Join 40,000 readers to enjoy a regular dose of inspiration and motivation, delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

The expression “Don’t get me wrong” is a good place to start – an ethical mandate as well as a critic’s dictum. In its efforts to enforce informality while insisting on the possibility of estrangement ...

Congratulations – or perhaps commiserations – to Michael Hofmann. “Crap hat, no rabbit.” The four words with which he dispatched The Magician, the new novel by Colm Tóibín, in last week’s TLS, are ...

Before Clio Barnard, Gurinder Chadha or even Sally Potter, there was Muriel Box. Between 1952 and 1964 Box directed thirteen features – more than any ...

“Oh, I thought you were a man!” were the words uttered by the pioneering nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford when he first met Lise Meitner, the scientist who would go on to discover nuclear fission.

Tomorrow the aliens will invade. Don’t look so surprised. You’ve had plenty of warning. These alien invaders will turn out to be incredibly intelligent: ...

In his very interesting account of Paul Voulet, Cora and Stephen Crane, and Joseph Conrad (Commentary, September 10), Rob Lemkin refers to Conrad’s underrated novel The Rescue, remarking, “It tells ...

When will I receive my first issue of the TLS? Your first copy of the TLS will usually arrive within a fortnight of payment being received. You can access the website as soon as you complete payment.

From Pierre Bourdieu’s disenchanting Homo Academicus (1984) to the superb Cursed Questions (2020) by the late musicologist Richard Taruskin, scholarship ...

Some years ago, my wife and I were in Jerusalem when we decided to visit the Hasidic neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. During my late teens, I had spent two years studying in a yeshiva just outside ...

Leo Tolstoy hoped to finish Anna Karenina quickly. Within a year of beginning the novel in early 1873, he was already looking forward to its rapid publication in book form. The entire “carcass” of ...