas Cromwell with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the author of a new, definitive biography; and finally, Rozalind Dineen offers a round-up of interesting new podcasts Books and podcasts discussed México...

Philip Horne and Frances Wilson join us to discuss Henry James, the not-always masterly Master who gave us novels as apparently divergent as Washington Square, with its clear, tight prose, The Ambassadors (prone to accidents of publication) and The Golden Bowl, which spills pleasures of an altogether more sinuous nature; plus, details of a little-known trip James took to California, whic...

Roz Dineen on the time-stained image of the artist-addict, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, and whether “stories about getting better [can] ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart"; "David Foster Wallace would send me letters and I wouldn’t answer them. He would send works in progress with forlorn notes. 'You’re under no obligation to read or to pretend you’ve read the enclosed,...

Andrew Motion discusses the life, work and curious afterlife of his friend and "subject" Philip Larkin; Imogen Russell Williams has written an essay on diversity (or the lack of it) in children's books and offers some recommendations; Zoe Williams gives her verdict on the very British political tradition that is Prime Minister’s Questions Books Philip Larkin: A writer's life by Andrew Mo...

Carl Miller, the author of The Death of the Gods, which deals with how power works and who holds it in the digital age, sheds light on how algorithms, originally devised as simple problem-solving devices, have become so complicated that no one, not even their creators, can control them; Kristen Roupenian points out the problem with an “unfailingly enthusiastic” compendium of twentieth-century fema...

In the course of his long literary career, Samuel Johnson reviewed only one novel. Who was it by? None other than the "preposterously confident” Charlotte Lennox, a force in eighteenth-century prose and a model for Jane Austen – Min Wild tells us more; What happens if you ask a literary critic to watch top-grossing (pun intended) Hollywood comedies from the past three decades? Robert Douglas-...

Are we entering a new age for LSD, full of medical potential? Can it shed its heavily tie-dyed cultural baggage? And who has written the finest prose about psychedelics? Toby Lichtig joins us to discuss; Eri Hotta (re)introduces us to Natsume Sōseki, "the greatest novelist of modern Japan"; Kate Chisholm considers the chequered history of Virago, founded in 1973 as a "feminist...

With Stig Abell and Roz Dineen. Steven Nadler drops in to tell us all we need to know about the much-misunderstood Descartes; and En Liang Khong visits the Foundling museum to see an installation about how to commemorate loss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To mark 200 years since Emily Brontë’s birth, we are joined by Robert Potts and Jacqueline Banerjee to look back at Brontë’s life and most famous work Wuthering Heights – with a nod to Kate Bush’s memorable track, as well as to other, more recent tributes; Mika Ross-Southall shares the story of Tommy Nutter, the "rebel tailor of 1960s Savile Row", who, from humble origins, pulled himself up by the...

“How much do you make things happen or let them happen to you?” “Can women be happy alone?” – questions such as these form the basis of a series of interviews with women, from heiresses to factory workers, conducted in the 1960s by the British writer Nell Dunn; as a reissue of Talking To Women appears Kate Webb introduces us to this seminal feminist text. And Patricia J. W...