Are we hard-wired to feel other people’s pain? And if so, is it necessarily a good thing? Andrew Scull has reviewed three new books on empathy and joins us to tell us more; Charles Dickens's love of all things theatrical – in life as in art – is no secret. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst considers fifty years' worth of Dickens adaptations for the stage (and film)
Books
The Empathy Instinct by Peter Bazalgette
Against Empathy: The case for rational compassion by Paul Bloom
The Invention of Humanity: Equality and cultural difference in world history by Siep Stuurman
Dickensian Dramas: Plays from Charles Dickens (Volume One, edited by Jacky Bratton; Volume Two, edited by Jim Davis
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’
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
Just Dumb Enough Podcast
Voices of Misery Podcast
House of Whimsical Terror
Stuff You Should Know
Timcast IRL