The TLS Podcast

By The TLSSociety & Culture Arts Fiction

The TLS Podcast episodes

January 31, 2019 Everything points north
Catherine Taylor on bookish goings on in the north of England, from her family’s bookshop in Sheffield to the Northern Fiction Alliance of small presses; Diarmaid Ferriter considers the fraught matter of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland; Fríða Ísberg on the spectre of war in Icelandic film and fiction

Books
The Border: The legacy of a century of Anglo-Irish politics by Diarmaid Ferriter
Hotel Silence (Ör) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlingsson
Section 6 of “American Standard”, a new poem by Paul Muldoon published in this week’s TLS; read by Lisa Dwan (full recording available as a separate podcast episode)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
47 min
January 24, 2019 Reddit's new religions
Imogen Russell Williams on children's books that tackle grief and war, “offering distressed adults the calming certainty of a script, and baffled children the reassurance of straightforward answers”; Carl Miller discusses the creation, and squabbling continuation, of Reddit, one of the most popular websites in the world; A. N. Wilson considers the Travellers Club in London, now in its 200th year, where Britain's prime ministers "got stuff done"

Books
White Feather by Catherine and David MacPhail
The Skylarks’ War by Hilary McKay
An Anty-War Story by Tony Ross
Only One of Me by Lisa Wells and Michelle Robinson (illustrated by Tim Budgen and Catalina Echeverri)
The Afterwards by A. F. Harrold and Emily Gravett
We Are the Nerds: The birth and tumultuous life of Reddit, the internet's culture laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
The Travellers Club: A bicentennial history (1819–2019) by John Martin Robinson

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
57 min
January 17, 2019 Egos and experiments
Boyd Tonkin states the case – never overstated – for literature in translation, and reviews a commendable recent effort "to grasp, and to survey, the entire planet of words"; Andrew Scull considers the travails of social psychology and the egos and experiments that professed to tell us something essential about human nature by setting fire to forests or electrocuting dogs...

Books
Found in Translation: 100 of the finest short stories ever translated, edited by Frank Wynne
The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment by Gina Perry
The Hope Circuit: A psychologist’s journey from helplessness to optimism by Martin Seligman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
47 min
January 10, 2019 Finer points of murder
Tom Stevenson offers a recent history of political assassination, from a CIA manual of 1953 to the Jamal Khashoggi affair; The literary achievements of Nancy Cunard have long been eclipsed by her image as the archetypal flapper-muse of the roaring 1920s – as Anna Girling reveals a previously unknown short story (published for the first time in this week's TLS), we reassess Cunard's legacy; Who killed Edwin Drood? In 1914, faced with Dickens's final, unfinished novel, prominent literary types gathered to stage the trial of Drood's alleged killer – Pete Orford tells us more...
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
47 min
January 03, 2019 Icons familiar and unfamiliar
With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas
Lara Pawson drops in to tell the tale of David Wojnarowicz, the New York artist whose time has come. Elaine Showalter examines a new biography of Germaine Greer. Kim Addonizio, winner of the Mick Imlah Prize for Poetry, reads her victorious poem. Plus, Lucy admits to having an allotment, and Stig learns he has been introducing the show all wrong.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
42 min
December 27, 2018 Highlights from 2018 – a bonus episode
An end-of-year edition, bringing together some of our favourite bits from the past twelve months: Kathryn Hughes on whether and where Charlotte Brontë meets Jane Eyre; Margaret Drabble reviews the life and work of Muriel Spark, whose centenary we marked this year; David Baddiel discusses whether Jewishness is inherently funny; Clare Pettitt revisits the history of the Peterloo massacre of 1819. A refresher for regular listeners and a sampler for newcomers – with thanks to all.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
1 hr 16 min
December 27, 2018 Mary Beard's 'Introduction to the Odyssey' – a bonus episode
Who is Odysseus? Why can't he get home? And will the gods help or hinder his journey? In this special episode, the TLS's Classics editor Mary Beard chairs a panel featuring the author and academic Simon Goldhill, the memoirist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and the novelist Madeline Miller. This is a recording of a live event, staged in collaboration with the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival in October 2018.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
1 hr
December 20, 2018 Arts of the Year 2018
TLS editors discuss some memorable arts events from the past twelve months; plus, food and drink in literature and a preview of the TLS's Christmas double issue, including how to do German food, M. F. K. Fisher, French food slang, pub stories, and a deconstruction of the traditional British Christmas dinner
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
56 min
December 13, 2018 Ode to the orca
Lucy Atkins charts our changing relationship with Orcinus orca, from "demon dolphin" to cuddly icon; Ruth Scurr on the lives and unlikely friendship of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn

Books
Orca: How we came to know and love the ocean’s greatest predator by Jason M. Colby
John Evelyn: A life of domesticity by John Dixon Hunt
The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn by Margaret Willes
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
37 min
December 06, 2018 Who on earth was William Gilbert?
Michael Caines on the little-known romantic William Gilbert, a “man of fine genius” (according to William Wordsworth) who had “unfortunately received a few rays of supernatural light through a crack in his upper story”; Daniel Beer tells the tale of the Gulag at Solovki, a converted monastery known as “the Paris of the Northern concentration camps”, a place of brutality but also of resistant culture and ideas; finally, Laurence Scott considers the cultural history of shoeshining, from Dickens to Police Squad

Books
William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism by Paul Cheshire
Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki, 1923–1930: The Paris of the northern concentration camps by Andrea Gullotta
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
47 min