TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features…
Critical views of D. H. Lawrence’s notorious novel By Nicholas Murray
Thirty-four TLS writers share their holiday reading
The Declaration of Independence at 250
A showily ingenious novel about the exploitation of attention
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Forcing our hand?’ – Edward Chancellor on nudge economics….
M. John Harrison’s anti-philosophy of the sublime By Nick Holdstock
Mourning a marriage and a creative partnership By Lily Herd
Cults and the longing for community By Harrison Hill
When behavioural economics meets politics By Edward Chancellor
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Is DNA destiny?’ – Matthew Cobb on engineering humanity.
J. H. Prynne and Geoffrey Hill’s clash over ‘hazards in rubric’ By Gabriel Rolfe
‘Aside from writing, what is your chief distraction, obsession or side-hustle?’ Writers at the Hay Festival reveal their private passions
Cold War double agents, their lives and motives By Richard Davenport-Hines
Addictive anthologies of letters and diaries By Dinah Birch
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Among Putin’s Russians’…
The ideology behind Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union By Richard J. Evans
Previously unseen letters between Ezra Pound and Gladys Hynes By Ed Vulliamy
The rise, fall and survival of open-air swimming pools By David Horspool
Video games and political violence By Regina Rini
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A View of Her Own’….
Tracey Emin’s self-fashioning By Sophie Oliver
Women landscape painters reconsidered By Jenny Uglow
Mankind has escaped nuclear war, for now By P. D. Smith
Mexico’s challenge to received historical ideas By Benjamin T. Smith
The bittersweet contentment of old age By Rory Waterman
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The many faces of Shakespeare’….
China, America and the danger of war By Philip Zelikow
Discovering exactly what Shakespeare owned By Lucy Munro
Blake Morrison’s guide to life writing By Joyce Carol Oates
Writing about others as a means to write about yourself By Catherine Taylor
An argument for ‘British is best’
The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.
The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd
What smartphones can’t record
Modern English translations that do justice to the work
The struggle between good and evil in William Golding’s fiction By Alan Jenkins
The many lives of W. H. Auden By Ian Sansom
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, the controversial US tech company By Emily Jones
Why do we experience consciousness?
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The state of British poetry’ by Tristram Fane Saunders…
The forward march of British poetry
A history of childbirth and a defence of the C-section
By Leah Hazard
Newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse
The thrill of marine archaeology
By Alan Jenkins
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Constable vs Turner’ by Ferdinand Mount….
Turner is on our banknotes, Constable in our hearts By Ferdinand Mount
Coming out of Tate Britain just before noon on Budget Day, you are blinded by a blistering white sun behind Vauxhall Cross. The steepling glass towers south of the river are washed in an opal mist, the ziggurats of the MI6 HQ eclipsed to a ruined beige. Vauxhall Bridge gleams in the scarlet and yellow of a Turner sunset. J. M. W. would have rushed to the Embankment, whipped out his sketchbook, then worked up the whole shimmering scene into a six-footer and called it something like “The End of England”. John Constable would probably have turned away to catch the next coach to Hampstead Heath to paint Branch Hill Pond again.
How the young Dylan Thomas repeatedly stole from others By Alessandro Gallenzi
A love-hate relationship recalled by France’s ‘greatest living writer’ By Marie Darrieussecq
Why stylish stationery won’t change your life By Ian Sansom
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