This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Rosinka Chaudhuri, the author of ‘The Literary Thing: History, poetry and the making of a modern cultural sphere’, to discuss Rabindranath Tagore, who, in 1913, became the first non-white and non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature – since which he has been largely overlooked; Kate Kennedy, the author of ‘Dweller in the Shadows’, a new Life of the war poet Ivor Gurney, considers the “peculiarly direct, urgent intensity” of the later work, composed while confined in an asylum; plus, let’s hear it for independent bookshops

'Rabindranath Tagore' by Bashabi Fraser 

'The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore', edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Michael Caines are joined by the critic and literary scholar Marjorie Perloff to discuss an encyclopedic work that sets out to tackle ‘Art and thought in the Cold War’, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Elvis Presley; the English professor and literary critic Rohan Maitzen explores the meticulously observed world of Olivia Manning’s Balkan novels; plus, the unhappy story of a youthful romance between Eric Arthur Blair and Jacintha Buddicom, played out in poetry

‘The Free World: Art and thought in the Cold War’ by Louis Menand

‘The Balkan Trilogy’ by Olivia Manning

‘“Dracula’s Daughter”: The rediscovery of a love poem for George Orwell’, by Eileen M. Hunt, and ‘Annotating George Orwell’, by D. J. Taylor ­– both in this week’s TLS: the-tls.co.uk

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Gerri Kimber to discuss a bold new biography of D. H. Lawrence, 'the most judged writer of his age'; twenty-odd writers share their formative encounters with nature, including the novelists Maaza Mengiste and Ali Smith; plus, reviews of the television adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s 'The Pursuit of Love' and 'Harm', a new play about loneliness and social media addiction

Burning Man: The ascent of D. H. Lawrence, by Frances Wilson

'Sinister, sublime, exhausting, hungry – formative encounters with the natural world', see the-tls.co.uk

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, BBC iPlayer

'Harm' by Phoebe Eclair-Powell, the Bush Theatre, London

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Devoney Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of ‘The Making of Jane Austen’, to discuss new research into the Austen family’s ties with slavery; Colin Grant, critic and writer, introduces Writers Mosaic, a new platform for writing and recordings; and Mary Beard considers the Roman love of temple-building and Euripides as reimagined by a poet and a comic-book illustrator.

Jane Austen & Co

writersmosaic.org.uk/

The Trojan Women: A comic book by Anne Carson and Rosanna Bruno

This episode of The TLS podcast is sponsored by Curtis Brown Creative. Go to www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk to find out more about their creative writing courses. Use code YOURWRITINGSUMMER for £20 off any six-week course.

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, to consider the work of Angela Thirkell, a kind of (but not really...) Anthony Trollope for the twentieth-century; the writer and audio documentarist Maria Margaronis considers the transformation of London’s Royal Court Theatre into a radical and moving “living newspaper”; plus, a library of the world’s literature that no censor can get to

‘Angela Thirkell: A writer’s life’ by Anne Hall

‘Living Newspaper’, Editions 6 and 7, Royal Court Theatre and royalcourttheatre.com

This episode of The TLS podcast is sponsored by Curtis Brown Creative. Go to www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk to find out more about their creative writing courses.

Use code YOURWRITINGSUMMER for £20 off any six-week course.

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Ann Hallamore Caesar to mark 100 years since the première of the modernist masterpiece ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, considering it in the context of Luigi Pirandello’s life and work; Alexander Leissle reviews ‘Promises’, an intoxicating intergenerational collaboration between a jazz saxophonist and an electro producer; plus, a new poem by Andrew Motion, “At Low Tharston”, written in memory of the late Anthony Thwaite.

'Stories for the Years' by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Virginia Jewiss

'The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio' by Luigi Pirandello, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

'Promises' by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra 

This episode of The TLS podcast is sponsored by Curtis Brown Creative. Go to www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk to find out more about their creative writing courses.

Use code YOURWRITINGSUMMER for £20 off any six-week course.

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Patricia Craig, a writer and critic from Northern Ireland, who relates a sad and murky case of accidental killings, which took place during the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s; the TLS’s politics editor Toby Lichtig reviews a handful of recent films – works of documentary and fiction – with political stories, mostly atrocities, at their hearts; plus, a lost Proust manuscript finally sees the light of day.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head, BBC iPlayer

The Mauritanian, Amazon Prime

The Dissident, Amazon Prime

Quo Vadis, Aida?, Curzon Home Cinema

Les Soixante-quinze feuillets et autres manuscrits inédits, by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, with a preface by Jean-Yves Tadié (Gallimard) 

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Patricia J. Williams to discuss ‘Giving a Damn: Racism, romance and Gone with the Wind’, Williams’s deeply researched, and deeply felt, essay on the roots and legacy of racial injustice in the United States; Douglas Field considers a novel about a 'human mole' by Richard Wright, the African American writer best known for 'Native Son', which now sees the light of day, eighty years after it was written; plus Sylvia Plath’s domestic embellishments and the greatest novels of the twenty-first century to date (cont.)

Giving a Damn: Racism, romance and 'Gone with the Wind' by Patricia J. Williams, published next week by TLS Books 

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, to discuss the new Arden 3 edition of ‘Measure for Measure’, one of the "problem plays" (word-bothers, en garde); the poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic marks 200 years since the birth of Charles Baudelaire, whose extraordinary work seems bizarrely neglected; plus, Charlotte Mew, and the dangers of ancient Greek medicine.

Measure for Measure, edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson (Arden Shakespeare)

The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates, by Robin Lane Fox

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew, by Julia Copus

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita of English at Princeton University, to discuss Blake Bailey’s keenly anticipated ‘Philip Roth: The biography’; and Alexandra Harris, the author of ‘Weatherland: Artist and writers under English skies’, considers a twenty-first century perspective on Joseph Wright of Derby, an eighteenth-century painter who is perhaps more darkness than light, more magic than science, and who deserves to be ranked among Europe’s greats.

Philip Roth: The biography by Blake Bailey

Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of darkness by Matthew Craske

www.the-tls.co.uk

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig are joined by Mary Norris, a New Yorker and editor at - what else? - the New Yorker magazine, to discuss the changing life of the city and its inhabitants; Yoojin Grace Wuertz talks us through a film garlanded with Oscar nominations, Minari, which casts a new light on the immigrant story and the American Dream; plus, the week's fiction reviews

New Yorkers: A city and its people in our time by Craig Taylor 

Pretend It's A City: Netflix

The Barbizon: The New York hotel that set women free by Paulina Bren

Minari: Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc

A special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/pod

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the historian Mark Mazower, who presents new approaches to the battle for Greek independence in 1821; Noreen Masud reviews a performance of Stevie Smith’s poems that conveys the unsettling power of her presence; plus, Paul Muldoon marks 400 years since the birth of Andrew Marvell with a new poem, ‘The Glow-Worm to the Mower’.

Stevie Smith: Black March – Dead Poets Live, filmed at the Wanamaker Playhouse, available on Globe Player until April 5th

Please visit the TLS website to read Mark Mazower’s essay (including bibliography) and to find Paul Muldoon’s poem, as well as those by Angela Leighton and Will Harris.

www.the-tls.co.uk

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the critic and novelist Claire Lowdon to consider Vivian Gornick, an American writer of essays – on literature, politics, the self – that demonstrate a rare “ability to stand back and look at the world in which she finds herself, and then set it down calmly on paper”; the TLS’s poetry editor Camille Ralphs explores the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and some of the literature that inspired it; plus, libraries under threat (again), Unica Zürn gets her time in the sun, and the three greatest novels of the twenty-first century...so far.

Taking a Long Look: Essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time by Vivian Gornick

Appendix N: The eldritch roots of Dungeons and Dragons, edited by Peter Bebergal

www.the-tls.co.uk

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Ann Pettifor, the economist and author of ‘The Case for the Green New Deal’, to discuss some inconvenient but incontrovertible truths left out of Bill Gates’s vision of the fight against climate change; Anna Aslanyan on a freewheeling account of the unpredictable life of the twentieth-century German writer Hasso Grabner; plus, re-reading Philip Larkin.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

Journey through a Tragicomic Century: The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner, by Francis Nenik, translated by Katy Derbyshire

www.the-tls.co.uk

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Edmund Gordon to review 'Klara and the Sun', Kazuo Ishiguro’s surprisingly hopeful new novel about an Artificial Friend; the world’s first poem about Superman (perhaps) was written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1942 but not published until now, in this week’s TLS – we discuss; and the medievalist Hetta Howes reviews two new translations of 'Beowulf', taking us back to the rich and troubling ambiguities of the original.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

“The Man of To-morrow’s Lament”, a poem by Vladimir Nabokov, with commentary by Andrei Babikov

Beowulf: A new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

Beowulf: In blank verse by Richard Hamer 

www.the-tls.co.uk

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Joyce Carol Oates to talk about the minimalist beauty in the photographs of Walker Evans, and his austere approach to his art. Colin Grant discusses the new film Nomadland, a blend of fact and fiction about US citizens who take to the road when they realize they cannot afford to grow old...and we look through a science fiction dictionary and check up on the latest writing by robots.

Walker Evans: Starting from scratch by Svetlana Alpers

Nomadland, on Hulu - UK release April 2021

www.the-tls.co.uk

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, to discuss the rise of Bellingcat, an investigative body, started in one man’s bedroom in 2014, now able to get to the bottom of even the murkiest global events; Dante, Dante, Dante…. and Anne Weber’s epic of Annette Beaumanoir; and who was Keats’s mysterious Mrs Jones? The biographer Jonathan Bate shares a theory.

We Are Bellingcat: An intelligence agency for the people by Eliot Higgins

Dante by John Took

Annette, Ein Heldinnen Epos / Epic Annette by Anne Weber

‘Cherchez la femme’ – Keats and Mrs Jones, by Jonathan Bate in the TLS

www.the-tls.co.uk

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Cal Revely-Calder, who finds that, in Samuel Beckett Studies, jargon and certainty too often crowd out impressions of the work and the importance of ‘knowing what you don’t know’; Alice Wadsworth brings snippets of interest from this week’s TLS, including ‘women who wouldn’t wait’ and Borges in Inverness; and Ruth Scurr on the history of the secretive, ritual-loving Freemasons.

Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts by Conor Carville

The Craft: How the Freemasons made the modern world, by John Dickie

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Avril Horner, author of a biography of Barbara Comyns whose quirky, menace-laced novels, long championed by Graham Greene, are finding their way back to us; a new poem by John Kinsella, 'Villanelle of Star-Picket-Hopping Red-Capped Robin'; and En Liang Khong describes the powerful pull – particularly difficult to resist during lockdown – of the fantasy urban landscapes portrayed in video games and anime

Several novels by Barbara Comyns, including: 'Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead', 'Mr Fox', 'Sisters by a River', 'The House of Dolls' and 'The Vet's Daughter'

'The legend and the crazy novelist: Graham Greene’s role in Barbara Comyns’s writing career' by Avril Horner

Virtual Cities: An atlas and exploration of video game cities, by Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Anime Architecture: Imagined worlds and endless megacities, by Stefan Riekeles

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The writer and comedian David Baddiel has written a book called 'Jews Don't Count', which explores the insidious, pervasive, exclusionary nature of ‘progressive’ antisemitism. Here, he talks to Toby Lichtig about how and why one of the most persecuted minorities in history continues to be overlooked

'Jews Don't Count' by David Baddiel

Producer: Ben Mitchell

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