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 ...

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: ...

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 ...

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 ...

In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

I watched the returns at a bar in the south-east of Wisconsin, in conservative suburbs forged by White Flight from the city of Milwaukee. The people who live here are religious, hardworking, and not ...

Amanda Craig is certainly ambitious. The Golden Rule, her latest state-of-the-nation novel, rollicks between crime noir, social satire and Arthurian romance with notable aplomb. Set against the lush ...

At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael imagines himself appearing on a bill, sandwiched between two great events. One is the “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States”; the ...

“One of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child [is] – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up were finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.” ...