TLS editors pick through the books some of our writers will be reading this summer, and share their own selections.
Visit the-TLS.co.uk to read the 'Summer Books' feature in full
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The death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith certainly can’t, especially as this week should have seen Edward Earl Johnson turn sixty. Instead, in 1987, he was executed at the Mississippi State Penitentiary for a crime nobody thinks he committed; Harry Sidebottom considers the ancients’ view on the plague, a serious outbreak of which occurred somewhere around the Mediterranean every ten to twenty years; “If oil is the blood of the global economy, shipping is the circulatory system”, say Tom Stevenson, who describes how the world’s economic and diplomatic relationships play out at sea
Fourteen Days in May – BBC Storyville, on BBC iPlayer
Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and capitalism in the Arabian peninsula by Laleh Khalili
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What art have we been enjoying in lockdown? What are we most missing? And what is the future of art institutions? The TLS's arts editor Lucy Dallas joins us to discuss; Edith Hall tells us about Artemidorus, the author of an ancient dream manual now finally available in English; David Bromwich on democracy and the rise of the strongman
A symposium on art in lockdown by the TLS , plus commentary by Nicholas Kenyon
The Interpretation of Dreams by Artemidorus, translated by Martin Hammond
An Ancient Dream Manual – Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams, by Peter Thonemann
See David Bromich’s round-up of books on the TLS website.
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Colin Grant on several hundred years of Jamaican excellence and dysfunction; fifty years since the death of E. M. Forster, Michael Caines considers Forster’s legacy as a novelist and critic; the poet A. E. Stallings on an Athens slowly emerging from lockdown
The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the postcolonial predicament by Orlando Patterson
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The poet and novelist Adam Foulds on the evolution of loneliness and its traditionally privileged cousin, solitude; Sam Leith on thrills, spills and racism in Willard Price’s children’s Adventure series; Molly Guinness dips into 300-odd years of children’s books and finds leaden instruction, radical ideas and pure nonsense
A History of Solitude by David Vincent
A Biography of Loneliness: The history of an emotion by Fay Bound Alberti
Discovering Children’s Books, the British Library online
British Literature Catalogue, Peter Harrington
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Hirsh Sawhney files a lockdown dispatch from New Haven, Connecticut, the uneasy home of Yale University; Arin Keeble talks us through the tricksy, rewarding and under-known work of Percival Everett; Lauren Kassel on the history of astrology, one of the oldest, most complex, intellectually powerful – and controversial – sciences
Telephone by Percival Everett
A Scheme of Heaven: Astrology and the birth of science by Alexander Boxer
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The TLS’s philosophy editor Tim Crane guides us through a selection of reviews and essays from this week’s issue, including on the future of AI and what Thomas Hobbes, Susan Sontag, Montaigne and the trolley problem can tell us about our present predicament; the novelist Will Eaves re-reads Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, “a caravan of episodes, made up of people going through the same horror in different ways”, and ponders a big-screen adaptation…
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Ian Buruma on the twentieth-century Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, a fascist and a fabulist with a hunger for war and a remarkable way of capturing it; Sue Stuart-Smith on gardening in the trenches of the First World War and the concept of horticultural therapy; to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the TLS's history editor David Horspool talks us through a range of books, articles and essays covering the Second World War
Selected books
Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, by Curzio Malaparte, translated from the Italian and the French by Stephen Twilley
The Well-Gardened Mind: The restorative power of nature, by Sue Stuart-Smith
Dresden: The fire and the darkness, by Sinclair McKay
The Volunteer: The true story of the resistance hero who infiltrated Auschwitz, by Jack Fairweather
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James Waddell on the disorderly history of alphabetic order; Beejay Silcox, who fled Cairo for Western Australia as the coronavirus spread, tells a tale of star-crossed lovers; Jordan Sand gives a short cultural history of mask-wearing
A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order by Judith Flanders
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Lawrence Douglas, in Massachusetts, on the presidential past, present and future of Donald Trump; Irina Dumitrescu, in Germany, on books as escape (attempt) and reading the plague into plague-free books; Lucy Dallas presents this month’s round-up of audio / visual offerings
A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s testing of America, by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Unmaking The Presidency: Donald Trump’s war on the world’s most powerful office, by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes
American Carnage: On the front lines of the Republican civil war and the rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
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William Shakespeare, the writer who – above all others, perhaps – keeps giving and giving. Michael Caines takes us through the latest research, theories and discoveries (or not, as the case may be); Why do women read more fiction than men? Lucy Scholes returns to the age-old conundrum
Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, stabbings and broken hearts by Kathryn Harkup
Untimely Death in Renaissance Drama by Andrew Griffin
Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro
Shakespeare and Trump by Jeffrey R. Wilson
‘Infecting the teller – The failure of a mathematical approach to Shakespeare’s authorship’ by Brian Vickers, in this week’s TLS
Why Women Read Fiction: The stories of our lives by Helen Taylor
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Today an edition of our new daily podcast - Stories of our times. Our new free daily news podcast takes you to the heart of the stories that matter, with exclusive access and reporting. Published for the start of your day, it is hosted by Manveen Rana and David Aaronovitch.
If you want to hear more please search for Stories of our times and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
With reading on the rise under the lockdown, TLS editor Stig Abell suggests three books for a little escapism during these uncertain times.
Stories of our times is the new daily podcast from The Times. Listen to more episodes here
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Samuel Graydon reviews two new albums, by the folk troubadour Sam Lee and indie rock band Cornershop, both of which offer innovative and intelligent musical perspectives on modern England; the TLS’s arts editor Lucy Dallas presents this month’s ‘Audio/Visual’, a monthly round-up of listening and watching; Josephine Livingstone grapples with the 'omnivore paradox' in the arts sector: why broader tastes in art have not led to wider participation
Featured works
Old Wow by Sam Lee
England is a Garden by Cornershop
Audio: ‘Reply All’, the podcast
Visual: ‘Five Guys a Week’, Channel 4
Entitled: Discriminating tastes and the expansion of the arts by Jennifer C. Lena
Steal as Much as You Can: How to win the culture wars in an age of austerity by Nathalie Olah
Smashing It: Working class artists on life, art and making it happen, edited by Sabrina Mahfouz
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Tim Parks talks us through the lockdown from Milan; A. N. Wilson explains the Prayer Book Controversy of the 1920s, and why it's a bit like Brexit; and Anna Girling looks back on the - failed - poetic and critical career of Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington, Two volumes, by Vivien Whelpton
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Frances Wilson gets implausibly angry about the hypocrisy of Patrick O’Brian; Michèle Roberts makes the case for the forgotten author of the nineteenth century, George Sand; Miranda Seymour turns literary detective to identify a new work by Ada Lovelace. And Roz Dineen fails to be enticed by cakes.
Romans 1 & 2 George Sand; Edited by José-Luis Diaz and Brigitte Diaz
Patrick O’Brian – A very private life Nikolai Tolstoy
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Edmund Gordon discusses whether Hilary Mantel's final Cromwell novel lives up to its billing - and whether, at 900-odd pages, it is the right length; Muriel Zagha looks at the female gaze in French cinema, with respect to the new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Irina Dumitrescu talks about how to write well, and when to break the rules
The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma
Why They Can't Write, by John Warner
Writing to Persuade, by Trish Hall
Every Day I Write the Book, by Amitava Kumar
First You Write a Sentence, by Joe Moran
Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison
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James Shapiro, the author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, discusses the history of West Side Story, the most popular and successful Shakespeare musical of all time, and Ivo van Hove's flawed Broadway adaptation; Toby Lichtig reviews Tom Stoppard's new play Leopoldstadt and talks us through a selection of Jewish-focused pieces in this week's issue of the TLS; David Horspool, the TLS's history editor and a keen consumer of audiobooks, tells us what he has been listening to this month
West Side Story, directed by Ivo van Hove
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, Wyndham's Theatre, London, until June 13
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