The TLS Podcast

By The TLSSociety & Culture Arts Fiction

The TLS Podcast episodes

July 17, 2019 Unromancing the Romantics
"The sociable side of nineteenth-century musical life is not acknowledged as often as it should be..." – Laura Tunbridge discusses the interconnected, complicated and often contradictory myths and realities that link Chopin, Schumann and Brahms; the TLS's music editor Lucy Dallas takes us through a selection of other pieces on music in this week's issue, including new histories of the blues and the poetic pop of Kate Bush and the Pet Shop Boys; when Irving Sandler wrote his seminal history of abstract expressionism, he neglected to mention Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Elaine de Kooning – Jenni Quilter joins us to put these artists back in the frame

Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five painters and the movement that changed modern art, by Mary Gabriel
Fryderyk Chopin: A life and times by Alan Walker
Schumann: The faces and masks by Judith Chernaik
Brahms in Context, edited by Natasha Loges and Katy Hamilton
(with Liebeslieder Walzer, Opus 52, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra)
Up Jumped the Devil: The real life of Robert Johnson by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow
The Original Blues: The emergence of the Blues in African American vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem by Neil Tennant
How To Be Invisible by Kate Bush
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
54 min
July 10, 2019 Loving Iris Murdoch
It’s the centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch, the novelist-philosopher who dominated the literary pages for much of the twentieth century. Where do we stand on her now? Michael Caines and Frances Wilson discuss; This was the week that the US women’s football team won the World Cup. Devoney Looser, the roller derby queen of academia, enjoys “a brief opportunity to revel in America’s better strengths”.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
43 min
July 03, 2019 Who reads John Updike?
Do the kids – in these times of identity politics – still read Updike? The answer is “probably not”. But should they? Claire Lowdon makes the case; Toby Lichtig discusses Chelsea Manning, the US Army data analyst turned whistle-blower, and a new documentary on her life; Eric Rauchway considers the prevalence of pro-Nazi feeling and policy in 1940s America and beyond

Novels 1959–1965: The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, by John Updike (Library of America)
XY Chelsea, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins
Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s supporters in the United States, by Bradley Hart
The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a village caught in between, by Michael Dobbs
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
54 min
June 26, 2019 Talk to the hands
Thea Lenarduzzi on the cultural history of gesture and body language; What is Chaucer to us today? When did he become known as the "Father of English poetry", and what did he get up to when he was not writing rude and memorable poetry? Julia Boffey explains; the Stonewall uprising in New York is remembered as a pivotal moment in LGBTQ rights – fifty years on, Hugh Ryan revisits the history

Books

Dictionary of Gestures: Expressive comportments and movements in use around the world by François Caradec
Silent History: Body language and nonverbal identity, 1860–1914, by Peter K. Andersson

The Stonewall Riots: A documentary history, edited by Marc Stein
The Stonewall Reader, edited by the New York Public Library
Pride: Photographs after Stonewall by Fred W. McDarrah
Love and Resistance: Out of the closet into the Stonewall era, edited by Jason Baumann

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
49 min
June 19, 2019 Summer Books 2019
TLS contributors – including David Baddiel, Mary Beard, Paul Muldoon and Elizabeth Lowry – give their seasonal reading recommendations; TLS editors wreak havoc and suggest their own. (Visit the-tls.co.uk to read the summer books feature in full.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
52 min
June 12, 2019 Russian greats and fictional eats
A "new" ending to a Nabokov novel and the unregarded first volume of Vasily Grossman's epic, the "Soviet War and Peace"; Rebecca Reich guides us through these and the question of whether the West is paranoid about Russia or vice versa; Laura Freeman joins us to talk about dinner with the Durrells and pond life sandwiches.

Books

Stalingrad: A novel by Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff

Plots against Russia by Eliot Borenstein
The Russia Anxiety by Mark B. Smith

Dining with the Durrells by David Shimwell
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
43 min
June 05, 2019 Ethical economics
If capitalism is broken, can it be fixed? And can it save the environment? Joseph E. Stiglitz discusses; as we mark seventy-five years since the D-Day landings, William Boyd considers a brilliant new "worm's-eye view" of historical events; a decade after leaving academia for the "wilderness of writing", Stephen Marche returns to report on the troubled field of the humanities

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the new anxieties by Paul Collier
Capitalism: The future of an illusion by Fred L. Block
Money and Government: A challenge to mainstream economics by Robert Skidelsky
Normandy ’44: D-Day and the battle for France by James Holland
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
50 min
May 29, 2019 Celestial Bodies – winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize for fiction
The Omani novelist Jokha al-Harthi and the translator Marilyn Booth won this year's Man Booker International prize for fiction in translation, for the novel Celestial Bodies, an account of three sisters living in the village of al-Awafi in an Oman on the brink of change. A couple of days after the announcement, at Waterstones book shop in Piccadilly, the winners spoke to the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak about the novel, Arabic culture and modernisation, translation, and women’s wisdom.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
44 min
May 29, 2019 Weighty matters
Anna Katharina Schaffner on the cultural history of fat and fat phobia; the TLS's travel editor Catharine Morris on why Paris will always be disappointing, the solitude of open spaces, and the problem with "Victor" the archetypal travel writer; an extract from the 2019 Man Booker International prize-winning Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi, read by the novel's translator Marilyn Booth

Books
Fat: A cultural history of the stuff of life by Christopher E. Forth
The Truth About Fat by Anthony Warner
Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fat phobia by Sabrina Strings
We’ll Never Have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix
The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
Heida: A shepherd at the edge of the world by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir and Heiða Ásgeirsdóttír, translated by Philip Roughton
Where the Hornbeam Grows: A journey in search of a garden by Beth Lynch
The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs
Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harthi, translated by Marilyn Booth
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
48 min
May 22, 2019 Victoria at 200
To mark the bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth, the TLS's history editor David Horspool guides us through all manner of Victorian matters, including the Widow of Windsor's mastery of soft power, how different things might have been had she been born a boy, how the Victorians amused themselves, and the Rebecca Riots; we also have a symposium in this week's paper, asking writers and thinkers – including Steven Pinker and Bernardine Evaristo – to tell us about the important books from their childhoods. To discuss this – and to share our own youthful reading – we're joined in the studio by a [insert collective noun here] of TLS editors

Go to www.the-tls.co.uk/ to read a selection of articles from our Victorian special issue, and much more.
Our symposium was prompted by an initiative – Books To Inspire – launched by Hay Festival Wales, aiming to compile a crowd-sourced list of titles to inspire the next generation. Find out more at hayfestival.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
53 min