The TLS

Theories of time; how Byzantium survived; Tolkien’s hobbit craft; lessons from Brexit; mastery of microbes; Faber’s full stops – and much more.

Out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

Games as a way of life; how Franco tried to cheat history; George Saunders’s new ghost story; Korean poets finding freedom; Dickensian women – and much more.

The new issue of the TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

Diminishing returns

Why fertility rates are collapsing around the world

Chaos in fourteen lines

An anthology of sonnets past and present

Beyond a balance sheet

What the reparations debate misses

People’s budget

The fraught relationship between taxation and democracy

Warming up for a fight

The Arctic as a battleground for the superpowers

Twenty Questions with Katherine Rundell

Twenty Questions with Katherine Rundell

First class delivery?

A history of childbirth and a defence of the C-section

A madcap time

Jessica Mitford: English aristocrat to American activist

Inheriting Norman Lewis’s library

Inheriting Norman Lewis’s library

Vivid life in an iconic Greek tomb painting

Vivid life in an iconic Greek tomb painting

The gutter life

Bar-room politics and rising resentment in 1930s Berlin

Anon and on

The forward march of British poetry

Kant and external law

‘The trouble with bespoke morality is that it can be very tailored indeed.’

Kant and external law

Horseplay

Ghosts and protest in Ali Smith’s latest jeu d’esprit

Portraits of the ‘Black Venus’

Revealed: newly discovered photographs of Baudelaire’s muse

The thrill of marine archaeology

The thrill of marine archaeology

The state of British poetry; Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus’ revealed; populations in crisis; a history of shipwrecks; Kant and external law – and much more.

The new TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

His critique of pure raisin Most biographies and memoirs of Ludwig Wittgenstein show, rather than say, that he could be a jerk. Some writers excuse his behaviour because he was so clearly a genius, others because he had a specia...

My @thetls.bsky.social review of Anthony Gottlieb’s new biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein (behind a paywall) www.the-tls.com/philosophy/h...

The bald truth When I was nineteen, I met a man who seemed very old to me, in a cafe in Trastevere, Rome. He asked me what I did in life. I was a theatre student and grandly told him I was a playwright. I had at tha...

Over the moon to have Deborah Levy making her début writing in @thetls.bsky.social with a rereading of Eugène Ionesco in the issue out now.

A great way to end the year. See you in 2026

www.the-tls.com/literature-b...

Between the pages Collections of short stories are sometimes made from previously published material, offering few surprises beyond the sequencing of the pieces. Paris

Absent or present? Gothic or uncanny? Fantastic or fantastique?

My @thetls.bsky.social review of Paris Fantastique by Nicholas Royle

www.the-tls.com/literature/f...

Mother was always right It seems that Emmanuel Carrère is now thought to be France’s “greatest living writer”. France has always needed a greatest writer, and even if there are

A great way to kick off this year's French literature coverage in the @thetls.bsky.social: Marie Darrieussecq on the latest book by Emmanuel Carrère in the latest issue.

www.the-tls.com/literature-b...

Twenty Questions with Anne Serre

How does distraction inform your writing? ‘I don’t really distinguish between distraction and everyday life.’

Twenty Questions with Anne Serre

‘One day, they’ll find me out’

How the young Dylan Thomas repeatedly stole from others

Twenty Questions with Michael Rosen

What is the worst job you ever had? ‘Painting the underside of an asbestos roof in a heatwave while standing on a plank with no guard rails.’

Twenty Questions with Michael Rosen

Twenty Questions with Elizabeth McCracken

Who has influenced your writing? ‘Everyone I am related to, by blood and marriage.’

Twenty Questions with Elizabeth McCracken

Conflicting ideas about the Celts

Conflicting ideas about the Celts

Boots and beastliness

Contrasting biographical portraits of Jane Austen

Wise fools

Irritating professors for the ages