Lynsey Hanley on the Pet Shop Boys and how a music duo that has always refused to play the pop game just keeps winning; The TLS’s history editor David Horspool talks us through a selection of articles on medieval history, including a compelling account of Henry III, a pious and peculiar king, who, against the odds, reigned for more than half a century 

‘Pet Shop Boys, Literally’ and ‘Pet Shop Boys Versus America’, both by Chris Heath 

Blood Royal: Dynastic politics in medieval Europe by Robert Bartlett 

Henry III 1207–1258: The rise to power and personal rule by David Carpenter 

Westminster Abbey: A church in history, edited by David Cannadine

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When, last year the writer and activist Bernardine Evaristo, won the Booker Prize for fiction – becoming in fact, the first black British person to do so – we at the TLS were not surprised. Evaristo has written for us for some years now, and ‘Girl, Woman, Other’, the novel for which the prize was awarded, was only the latest in a run of novels full of life and questions and challenges. And the recognition keeps coming. This week brought two more prizes at the British Book Awards; 'Girl, Woman, Other' won in the Fiction category and Evaristo was named Author of the Year. In this reissued episode of the TLS podcast, recorded just after winning the Booker Prize, the author speaks to our fiction editor Toby Lichtig

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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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Ellen Crowell investigates an early-twentieth-century tale of doomed lesbian romance, decadent cryptography, morphine-induced suicide and more; Richard Smyth on the joys of bird-watching during lockdown; Michael Caines reads his poem “Decadence”

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A recovering Alexander van Tulleken shares some thoughts on the British response to Covid-19; What cultural things are people doing to pass the time in isolation? We asked a selection of our writers, and Lucy Dallas joins us (from what sounds like a small tin box) to pluck at the results

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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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