A weekly journal for literature and ideas. We publish book reviews, book extracts, essays and poems by leading writers from around the world. Each week, we also review the latest in fiction, film, opera, theatre, dance, radio and television.

2 days ago · In this week’s TLS. Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers argues that the almost certainly homosexual American painter had an outsider’s affinity with the artistic Jewish Wertheimer family with whom he became close friends.

Since 1902, we have been publishing expert reviews and insightful, sometimes provocative essays by the best writers from around the world. We cover everything from The Tempest to the climate crisis; little magazines to Big Tech; The Rite of Spring to the Arab Spring; Dionysus to Diane Arbus.. Every year, we review 1500 books – that’s more than the London Review of Books, Literary Review ...

Nov 15, 2024 · In this week’s TLS. Novels that make the Booker prize shortlist often get overlooked in the TLS’s Books of the Year feature.This year, however, Percival Everett’s reimagining of Huckleberry Finn, James, received more nominations than any other

Mar 1, 2024 · Thomas Hardy and women; Yaël Farber’s elegiac Shakespeare; Yiddish writing; Hannah Arendt for today; Canal Fiction revisited – and much more

Collection. Literature. Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, Murakami, Jane Austen and James Baldwin, metaphysical poets and the Bloomsbury set, New Criticism and post-colonialism: in essays and reviews, our writers assess the latest fiction in English and in translation, and explore poetry, prose and criticism from across the world and across the centuries

Mar 29, 2024 · The letters of Ray Bradbury; carving up the solar system; Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel; the limits of consent – and much more

The late American philosopher and critic Shirley Robin Letwin argued that “the most perfect gentleman in Trollope’s novels is Madame Max Goesler”. Goesler, the rich daughter of a German-Jewish lawyer, enchants Victorian society in the Palliser novels, and conducts herself with an integrity that the native nobility can’t match. In real life Benjamin Disraeli, a […]

Nov 29, 2024 · The TLS Archive | More than 100 years of TLS reviews, essays and debate, featuring Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Mary Beard and more

Seamus Heaney begins “Englands of the Mind” (1976), his exploration of the poetry of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin, by invoking T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “auditory imagination” – that “feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most […]