All Episodes
The TLS Podcast — 666 episodes
The Art of Chaos
Economies of Scale
Beach bonanza!
Toby Lichtig in conversation with Nigel Planer
Live From the Hay Festival: Toby talks to Colm Tóibín
Live From the European Writers' Festival with Toby Lichtig
Live From the Hay Festival
May Highlights
Antidotes to doomscrolling
Fabrications
Exclusive: Ed Vulliamy in Full
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Looking at the Stars
April Highlights
Strike!
On the Road
Grief Work
March Highlights
Cool Your Jets!
That Old Chestnut
Food fights
In Conversation with Michael Morpurgo
From trains to treaties
Revolutionary Roads
Full Interview with Francis Spufford
Escape Artists
February Highlights
Darkness Visible
A Cortège of Snails
Great Balls of Fire
The Game's Afoot
January Highlights: Conversations That Started 2026
Now You See Me
This Be The Verse
Mind Games
Exclusive: Doubting Thomas
Merry Christmas!
Altogether Elsewhere
Beyond the bonnet
In Transit
Foundation course
Books of the Year
Devices and Desires
Motherload
Scare Stories
Escape Artists
Dramatic licence
What Ho!
Not All Heroes Wear Capes
All Rise
Epic moves
Such stuff as dreams are made on
Code-breakers
Let's Get Lost
In vino veritas
A Force of Nature
Feather weight
Blowing in the wind
Hedging Your Bets
Across the Pond
Letters from America
HORSE TRADING
DON'T STOP...
Seasons in the Sun
It All Adds Up
Making Hay
Unearthed Treasures
Vagabond Hearts
Days to Remember
Big Cheese, Big Apple
On our travels
Renaissance Men
Be not afraid of greatness!
Psychopomp and circumstance
Life is a Cabaret
Into The Wild
Breaking Ground
Making Waves
Once Upon a Time
Hidden Realms
Hubris and Nemesis
Elegant Variations
Close Encounters
His Back Pages
Tales of the City
Picture This
Keeping The Pot Boiling
Happy New Year!
Glad to Exist
Revolutionary Roads
On the Shoulders of Giants
Friends, Romans... Rhinoceroses?
Coup de Foudre
Watch This Space
Good at Games
Letter from the Capitol
Double Vision
Home Truths
From Seoul to Stockholm
Cherchez La Femme
Taking flight
Tuning In
Autumn Leaves
Typecast
HAPPY DAYS
Magic of the Minds
Making Change
Fixtures and Funerals
The History Boys
The Mind Bind
After the Deluge
Sitting Pretty
Testaments of Youth
Private Eyes and Private Lives
Marginal Gains
Here Comes the Sun
Metamorphosis and Myth
The TLS on Tour
Found in Translation
Let the Games Begin!
Regeneration Games
How to Dress for Bouillabaisse
Better to Travel Hopefully
Super Furry Animals
Power Plays
Unjust Deserts
Time Past and Time Future
Illustrated Men
O Pioneers!
Between The Sheets
A Worm’s-eye View
Revivals
Cometh the Hour
Flights of Fantasy
In Conversation with Richard Sennett
All the World's a Stage
Splendid Isolation
Class Struggles
Energy Creation
Out Of Our Minds
Turning Leaves: Dame Penelope Lively and Josephine Lively
A Cure for Twixmas
Worlds of Pure Imagination
From Paris To The Prairies
There May Be Trouble Ahead
Silently And Very Fast
Charm School
Back Of The Net!
Lost In Space
The Handmaids' Tales
History in the Making
Finding Tongues In Trees
Punching Above Their Weight
Sing, O muses!
Elegies And Energies
Back To The Future
Back to School!
Power Play
To the Scriptorium!
Nevertheless, They Persisted
The Pursuit Of The Interesting
Femmes Fatales
Natural Passions
School's Out For Summer
Running And Dancing Through Our Stories
Riders On The Storm
Take A Walk On The Wild Side
The Writing on The Wall
The Limits of Love
Long Hot Summer
Winning On The Home Front
Sauce Bolognese
Know Thyself
Hay Festival Special
Puffed Up with Wind
Inheritance Taxes
Their Little Pony
O Tempora! O Mores!
Life In The Slow Lane
To The Barricades
All The News That’s Fit To Print
Every Little Helps
To Thine Own Self Be True
Everyone’s Business
How To Respect A Chihuahua’s Privacy
Look Back In Anger
A Place of Greater Safety
So Long, Farewell
Connecting the Dots
Searching for the Good Life
Disrupting the Narrative
Mother Knows Best
Always Look On The Bright Side of Life
Scratch The Surface
Private Faces In Public Places
In A Green Shade
American Paranoia
The Isle is Full of Noises
Turning Leaves
Give Them Back!
Coming to Fruition
Good Chaps
A Treasure on Your Shelf, Waiting
Into The Woods
Dogs Days in the Writer’s Life
A Town Called Sue
State Secrets and Private Passions
Big Tech Is Reading Your Mind
All Those Old Familiar Places
The Gene Genie
Telling It Like It Is
Stories That Simply Unfold
Rattling The Handle On Life
A Sea-Brooding Poet
Radical Barbie
Festive Shadows and Feasts of Panackelty
Simon McBurney of Complicité - "We've always been interested in the idea of connection"
The Power of Connections
The Road To St Helena
Female Perspectives Take Centre Stage
His Biggest Role
Roman Coins And Radical Rosa Bonheur
Conquering Sociopaths
“It Is An Astonishment To Be Alive”
End Of The Road
Bearing Witness To Terror
Tinker, Tailor, Lover, Spy
Men On A Mission
One Step Beyond
Who Knows Where The Time Goes
Big Unfriendly Giant
From Battleground to Billiard Table
Acid Raine
A Journey Into The Ambiguous Afterlife
Beyond Flesh and Blood
Measuring Our Lives, One Reindeer At A Time
What's For Dinner?
United We Stand
If We Only Had Eyes To See
Marching To Their Own Tune
Vaccines On Stage, Elves On Screen
Elizabeth II in History
The Rise of Your Frenemy’s Sourdough
The Hour Of Our Death
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Our New Gilded Age
Women In Cages, Everywhere
In Which Summer’s Lease Runs Out
Earth Matters
Visionaries Revisited
Summer Breeze
Revolutionary Roads
Boys And Their Toys
Paradise Lost and Particles Found
Making Waves: An Oceanic Austen And A Modern Orwell
From Mountain Passes To Streets Paved With Gold
Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon
Kidneys, Plums and Free Love
The TLS podcast at the Hay Festival
The Ebb and Flow of Power
Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité
Mementoes and Mayhem
Free-thinking Dinners in the Age of Revolutions
The Shape Of Things To Come
The Birds and the Bees, and Books Made of Cheese
Lives, Interrupted
Life Lessons and Making Sporting History
Early Days And Their Long Shadows
Boundaries Real and Imagined
Visions of Violence
Rock Star, Freak, Agitator
Say What You’re Going To Say
Faint Praise
Birds of a Feather
A Story With Strings Attached
Writers at the Gates of Dawn
Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!
Clarity, Honesty, Fluff
Carnival of Darkness
Give Me Your Heart
A Constant State of Foreignness
Best of 2021
Best of 2021
BONUS: Sarah Hall and Sarah Moss – an interview
This Is Magic
On not letting it be
George Orwell and his Roses and a History of Self-Improvement
Books of the Year 2021
The Mythic Town of Concord and the Magic of the Lighted Window
The Booker-winner and the Beatle
Wild Lives
Doom, Faith and Sabotage
Radical Turns
The Autumn Livres
E.M. Forster's Happy Solution
When the Flawed Succeed
Survival of the Wittiest
Sad and Twisted Stories
Greatest Hits
Don't sweat it
Indexes, Newsletters, Potatoes, Gold!
TLS Summer Library: Part IV
TLS Summer Library: Part III
The Guidance of Brains
TLS Summer Library: Part II
TLS Summer Library: Part I
Turning poetry into profit with Alighieri Jewellery's Rosh Mahtani
Paternal Effects
A Genius of Cancer and a Queen of Bohemia
The Miraculous Mundane
Private Profits, Public Cost
The movie we want it to be
Insiders, outsiders and insider-outsiders
No Ideas, But in Things
Proust's Way
Strange Worlds of Their Own
Robots Working, Humans Reading
Mozart the Happy Harlequin and Lost British Labourism
A Bengali Polymath and an ‘Accidental Modernist’
‘But Where’s the Poetry?!’
D. H. Lawrence in Flames
Jane Austen and Abolition
Angela Thirkell’s Relentless Self-Belief
Pirandello’s Controlled Chaos
Violence Upon the Roads
Underground and on the Run
Getting Shakespeare’s Measure
Philip Roth, For Better, For Worse, Forever?
Dreams of America
Myth-busting, awkwardness, pure Marvellousness
Vivian Gornick’s Time
Avoidance and absurdity
Ishiguro’s AI and Grendel’s Mother
Nostalgia, Outsiders and "Rubber Tramps"
Weapons, Grouse and Red Herrings
Tentatively Pressing
The Barbara Comyns revival
BONUS: David Baddiel - Jews Don't Count
Borges - Encounters and "Encounters"
Delicate Matters
Epiphanies and Kidneys
This is Pakistan
Jacques Tati’s Serious Gags
Stalin, little and large
Beethoven at 250
BONUS: 2020 Booker Prize Winner - Douglas Stuart
Neither Victims nor Perpetrators
Gagged with Ashes
Books of the Year 2020
You Have Fixed Me
Terrifyingly True (or Not)
Classical music conductors: Overpaid, oversexed and over the hill?
Out Caravaggio-ing Caravaggio
Dancing on Air
Milk as Metaphor
Seduction and Uprisings
Murder at the Opera
Books! Books! Books!
Sex and the City of Ladies
The TLS, rewind #4
The TLS, rewind #3
The TLS, rewind #2
The TLS, rewind #1
Climate change, from 'doomism' to optimism
Life as a Roman emperor
How the West was written
Romance versus realism
The Pet Shop Boys paradox
Bernardine Evaristo wins again
Holiday in the living room
Don’t forget Edward Earl Johnson
Finding art in lockdown
Slave driver, the table is turn
How to be alone
Townies and gownies
‘How does it smell?’
Grotesquely good
Easy as ABC?
Godzilla, the plague, etc
‘It’s not him, it’s us’
Introducing: Stories of our times
‘A very peculiar telegram’
The kangaroo curve
Tweets, memes and the smell of masculine
Tales of a century
Passion projects
Absolutely worth the hype
The Mirror & the Light – an extract from Hilary Mantel's new novel
West Side Storyless
Vanilla sex in Pompeii
Anne Enright – a reading from Actress
Can't go on. Go on.
Daniel Kehlmann, an interview
Bringing Tolstoy down
Carrier bag or stick?
Byron's oddness
Bonus episode: Five women, one radical address
Huge stars in a minor key
Seen and not heard?
Apples and oranges in space
The decade that was
Haunted by Miss Austen
The Iron Lady and the judo politician
Books of the Year, 2019
Hallie Rubenhold – an interview
Elizabeth Strout – an interview
Two phat ladies
How to read
Cold War machinations
Morals and mysteries
Magazine love
Bernardine Evaristo – winner of the 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction
David Greig – revisiting 'Solaris'
Prize controversies
How to grow a human
Patronizing writers of colour
Scavenger of eternal truths
Unsettled by Sontag
The recipe for superstardom
Is it too late?
What do the kids say?
'We should all be interested in pigeons...'
The most expensive mystery of all
How to be modern: conspiracy theory, free will and the avant-garde
‘We don’t know what he has, we don’t know what he’s done with it’
Nature for sale
Unromancing the Romantics
Loving Iris Murdoch
Who reads John Updike?
Talk to the hands
Summer Books 2019
Russian greats and fictional eats
Ethical economics
Celestial Bodies – winner of the 2019 Man Booker International prize for fiction
Weighty matters
Victoria at 200
Knowing laughter
Journey to the centre of the earth
To infinities – and beyond
The life-writing issue
As we like it
Ian McEwan – an interview
Youth injustice system
Whitechapel and Weimar
A deep history of Europe
Forgotten, not gone
Dave Eggers: The violations start with us
O, the Edward Gorey of it all
A nose is a nose is a nose…
Unsilenced voices
Half glitzy, half dowdy
Zadie Smith, in conversation
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: the inaugural Gabriel García Márquez lecture
Narratives of sexual assault
How Macron went wrong
‘American Standard’, a new poem by Paul Muldoon
Everything points north
Reddit's new religions
Egos and experiments
Finer points of murder
Icons familiar and unfamiliar
Highlights from 2018 – a bonus episode
Mary Beard's 'Introduction to the Odyssey' – a bonus episode
Arts of the Year 2018
Ode to the orca
Who on earth was William Gilbert?
Our problem with cows
The best books of 2018
Is it accurate to call Donald Trump a fascist?
WW1: Remembering / forgetting
Remembering Peterloo
BONUS: Must read – must buy?
1844, remember the date...
Ever-enigmatic Leonardo da Vinci
An Odyssey for everyone
Radical Cheltenham and a poem from Paul Muldoon
Diarmaid MacCulloch on Thomas Cromwell
Mexico's great disgrace
Henry James in LA
On booze and art
Philip Larkin, beyond the grave
Too smart for our own good
Same old gags
Turn on, tune in, drop out?
Mind and memory
Emily Brontë's wuthering wilds
Women, in and out of control
Summer Books 2018
Ode to Lee Child – a bonus episode
Notes on 50 years of the Man Booker Prize
An interview with Tim Winton – a bonus episode
The wildness of Muriel Spark
Russia's blood games
Changing your mind and opening the doors
Rules of law
Jesmyn Ward’s lyrical fiction - a bonus episode
Those are pearls . . . and Michael Jackson's performative drama
Philip Roth and the translatable
The making of me
Roman emperors and football managers
BONUS: Madeline Miller on Circe
Mothers and millennials
Carlo Rovelli's time – a special episode
Why does everyone hate Nixon?
The risky art of cartooning
Culture clash
Empathy: for better, for worse
The New Elizabethans
Hyper-liberalism and the 6,000th TLS
Everyone's a winner – a bonus episode
On the consciousness of cows
Ada Lovelace: tech prophet and trophy wife
Writers and their mothers
Jewishness: seriously funny
Prickly, profound Isaac Newton
Fiona Mozley and Lisa McInerney – at Hay Festival, Cartagena
Can things only get better?
Mothers of #MeToo
Gregory Norminton, an interview
The 'real' Jane Eyre
Having a nice day
Language lolz
Was Jesus a Buddhist? Well, no...
The Problem We All Still Live With
Highlights from 2017
Arts of the Year 2017
Darwin: good, bad, ugly
Critical women
Dancing with Anthony Powell
BONUS: Geoff Dyer on Geoff Dyer
Can Utopia survive 2017?
The best books of 2017
A woman's 'Odyssey'
A brand-new London theatre
Kathy Acker's guts
Matthew Arnold's good-bad poetry
Valeria Luiselli on the US immigration crisis
Heavy with odours
Authors of injustice
Good, bad and loud feminist writing
Free Speech vs Safe Space: the Great Campus Divide
Samuel Beckett's turtle-neck, etc
Matters poetical
Peter Brook at work
The world's most mysterious manuscript
Pop science and Punjabi epics
Peak bullshit
India's broken legacy
Ian Nairn, route master
Trump and the great car crisis
Jane Austen at 200
'Let me be clear...'
Robert Frost's aggression
'Who shall we kill today?'
What to read this summer: an almost-legendary TLS special edition
The summer of shrug
Embarrassing questions
Football and the modern Middle East
Is consciousness a thing?
How to get rid of your spouse
States of the nations
#1. If This Is A Man – a live reading of Primo Levi's memoir of Auschwitz
Rousseau and the me me me memoir
How comics got serious
Primo Levi speaks
Beers with James Baldwin
Poets, cannibals and philosophers
Not so still lives
Isherwood, from Weimar Berlin to Hollywood
A new French Revolution?
Fragments of the American Dream
George Saunders on 'Lincoln in the Bardo'
The Jam's literary credentials
Anthony Burgess at 100
Writing The Russian Revolution
Cowgirls, Hockney, and how to write a bestseller
The age of mass incarceration
March on
Reboots and reputations
Bad sex, 'the Malala effect', layers of place
Chilling, glitzy and dark
The many faces of King’s Cross
A monster success
From book to box and beyond
Overrated/Underrated
Brexit, bubbles, and the best arts of 2016
God, sex and the arts / science divide
Defiance, good death and Mexico
Controlled violence
Books of the Year
Lionel Shriver: "Terror as recreation"
The life in the work
Against nature
Violence and poetry
Halloween story special
Shades of censorship
Ali Smith on Autumn
Life, writing and life-writing
The mythical Lévi-Strauss
A lecture by Terry Eagleton
Duck or Rabbit?
Rose Tremain at the Wimbledon Bookfest
Beatrix Potter, marriage, and data
Hardy's London & the modern Middle East
Ideas of Englishness
Beginnings of life and the end of the NHS
Clare Lowdon on Safran Foer's great big dazzling novel
Eimear McBride on The Lesser Bohemians
Panama Papers, the Nero enigma & women in Hollywood
Brazil, Bloomsbury, and Geoff Dyer
Edmund White on Nabokov
Andrew Motion on Housman
The view from Istanbul
Richard Ford on Donald Trump
Tim Parks on translating Leopardi
Mary Beard on referenda
Fiction and the refugee crisis
Svetlana Alexievich and the Russian-Soviet soul
Tessa Hadley and Sarah Hall in conversation
Utopia – Then and Now (live from Kings Place)
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Casanova's escape
Thomas De Quincey
Robert Browning's Poetic Characters
Shakespeare and Cervantes, 400 years on
Utopia at 500
Being Jewish, being American
Oscar Wilde and the Chatterton myth
Henry James in the TLS
Mary Beard
Jane Austen's Emma
"Tea at the Midland" by David Constantine
Jacob Tonson's poets
John Donne
Vertigo
Douglas Oliver: a poetic vision of the body politic
J.H. Prynne: an examination of imagery
Summer Holidays
Cycling: tour de force
Tennis: Game, Sex and Match
John Fletcher
Christine Brooke-Rose
Waterloo
Byron
Anthony Trollope
Hermione Lee discusses Virginia Woolf
Ruth Scurr discusses John Aubrey and the art of writing biography
Robert Herrick and John Evelyn
Ariel poems
T. E. Hulme
Ivor Gurney
Gabriel-Ernest by Saki
The Eyes by Edith Wharton
There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard by M.R. James
Laurie Lee with Ronald Blythe
David Collard discusses Flametti by Hugo Ball
Clive James
Mary Beard talks Medea at The National Theatre
Edward Thomas
Summer Books - Alex Clark on The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Summer Books - Frances Wilson on What You Want by Constantine Phipps
Summer Books - Lidija Haas on The Interior Circuit by Francisco Goldman
Summer Books - Mary Beard on Augustus by John Williams
Cavafy
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Ian Hamilton