The TLS Podcast

It's that time again... TLS contributors and editors share recommendations from a year of reading Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The author of 'The Five: The untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper', which won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, speaks to Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Apart from capitalism itself, is there any cultural and economic manifestation in the world today as ubiquitous, powerful and globalized as football?” John Foot assesses two new studies of the game; just over ten years ago, Elizabeth Strout introduced readers to a frustrated maths teacher called Olive Kitteridge. The novelist speaks to Roz Dineen about bringing Olive back onto the scene; the famously over-the-top cookery show ‘Two Fat Ladies’ last graced our television screens twenty years ago. Anna Girling celebrates the legacy of this unlikely union ‘The Age of Football: The global game in the twenty-first century’ by David Goldblatt‘Ultra: The underworld of Italian football’ by Tobias Jones‘Olive, Again’ by Elizabeth Strout Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just over ten years since introducing readers to a frustrated maths teacher called Oliver Kitteridge, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout reprises the character in a new novel, ‘Olive, Again’. Here, Strout talks to the TLS’s Roz Dineen about the craft of writing, why Olive has returned, and ageing on the page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TLS editors talk about Virginia Woolf's writing for the TLS, as we publish a collection of the reviews she wrote for us over a period of thirty years; on the eve of George Eliot's bicentennial, Rosemary Ashton talks about how she came to conclusions, moral and otherwise, in her novels; Caryn Rose sees Bruce Springsteen's new film and looks over his 'storied fifty-year career' Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read by Virginia WoolfLong Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen, edited by Jonathan D. Cohen and June Skinner SawyersWestern Stars by Bruce Springsteen Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Lonsdale recounts how writers became enmeshed in national struggles; Jane Yager tells the surprising story of DIY punk in the DDR; we talk to Robert Potts about the pleasures of reading John le Carré ("I was never happier than when I was reading John le Carré")Cold Warriors: Writers who waged the literary Cold War, by Duncan White Burning Down the Haus: Punk rock, revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, by Tim Mohr   Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Caines reports on an unprecedented gathering of work by William Hogarth, “replete with a bitter exuberance, folly finely observed and sin satirized”; “Sometimes a dark and stormy night calls for nothing more innovative than a classic chilling tale.” Joanna Scutts considers three new compendiums of the spooky and the macabre; Les Green makes a case for changing the UK's constitution (writing it down in one place being a good start...)Hogarth: Place and progress, at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, until January 5, 2020A Quaint and Curious Volume: Tales and poems of the gothicWomen’s Weird: Strange stories by women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa EdmundsonPromethean Horrors: Classic tales of mad science, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having asked a selection of writers to nominate their favourite magazines/journals, for a symposium in this week’s TLS, we pick through the results; as Granta turns forty, Alex Clark dives into the magazine’s archives, recently given to the British Library, and emerges clutching gems and old boots (including meeting minutes and evidence of fantasy commissioning); finally, the novelist and translator Lydia Davis talks us through her Thoreau-inspired approach to gardening Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bernardine Evaristo speaks to the TLS's fiction editor Toby Lichtig about her novel 'Girl, Woman, Other' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having been staged in Edinburgh and Melbourne, David Greig's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 'Solaris' is now at the Hammersmith Lyric Theatre in London. The TLS's Arts editor Lucy Dallas asks him about returning to this strange story of contact, consciousness and how to avoid using "fremulators" on stage Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.