Book review | On Dogs: An anthology, edited by Tracey Ullman; Dogs by Mark Alizart; Faces: Profiles of dogs by Vita Sackville-West | Continue reading
Book review | Metternich: Strategist and visionary by Wolfram Siemann, translated by Daniel Steuer, reviewed by Ferdinand Mount - The TLS | Continue reading
Princeton, New Jersey. A mild grey January day, two weeks after the unsealing of modern literature’s best-known archive: the 1,131 letters that T. S. | Continue reading
Samuel Earle on the malign divinity of tech companies | Continue reading
Book review: Plagued by Fire: The dreams and furies of Frank Lloyd Wright by Paul Hendrickson reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates | Continue reading
Grace notes essay: Arnold Schoenberg | The dramatic life and musical innovations of a composer both vilified and acclaimed | Continue reading
Book review: H. G. Wells: A literary life by Adam Roberts; Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the twentieth century by Sarah Cole; All things russian by Galya Diment reviewed by Michael Sherborne | Continue reading
Henry Hardy considers the hostility to oversimplification that motivated Berlin’s work | Continue reading
Ann Pettifor argues that a failure to recognize the economist’s work guarantees further crises | Continue reading
Peter Adamson considers the vast impact of the philosopher who usurped Aristotle’s place in the Islamic world | Continue reading
Hot things glow red, hotter things yellow, and really hot things white. When you heat glass, it does not shine forth with an encouraging green or pale | Continue reading
A terrible paradox assails the mind of the thinking man to-day. He is involved in a struggle against the most inhuman political creed, and the most | Continue reading
In the opening pages of The Europeans, Orlando Figes describes the departure of the first train on the brand new railway tracks linking Paris to Brussels | Continue reading
Hot things glow red, hotter things yellow, and really hot things white. When you heat glass, it does not shine forth with an encouraging green or pale | Continue reading
No, I am not talking about the periodic pile-ins aimed at people who step out of line (a modern version of scapegoating as an Oxford colleague has argued, | Continue reading
Richard Dawkins’s new book Outgrowing God: A beginner’s guide to atheism (Bantam, £14.99) is relentlessly confrontational. While discussing it with | Continue reading
Juliette Kennedy discusses Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems: the ingenious proofs and enduring impact | Continue reading
The first time I met my cousin Oliver Sacks I was fourteen. He was twenty-four, huge, shy, with a voluminous black beard. He was family but, as he grew up | Continue reading
Over the summer of 2019, images of a decimated, burning Amazon captured global media attention; a group of former FARC guerrilla commanders rejected the | Continue reading
The death of God, announced by Nietzsche in the 1880s, is still proving to be traumatic. In contrast, the death of Economic Man will be a balm to the | Continue reading
Lewis Namier: a major historian who was not well liked by his colleagues | Continue reading
The arduous life of a concert pianist | Continue reading
The life and work of George Eliot | Continue reading
'In the United Nations General Assembly today, 193 sovereign nations are represented. But Diamond considers the histories of just seven, all of which he knows well, having lived in six of them and learnt all the relevant languages, save Japanese' | Continue reading
This is an extract from The Hero by Lee Child, published by TLS Books this month | 'Let’s start with opium. That venerable poppy grew wild and natural after the retreat of the last Ice Age, across a broad band of territory stretching from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean to North … | Continue reading
'Le Carré, then, has been important to me for almost all my reading life, and my writing one, too. Whether or not I borrowed J. Lamb from the pages of Smiley’s People, the opening chapter of my novel Dead Lions (2013) is certainly in debt to that book, with one old spook tracing … | Continue reading
To mark the imminent publication of the French translation of Ada, Bernard Pivot interviewed Vladimir Nabokov for an episode of Apostrophes, the prime-time literary talk show on French television. (The episode was first broadcast on May 30, 1975.) Although Apostrophes was one of … | Continue reading
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books is not an attempt to replace one monolithic account of the book with another, but to encourage readers to think about what it is to read and what form that reading takes. | Continue reading
“Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist”, wrote Auberon Waugh in 1980. For the remaining twenty-one years of his life he took pleasure in adding to his list of victims. Feminism and AIDS w … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, psychiatry (or at least German psychiatry) rightly saw mental illness as rooted in biology, more specifically in the brain. Then Freud came along and turned people’s heads, and from this nightmare, we suddenly awoke in the last quarter of the twentieth century. | Continue reading
Norman Mailer could be politically romantic about all sorts of things – he was stubbornly, stupidly opposed to birth control; when he ran for mayor in New York he thought juvenile delinquents should solve their disputes in jousting pageants in Central Park | Continue reading
Late in 2011, Michiko Kakutani opened her New York Times review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens with “a remarkable account” she had found in its pages. In London for a few days in 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky had dropped in on Dickens’s editorial offices and found the … | Continue reading
'Asked by an interviewer in 1978 why he decided to become a philosopher, Michel Foucault replied: “We did not know when I was ten or eleven whether we would become German or remain French. We did not know whether we would die or not in the bombing”' | Continue reading
Grace Notes is a TLS Online series which celebrates pioneering composers and musicians, and assesses the enduring impact of their work | Richard Wagner would have loathed this article. His achievements were too grand, he’d have thought, to be condensed into “notes”, and too uniqu … | Continue reading
When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians. The fame-babies of a double murder (their father Robert Kardashian represented O. J. Simpson), the Kardashians and their extension pack, t … | Continue reading
'Baths are very comforting: gentler, calmer than showers. The slow clean. For a while, though, across a patch of nervous books in the mid-twentieth century, baths were troublesome' | Continue reading
John-Paul Stonard considers Fra Angelico, an artist who helped usher in a ‘new era of open, illusionistic space’ | Continue reading
The young Philip Larkin was a bit of an all-rounder. Kingsley Amis remembered his undergraduate friend’s “delicate, bluesy” style at the pub piano, while the schoolboy filled his notebook with clever pastiches of Auden and commanded a fluent, accurate line in his sketches and car … | Continue reading
Carolin Duttlinger discusses Walter Benjamin, a writer who sought to ‘bring past events into a dialogue with the present’ | Continue reading
'Even if the term is something of a novelty, conspiracy theory has a very long history. “It must be a conspiracy!” is the answer to the question, “Why do bad things happen?” when other explanations are unavailable, insufficient, or unconvincing' | Continue reading
'A decade ago I went to a racing pigeon club meeting with my boyfriend of the time, who lived in a bungalow on a farm in the Midlands and kept a loft of Janssens, checkered blue racing pigeons resembling town pigeons that had spent too much time at the gym' | Continue reading
Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers Umberto Eco died in 2016, and as the obituaries made clear, his death marked the passing of a hugely influential polymath. Yet few of the newspaper obituarists seeme … | Continue reading
'Once a picture has been accepted into the canon, the canon itself changes, expands slightly, so when the next dealer claims to have discovered a “new” Leonardo, we will measure it against a canon containing, let us suppose, the Salvator Mundi.' | Continue reading
Patrick Wilcken examines Claude Lévi-Strauss, a thinker who applied the rigour of science and the technical models of linguistics to social phenomena | Continue reading
'Byron’s view was that being simultaneously drenched and scorched would be nothing out of the ordinary to a true man of the world. And this was very much how he wanted Don Juan to be taken – as a piece of versified worldliness, free to rove where it wished, contradictory climates … | Continue reading
Review: Novels 1959–1965, by John Updike | 'Are the kids reading John Updike now? Or is he, like his most famous creation, “just one more piece of the sky of adults”?' | Continue reading
'Like the viewers of GoT’s Season Eight, readers of The book of fame made by Gefferey Chaucer were left with a story that, while “completed” by its printer, remained unfinished by its author.' | Continue reading
'The neat term “graphic fossils” underlines a time-stamped aspect, too, denoting gestures that have fallen out of fashion, such as kissing the hand or, like Shakespeare’s Veronese Sampson, biting the thumb' | Continue reading