A faculty promotes dialogue between China’s five main religions
To be a writer in China is to work under the shadow of censorship, what Perry Link once called the ...
A novel of the Cultural Revolution
During the calculated chaos of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), millions of urban youths were sent “up to the mountains and ...
How Shakespeare came to be seen as a cuckold
The door to the biographical criticism of Shakespeare swings open in 1780 when, in the first critical edition of the ...
Shakespeare’s concerns don’t always coincide with ours
Stephen Orgel is interested in books: continental books, illustrated books, Caxton’s books, editors’ creation of books. He is also interested ...
‘Blood’ by Carl Dennis | Original poem | The TLS
When I’m not in the mood to learn from others, I still have to put up with the preaching From ...
Giving new life to manuscripts in the Middle Ages
As any medievalist knows, you never bring pens into a reading room. Nothing is permitted there that might permanently mark ...
In Max Porter’s new novel, a troubled, self-destructive young man heads out to the lake
Figures able to commune between the natural world and that of humankind are regularly afforded pivotal roles in Max Porter’s ...
Michael Magee’s novel of life down and out in modern Belfast
There is a particular kind of class dynamic in Ireland that can easily be missed by outsiders. As the popular ...
How our narratives now threaten to devour us
Years ago I was invited to give a guest talk on storytelling to university students on a master’s degree in ...
Public and private tragedy on an ill-fated cruise
The power dynamics underlying power couples tend to be revealed when such couples come apart. In Stephanie Bishop’s fourth novel, ...
The autobiographical novels of two French writers in love with the same man
George Sand (1804–76) and Louise Colet (1810–76) would seem to have a lot in common. Both were highly esteemed, bestselling ...
A richly drawn sequel mourns a lost London and lost youth
In Ordinary People (), Diana Evans raised the curtain on a moment of euphoria: a houseful of glamorous, well-connected, predominantly ...
‘Lark Rise’ by Angela Leighton | Original poem | The TLS
Funny little wind-up soul –your coil-spring ascension’s a callto daylight, alarming and comical. As if you were climbing a ropeof ...
A fractured society in the hour of Franco’s victory
The Hive (La colmena, 1950) by Camilo José Cela is a postmodern narrative in fragments by a writer who won ...
Marguerite Duras’s existential ‘unknown masterpiece’
Marguerite Duras’s second novel, La Vie tranquille, first published in 1944 and now translated into English for the first time ...
How landscape and life shaped a bestselling Canadian writer
By the time of her death in April 1942, L. M. Montgomery had published more than 500 stories, as well ...
A meditation on the disciplines a middle-aged writer wishes he had mastered
The idea – first proposed by the Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers (2008) ...
Terrorism, espionage and moral calculation in Javier Marías’s luminous final novel
Javier Marías, who died in September 2022, was a Spanish writer of philosophical disquisitions brilliantly disguised as thrillers. He was ...
The preening and posturing of Sweden’s intellectual elite
Immersion is widely understood to be a good thing when it comes to novels. It is, we are told, a ...
Art, fame and reinvention in a counterfactual United States
Catherine Lacey’s new novel, Biography of X, follows a fictional agent provocateur and multimedia artist through the 1960s, 1970s and ...
Romantic and Victorian poets inspired by birdsong
People have, for centuries, taught birds to talk. Alec Guinness had a parrot that could recite lines from Hamlet. They ...
York International Shakespeare Festival at York St John University, Week 9. – Words Matter.
York International Shakespeare Festival runs between 21st April and 1st May 2023. A message from Dr Saffron Vickers Walking, York International ...
International Women’s Day by Polly Reed – Words Matter.
Polly Reed is a second year undergraduate student on the English Literature programme at York St John University. She is ...
(Un)timely poems about the English Civil War
When Peter Scupham died, poetry lost what one might call a backward-looking visionary. Thankfully, his sense that the past is ...
A dazzling analysis of what it means to be a tattooed woman
Helen Mort’s third collection of poems, The Illustrated Woman, is concerned with what it means to live in a female ...
