Media

Jonathan has made many radio and television appearances.

He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and an occasional reviewer for The Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Contributions to other publications including Around the Globe, Cambridge Review, Harper’s Magazine, London Review of Books, The Stage, Standpoint Magazine, Sunday Times, Times Higher Education Supplement. For ten years, he was lead literary book reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph. He has been a feature writer for BBC Radio 3 Night Waves and an interviewee for BBC Radio 4 Front Row (formerly Kaleidoscope) and In our Time (16 appearances, more than any other guest). He wrote and presented introductions to the BBC Radio Shakespeare and to BBC radio broadcasts of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

He has been the writer and presenter of several BBC Radio 4 documentary feature series: “The Discovery of England” (2003), “Faking the Classics” (2005), “The Poetry of History” (two series, 2006-7), in which each programme examined a poem inspired by an historical event, and In Wordsworth's Footsteps (2020). For Radio 3, he wrote and presented the one-off features “All the World his Stage” (2000), “In a Green Shade” (2001), “The Opium Eater” (2001), and “Art in Mind” (2002, on neuroaesthetics). He was academic consultant for a documentary on Shakespeare in BBC2’s Great Britons, and has appeared on BBC2 (Review, The Trouble with Love), ITV (South Bank Show), and Channel 4 (Millennium Minds).

The eight episodes of The Poetry of History, together with the series on Wordsworth and In Our Time episodes on the Romantics and John Clare, have been published by the BBC as an Audiobook.

In the USA, he was script adviser and lead interviewee for the PBS series Shakespeare Uncovered (18 episodes) and he is currently working with the same team on a documentary about the First Folio.

He has given many platform talks for the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Royal Festival Hall, Royal Opera House, Metropolitan Opera New York, Public Shakespeare New York, and has written programme notes for the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Birmingham Rep, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, Manchester Royal Exchange and BAM (where his play Being Shakespeare had its New York run).