The TLS Podcast

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 

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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

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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

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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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