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Novels that make the Booker prize shortlist often get overlooked in the TLS's Books of the Year feature. This year, however, Percival Everett's reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, James, received more [...]

Contemplating his likely end, Vladimir Putin's gadfly opponent Alexei Navalny joked that his memoir, Patriot (reviewed by Wendy Slater), was bound to be a bestseller--'The book's author has been murdered [...]

Asked why he liked horror films, or terror films as he preferred to call them, Kingsley Amis wrote: "like Mark Twain on a dissimilar occasion, I have an answer to [...]

The popular story of the glory that was Greece begins at the monumental Lion Gate of the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, attributed to the work of giant Cyclopes by [...]

Sylvia Plath once said that 'nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing'. Ted Hughes curated two editions of her prose in 1977 and 1979, but admitted that his selections [...]

'Does Britain have a national literature?', asks Tim Parks in his first Afterthoughts column. Once upon a time the Italians drove nothing but Italian cars, owned Italian refrigerators, ate and [...]

James Baldwin declared that "the great problem" was "how to be--in the best sense of that kaleidoscopic word--a man". Ralf Webb's study of literary masculinity in mid-century America, Strange Relations, [...]

The Victorians astound us with their energy. The most famous Victorian of them all, after the queen herself, William Gladstone chopped down trees for exercise. With equal vigour he kept [...]

Moral panic over the habits of the young will always be with us. 'Reefer madness' in the 1930s was followed by the 'posture panic' over slouching American teenagers in the [...]

The most common and destructive form of conflict is civil war', writes Brian Holden Reid in his review of the latest edition of The New Makers of Modern Strategy, for [...]

Is Joe Biden fit to serve a second term as president of the United States? After a faltering performance in his first debate with Donald Trump last month, many of [...]

In the musical My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins, an archetypal male intellectual bully, complains: 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' The anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's [...]

Some writers have peculiar ideas about getting away from it all. One of Mary Beard's choices for our Summer Books feature is brave, even masochistic. The TLS's Classics Editor thinks [...]

Sigmund Freud gets his turn on the couch in this week's TLS. Frank Tallis's Mortal Secrets, reviewed by George Prochnik, asks intriguing questions of psychoanalysis's founding father that bear on [...]

One of the minor events in the literary calendar, the Bad Sex in Fiction award honours 'the year's most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel'. [...]

Mormons have been the butt of satire (and rage) ever since Joseph Smith claimed to have seen the gold plates that bore the religion's foundational text. Most recently, Trey Parker, [...]

Everyone has their own Henry V. I have enjoyed many productions, but Laurence Olivier's Oscar-winning portrayal is mine. The film of the play, 'dedicated to the 'Commandos and Airborne Troops [...]

To the science fiction aficionado Kingsley Amis, Ray Bradbury was the 'Louis Armstrong' of the genre, 'the one practitioner well known by name to those who know nothing whatever about [...]

Anchorites and Christian ascetics perched on their pillars seldom suffered from loneliness Alypius, more or less cheerfully, sat on his for sixty-seven years. Crowds of gawpers sought their spiritual advice [...]

The past fifty years have seen a collapse in the quality of women's diary writing, argues Nicola Shulman in her review of Secret Voices: A year of women's diaries, edited [...]

In this issue The catastrophe of the First World War led Sigmund Freud to analyse the tensions between the individual and society. Human nature was predisposed towards death and destruction. [...]

The philosopher Thomas Nagel is celebrated for his insight that humans can't know what it is like to be a bat. And 'as with bats, so with friends, relatives, lovers'. [...]

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes, said Bertolt Brecht. Make that two lands. Alexei Navalny, most likely murdered by agents of Vladimir Putin in the Russian Arctic [...]

Do androids dream of electric sheep, asks the title of Philip K. Dick's influential novel. Dick's protagonist, Rick Deckard--who makes a living hunting down fugitive androids for the San Francisco [...]

Liberal democracy is set for a testing year in 2024. Polarized contests are due in the largest polities, Indonesia, India, Europe and the US. (Here in little Britain we expect [...]

Two gloomy views about the state of literary studies and the humanities in general this week. Gordon Fraser begins his review of books about the modern literary canon, Alexander Manshel's [...]

The red-hot poker flowers in Aldous Huxley's garden came 'so passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance'--or that was what he saw after [...]

'Who goes Nazi?' is an unpleasant game of speculation about how friends, acquaintances and enemies would have behaved under the Third Reich. It was popular around Anglo-American dinner tables after [...]

THE PARTY'S OVER The rise and fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak PHIL BURTON-CARTLEDGE 368pp. Verso. Paperback, 11.99 [pounds sterling]. THE RIGHT TO RULE Thirteen years, five prime [...]

In the poem 'Afternoons' Philip Larkin observes young mothers in a playground: 'Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives'. Celebrity, Larkin felt, was pushing him [...]

Bang, crunch, rat-tat-tat, kaboom! Here comes Godzilla, 'the monstrous embodiment' of nuclear destruction and cover star of the TLS's Christmas books issue. The film of Godzilla, directed by Ishiro Honda, [...]

If we remember 'Adlestrop' and other works by Edward Thomas, it's partly thanks to the advocacy of Edna Longley: his 'best critic', as Andrew Motion calls her. The 140 poems [...]

Should scientists write histories of science? In his cover review of two works about human pandemics and pathogens, Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama and Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy, Adam Rutherford [...]

In this issue E.M. Forster believed that 'the true history of the human race is the history of human affection'. Cold rationalists like Henry Kissinger (still moving the pieces on [...]

'Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words', begins one trenchant essay by John Updike. Yet in death as in [...]

It was Philip Roth's trademark to blur the boundaries of autobiography and fiction. Two fictional alter egos, the writer Nathan Zuckerman and the academic David Kepesh, narrated twelve Roth novels [...]

Dean Rickles is worried that many of us have abandoned the search for the Good Life in order to watch 'a monkey riding a pig backwards on YouTube'. Those don't [...]

'I don't think I'm supposed to like this novel', writes Claire Lowdon in her TLS Commentary on Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers, which turns fifty this year. Lowdon says her [...]

In this issue Greed is good and lunch is for wimps, if you support effective altruism (EA). As a student at MIT, Sam Bankman-Fried, the future king of crypto-currency, was [...]

In this issue John Maynard Keynes is commonly credited with the saying, 'When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?' A less celebrated but perhaps [...]

In the gladiatorial arena of BBC's Newsnight, interviewer Jeremy Paxman once seemed invincible. During the first Gulf War in 1991, however, a young Israeli spokesman, speaking fluent American English, bullied [...]

This week's TLS takes a walk on the wild side with a review of Eat Your Mind, Jason McBride's biography of the New York underground writer Kathy Acker. Our reviewer, [...]

A hundred years ago T. S. Eliot returned to London from treatment in a Lausanne sanitarium carrying what Ezra Pound described as 'a damn good poem (19 pages) in his [...]

Most western strategists tell us that Vladimir Putin is bluffing when he threatens nuclear escalation in his war against Ukraine. Would Russia's high command balk at such an order? In [...]

Queen Victoria was not amused, but her great-great-granddaughter allowed herself a private smile, even a chuckle, while watching herself played in television drama. The usual anonymous sources claim that Elizabeth [...]

Are individuals moulded largely by impersonal forces and events? Or is history shaped by personality? Ian McEwan and Orhan Pamuk tease out answers in their latest novels. The life of [...]

Not everyone has been looking forward to the publication of Memoirs by Robert Lowell, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. 'Do we really want more material on the [...]

The cosy, prosperous world many of us take for granted is in peril. The war in Ukraine has led to Russian rocket-rattling and inflationary energy price hikes. Gas supplies to [...]

Jean Rhys found literary fame late in life. The daughter of a white Creole mother from Dominica, she kept her lilting West Indian accent, and never quite fitted into gloomy, [...]

In The Song of the Earth (2000), his ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate saw the Romantic movement as attempting an imaginative reunification of mind and nature despite 'a [...]