The TLS Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Finer points of murder Jan 10, 2019

Show notes

Tom Stevenson offers a recent history of political assassination, from a CIA manual of 1953 to the Jamal Khashoggi affair; The literary achievements of Nancy Cunard have long been eclipsed by her image as the archetypal flapper-muse of the roaring 1920s – as Anna Girling reveals a previously unknown short story (published for the first time in this week's TLS), we reassess Cunard's legacy; Who killed Edwin Drood? In 1914, faced with Dickens's final, unfinished novel, prominent literary types gathered to stage the trial of Drood's alleged killer – Pete Orford tells us more...

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Icons familiar and unfamiliar Jan 03, 2019

Show notes

With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas

Lara Pawson drops in to tell the tale of David Wojnarowicz, the New York artist whose time has come. Elaine Showalter examines a new biography of Germaine Greer. Kim Addonizio, winner of the Mick Imlah Prize for Poetry, reads her victorious poem. Plus, Lucy admits to having an allotment, and Stig learns he has been introducing the show all wrong.

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Highlights from 2018 – a bonus episode Dec 27, 2018

Show notes

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 1819. A refresher for regular listeners and a sampler for newcomers – with thanks to all.

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Mary Beard's 'Introduction to the Odyssey' – a bonus episode Dec 27, 2018

Show notes

Who is Odysseus? Why can't he get home? And will the gods help or hinder his journey? In this special episode, the TLS's Classics editor Mary Beard chairs a panel featuring the author and academic Simon Goldhill, the memoirist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and the novelist Madeline Miller. This is a recording of a live event, staged in collaboration with the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival in October 2018.

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Arts of the Year 2018 Dec 20, 2018

Show notes

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

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Ode to the orca Dec 13, 2018

Show notes

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 and John Evelyn by Margaret Willes

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Who on earth was William Gilbert? Dec 06, 2018

Show notes

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 culture and ideas; finally, Laurence Scott considers the cultural history of shoeshining, from Dickens to Police Squad

Books

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism by Paul Cheshire

Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki, 1923–1930: The Paris of the northern concentration camps by Andrea Gullotta

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Our problem with cows Nov 29, 2018

Show notes

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 which four decades of favourite quotations converse with each other

Books

The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie

Palma Africana by Michael Taussig

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The best books of 2018 Nov 22, 2018

Show notes

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

Charles de Gaulle: A certain idea of France by Julian Jackson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Murmur by Will Eaves

Circe by Madeline Miller

Talking To Women by Nell Dunn

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long

Grant by Ron Chernow

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Is it accurate to call Donald Trump a fascist? Nov 15, 2018

Show notes

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 Risk by Michael Lewis

Nobody hates Trump more than Trump by David Shields

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