TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (June 18, 2025): In this week’s TLS, Mary Beard and Margaret Drabble are not quite getting away from it all this summer. For our summer books selection, they have picked a brace of biographies of Labour prime ministers past and present. Along with Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent translation of the Odyssey, our Classics editor chooses Alan Johnson’s biography of Harold Wilson, her mother’s favourite politician. By Martin Ivens
Summer books 2025
Twenty-four TLS writers share their summer reading
Young and damned
Three teen-centric novels arrive at a time of national soul-searching
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Who won the war?’ We did, say the Americans, the British and the Russians. Each nation has a long history of claiming a unique role in defeating the Axis powers and diminishing the contribution of its allies. By Martin Ivens
In “The Once and Future World Order,” by Amitav Acharya, and “The Golden Road,” by William Dalrymple, our best hope might be that history repeats itself.
“The dollar plays a similar role to that of the English language in global commerce”, writes Edward Chancellor in his lead review of three books devoted to American financial supremacy. “Both enjoy network effects: the more they are used, the more others are obliged to use them.”
Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour
Letters
Galen Strawson, Rachel Hammersley, Colin McArthur, Jeremy Whiteley, Richard Davenport-Hines, Terry Hanstock, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, George Anderson, Koldo Casla, Martin Rose
Ed Kiely
Short Cuts: University Finances
Susan Pedersen
Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Neal Ascherson
A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis by Norman Lewis, introduced and selected by John Hatt
The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.
The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel
An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker
Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home
