After Ramona: a call to Australian TLS-lovers

At nine in the London morning, in Portland Place, beside the Falun Gong protesters and the BBC coffee-clutching day shift, I was rarely at my best.

 The prospect of speaking to Australia's literary microphone mistress, Ramona Koval, was always a challenge.

 She would ask probing questions about the latest issue of the TLS - and I would answer them as best I could. We covered the classics and the contemporary for the ABC Book Show in sunny Melbourne (I always thought of it as sunny) and that was fine.

 We sometimes extended into centuries where my 9 am knowledge was not quite so sharp as of the ancients and of now. But on this show, with this interviewer, that was always fine too. Ramona knew a lot - and thus, so it seemed, did we both. And for her it was evening.

I hadn't heard from Ramona for a while.  I was half wondering whether my knowledge of the nineteenth century had suddenly been found just too wanting. 

I discover today - late, I know - that the Book Show has disappeared in to an arts show, the latest case of the global obsession with pretending that literature can be mixed up with other cultural stuff without damage to the common good.

Australians who read the TLS, want to read it, or think they should will in future lack the Koval spur. I invite you now to subscribe and read us just to spite the misguided..