The TLS Podcast

By The TLSSociety & Culture Arts Fiction

The TLS Podcast episodes

March 05, 2020 Absolutely worth the hype
Edmund Gordon discusses whether Hilary Mantel's final Cromwell novel lives up to its billing - and whether, at 900-odd pages, it is the right length; Muriel Zagha looks at the female gaze in French cinema, with respect to the new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Irina Dumitrescu talks about how to write well, and when to break the rules

The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma
Why They Can't Write, by John Warner
Writing to Persuade, by Trish Hall
Every Day I Write the Book, by Amitava Kumar
First You Write a Sentence, by Joe Moran
Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison
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50 min
February 27, 2020 The Mirror & the Light – an extract from Hilary Mantel's new novel
This week the TLS is running an extract from The Mirror & the Light, the long-awaited third and final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, questions Geoffrey Pole, the youngest son of a great family. Pole is accused of conspiring against Henry VIII and attempting to bring back the old religion and reinstate the Pope as head of the Church. (The Mirror & the Light will be published on March 5 by Fourth Estate. The audio book is published by W F Howes and narrated by Ben Miles.)
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26 min
February 27, 2020 West Side Storyless
James Shapiro, the author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, discusses the history of West Side Story, the most popular and successful Shakespeare musical of all time, and Ivo van Hove's flawed Broadway adaptation; Toby Lichtig reviews Tom Stoppard's new play Leopoldstadt and talks us through a selection of Jewish-focused pieces in this week's issue of the TLS; David Horspool, the TLS's history editor and a keen consumer of audiobooks, tells us what he has been listening to this month

West Side Story, directed by Ivo van Hove
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, Wyndham's Theatre, London, until June 13
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50 min
February 20, 2020 Vanilla sex in Pompeii
Rebecca Langlands on lessons learnt in the only known ancient Roman brothel; Caroline Moorehead reviews Elena Ferrante's latest novel; Rory Waterman reads a new poem, "Defences" ("'Crikey!' you say. 'It’s gorgeous!'...")

Books:
The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, class, and gender at the margins of Roman society, by Sarah Levin-Richardson
La vita bugiarda degli adulti, by Elena Ferrante
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47 min
February 13, 2020 Anne Enright – a reading from Actress
The Irish novelist reads an extract from her new novel, published in this week's TLS, in print, app and online
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20 min
February 13, 2020 Can't go on. Go on.
Is it the best of times or the worst of times to be a satirist? Madeleine Brettingham, a writer on the BBC's News Quiz, joins us to discuss; Toby Lichtig on a new production of Endgame and the constraints imposed on Samuel Beckett adaptations; founded in the 1960s, the Oulipo was – and remains – a group of writers and scientists striving for "potential literature". Anna Aslanyan considers the movement's legacy

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in print and performance 2016–2019, by Stewart Lee
The Joke is On Us: Political comedy in (late) neoliberal times, edited by Julie A. Webber
Endgame / Rough For Theatre II, at the Old Vic theatre, London
The Oulipo and Modern Thought, by Dennis Duncan
All that is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963–2018, edited and translated by Daniel Levin Becker and Ian Monk
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50 min
February 06, 2020 Daniel Kehlmann, an interview
One of Germany's most acclaimed novelists talks to Maren Meinhardt about his new novel, Tyll, a vivid account of a seventeenth-century trickster's journey through a Europe ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War.
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30 min
February 06, 2020 Bringing Tolstoy down
Caryl Emerson on Tolstoy’s art, ideas and life, and the extent to which these came together; Benjamin Markovits returns to a treasured childhood book: The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook; Eve Babitz – a “fizzy”, “fabulous” chronicler of 1960s and 70s Los Angeles – is mid revival. Megan Marz fills us in.

Lives and Deaths: Essential stories by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Boris Dralyuk
Leo Tolstoy: A very short introduction by Liza Knapp
Leo Tolstoy by Andrei Zorin
The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook by Gary Gygax
I Used To Be Charming: The rest of Eve Babitz, edited by Sara J. Kramer
Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the secret history of L.A., by Lili Anolik
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47 min
January 30, 2020 Carrier bag or stick?
Lucy Dallas reports on theories, developments and disputes in the world of science fiction; Lawrence Douglas adds crucial historical context – stretching back to the Middle Ages, in fact – to the current US presidential impeachment; the poet Hannah Sullivan emerges from Princeton University Library with fresh insight into T. S. Eliot's love letters

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin
The Expanse, Volumes 1–8, by James S. A. Corey
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53 min
January 23, 2020 Byron's oddness
Did Byron have an eating disorder? Mummy issues? Daddy issues? Does it matter? Emily A. Bernhard Jackson joins us to discuss; Stanley Donwood, the artist and designer of Radiohead's record covers, makes the case for this most democratic of artforms; Keith Miller on the work of the designer and architect Charlotte Perriand, a high-minded high modernist whose life spanned the whole of the twentieth century

The Private Life of Lord Byron by Antony Peattie
Charlotte Perriand: Complete works, by Jacques Barsac
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51 min