Elaine Showalter on the “avid, ardent, driven, generous, narcissistic, Olympian, obtuse, maddening, sometimes loveable but not very likeable” Susan Sontag; Patrice Higonnet goes in search of the real Robespierre; A. N. Wilson cuts through class, aristocracy, family and fantasy in Downton Abbey
Sontag: Her life, by Benjamin Moser
Robespierre: L’homme qui nous divise le plus, by Marcel Gauchet
Downton Abbey (Various cinemas)
Almanach de Gotha 2019, two volumes, edited by John James
"When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians." So says Irina Dumitrescu, who joins us to discuss the phenomenon of celebrity, from Sarah Bernhardt to the Kardashian-Jenners; Rafia Zakaria on the murder of the Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch, aka "How I'm looking?" girl; Lamorna Ash on 'Bait', a new film about a timeless clash between them and us, set in a small Cornish fishing village
The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus
Kardashian Kulture: How celebrities changed life in the 21st century by Ellis Cashmore
Tweenhood: Femininity and celebrity in tween popular culture by Melanie Kennedy
A Woman Like Her: The short life of Qandeel Baloch by Sanam Maher
The future of the planet is in question this week, or at least, humanity's place on it, as Gabrielle Walker discusses possible solutions to climate change and why we don't need to panic - yet - but we do need to act, together. The TLS's fiction editor, Toby Lichtig, talks us through the hype and hoopla around Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - and what the book itself is like. And are you Team Scott or Team Zelda? Joanna Scutts looks at 'the messy intertextuality of a marriage', and the question of influence within the Fitzgerald ménage.
Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben
Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change byNathaniel Rich
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour
We turn to children's and YA literature in this week's episode, with Rozalind Dineen and Toby Lichtig presenting new releases (as reviewed by a selection of young readers), as well as discussing some of the pros and cons of age-specific reading; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reintroduces J. M. Barrie's classic work Peter Pan, where a wild imagination masks tragic, sometimes disturbing, realities
What kind of son was Philip Larkin? The TLS's poetry editor Alan Jenkins finds insight in some of the 4,000-odd letters and postcards the poet sent home to his "Mop" and "Pop"; Helen Macdonald, the author of H is for Hawk, tells us more than we could ever hope to know about pigeons and pigeon fanciers; Norma Clarke considers the internet artist Cold War Steve, whose ‘furious absurdism’ has won him some 192.8K Twitter followers, and ponders connections with the eighteenth-century satires of Hogarth and Gillray
Letters Home, 1936–1977, by Philip Larkin, edited by James Booth
Homing: On pigeons, dwellings, and why we return, by Jon Day
Cold War Steve Presents...The Festival of Brexit, by Cold War Steve
The whereabouts of the "Salvator Mundi", the most costly artwork in the world, are still uncertain, as is its attribution to Leonardo da Vinci. Federico Varese, best known for his studies of the mafia, follows the trail; the TLS's history editor David Horspool considers the inner and outer worlds of Anne Frank’s diary, the actual anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, and a selection of other contributions to this week's special issue; Ladee Hubbard reflects on the late Toni Morrison, who died last week, and considers 'The Pieces I Am', a documentary that highlights Morrison's multifaceted life, work and legacy
The Collected Works, by Anne Frank, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier, Susan Massotty, Mirjam Pressler and Kirsten Warner and edited by Mirjam Pressler
Peterloo: The English uprising by Robert Poole
Legacy: One family, a cup of tea and the company that took on the world, by Thomas Harding
Jill Lepore traces the history of conspiracy theories and the conditions that allow them to thrive; Tim Crane talks us through whether we have free will or not, and why it is still a problem; Michael Caines looks at non-traditional approaches to criticism
Books
CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THEM, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
CONSPIRACIES OF CONSPIRACIES: How delusions have overrun America, by Thomas Milan Konda
THE STIGMATIZATION OF CONSPIRACY THEORY SINCE THE 1950s: ‘A plot to make us look foolish’, by Katharina Thalmann
THE AMERICAN CONSPIRACIES AND COVER-UPS: JFK, 9/11, the Fed, rigged elections, suppressed cancer cures, and the greatest conspiracies of our time, by Douglas Cirignano
REPUBLIC OF LIES: American conspiracy theorists and their surprising rise to power, by Anna Merlan
A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING:The new conspiracism and the assault on democracy, by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
HARVESTER OF HEARTS: Motherhood under the sign of Frankenstein, by Rachel Feder
THE HUNDREDS, by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart
TUNNEL VISION, by Kevin Breathnach
ON THE LITERARY MEANS OF REPRESENTING THE POWERFUL AS POWERLESS, by Steven Zultanski
The Limits of Free Will: Selected essays by Paul Russell
Aspects of Agency: Decisions, abilities, explanations, and free will by Alfred R. Mele
Self-Determination: The ethics of action – Volume One by Thomas Pink
Following the discovery of a strange book, Sarah Green revises the story of the late nineteenth-century poet Lionel Johnson, whose legacy was distorted in the 1950s by a criminal with a taste for fancy bedding; in the US, of 70,000 cases that went to disposition in 2016, more than 99 per cent resulted in conviction. What does this tell us? Clive Stafford Smith explains why American justice is a mirage; since 2015, Refugee Tales – part walking pilgrimage, part protest, part collection of narratives about those unjustly treated by Britain’s immigration system – has become an annual event. David Herd tells us what ground remains to be covered
Doing Justice: A prosecutor’s thoughts on crime, punishment, and the rule of law, by Preet Bharara
Nick Groom ponders the fate of the beleaguered British countryside and shares new theories about the economics of the natural world; En Liang Khong takes us through the increasingly global phenomenon of Japanese manga (which translates as “pictures run riot”); Damian Flanagan on Mishima, a writer who yearned to transcend time and identity
Green and Prosperous Land: A blueprint for rescuing the British countryside by Dieter Helm
Who Owns England?: How we lost our green and pleasant land and how to take it back, by Guy Shrubsole
Manga, and exhibition at the British Museum in London
Star, by Yukio Mishima; translated by Sam Bett
The Frolics of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima; translated by Andrew Clare
"The sociable side of nineteenth-century musical life is not acknowledged as often as it should be..." – Laura Tunbridge discusses the interconnected, complicated and often contradictory myths and realities that link Chopin, Schumann and Brahms; the TLS's music editor Lucy Dallas takes us through a selection of other pieces on music in this week's issue, including new histories of the blues and the poetic pop of Kate Bush and the Pet Shop Boys; when Irving Sandler wrote his seminal history of abstract expressionism, he neglected to mention Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning – Jenni Quilter joins us to put these artists back in the frame
Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art, by Mary Gabriel
Fryderyk Chopin: A life and times by Alan Walker
Schumann: The faces and masks by Judith Chernaik
Brahms in Context, edited by Natasha Loges and Katy Hamilton
(with Liebeslieder Walzer, Opus 52, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra)
Up Jumped the Devil: The real life of Robert Johnson by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow
The Original Blues: The emergence of the Blues in African American vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
It’s the centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch, the novelist-philosopher who dominated the literary pages for much of the twentieth century. Where do we stand on her now? Michael Caines and Frances Wilson discuss; This was the week that the US women’s football team won the World Cup. Devoney Looser, the roller derby queen of academia, enjoys “a brief opportunity to revel in America’s better strengths”.
Do the kids – in these times of identity politics – still read Updike? The answer is “probably not”. But should they? Claire Lowdon makes the case; Toby Lichtig discusses Chelsea Manning, the US Army data analyst turned whistle-blower, and a new documentary on her life; Eric Rauchway considers the prevalence of pro-Nazi feeling and policy in 1940s America and beyond
Novels 1959–1965: The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, by John Updike (Library of America)
XY Chelsea, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins
Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s supporters in the United States, by Bradley Hart
The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a village caught in between, by Michael Dobbs
Thea Lenarduzzi on the cultural history of gesture and body language; What is Chaucer to us today? When did he become known as the "Father of English poetry", and what did he get up to when he was not writing rude and memorable poetry? Julia Boffey explains; the Stonewall uprising in New York is remembered as a pivotal moment in LGBTQ rights – fifty years on, Hugh Ryan revisits the history
Books
Dictionary of Gestures: Expressive comportments and movements in use around the world by François Caradec
Silent History: Body language and nonverbal identity, 1860–1914, by Peter K. Andersson
The Stonewall Riots: A documentary history, edited by Marc Stein
The Stonewall Reader, edited by the New York Public Library
Pride: Photographs after Stonewall by Fred W. McDarrah
Love and Resistance: Out of the closet into the Stonewall era, edited by Jason Baumann
TLS contributors – including David Baddiel, Mary Beard, Paul Muldoon and Elizabeth Lowry – give their seasonal reading recommendations; TLS editors wreak havoc and suggest their own. (Visit the-tls.co.uk to read the summer books feature in full.)
A "new" ending to a Nabokov novel and the unregarded first volume of Vasily Grossman's epic, the "Soviet War and Peace"; Rebecca Reich guides us through these and the question of whether the West is paranoid about Russia or vice versa; Laura Freeman joins us to talk about dinner with the Durrells and pond life sandwiches.
Books
Stalingrad: A novel by Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff
If capitalism is broken, can it be fixed? And can it save the environment? Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses; as we mark seventy-five years since the D-Day landings, William Boyd considers a brilliant new "worm's-eye view" of historical events; a decade after leaving academia for the "wilderness of writing", Stephen Marche returns to report on the troubled field of the humanities
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the new anxieties by Paul Collier
Capitalism: The future of an illusion by Fred L. Block
Money and Government: A challenge to mainstream economics by Robert Skidelsky
Normandy ’44: D-Day and the battle for France by James Holland
The Omani novelist Jokha al-Harthi and the translator Marilyn Booth won this year's Man Booker International prize for fiction in translation, for the novel Celestial Bodies, an account of three sisters living in the village of al-Awafi in an Oman on the brink of change. A couple of days after the announcement, at Waterstones book shop in Piccadilly, the winners spoke to the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak about the novel, Arabic culture and modernisation, translation, and women’s wisdom.
Anna Katharina Schaffner on the cultural history of fat and fat phobia; the TLS's travel editor Catharine Morris on why Paris will always be disappointing, the solitude of open spaces, and the problem with "Victor" the archetypal travel writer; an extract from the 2019 Man Booker International prize-winning Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi, read by the novel's translator Marilyn Booth
Books
Fat: A cultural history of the stuff of life by Christopher E. Forth
The Truth About Fat by Anthony Warner
Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fat phobia by Sabrina Strings
We’ll Never Have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix
The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
Heida: A shepherd at the edge of the world by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir and Heiða Ásgeirsdóttír, translated by Philip Roughton
Where the Hornbeam Grows: A journey in search of a garden by Beth Lynch
The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs
Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi, translated by Marilyn Booth
To mark the bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth, the TLS's history editor David Horspool guides us through all manner of Victorian matters, including the Widow of Windsor's mastery of soft power, how different things might have been had she been born a boy, how the Victorians amused themselves, and the Rebecca Riots; we also have a symposium in this week's paper, asking writers and thinkers – including Steven Pinker and Bernardine Evaristo – to tell us about the important books from their childhoods. To discuss this – and to share our own youthful reading – we're joined in the studio by a [insert collective noun here] of TLS editors
Go to www.the-tls.co.uk/ to read a selection of articles from our Victorian special issue, and much more.
Our symposium was prompted by an initiative – Books To Inspire – launched by Hay Festival Wales, aiming to compile a crowd-sourced list of titles to inspire the next generation. Find out more at hayfestival.com
The comedian and writer Helen Lederer joins us to discuss gender and comedy and the new Comedy Women In Print Prize; Lucy Dallas considers a clutch of novels in which animals might offer a little respite from human company; the TLS’s philosophy editor Tim Crane guides us through the riches of this week’s philosophy issue, including how the advent of biological immortality might augur “the greatest inequality experienced in all human history” and what happened when Michel Foucault took LSD in Death Valley
To Leave with the Reindeer by Olivia Rosenthal, translated by Sophie Lewis
Animalia by Jean-Baptiste del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne
The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini, translated by Michael F. Moore
“The last mortals: why we are especially unfortunate to die, when our near-descendants could be immortal", by Regini Rini – see this week’s TLS (in print and online)
Foucault in California: A true story, wherein the great French philosopher drops acid in the Valley of Death by Simeon Wade
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