This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Emer Nolan, Professor of English at Maynooth University, to discuss the letters of John McGahern, one of Ireland’s most accomplished writers of fiction; How did Napoleon get his hands on Veronese’s enormous masterpiece “The Wedding Feast at Cana”, once safely housed in a Venetian monastery? Does it matter and should we do anything to remedy the situation? Ruth Scurr, the author of ‘Napoleon: A Life told in gardens and shadows’, considers Napoleon’s thirst for art, and its legacy; plus, a quick look at some of 2021’s most favourably reviewed films and plays ‘The Letters of John McGahern’, edited by Frank Shovlin‘Napoleon’s Plunder: And the theft of Veronese’s Feast’ by Cynthia SaltzmanProduced by Sophia Franklin
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Francesca Wade, at work on a book about Gertrude Stein’s afterlife, to discuss Stein’s ‘lost’ notebooks – and the magnificent amount of research conducted by Leon Katz, who discovered them some seventy years ago – and shed new light on the writer’s process and personal life; and the musician and critic Wesley Stace takes us back to a stormy but productive time in the life of The Beatles, via a new film by Peter Jackson
‘No no no, nonsense, never: Hidden notebooks reveal the tense relationships behind Gertrude Stein’s genius’ by Francesca Wade, in this week’s TLS.
This week, Lucy Dallas and Alex Clark discuss roses, Orwell and rhizomatic thinking with Margaret Drabble; Kathryn Hughes is our guide through histories of self-improvement; plus, what log-rolling really means.
'Orwell's Roses' by Rebecca Solnit
'The Art of Self-Improvement' by Anna Katharina Schaffner
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by TLS editors to look through twelve months of intriguing books, as nominated by contributors including Mary Beard, the poet Paul Muldoon and the writer and critic Marina Warner, covering a range of genres and subjects, from ancient Greek swear words to fictional messiahs
This week, Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig are guided by Mark Ford through Concord, Massachusetts, the home of Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists; we talk to Susan Owens about the mystery and melancholy of lighted windows seen from outside; plus, new work from Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith
'The Transcendentalists and their world' by Robert A. Gross
'The Every' by Dave Eggers
'The Wife of Willesden' by Zadie Smith
'The Lighted Window: Evening walks remembered' by Peter Davidson
This week, the TLS's fiction editor Toby Lichtig speaks to 2021’s Booker Prize-winner Damon Galgut, whose recent novel ‘The Promise’ follows one family through three decades of life and death in South Africa; Douglas Smith, whose books include a biography of Rasputin, turns to Russia in the 1830s to try to understand the Russia we face today; plus, the lyrics of Paul McCartney, explained by the man himself
'The Promise' by Damon Galgut
'1837: Russia’s quiet revolution' by Paul W. Werth
'The Lyrics: 1956 to the present' by Paul McCartney, edited by Paul Muldoon – discussed at an event at the Royal Festival Hall, London on November 5; available to stream until November 12
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Michael Sherborne to consider a master of science fiction, H. G. Wells, whose life was a runaway spaceship… until it ran out of steam; Niki Segnit, the author of ‘The Flavour Thesaurus’, explores some of the world’s rarest and most endangered foods; plus how sustainable – ecologically and economically – is book selling?
‘The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the world’ by Claire Tomalin
‘The City of Dr Moreau’ by J. S. Barnes
‘Eating To Extinction: The world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them’ by Dan Saladino
This week, ahead of COP26, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by David Wallace-Wells, the author of ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, to discuss a flurry of new books on climate change and what to do about it, from quiet reflection to radical, explosive action; and the biographer of royals A. N. Wilson considers a lively new Life of King George V that suggests the monarch wasn’t that dull after all
‘Deep Adaptation: Navigating the realities of climate chaos’, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read
‘How To Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to fight in a world on fire’ by Andreas Malm
‘Saving Us: A climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world’ by Katharine Hayhoe
‘Geopolitics For the End Time: From the pandemic to the climate crisis’ by Bruno Maçães
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Michael Caines are joined by Jenni Quilter, the author of ‘New York School Painters and Poets: Neon in daylight’, to discuss the colourful and ceaselessly experimental work of the American artist Helen Frankenthaler; and Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, reviews a radical (and watery) new production of ‘Macbeth’ that redeems the fallen world of this overfamiliar tragedy.
‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’, Almeida Theatre, London; also streaming
‘Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York’ by Alexander Nemerov
‘Helen Frankenthaler: Radical beauty’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; until April 18, 2022
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Russell Williams, to talk through the uniquely French phenomenon of the rentrée littéraire - the politics, the scandals, the big beasts and the new voices; and Michele Pridmore-Brown considers a recent book that offers a cultural history of breast milk and the rise of the bottle.
‘White Blood: A history of human milk’ by Lawrence Trevelyan Weaver
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Peter Parker, the biographer of J. R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood among others, to reconsider the gestation and legacy of E. M. Forster’s final novel, ‘Maurice’, a love story between men across the class divide, published fifty years ago; ‘Keep up, watch out: Or why the people next door have always mattered’ – the historian Arnold Hunt reviews two studies of neighbourly love, and hate, in early modern Britain.
‘Faith, Hope and Charity: English neighbourhoods, 1500–1640’ by Andy Wood
‘Caritas: Neighbourly love and the early modern self’ by Katie Barclay
In this bonus TLS long read, the former politician Rory Stewart discusses to power of modern politics, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the corrosion of morals.
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by the scholars Janet Todd and Derek Hughes to revisit the life and work of Restoration England’s first woman of letters, the playwright Aphra Behn, who “seems formed for our noisy, sex-obsessed times”; the translator, poet and critic Sasha Dugdale considers Russian protest poetry and the rise of Galina Rymbu; plus, literary festivals rebooted.
‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn: Volume IV: Plays, 1682–1696’, edited by Rachel Adcock, et al
‘F Letter: New Russian feminist poetry’, edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse; translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Ainsley Morse, Alex Karsavin, Helena Kernan, Kit Eginton, Valzhyna Mort and Kevin M. F. Platt
‘Life In Space’ by Galina Rymbu; translated by Joan Brooks
‘The Scar We Know’, a bi-lingual edition of Lida Yusupova's poetry with introductions by Oksana Vasyakina and Ainsley Morse, has just been published by Cicada Books
This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Skye C. Cleary to discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘lost’ novel, ‘The Inseparables’, published almost seventy years after it was written; Anna Picard reviews a very dark production of ‘Rigoletto’ at the Royal Opera House; plus, buying and selling (and maybe stealing) Emily Dickinson’s hair (maybe).
'The Inseparables' by Simone de Beauvoir
'Rigoletto' by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Royal Opera House, until September 29, then February–March, 2022
This week, Lucy Dallas and Toby Lichtig are joined by the critic and gym-sceptic Irina Dumitrescu to consider a clutch of books about fitness – how it came to be the industry it is, what it means to us, even what the smell of sweat does; Alex Clark, a regular contributor to the TLS’s fiction pages, runs through this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, just announced, before turning to a real-life story that reads like a mystery novel: the “Stonehouse affair”, the tale of the MP and former Cabinet minister John Stonehouse, who disappeared while swimming from a private beach in Miami
The Age of Fitness: How the body came to symbolize success and achievement by Jürgen Martschukat
Exercised: The science of physical activity, rest and health by Daniel Lieberman
The Joy of Sweat: The strange science of perspiration by Sarah Everts
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel
John Stonehouse, My Father: The true story of the runaway MP, by Julia Stonehouse
Stonehouse: Cabinet minister, fraudster, spy by Julian Hayes
Lucy Dallas and Michael Caines are joined by Dennis Duncan, the author of ‘Index, A History of the’, to discuss how we navigate the contents between books' covers, taking in alphabets, concordances, ancient search engines and much more; What is Substack: a publishing start-up or a reboot of a nineteenth-century literary idea?; and the writer and translator Miranda France discusses a new book by the famed psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which takes us to Peru, in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, who made a fascinating and, to us, troubling expedition to the Upper Amazon region in 1891.
‘Index, A History of the’ by Dennis Duncan
‘The Gold Machine: In the tracks of the mule dancers’ by Iain Sinclair
Throughout the summer, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year.
In this episode - it's movie week; the author Colin Grant discusses Steve McQueen's Small Axe and the Academy Award-winning Nomadland starring Frances McDormand, Yoojin Grace Wuertz talks us through the Korean American Dream film Minari, and Clifford Thompson reviews Regina King's directorial debut One Night in Miami - which sees Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Cassius Clay gather for a heated debate.
Throughout August, we are revisiting the very best of the podcast during the last year.
In this episode; the comedian David Baddiel joins Toby Lichtig to talk about his book 'Jews Don't Count' which explores the insidious, pervasive, exclusionary nature of ‘progressive’ antisemitism, Éadaoín Lynch remembers fully and truthfully the relationship between the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and Lucy Scholes reviews a clutch of novels in the British Library's Women Writers series, dedicated to once-popular writers.
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