The TLS Podcast

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

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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

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TLS editors pick through the books some of our writers will be reading this summer, and share their own selections.

Visit the-TLS.co.uk to read the 'Summer Books' feature in full  

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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

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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

A symposium on art in lockdown by the TLS , plus commentary by Nicholas Kenyon

The Interpretation of Dreams by Artemidorus, translated by Martin Hammond

An Ancient Dream Manual – Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams, by Peter Thonemann

See David Bromich’s round-up of books on the TLS website.

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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

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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

British Literature Catalogue, Peter Harrington

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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

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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…

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