Critic and novelist Margaret Drabble joins us to review the life and work of Muriel Spark, whose centenary we mark this year; Samuel Graydon discusses a new exhibition on J. R. R. Tolkien, including drawings and doodles, language trees and fan mail; the TLS's History editor David Horspool introduces a selection of new work on the medieval period
Works discussed
The Centenary Edition of the Novels of Muriel Spark, edited by Alan Taylor
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth, an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with accompanying book by Catherine McIlwaine
‘Finding Henry – Why England’s most powerful medieval monarch should be better remembered’ by Claudia Gold, in this week’s TLS
Medieval Bodies: Life, death and art in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell
Sea of Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the medieval Islamic world by Christophe Picard, translated by Nicholas Elliott
The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 1: 1000–1350: Conquest and Transformation by Laura Ashe
Two phat ladies
Elizabeth Strout – an interview
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’
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