In 1405, Christine de Pisan took up the pen in defense of her maligned sex, imagining a 'City of Ladies' in which the most virtuous female leaders of history might be preserved from the distortions of misogyny. Six hundred years later, with Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia and Catherine the Great as her guides, the novelist and historian Lisa Hilton revisits the City to shake the foundations of the way we write about power
Throughout August, we are revisiting our books roundups from previous years, and today we’re returning to last year’s suggestions. In 2019, our contributor Diana Darke said in the paper: "A lot of things need saving this summer – tangible things like bees, Notre-Dame, water … and intangible things like democracy, humanitarian ideals, community". Among the many subjects under discussion here are Oulipo, impeachment, and climate change.
We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine.
Throughout August, we are revisiting our books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance to catch up on books you might have missed. Today we are sauntering back to the summer of 2018, and an episode in which we learnt which books our contributors – including Bernardine Evaristo, Claire Lowdon and Carlo Rovelli – were looking forward to. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine.
Throughout August, we are revisiting books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance once again to hear recommendations from our writers and editors, on subjects like Marcel Proust’s letters, tech-ensnared science fiction and Euripides. In this episode, from 2017, there is also an interview with that year’s Man Booker International Prize Winner, David Grossman, and his translator Jessica Cohen. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine.
Throughout August, we are revisiting books roundups from previous years, to give you a chance to catch up on all that good stuff. Today we’re skipping back to 2016’s books of the year recommendations. We’ll be back with new weekly episodes from September 10th. Until then, head to the website – the-tls.co.uk – to keep up with the weekly magazine.
Gabrielle Walker talks us through three unhelpful attitudes to global warming, as exemplified in the Michael Moore-produced film Planet of the Humans; Sudhir Hazareesingh discusses the complex relationship between charisma and celebrity in the age of Revolution (spoiler: it helps to have a horse)
What style of life did an ancient Roman emperor lead? How did he actually spend his time? Mary Beard fills us in; Frances Wilson on literary couples (and their pet names) and what they can, and can’t, tell us about marriage; Mika Ross-Southall on how gentrification works and who it works for
The Emperor in the Roman World by Fergus Millar
Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and intimacy by Janine Utell
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian marriages by Phyllis Rose
Newcomers: Gentrification and its discontents by Matthew L. Schuerman
Us Versus Them: Race, crime, and gentrification in Chicago neighborhoods by Jan Doering
The Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change, edited by Lisa Berglund and Siobhan Gregory
Alpha City: How London was captured by the super-rich, by Rowland Atkinson
Geoff Dyer on why Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove was one of the most memorable reading experiences of his life (a taster from his essay: “There was no book and no reader. There was just this world, this huge landscape and its magnificently peopled emptiness”);In April 1939, the black contralto Marian Anderson stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and performed to a crowd of 75,000 people. Carol J. Oja sheds light on the twists and turns behind a moment when the history of Civil Rights intersected with that of classical music. Read more at the-tls.co.uk
Min Wild on recent attempts to get to grips with that most slippery of beasts, the history of the novel (expect a lively cast, including Frances Burney, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne and Jane Porter); Declan Ryan on where writing overlaps with boxing and the story of the eighteenth-century boxer Daniel Mendoza, known as The Fighting Jew, who made of the sport an art form
Books
Without the Novel: Romance and the history of prose fiction by Scott Black
Revising the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Authorship from manuscript to print by Hilary Havens
Public Vows: Fictions of marriage in the English Enlightenment by Melissa J. Ganz
Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the early realist novel by Stephanie Insley Hershinow
Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, edited by Manushag Powell
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, edited by Judith Hawley
Thaddeus Of Warsaw by Jane Porter, edited by Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…
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
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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