The TLS

John Updike’s literary letters; Jane Austen at 250; irritating professors; Cixin Liu’s stories of wonderment; beer as object and metaphor; our annual Christmas quiz – and much more.

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

The social history of saturated shades This spring, I began painting, a hobby that rapidly grew into an obsession. I fell in love with it because it gave me a space away from words. Or, to be

My name is Irina, I'm obsessed with colour, and I wrote about it for my column in this week's @thetls.bsky.social

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Twenty Questions with Simon Okotie

What does a writing day look like for you? ‘I write fiction on Wednesday and Sunday mornings between 1 March and 31 October (inclusive).’

Twenty Questions with Simon Okotie

Age-inappropriate

Kathryn Murphy: Alternating perspectives on a secret relationship

Fractured forms

Freddie Shaw on a story of uncertain existences

True lies

Ian Thomson on the life of a contrarian ‘who liked to annoy’

Know your reds

Nooresahar Ahmad: From the boxing ring to the nail salon

Abandoned dreams

Juliette Bretan on a family's traditions and transitions in early twentieth-century Poland

Place of invocation

Charles Foster on a philosophy of being close to the earth

A nimbus of memories

Charlie Louth on conveying Rilke's German into French

The future of the BBC

Letters to the Editor: The future of the BBC, The US Supreme Court, Young Tennyson, etc

John Buchan at 150, Biblio-magic, W. H. Auden and beauty, Correspondence www.the-tls.com/regular-fea...

Gone to look for America

'They are not the fabled American road trips of so many bucket lists.'

Tom Lathan: A meditation on a continent from a Greyhound bus

I am the last poet of the village

'When I am found, pray / my belly is full so they may understand / we believed in the harvest.'

I am the last poet of the village by Tishani Doshi

The fear of liberation

'Read his books and you can’t avoid the inexplicable presagement – like spotting your doppelgänger in a nineteenth-century photo.'

Regina Rini on Marshall McLuhan’s poetic prescience

Pole position

'The conciseness, intricacy and focus of the short-story genre have given it a particularly delicate literary role to play amid the mammoth forces of invasion, oppression and annihilation that have devastated modern Polish history.'

Larry Wolff on short stories from a rich literary culture

Joys of Yiddish

'Singer’s response to this self-alienation was to promote the possibility of a holistic Yiddishkayt in the US, composed of study houses, a café culture and inspired publishers.'

Bryan Cheyette: Joys of Yiddish

Night moves

'From a train window, “every village, town and city present[s] itself like a tease[r] trailer” – distant panoramas giving way to glimpses of living rooms.'

Alev Adil: Train travel in the dark and trips to the British seaside

Underground Man

Leonid Tsypkin, who died in 1982, exemplified the “major minor” Soviet writer, to borrow a phrase from the American literary translator Bernard Guilbert'He only became a published author aged fifty-six, a week before his death.'

Muireann Maguire on an unofficial Soviet writer

Minds over matter

'In 1959, the psychologist Milton Rokeach brought three men, each convinced that he was Jesus Christ, into a shared therapy group.'

Alice Wadsworth on delusions in every shape and form

Craftwork

'MacBeth laments traditions that have vanished, the ephemeral nature of costumes and the ease with which handwritten notes recording otherwise forgotten local customs and folk tales can end up in a skip.'

Susan Owens on Britain’s lost arts

The small print

'No aspect of Furnivall’s life, however small, is overlooked. Even the size of his beard warrants a couple of pages.'

A. S. G. Edwards on a scholarly editor of medieval and early modern texts

Just their type

'To those alternately blessed and cursed with typomania – those who, to the bewilderment of their friends, are often too busy scrutinizing a menu’s font to pick out a dish – David Jury’s contribution will sing like a nightingale.'

Tom Cook on modern fonts

While you were sleeping

'The problem remains: more than 125 years after Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, the field is still dominated by conjecture.'

Russell Foster: Dreams defy exact scientific analysis

What they mean

'What is analytic philosophy? Nobody seems to know.'

Sarah Richmond on a Marxist polemic against analytic philosophy

Suitable case for treatment

'The Wound Man we encounter today – as spectacle and shorthand – is the inverse of its original form, which was to organize and visualize complex medical information in an accessible way.'

Fay Bound Alberti on a representation of medieval medicine

Sympathy for the devil

'It is into this somewhat censorious environment that Mandeville hurls his beehive grenade.'

Jonathan Egid on Bernard Mandeville’s defence of private vices with public benefits

Filleted accounts

'Something beside the seabed is being obliterated by deep-sea commercial fishing: namely, the small fishing communities that have existed for thousands of years in port towns around the world.'

Isaac Nowell on the devastation caused by deep-sea commercial fishing

Twenty Question with Fanny Howe

What does a writing day look like for you? ‘Early mornings basically in bed. Or late afternoon taking a walk. It looks like time.’

Twenty Questions with Fanny Howe

Taken at the flood

'Less than 1 per cent of current reservoir capacity in England has been added since 1990, with most of the water storage assets on which we rely built between 1945 and 1975.'

Tony Juniper on an alternative to the current system of failing water companies