The TLS

Mark Antony’s wife was a political player in her own right

'If you want to pry into other people’s lives, you should not spy on your neighbour, but instead turn to history.'

Helen Morales: Mark Antony’s wife was a political player in her own right

Argumentative routes

Constance Higgins: Taking creative paths to familiar locations

Should the ancient Athens serve modern progressive causes?

'A polemical reply to those who regard the classics as a storehouse of timeless value.'

James Romm: Should the ancient Athens serve modern progressive causes?

A poet who prospered despite Rome’s bloody civil wars

'Horace proudly repeats the phrase ‘son of a freedman’ as a measure of how far he has come...'

William Fitzgerald on a poet who prospered despite Rome’s bloody civil wars

The events that led to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth

'The difficulty arises from the sources that are the main evidence for Jesus’s life and final days: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.'

James Carleton Paget on the events that led to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth

Half-price Interrail pass

Alev Adil on a cheap and cheerful adventure by train

'The mistral fought back. Every anemometer installed in the Mont Ventoux observatory broke within days.'

Emile Chabal: Icy blasts from the north have inspired French artists, writers and scientists
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Tales from a continent that is itself ‘a little fantastical’

'The lands breathe stories” and there is something “a little fantastical” about African reality.'

Estelle Shirbon on tales from a continent that is itself ‘a little fantastical’

Time to hit pause

'You occasionally get the feeling that Keret himself doesn’t quite know what his thought experiment is supposed to test, and these are the stories I liked most.'

Benjamin Markovits on genre-bending short stories of the modern world

'A “grandmother’s arse” is clearly not a saucy dish. Better stick to the escargots.'

Michèle Roberts on eating your way through the arrondissements
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Precise, patient, yearning

Karen Leeder on a unique poetic voice translated into English for the first time

Out of place

'That people can act and feel out of joint with themselves is a consistent concern here.'

Lucy Thynne on stories of travel and estrangement

It’s their life

'Never sentimental, the six tales in Everyone Still Here repeatedly catch readers unawares by veering off in new directions or suddenly changing tone.'

Alison Kelly on the weight of the Troubles for the ceasefire generation

A right to choose

'The age-old debates about when a foetus achieves ensoulment or viability continue to this day.'

Elizabeth Abbott on efforts to prohibit abortion down the ages

No business like show

'His most thrilling set piece involved acting out Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy, an experience so terrifying that women screamed and men fainted.'

Kathryn Hughes: 200 years of Dickens on stage and screen

Provocateur’s progress

'For Lewis, the crisis lay at home, in the mortal endangerment of the British Empire by leftist bunkum.'

Beci Carver: Provocateur’s progress

Maggots as meat

'If the putative sentience of a soldier fly can motivate an impulse to care, what might we owe to a much more complex human foetus?'

Simone Gubler on maggots as meat

Snuff boxes and Catherines

George Monaghan: A loose picaresque made up of a compositional gimmick

Moving stories

'Each dancer moves like a segment of the serpentine protagonist from the mobile game Snake.'

Emily May on moving stories

Let me repent, but not today

'Contrary to popular belief, procrastinators tend not to be carefree hedonists.'

Anna Katharina Schaffner: Escaping the procrastination trap and living with a purpose

Music of the spheres

'It is a commonplace to say that in listening to Bach we respond to something eternal, but it’s intriguing to think that, at the deepest and most necessary level, this may indeed be what is happening.'

David Whitehouse on harmonies in mathematics

What lies ahead for fiction?

'Okotie believes that the prospect of a novel generated by AI is some way off.'

Benjamin Markovits: What lies ahead for fiction?

A year without reading; escaping the procrastination trap; eating insects; Dickens on stage and screen; how Horace prospered – and much more.

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The Accident

'Birds are really the notes and not the song, / Hence the silence on the staff of branches / Until the sun comes out, which won’t be long. / Until the songs come out, in avalanches.'

The Accident by Rex Wilder

Life beyond literature

'My anguish at the thought of what some books had done to me, had made of me, was shot through with scepticism as to the nature of that thought itself.'

Daniel Karlin on a year without reading

Caught between the shadows

John Sweeney on surviving a world made mad by bad actors

The opposite of parochial

Victoria Moul on strange and wise poetry

Fatal complexity

Nooresahar Ahmad on a ‘buzzword smoothie’ of a novel

Powering through

Emily A. Bernhard Jackson on the possibilities of ‘magic as a political tool’

Other conclusions

Benjamin Shull: Considering the Chilean coup of 1973