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Times Literary Supplement
Site URL: www.the-tls.co.uk
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Posts: 36
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Writing in books
Published: September 6, 2024 11:17
A few weeks ago, I wrote in a blog post that there is a double standard when it comes to graffiti. We deplore it when it is scrawled by some young thug, yet we tend to treasure it when it was scrawled two hundred or even two thousand years ago (sometimes…
Happy Days
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/the-podcast/the-tls-podcast-september-5-2024
Published: September 5, 2024 13:00
This week, Mary Beard joins us to explain why two recently discovered fragments of Euripides are big news; and an interview with the director James Macdonald and the actor Lucian Msamati on their new production of Waiting for Godot. The post Happy Days…
The Royal Society of Literature
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/the-royal-society-of-literature-2
Published: September 4, 2024 15:29
Since my bulletin about the travails of the Royal Society of Literature (Letters, May 10), there have been mixed messages and no concrete improvements. The RSL’s Council (its board of trustees), or what’s left of it, refused without explanation to hold the…
Speaking out
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/nb/speaking-out
Published: September 4, 2024 15:28
The news of a proposed smoking ban in the UK has elicited the predictable range of sensible and not-so-sensible reactions. Responding to the possibility that smoking in, say, the grounds of a hospital could become illegal, the MP Esther McVey has…
The Golden Age
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/fiction/hidden-faces-salvador-dali-book-review-keith-miller
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
In 1938, Salvador Dalí was introduced to Sigmund Freud by Stefan Zweig. The psychoanalyst noted the artist’s “candid, fanatical eyes”, but praised his “technical mastery” (honed by long visits to the Prado during his student days), pronouncing him a…
The best United
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/fiction/munichs-david-peace-book-review-david-annand
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
David Peace is the William Faulkner of the M62. Like the great novelist of the American South, he has created a body of work centred on a relatively small geographical area that, despite being far removed from its seat of power, somehow feels like the seat…
An unlikely high-wire act
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
The secret world often attracts eccentrics. When creative, independent thinkers have been embraced by intelligence agencies, they have delivered some of the greatest national security successes. The finest example in British intelligence history is the…
Soulmate, saviour, murderer?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/fiction/gabriels-moon-william-boyd-book-review-giles-foden
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
We begin in 1936, with a candle inside a glass “moon-globe”, which Gabriel Dax’s mother lights. It is a ritual important to a fatherless child, “signifying order and calm”. Soon after, the mother, a keen smoker, is found dead by Gabriel on the carpet…
Chill before Cold War
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
In 1944, as Great Britain, the US and the Soviet Union closed in on Nazi Germany, the US ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, made a sensitive request to the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. British and American bombers were pounding Germany, but as they…
Go west, comrade
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
The tsarist empire was known in its heyday as the “breadbasket of Europe”, thanks to the exceptionally fertile black earth of its southern, mostly Ukrainian, provinces. When the Bolsheviks took over this sprawling agro-state, they all but ruined it,…
Creature of Heaven
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Clare Balding gives us an insight into her inner workings early on in Isle of Dogs. Speaking at a children’s literary festival, she explains to the audience that, when she was little, she thought she was a dog. A child asks her how old she was when she…
Ordinary people
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Public fascination with Adolf Hitler and his court has barely abated over the nearly ninety years since the end of his “Thousand Year Reich”. As Richard J. Evans points out at the start of his new book, the latest to try to shed light on the men at the top…
Ancient airs
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/arts/music/sound-tracks-graeme-lawson-book-review-armand-dangour
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
The absence of recorded sounds across millennia makes the interpretation of surviving material evidence for music difficult and uncertain. But the quest to recover lost sounds has intensified in recent decades, with exciting results emerging from research…
Their trade was secrecy
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
In 1987 Margaret Thatcher’s government brought a lawsuit before the Supreme Court of New South Wales to prevent the publication in Australia of Peter Wright’s renegade Security Service memoir, Spycatcher. In the early 1960s Wright had taken Neal Wood’s…
In this week’s TLS
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/a-note-from-the-editor/in-this-weeks-tls-457
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Baudelaire is not just the first great urban poet to capture fleeting modernity, writes Seth Whidden in his review of a new edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes, published by Gallimard – “he is also more; an urban chronicler, a nasty piece of work, a…
Rough and tumble
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
It is clear from our entertainment channels, filled with cute creatures doing charming and surprising things, that we do not think a capacity for play is restricted to our own species. Many eminent scientific figures of the past – including Charles Darwin…
Passeig de Gracia
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Love me like cream cuts coffee. Sharp clouds and then the silk throat of a dreamy waking. Are you obeying me by disobeying oranges, with olive oil and cinnamon in the thick of salt mist thinning two miles inland from the sea? At first, the old man walking…
Crossword 1542
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/crossword-quiz/crossword-1542
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
A PDF of this crossword can be found here The post Crossword 1542 appeared first on TLS.
Learning how to die on stage
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Stand-up comedians are sometimes hailed as “modern-day philosophers”, casting a critical eye on contemporary life, posing questions others do not think, or dare, to ask. Remarking on this trend, the Canadian comic Norm Macdonald once confessed that he felt…
No strategy, no destination
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict scales new heights of ferocity and depths of misery, myriad scholars and polemicists continue to clash about its origins. The chief culprit, according to the meticulous research of the British scholar Peter Shambrook in…
In the flesh
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
I toyed with reading Rose Boyt’s Naked Portrait: A memoir of Lucian Freud while sitting for an artist friend. A naked portrait reading Naked Portrait. I barely see the artist friend, other than when I sit. For those in the orbit of painters who work from…
Faces being looked at
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/finding-a-likeness-nicholson-baker-book-review-ben-street
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Eighty pages into Finding a Likeness: How I got somewhat better at art, Nicholson Baker describes his frustration at attempting to render in gouache a photograph of a car park outside a multiplex cinema, writing: “I HATE THIS TOAD OF SHIT THAT HAS EMERGED…
Grace, ease and struggle
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
In Berthe Morisot’s “The Bowl of Milk”, a young girl holds a brimming earthenware bowl up against a blue-green summer blur, her red lips bright against a pale round face that gazes at us frankly. The girl’s name is Gabrielle Dufour; in 1890 she lived at…
Lover and hater
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
The same week this new two-volume edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes arrived in bookshops, Spotify unveiled a new advert in the Paris Métro. It read: “You knew Le Spleen de Paris, here’s the Spleen of La Courneuve”. In the heart of the…
Saving the city of light
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
On an evening in early August 1944, a company of largely Spanish soldiers, newly arrived in Normandy, came across a strange, tall peasant woman. They were excited at having landed in France, under the overall leadership of General Leclerc, but the…
Greek tragedies from an Egyptian tomb
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/classics/greek/new-euripides-papyrus-essay-bill-allan
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Imagine for a moment that only eight of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays had survived intact – which ones would you hope had made it? How different would our view of Shakespeare be depending on your selection? That’s more or less where we are with…
Fit for purpose
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Ben Hutchinson has “long believed in the edifying powers of ‘great writing’” to give life “purpose”. “In truth”, he admits, “this belief … has long lain unexamined.” On Purpose wrestles it into “ten precepts … capturing it in ten commandments, I am…
At the bottom of time
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
In the days following June 6, 1944, hard on the heels of the tanks and artillery, came the doctors, orderlies and nurses of the Casualty Clearing Stations, setting broken limbs, sewing up torn flesh. They camped in fields of twisted metal and bombed trees,…
Raincoat feelings
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
“People have this image of me as a crazy psychotic egomaniac, but I’m much nicer in real life”, writes Alan McGee, former record industry bigwig via his hugely influential Creation label, in this memoir disguised as a how-to guide. He has structured it in…
Smiley in the shadows
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
A lone spotlight beams down from a corrugated iron watchtower onto a discarded bicycle below, its frame sprawled across a large map of Europe with names and borders that mark the period: West Germany, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Berlin divided by a wall,…
Hastings and Haestingas
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
“The past is a foreign country”, writes the Chinese-British film-maker and writer Xiaolu Guo. “This is true for me. But the past of Hastings and Anglo-Saxon history is doubly foreign.” My Battle of Hastings – the third and final instalment in the author’s…
Broken homes
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/in-brief/domicide-ammar-azzouz-book-review-robert-bevan
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Conflict is an inveterate breeder of neologisms. Raphael Lemkin’s 1940s Greco-Latin elision “genocide” is enduring. The Bosnian war gave us “urbicide” – a term coined by the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock in 1963 and popularized by Sarajevo’s…
Learning to read
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Many people educated in anglophone cultures will recall their first, challenging experience of reading Chaucer. His language probably seemed baffling, even foreign, with its lack of standardization, wayward vowels and embrace of dialect. Understanding it…
Legacies of abuse
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/in-brief/amma-saraid-de-silva-book-review-rhoda-feng
Published: September 4, 2024 14:25
Saraid de Silva’s novel follows three Sri Lankan women – the stunt double Annie, her mother, Sithara, and her grandmother Josephina – whose stories, taking us from 1950s Singapore to contemporary London and New Zealand, are relayed in alternating chapters…
‘Everyone will be there’
Published: September 3, 2024 14:02
“To make art out of something painful, uncertain or damaging is an act of real empowerment”, said Kathryn Bevis – who died earlier this year – of her debut pamphlet Flamingoes (2022), a collection shot through, in the words of one reviewer, with…
Journals on the scrap heap
Published: September 3, 2024 13:27
My runs of journals, in print, used to be my pride and joy: the Journal of Roman Studies, the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Past and Present, Classical Review, Art History and more. A nucleus of these I had subscribed to myself, but I had bought up (or been…