The TLS Podcast

Latest Episodes:

On booze and art Sep 12, 2018

Show notes

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,' he wrote on one piece. I didn’t." – David Streitfeld recalls being David Foster Wallace's "worst friend"

Books

The Recovering by Leslie Jamison

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close encounters with addiction by Gabor Maté

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Philip Larkin, beyond the grave Sep 05, 2018

Show notes

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 Motion (1993; reissued September 2018)

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Square by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen

I Am Thunder by Muhammad Khan

Knights and Bikes by Gabrielle Kent

You’re Safe With Me by Chitra Soundar and Poonam Mistry

Knights and Bikes by Gabrielle Kent

You’re Safe With Me by Chitra Soundar and Poonam Mistry

(For all the books discussed by Imogen Russell Williams, go to the-tls.co.uk)

Punch and Judy Politics: An insider’s guide to Prime Minister’s questions by Tom Hamilton and Ayesha Hazarika

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Too smart for our own good Aug 22, 2018

Show notes

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 female intellectuals (including Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion): who is left out and why?; eighty-odd years ago, Zora Neale Hurston, now best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, interviewed Kossola O-Lo-Loo-Ay, the last known survivor of the Atlantic Slave Trade. As her book is finally published, Colin Grant joins us to tell us more

Books

The Death of the Gods: The new global power grab by Carl Miller

Sharp: The women who made an art of having an opinion by Michelle Dean

Barracoon: The story of the last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale

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Same old gags Aug 15, 2018

Show notes

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-Fairhurst explains how comedy reflects broader culture and anxieties; How are women treated in film and television? Is there cause for celebration? Alice Wadsworth joins us in the studio to discuss.

Books

Charlotte Lennox: An independent mind by Susan Carlile

Stealing the Show: How women are revolutionizing television by Joy Press

Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive portrayals in speculative film and TV by Diana Adesola Mafe

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Turn on, tune in, drop out? Aug 08, 2018

Show notes

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 press", plus 40 years of Modern Classics, a series conceived to challenge the established male dominated literary canon and rescue and rehabilitate forgotten works by women

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Mind and memory Aug 01, 2018

Show notes

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.

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Emily Brontë's wuthering wilds Jul 25, 2018

Show notes

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 force of his wild imagination to dress anyone who was anyone

Books, etc

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (new edition by HQ; with a foreword by Michael Stewart)

Ill Will: The untold story of Heathcliff by Michael Stewart

Emily Brontë: A life in twenty poems by Nick Holland

Emily Brontë Reappraised: A view from the twenty-first century by Claire O’Callaghan

Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music by John Hennessy

The Brontë Stones project - https://bit.ly/2LOgEiQ

House of Nutter: The rebel tailor of Savile Row by Lance Richardson

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Women, in and out of control Jul 18, 2018

Show notes

“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. Williams discusses the role and lingering influence of the Progressive Era's 'American Plan' to stamp out immorality through policies including compulsory STD tests and government-endorsed sterilization

Books

Talking To Women by Nell Dunn

Fixing the Poor: Eugenic sterilization and child welfare in the twentieth century by Molly Ladd-Taylor

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison 'promiscuous' women by Scott W. Stern

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Summer Books 2018 Jul 11, 2018

Show notes

We’re joined in the studio by TLS editors for arts, features and fiction, respectively, Lucy Dallas, Roz Dineen and Toby Lichtig, to pick through a selection of TLS writers’ summer reading choices – from reworked Classical myths to Deadpool comics – before offering a taste of our own, including books by Sally Rooney, Bruno Latour and an account of witchcraft and agrarian cults in early modern Italy. Go to the-TLS.co.uk to read our summer books feature in full.

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Ode to Lee Child – a bonus episode Jul 11, 2018

Show notes

Sam Leith, the books editor of the Spectator, and Stig Abell discuss their mutual appreciation of the crime novels of Lee Child.

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