Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi are joined in the studio by Daisy Dunn to discuss the history of the written word (yes, all of it), from the Chinese invention of paper in 100 BC to the advent of a new BuzzFeed-y style guide; What was Stalin's real purpose? Lewis Siegelbaum considers Stalin's middle years in light of a new instalment of Stephen Kotkin’s epic biography.

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Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi are joined in the studio by Marcel Theroux to discuss why a mysterious nineteenth-century Russian writer-explorer may have forged a tale about Jesus in India; the Palestinian writer Linah Alsaafin considers the (f)utility of writing about Israeli occupation, via recent efforts including Kingdom of Olives and Ash, edited by Michael Chabon and Avelet Waldman; Francesca Happé tells us what it means to be 'on the autism spectrum' and how gender affects diagnosis.

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With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas. We are joined by Patricia Williams, to discuss how black girls are silenced, marginalised and abused within American society, an ongoing tragedy with its origins in slavery. Katherine Lewis, the winner of the inaugural TLS/Mick Imlah Poetry Prize, then comes on to read her prize-winning poem, "Memory of An Ocean".

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A special end-of-year edition of the podcast, with highlights, including: Sudhir Hazareesingh came on thew show back in March, ahead of the French election, to share his thoughts on Emmanuel Macron, the underdog philosopher-politician soon to become President; before Weinstein and #metoo, Charlotte Shane drew our attention to problems and divisions in feminism, and called for responsible, serious literature to take things forward; Clive Stafford-Smith, liberal lawyer and campaigner against the death penalty, on the rise of 'kill lists', an almost-blatant programme of state-sanctioned murder that goes on around the world; finally, in 2017 we marked the bicentennial of the death of Jane Austen by inviting Austen expert Claire Harman for a game of “rank your favourite Austen novels”. A refresher for regular listeners and a sampler for newcomers – with thanks to all.  

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Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi are joined in the studio by TLS Arts editor Lucy Dallas and Fiction editor Toby Lichtig to discuss the best (and worst) arts events of 2017.

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The American author and cultural critic Naomi Wolf explores connections between Oscar Wilde and Edith Wharton, taking us from gay rights to "strong" women; Dinah Birch turns to John Ruskin, the great polymath of his age – and ours?; finally, continuing the theme of Victorian excellence, Charles Darwin is the subject of a number of recent books, including an excoriating criticism by A. N. Wilson – Clare Pettitt sets the record straight

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Elizabeth Hardwick, the critic, co-founder of the NYRB, and, yes, stoic wife of Robert Lowell, died ten years ago this month – a new Collected Essays is cause for celebration; Suzannah Lipscomb delves into early modern French court records to tell us about the lives of women at a time when moral crimes were punished by strange rituals of public shaming; Leaf Arbuthnot, one of this year's judges of the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Awards, discusses the importance of this playful format, bringing us poems to be read, heard – and sniffed

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Who reads Anthony Powell now? A. N. Wilson celebrates the muted comedy of a British novelist best-known (only known?) for his twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time; TLS Fiction editor Toby Lichtig talks to the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer at the 2017 Hay Festival in Arequipa, Peru; Imogen Russell Williams rounds up the brightest and most inspiring new children's books

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TLS Fiction editor Toby Lichtig talks to the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer at the 2017 Hay Festival in Arequipa, Peru.

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – 500-plus years since Thomas More coined the term “Utopia”, denoting a too-good-to-be-true land, Chloë Houston considers the relevance, and importance, of Utopian thinking, and asks if we feel more at home in dystopia; prompted by a magisterial new biography by Jonathan Eig, J. Michael Lennon describes the transformation of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali (and tells us what it was like to meet Ali at Normal Mailer’s seventy-fifth birthday party); TLS editor Lucy Dallas speaks to the novelist Nick Harkaway, no stranger to grim (not necessarily) alternative realities, about his new novel Gnomon

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This week we're joined by TLS editors Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig to pick through the "books of the year", as nominated by a roster of TLS contributors, including Lydia Davis, Hilary Mantel, William Boyd and Tom Stoppard; plus, we bite the literary bullet and share our own nominations, from Reni Eddo-Lodge's account of entrenched racism to Laurent Binet's riotous fictional homage to Roland Barthes

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We're joined this week by the TLS's Classics editor Mary Beard to discuss Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey – the first ever by a woman – as well as other issues surrounding women in Classics and women in power more generally; Andrew Motion considers the life of the editor Edward Garnett, “one of the great taste-makers of the twentieth century”; and finally, could you name anything by Dorothy Dunnett? Rohan Maitzen fills us in on The Lymond Chronicles, the most rollicking historical novels you might never have heard of

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With Toby Lichtig and Lucy Dallas – London has a brand-new theatre: the Bridge, the latest venture by Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, based in Southwark and dedicated to original writing. And it starts its life with a new play by Richard Bean and Clive Young: Young Marx features Rory Kinnear as a delinquent Karl Marx, with a dash of Monty Python thrown in. The TLS’s Michael Caines joins us in the studio to discuss it; The “common view” of atheists is that religion is a combination of cosmology (a theory of the universe) and morality (or how best to behave) – but for the TLS’s Philosophy Editor Tim Crane this conception seems “deeply inadequate”. Crane identifies a third category, too often ignored: religious practice itself. He joins us on the line to discuss the religion of belonging, along with this week’s other philosophy pieces; The Austrian author Marianne Fritz was hailed in the late 1970s as a literary wunderkind, for a debut novel that described the descent into madness of a young mother in post-war Vienna. But as the decades progressed, her work grew increasingly obscure: brilliant for some, maddening for others. Jane Yager offers her insights into the author often dubbed, perhaps unfairly, “the female James Joyce”.

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Georgina Colby joins us in the studio to discuss our growing recognition of the punk writer Kathy Acker, an experimental late-modernist; Alev Scott on 'Weinsteining' in publishing and what we should do about it; Tove Jansson is best known as the creator of the Moomins, but there is a great deal more to her oeuvre than those strange hippopotamus-like creatures – TLS Arts editor Lucy Dallas visits a new retrospective of Jansson's work

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli joins us to discuss her new book, Tell Me How It Ends: An essay in 40 questions, about America's role in an ongoing immigration crisis where tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American children arrive at the border, unaccompanied and undocumented; Is Matthew Arnold responsible for the worst opening line of a sonnet in English? Seamus Perry gives an impassioned defence of the poet's dissonant and awkward verse; "If you are transgender, and if you come out as an adult in a position of authority (a tenured professor, say), non-trans people may treat you as an expert." So argues Harvard Professor Stephanie Burt, who has reviewed two accounts of being a trans person, Trans Like Me, by C. N. Lester and The Gender Games by Juno Dawson. She joins us to discuss.

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The Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli joins us to discuss her new book, Tell Me How It Ends: An essay in 40 questions, about America's role - and her own - in an ongoing immigration crisis where tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American children arrive at the border, unaccompanied and undocumented.

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Joining Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas this week: Muriel Zagha, to discuss the redolent funk of French cinema; and James O'Brien, to summarise the rancid political mess of Great Britain. Meanwhile, Sam Graydon goes to see the National Poetry Library in London.

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – As a new anthology of stories brings the thrills-and-chills of genre writing to bear on the experiences of the "wrongfully convicted", the author and essayist Leslie Jamison discusses competing impulses in the writer–convict–reader relationship, why we need to talk about guilt rather than innocence, and her own correspondence with three prisoners; Federico García Lorca is well-known as a modernist, avant-garde poet and playwright, but what of his proficiency in haiku? And how does this Japanese tradition relate to the Spanish art of flamenco? We're joined by Paul Chambers, himself a haiku poet who has translated a number of Lorca's poems for the first time

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With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – "For every competent feminist book”, Camille Paglia wrote in 1995, “there are twenty others shot through with inaccuracies, distortions, and propaganda.” Charlotte Shane runs us through a clutch of recent books by, among others, Laurie Penny, Rebecca Solnit and Paglia herself; How do we account for the extraordinary and enduring popularity of the French theorist Roland Barthes? Might it have something to do with his incurable boredom? Samuel Earle joins us in the studio to discuss the bundle of contradictions that was, and is, Barthes

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A bonus episode: Stig Abell hosts a debate at the Brooklyn Literary Festival in which the New Yorker's Jelani Cobb, the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg and Pen America's Suzanne Nossel consider what is going on in American universities and beyond when it comes to debates about race, gender and identity.

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