The TLS Podcast

Elaine Showalter on the “avid, ardent, driven, generous, narcissistic, Olympian, obtuse, maddening, sometimes loveable but not very likeable” Susan Sontag; Patrice Higonnet goes in search of the real ...

25 Sep 201954min

"When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians." So says Irina Dumitrescu, who joins us to discuss the ph...

18 Sep 201951min

The future of the planet is in question this week, or at least, humanity's place on it, as Gabrielle Walker discusses possible solutions to climate change and why we don't need to panic - yet - but we...

11 Sep 201943min

We turn to children's and YA literature in this week's episode, with Rozalind Dineen and Toby Lichtig presenting new releases (as reviewed by a selection of young readers), as well as discussing some ...

4 Sep 201936min

What kind of son was Philip Larkin? The TLS's poetry editor Alan Jenkins finds insight in some of the 4,000-odd letters and postcards the poet sent home to his "Mop" and "Pop"; Helen Macdonald, the au...

21 Aug 201947min

The whereabouts of the "Salvator Mundi", the most costly artwork in the world, are still uncertain, as is its attribution to Leonardo da Vinci. Federico Varese, best known for his studies of the mafia...

14 Aug 201949min

Jill Lepore traces the history of conspiracy theories and the conditions that allow them to thrive; Tim Crane talks us through whether we have free will or not, and why it is still a problem; Michael ...

7 Aug 201951min

Following the discovery of a strange book, Sarah Green revises the story of the late nineteenth-century poet Lionel Johnson, whose legacy was distorted in the 1950s by a criminal with a taste for fanc...

31 Juli 201946min