Literary conversation with patience and wit.
The TLS Podcast pairs literary chat with careful interviews about writers, archives, education, and cultural memory. It is calm, companionable, and alert to the pleasures as well as the limits of reading.
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The TLS Podcast is a literary and cultural conversation with a gentle editorial spine. It rarely rushes. Recent episodes move from ordinary observations, such as Easter leftovers, blossom, garden irritations, or the small comedy of e-readers, into questions about books, memory, education, and historical survival. That shift is part of its charm. The show treats cultural life as something lived before it is analyzed. A discussion of lost plays becomes a larger meditation on grief, scholarship, and the limits of the archive. The most interesting moments often arrive when a guest or editor pauses over what cannot be known. Instead of pretending the record is complete, the conversation makes room for partial evidence, missing voices, and the difficulty of accepting absence. Interviews can be expansive. In the Michael Morpurgo conversation, childhood listening, school discipline, maternal storytelling, Beowulf, and the generosity of good teaching all become part of one long account of how words enter a life. The show also returns to the question of how culture is passed on. Reading is not presented simply as virtue or homework, but as pleasure, music, memory, and sometimes resistance. History appears in a similar light. The episode touching on Eileen and Rhoda Power considers radio, schools, dramatic interludes, and the attempt to make history feel populated by real people. The tone remains polished but companionable. It can be dryly amused, then suddenly grave. Listeners who enjoy literary criticism, author interviews, archive talk, and cultural history will find a show that assumes curiosity without demanding specialist credentials. Its best quality is patience: the patience to let a question gather context, to follow an anecdote, and to notice when a book or poem has become part of someone’s life.
Made for: For readers who like author interviews, cultural history, literary criticism, and reflective conversation about how books are read, taught, remembered, and lost.
What sets it apart: It blends editor-led literary discussion with intimate, guest-shaped reflection, moving easily from domestic asides to archives, schools, poems, and the afterlife of stories.
A weekly podcast on books and culture brought to you by the writers and editors of the Times Literary Supplement. To read more, welcome to the TLS. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The TLS Podcast makes the life around books legible, from first encounters with language to adaptation, teaching and archival survival.
The TLS Podcast starts with books and follows the questions they leave open. Alex Clarke and Lucy Dallas move easily from Michael Morpurgo's memories of learning to love language to discussions of archival loss, unfamiliar reading and the long cultural life of Mrs. Dalloway.
Beowulf, Virginia Woolf and lost archives await when your reading life needs better questions, not homework.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A calm conversation about grief, archives, and the limits of what can be known.
Grief Work treats acceptance less as a destination than as a search through archives, lost plays, and the fragile pieces that remain. Alex Clark and Lucy Dallas move from the stages of grief to the harder question of what can still be known, and lostplays.org works well as a…
Michael Morpurgo reflects on reading, teaching, and the books that shaped him.
The TLS Podcast gives Michael Morpurgo a special episode, and it is most rewarding when it lingers on his belief that reading is something handed on, not simply stored away.
A literary conversation about how a mother's reading voice lingers against a school culture of testing and fear.
The TLS Podcast opens with St Patrick's Day small talk and Oscar-season adaptations, then settles into a more intimate reflection on how reading first enters a life: as sound, company, and ritual.
A focused discussion of Eileen Power, Rhoda Power, and their work making history live on radio for schools.
The TLS Podcast sets Eileen Power and Rhoda Power against a precise question: how history might be made vivid for children. Eileen is placed as the historian, while Rhoda's dramatic radio interludes use voices, music, and sound effects to bring episodes from the past into…
Cherry blossom banter opens into Anne Morgan's thoughtful case for reading with uncertainty.
The TLS Podcast begins in a lightly domestic register, with cherry blossom, magnolia, and trees arriving too early before Alex Clarke and TLS arts editor Lucy Dallas turn toward a more substantial question: what it means to read without rushing to mastery.
A calm literary conversation on Mrs Dalloway, Helen Garner's diaries, and the lives books take on beyond the page.
Garden talk gives way to a clear, literary discussion of afterlives: how Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway keeps moving through teaching, film, and later books.
Iris's money markets and angels become rival powers in Spufford's conversation about Nonesuch.
Francis Spufford's conversation about Nonesuch is sharpest when it tracks the novel's bond between financial ambition and supernatural power. Iris, 22 and living in 1940, reads money markets with unusual confidence just as the economy is closing in around her.
Two classical-education teachers slow-read novels like Jane Eyre, chapter by chapter.
Book talk with room to wander.
This episode investigates the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit, with new revelations about the case.
This episode features a conversation with arts editor Lucy Dallas about her recent travels and interviews with authors and actors like Mick Herron, Richard Osman, Alan Hollinghurst, and Rupert Everett, who expressed interest in playing Dumbledore.
This episode of the TLS podcast features arts editor Lucy Dallas discussing the newly announced Hay Festival program and recommending specific events.
This episode of the TLS podcast discusses the Nobel Prize in literature and features an interview with the political activist group Led by Donkeys.
Francis Spufford turns up amid publication-week bustle.
A garden opens the door.
Grief becomes a practice.
This episode reflects on March highlights, discussing topics like wildfire management using prescribed burns and Indigenous knowledge at UBC, and the challenges of reading for children and adults.
This episode discusses a major miscarriage of justice case involving Andrew Malkinson's wrongful conviction for rape in Greater Manchester, alongside a lighthearted conversation about Easter treats.
This episode of the TLS podcast features host Alex Clark and arts editor Lucy Dallas discussing personal anecdotes and observations, starting with a humorous story about shouting at burgonias.
The TLS podcast hosts discuss cherry blossom season in London, with Lucy Dallas sharing an anecdote about recording bee sounds under a tree.
Michael Morpurgo's strongest passage starts with teachers.
St Patrick's Day sets the table.
Spring is in the air.
This episode features a full interview with award-winning author Francis Spufford discussing his new novel Nonesuch during its publication week.
Cherry blossom drifts into reading.