The life of Henri Bergson provides rich material for an intellectual biography. Philosopher of the lived experience of time and of the élan vital in biological and psychological life, he became at the ...

“How should one read a book?” Virginia Woolf asked this question, in different forms, throughout her life. In an essay of 1926 with that title, she described the pure pleasure that readers know: the ...

Towards the end of Tessa Hadley’s engaging new novella, The Party, Moira, a young fashion student, throws herself into a high-stakes sexual competition for a handsome but predatory American serviceman ...

Joan Smith’s history of Roman imperial women in the first, Julio-Claudian dynasty is an uncompromising study of violent misogyny. Of the twenty-three individuals she discusses, sixteen were killed on ...

Ellen Jones reviewed Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil’s ÄÄ for the TLS in 2021 (In Brief, April 23). She has now translated it from Spanish into English as This Mouth Is Mine. In this collection of articles ...

Bernard Cerquiglini is a former director of the Institut national de la langue française, and the first part of his catchy title quotes the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who was ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

Thirteen-year-old Briar and his younger sister Rose are hiding out in an empty house against an unspecified threat. The keys to the house are attached to a see-through plastic keyring containing a ...

Darren Coffield is a painter of no small repute in the generation of the 1990s known as the YBAs (Young British Artists: he once notably did a heroic portrait of Arthur Scargill in the medium of coal ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a creature of contradictions. For Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon ...

I first went to look at medieval manuscripts in Longleat House in the early 1970s. In those days readers were placed in an ...