An edited version of the introduction to The Folio Society edition of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Sam Weber | Continue reading
Paula Marantz Cohen on Arthur Miller's shame in relation to his family, ethnicity and as a theme in his productions. "Arthur Miller was a man seeking to escape his roots, wanting to be a distinctly American success story, just as Willy Loman wanted this in another register." | Continue reading
Stephen Brown on ‘the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears’: explosions of invention within a tightly structured geometry | Continue reading
'In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point while Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge blared from the speakers of a nearby tape recorder. Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time...' | Continue reading
'Our great-great-grandchildren will not be elves, but they may also not be mortals like us. To be precise, the kind of immortality I have in mind can be called biological immortality' | Continue reading
On February 15, 1938 T. S. Eliot wrote to his friend John Hayward asking him to be his Literary Executor. The functions would be chiefly negative. I have had to write at one time or another a lot of junk in periodicals the greater portion of which ought never to be reprinted … [Y … | Continue reading
Michael Caines traces the history of a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, cleaned, repaired and soon to be on display | Continue reading
'Your editor has asked me to give you some practical advice about the kind of labour involved in planning and executing a book of the kind I have just published – a work of some 80,000 words about a fellow-author whose name is D. H. Lawrence' | Continue reading
Grace Notes | Kevin Le Gendre explores the work of John Coltrane – a creative obsessive with pop appeal | Continue reading
The TLS Map of Writers’ Homes is far from complete. Help us to populate it with the houses of (deceased) writers. The map will be updated every week. | Continue reading
'It is an irony of US history that the most photographed and heard American of the nineteenth century, according to his latest biographer David W. Blight, was the former slave and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass' | Continue reading
'Clearly, the con – the bunco, the gyp, the sting – lends itself to anecdote. It’s no accident that Hustlers and Con Men (1976), Jay Robert Nash’s thick compendium of 200 years’ worth of cheats and hucksters of all kinds, used that pithy narrative form as its sole vehicle' | Continue reading
'As Frank Furedi argues in How Fear Works: Culture of fear in the 21st century, the primacy of fear in our lives is intimately linked to this “motivational crisis that stems from the feeble status of moral authority”' | Continue reading
Talking to Iain Sinclair about the state of London today, Keggie Carew described the burgeoning population of coffee shop laptoppers as “dystopian”. | Continue reading
Late in his tenure as head of the Bodleian Library, E. W. B. Nicholson received an unusual letter from a History fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. The correspondent explained that he had been asked to enquire on behalf of a “Cambridge don” whether there existed “any Siberia atta … | Continue reading
'There are lots of ways of describing Reddit that are both accurate and fail to capture what it is. It is one of the most popular websites in the world, with 330m active users. It’s a “social news site”, the “front page of the Internet”, a place where users can “up-vote” the stor … | Continue reading
John E. Joseph considers Ferdinand de Saussure's revolutionary approach to linguistics and the unintended consequences of his work | Continue reading
Andrew Scull on the travails of social psychology | Review: The Lost Boys, by Gina Perry; The Hope Circuit, by Martin Seligman | Continue reading
'We all like to see a good villain brought to justice, but when the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 left his final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished, his fans took the idea literally by putting the villain on trial.' | Continue reading
Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers | Thomas Hobbes, dubbed by his detractors “The Monster of Malmesbury”, was born prematurely in Wiltshire, on April 5, 1588, allegedly because his mother had taken fr … | Continue reading
'A Study of Assassination was an anonymously authored CIA handbook for covert political murder written in 1953 and declassified in 1997. The handbook was produced as a “training file” for operation PBSUCCESS, the codename of a CIA plot launched by the Eisenhower administration to … | Continue reading
There are many other uses of questions in the Investigations (indeed, Wittgenstein once considered writing a work that consisted entirely of questions). | Continue reading
'One hundred years ago this month, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (“acidic waters”), a curative town in the North Caucasian foothills of Russia, which was then wracked by civil war.' | Continue reading
Kate Hext reviews three books that revisit the Oscar Wilde we think we know, asking what he represents to the modern reader, and the dangers of simplifying our icons. | Continue reading
From autofiction to ‘unbooks’ and ‘Ancient Mariner novels’ | Contributors to the TLS – including Mary Beard, Esi Edugyan, Clive James and Emily Wilson – pick their Books of the Year 2018 | Continue reading
'either a censorious approach – one thinks of post-war Leavisite proclamations on the degeneracy of the popular reading public – nor a romantic one, in which every working man is a classicist manqué – is adequate to describe the complex and contending mental worlds of the million … | Continue reading
Tim Crane considers the vast financial burden private academic publishers of peer review journals place on public institutions | Continue reading
Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers | Ann Pettifor argues that further financial crises are assured if we fail to recognize the work of John Maynard Keynes | Continue reading
Mark Twain continues to bedevil the academy, if not the reading public. Like Kipling, he has been by turns reviled and revered, often for the wrong reasons. | Continue reading
The history of the book does not always involve the study of either history or books. As James Raven shows in this slim, engaging volume, the question of what sort of object might count as a book remains very much up for debate. The history of the book in the Western world has tr … | Continue reading
'Setiya’s philosophy aims to give concrete advice on how to change one’s life in order to rid oneself of the midlife crisis. (Not so much ten tips to please your lover as two conceptual distinctions to change your life.)' | Continue reading
Being a bad friend to David Foster Wallace | He would send me letters and I wouldn’t answer them. He would send works in progress with forlorn notes. “You’re under no obligation to read or to pretend you’ve read the enclosed”, he wrote on one piece. I didn’t.' | Continue reading
'My aim in the biography was to present as complete a picture of Larkin as possible, and to allow readers to make up their own minds about what to like and what to dislike' | Continue reading
'Algorithms have changed, from Really Simple to Ridiculously Complicated. They are capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they’ve never been able to do before.' | Continue reading
Review: How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics by Michael Pollan | 'Many drugs are classified according to their effects ... and when LSD was first made widely available to researchers in 1950 there was a question of how to classify it.' | Continue reading
Philosophy | A new Life (The Young Descartes) shows Descartes ‘deeply embedded in his dangerous times’ | Continue reading
'“Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?” Philip Larkin asked this in 1954, just before he applied for, and got, the job of librarian at the University of Hull.' | Continue reading
Brian Leiter examines Friedrich Nietzsche's views on what makes life worth living | Continue reading
David Papineau argues that it is crucial for scientists to start heeding the lessons of the eighteenth-century statistician Thomas Bayes | Continue reading
Arkady Ostrovsky: The “doublethink” of Putin’s Russia seeks, in George Orwell’s words, to “repudiate morality while laying claim to it” as a way of claiming that “war is peace”. | 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
Cultural Life | "In general, creative culture in Japan is thriving, and oddly unfettered compared to its Western counterparts." | Continue reading
In Free Woman [Feigel] takes her passion for Doris Lessing beyond academic admiration, intellectual identification, even fan adoration, to a risky obsession | Continue reading
Julie-Marie Strange reflects on our relationship with death in the modern world, | Continue reading
Alberto Manguel reviews In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes by Giorgio van Straten | Continue reading
Failed projects in British culture form 1660 to 1730 | Continue reading
Fríða Ísberg: "Iceland, with its small population, poses unusual ethical problems concerning what one can, and should, write." | Continue reading
Leigh Hunt said that when you met Dickens his face appeared to contain “the life and soul of fifty human beings”. Novelist, journalist, social campaigner, editor, hypnotist, amateur magician and more besides, he was like a bundle of different individuals who happened to share the … | Continue reading