Richard Fortey takes us on an energetic sprint through 65 million years of Europe's complex biological history; David Robey introduces the life and work of Emilio Salgari, the Italian Rider Haggard; Ella Baron, the TLS's regular cartoonist, discusses her work, including this week's European cover.

Books

Europe: A natural history by Tim Flannery

Emilio Salgari: Una mitologia moderna tra letteratura, politica, società (volumes I and II) by Ann Lawson Lucas

Ella Baron's work will be exhibited at Christie's in London, from April 5 to 10

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Carol Tavris considers new approaches to the old problem of old age (and the newer problem of old old age); as secularism wanes on the global scale, Rupert Shortt considers whether religion does more harm than good 

Books

Bolder: Making the most of our longer lives by Carl Honoré

Borrowed Time: The science of how and why we age by Sue Armstrong

Retirement and Its Discontents: Why we won’t stop working, even if we can by Michelle Pannor Silver

Women Rowing North: Navigating life’s currents and flourishing as we age by Mary Pipher

On the Brink of Everything: Grace, gravity and getting old by Parker J. Palmer

This Chair Rocks: A manifesto against ageism by Ashton Applewhite

Does Religion do More Harm than Good? by Rupert Shortt

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“What we often forget in the daily drumbeat of abuses by the dominant tech companies is our complicity in these abuses, and in the fundamental and unsettling ways the internet has changed every one of us.”

As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enters its seventieth anniversary, Dave Eggers, in the 2018 PEN H. G. Wells lecture, argues that urgent amendments are needed to mitigate the corrosive effects of technology on the societal and the personal. You can read an edited extract from the lecture on the TLS website.

This is a recording of an event that took place on December 16, 2018, at the Bridge Theatre, London.  

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Phil Baker guides us through the morbid, wistful and yet immensely charming world of the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey; Frances Wilson weighs the pleasures and pains of letter and email writing; Ian Sansom on the struggle to be funny

Books

Born To Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery

What a Hazard a Letter Is: The strange destiny of the unsent letter, by Caroline Atkins

Written In History: Letters that changed the world, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

In Their Own Words: Volume 2: More letters from history

Wit's End: What wit is, how it works, and why we need it, by James Geary

Messing About In Quotes: A little Oxford dictionary of humorous quotations, compiled by Gyles Brandreth

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David Coward celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose radical thought has long been obscured by his protuberant nose; Muriel Zagha on Molière, France’s most famous playwright, and a bold new adaptation of Tartuffe; finally, a poem by Stephen Knight: “Rail Replacement Bus Service” (sigh)

 

Molière’s ‘Tartuffe’, a new version by John Donnelly, at the National Theatre, London

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With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas

Toby Lichtig comes in to talk the wide scope of Jewish culture, the “lachrymose” theory of history and why it is Arthur Miller time once more. Roz Dineen deals with porn, pile-ons and goop podcasts. And we call Thea when she is “working from home” to check in on her new dog.

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The writer and comedian Charlie Higson, half of the team behind The Fast Show, on the curious history of comedy written and performed by pairs; the novelist Margaret Drabble considers the dizzying new releases from the estate of Anthony Burgess, the man Philip Larkin once called “the Batman of contemporary letters”  

Texts

Stan & Ollie, directed by Jon S. Baird 

Morecambe & Wise: 50 years of sunshine, by Gary Morecambe

The Double Act: A history of British comedy duos, by Andrew Roberts

Soupy Twists!: The full, official story of the sophisticated silliness of Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie, by Jem Roberts

Beard’s Roman Women by Anthony Burgess, edited by Graham Foster

Puma by Anthony Burgess, edited by Paul Wake

The Black Prince by Adam Roberts

Obscenity and the Arts, a talk by Anthony Burgess, edited by Johnny Walsh

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A conversation between the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith and the journalist Carolina, recorded at Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia earlier this month. The full Hay Festival archive can be accessed by subscribing to Hay Player online at hayfestival.org

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A recording of the inaugural Gabriel García Marquez lecture given this February by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, at Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia. The full Hay Festival archive can be accessed by subscribing to Hay Player online at hayfestival.org

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As the MeToo movement continues to focus our attentions on questions around abuse, consent and justice, Rebecca Watson joins us to discuss the various and prolonged impacts of sexual assault, and the warping effect of trauma on narrative; the TLS’s French editor Adrian Tahourdin considers the inexorable rise of “le globish” (by which English words supplant, or pervert, French ones), and presents the diverse and challenging books in contention for this year’s Society of Author’s Translation Prizes

 

Books

Not That Bad: Dispatches from rape culture, edited by Roxane Gay

A False Report: A true story by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong

On Rape by Germaine Greer 

The President’s Gardens by Muhsin al-Ramli, translated by Luke Leafgren 

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell

Kruso by Lutz Seiler, translated by Tess Lewis 

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Eighteen months after Emmanuel Macron rode a wave of optimism to the Élysée Palace, the French are rioting and the President's approval ratings are desperately low – Sudhir Hazareesingh tells us what went wrong; James O'Brien reflects on another week of Brexit bafflement; Laura Freeman introduces the "Hungry Novel", a sub-genre of the post-war British novel in which writers, subsisting on meagre rations of stodge and tinned goods, channelled their appetites into their prose

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Read by Lisa Dwan. Full text available at the-tls.co.uk

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Catherine Taylor on bookish goings on in the north of England, from her family’s bookshop in Sheffield to the Northern Fiction Alliance of small presses; Diarmaid Ferriter considers the fraught matter of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland; Fríða Ísberg on the spectre of war in Icelandic film and fiction

 

Books

The Border: The legacy of a century of Anglo-Irish politics by Diarmaid Ferriter

Hotel Silence (Ör) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlingsson

Section 6 of “American Standard”, a new poem by Paul Muldoon published in this week’s TLS; read by Lisa Dwan (full recording available as a separate podcast episode)

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Imogen Russell Williams on children's books that tackle grief and war, “offering distressed adults the calming certainty of a script, and baffled children the reassurance of straightforward answers”; Carl Miller discusses the creation, and squabbling continuation, of Reddit, one of the most popular websites in the world; A. N. Wilson considers the Travellers Club in London, now in its 200th year, where Britain's prime ministers "got stuff done" 

Books

White Feather by Catherine and David MacPhail

The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay

An Anty-War Story by Tony Ross

Only One of Me by Lisa Wells and Michelle Robinson (illustrated by Tim Budgen and Catalina Echeverri)

The Afterwards by A. F. Harrold and Emily Gravett

We Are the Nerds: The birth and tumultuous life of Reddit, the internet's culture laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

The Travellers Club: A bicentennial history (1819–2019) by John Martin Robinson 

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Boyd Tonkin states the case – never overstated – for literature in translation, and reviews a commendable recent effort "to grasp, and to survey, the entire planet of words"; Andrew Scull considers the travails of social psychology and the egos and experiments that professed to tell us something essential about human nature by setting fire to forests or electrocuting dogs... 

Books 

Found in Translation: 100 of the finest short stories ever translated, edited by Frank Wynne

The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment by Gina Perry 

The Hope Circuit: A psychologist’s journey from helplessness to optimism by Martin Seligman 

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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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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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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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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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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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