TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at sixty; The case against progress; Patricial Lockwood’s bag of scraps…
The sixtieth anniversary ‘heritage’ edition of Ariel By Seamus Perry
Thomas Pynchon’s haunted vision of history By James Marcus
The wisdom of Bertie Wooster By Tim Lake
The precocious poetry of Charlotte Brontë By Samantha Ellis
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features Lawrence Durrell, “so many towns” that could “become Alexandria” – “founded”, as indeed so many were, “At the doors of Africa”, “Upon a parting”. Yet what other town could boast of anything to compare with that “last pale / Lighthouse”, the Pharos of Alexandria, “like a Samson blinded”?
Literary myth-making, from Alexandria to Corfu By Jonathan Keates
The pleasures and challenges of making – and describing – great wines By George Berridge
Investigating the deathbed conversion of Oscar Wilde By Richard A. Kaye
To what extent are addicts responsible for their actions? By Crispin Sartwell
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Tech Bro Utopia’ – Why Bacon’s New Atlantis is Peter Thiel’s favorite book; The monarch who built Britain; Charles and the carbuncles; The miseries of Victor Hugo’s daughter…
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features Daniel Karlin about his twelve-month abstinence from the printed word. As one of his friends remarked, he must have been the first person to make a New Year’s resolution to read less.
A year without reading By Daniel Karlin
AI, literary theory and traditional storytelling By Benjamin Markovits
The ethics of industrial insect farming By Simone Gubler
Efforts to prohibit abortion down the ages By Elizabeth Abbott
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features All change is for the worse? Pessimists will find evidence in Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange: Making the news in early modern Europe, reviewed for the TLS by Noel Malcolm.
Where newspapers came from By Noel Malcolm
A cultural conservative who paved the way for Ronald Reagan By Christopher J. Scalia
Ancient rural skills in a modern world By Norma Clarke
Restfully contemplative holiday reading By Irina Dumitrescu
How accountable are US intelligence agencies to the president and Congress? By Richard Norton-Taylor
Henry James’s return to the United States By Alicia Rix
New light on ‘Captain’ Warner’s weapon of mass destruction By Trevor Pateman
A poet for yesterday and today By Emma Greensmith
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘American Dreamer’ – On the enduring greatness of Gatsby; Tear down the museums?; Big tech is watching you; A new Locke manuscript; The ultimate declutter and An epic bromance for our times…
What makes a novel of ideas? By Benjamin Markovits
The centre left has joined the populist right in despairing of good government By Sam Freedman
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The writer as thinker’ – On the novel of ideas; The age of misgovernment; Keeping up with the Camerons; Chaucer’s ambitions for English and Samuel Beckett and me…
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (June 25, 2025): In this week’s TLS , If all Russian writers are supposed to have come out of Gogol’s Overcoat, then “all American literature”, according to Ernest Hemingway, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. James Marcus reviews Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page biography of Twain – the Great American Novel seems fated to be twinned with the Great American Door-Stopper.
How Stalin shaped the Soviet collective memory By Bryan Karetnyk
Mark Twain and the making of an American literary revolution By James Marcus
Jimmy Carter’s abrasive foreign policy adviser and rival to Henry Kissinger By Edward N. Luttwak
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
Twenty-four TLS writers share their summer reading
Three teen-centric novels arrive at a time of national soul-searching
Intellicurious 