Muriel Zagha reviews Marriage Story and considers a few other deserving/undeserving films either lauded or ignored by this year's awards panels; a clip from an interview with Francesca Wade, the author of Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (you'll find the full interview in your podcast feed); this month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anne Brontë, the sister whose reputation has been slowest to blossom but who, according to Samantha Ellis, was the most radical and modern of them all
Sanam Maher looks at how Muslim women are viewed in the West; Claire Lowdon finds puzzles and philosophy but no pleasure in J. M. Coetzee's recent work; Alan Jenkins explains the significance of the recently opened archive of T. S. Eliot's letters; Jeffrey Wainwright reads his poem "If all this did begin"
Books
From Victims to Suspects: Muslim women since 9/11 by Shakira Hussein
It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim women on faith, feminism, sexuality and race, edited by Mariam Khan
Sam Graydon grapples with quantum physics and the subatomic world; Elaine Showalter considers the 'startlingly racy, contradictory, emblematic' E. Nesbit, the 'first modern writer for children'; Which out-of-print books should be back in circulation and why? Roz Dineen presents the results of a TLS symposium
Books
Six Impossible Things: The ‘quanta of solace’ and the mysteries of the subatomic world, by John Gribbin
Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond the quantum, by Lee Smolin
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Author of ‘The Railway Children’, by Eleanor Fitzsimons
The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit: Author of ‘Five Children and It’ and ‘The Railway Children’, by Elisabeth Galvin
TLS editors gather to consider some of the decade’s major cultural shifts and events, with specialist insights from Mary Beard on academia, Beejay Silcox on fiction and Zoe Williams on gender
Go to the-tls.co.uk for the full twelve-page retrospective.
A newly discovered, pseudonymously signed mock-letter to the editor of 'The Lady’s Magazine' in 1823 tells the story of a wannabe writer who is visited by the "gentle spirit of Miss Austen". Not only might the letter offer new information on what Austen might actually have been like, says Devoney Looser, it is also the first piece of Jane Austen-inspired fan fiction; Anna Picard discusses the poet Anne Boyer’s memoir of modern illness and considers the intersections of literature and cancer; Jonathan Lynn shares memories of adventures with his cousin Oliver Sacks
Norma Clarke considers the third and final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher; having spent the past twenty years reporting on Russia, Owen Matthews tries to put his finger on why Vladimir Putin may prove to be one of the most successful political leaders of our era
Books
The Code of Putinism by Brian Taylor
Putin’s World: Russia against the West and with the rest by Angela Stent
The Putin System: An opposing view by Grigory Yavlinsky
Kremlin Winter: Russia and the second coming of Vladimir Putin by Robert Service
The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev, translated by Stephen Dalziel
We Need To Talk about Putin: How the West gets him wrong by Mark Galeotti
Dealing with the Russians by Andrew Monaghan
Putin v. the People: The perilous politics of a divided Russia by Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson
Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The path from market economy to kleptocracy by Anders Åslund
The author of 'The Five: The untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper', which won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, speaks to Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi
Just over ten years since introducing readers to a frustrated maths teacher called Oliver Kitteridge, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout reprises the character in a new novel, ‘Olive, Again’. Here, Strout talks to the TLS’s Roz Dineen about the craft of writing, why Olive has returned, and ageing on the page
“Apart from capitalism itself, is there any cultural and economic manifestation in the world today as ubiquitous, powerful and globalized as football?” John Foot assesses two new studies of the game; just over ten years ago, Elizabeth Strout introduced readers to a frustrated maths teacher called Olive Kitteridge. The novelist speaks to Roz Dineen about bringing Olive back onto the scene; the famously over-the-top cookery show ‘Two Fat Ladies’ last graced our television screens twenty years ago. Anna Girling celebrates the legacy of this unlikely union
‘The Age of Football: The global game in the twenty-first century’ by David Goldblatt
‘Ultra: The underworld of Italian football’ by Tobias Jones
TLS editors talk about Virginia Woolf's writing for the TLS, as we publish a collection of the reviews she wrote for us over a period of thirty years; on the eve of George Eliot's bicentennial, Rosemary Ashton talks about how she came to conclusions, moral and otherwise, in her novels; Caryn Rose sees Bruce Springsteen's new film and looks over his 'storied fifty-year career'
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read by Virginia Woolf
Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen, edited by Jonathan D. Cohen and June Skinner Sawyers
Sarah Lonsdale recounts how writers became enmeshed in national struggles; Jane Yager tells the surprising story of DIY punk in the DDR; we talk to Robert Potts about the pleasures of reading John le Carré ("I was never happier than when I was reading John le Carré")
Cold Warriors: Writers who waged the literary Cold War, by Duncan White
Burning Down the Haus: Punk rock, revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, by Tim Mohr
Michael Caines reports on an unprecedented gathering of work by William Hogarth, “replete with a bitter exuberance, folly finely observed and sin satirized”; “Sometimes a dark and stormy night calls for nothing more innovative than a classic chilling tale.” Joanna Scutts considers three new compendiums of the spooky and the macabre; Les Green makes a case for changing the UK's constitution (writing it down in one place being a good start...)
Hogarth: Place and progress, at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, until January 5, 2020
A Quaint and Curious Volume: Tales and poems of the gothic
Women’s Weird: Strange stories by women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson
Promethean Horrors: Classic tales of mad science, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes
Having asked a selection of writers to nominate their favourite magazines/journals, for a symposium in this week’s TLS, we pick through the results; as Granta turns forty, Alex Clark dives into the magazine’s archives, recently given to the British Library, and emerges clutching gems and old boots (including meeting minutes and evidence of fantasy commissioning); finally, the novelist and translator Lydia Davis talks us through her Thoreau-inspired approach to gardening
Having been staged in Edinburgh and Melbourne, David Greig's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 'Solaris' is now at the Hammersmith Lyric Theatre in London. The TLS's Arts editor Lucy Dallas asks him about returning to this strange story of contact, consciousness and how to avoid using "fremulators" on stage
As the Nobel in Literature and the Booker Prize break the rules, split opinion, and (probably) boost sales of a few books, a bunch of TLS editors share their thoughts on the whole endeavour of prize-giving (Michael: "you may as well throw a stone..."); Alexander van Tulleken considers 'War Doctor: Surgery on the front line', David Nott's tales from the operating tables, and floors, of war-torn places; as his stage adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 'Solaris' comes to London, David Greig, the artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, talks to the TLS's arts editor Lucy Dallas
In this bonus edition of the podcast, William Collins have taken over the feed to play a new episode of their podcast, Ideas Matter. In this exclusive extract, science writer Phillip Ball talks to his editor Myles Archibald about the ideas explore in his book, How To Grow A Human.
To subscribe to Ideas Matter and discover more authors by William Collins, click here.
As #PublishingSoWhite continues to shame publishers into diversifying their lists, Colin Grant discusses some of the anxieties and complexities beneath the surface; Andrew Motion on why he keeps returning to William Wordsworth; Kate Miller reads a new poem, "Turned-down"
Wordsworth’s Fun by Matthew Bevis
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their year of marvels by Adam Nicolson
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