Grace Notes is a TLS Online series which celebrates pioneering composers and musicians, and assesses the enduring impact of their work When J. S. Bach died in 1750, his widow asked their sons what she…

Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield in 1963 and attended “the first purpose-built comprehensive school in North Yorkshire” before studying geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic. It may be this…

Photo: M. Caines By MICHAEL CAINES One day in March 1742, the aspiring artist Joshua Reynolds, not yet twenty years old, was attending an auction in Covent Garden, when the crowd parted and somebody…

The comedian and writer Helen Lederer joins us to discuss gender and comedy and the new Comedy Women In Print Prize; Lucy Dallas considers a clutch of novels in which animals might offer a little…

Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing their favourite books, writing habits and best advice What is your favourite book published in the past twelve months? Blind…

What does a novelist need? Balzac’s letters suggest the following: a peaceful place to work; a home full of beautiful, expensive objects to create “happiness and a sense of intellectual freedom”;…

Ray Yoshida, one of the key mentors of the Chicago Imagists, summed up the group’s ethos with the instruction: “cut out images from wherever and organise/paste them in sketchbooks, based on formal…

Hear Our Defeats (Écoutez nos défaites, 2016) is not a conventional historical novel, in the sense of trying to recreate the past imaginatively. Rather, it draws on a series of past episodes, from…

There’s a startling moment at the end of the second act of Rosmersholm. Rebecca West, a single woman and a freethinker, who has been living, we assume chastely, with the widowed pastor John Rosmer,…

In one of his later works of political philosophy, Hobbes famously declared that the science of civil philosophy “is no older … than my own book De cive”. In this declaration, he threw down the…

West Indies Calling, a Ministry of Information film broadcast in the midst of the Second World War, sowed confusion in the minds of many Britons. It featured Ulric Cross, a handsome bomber navigator;…

When Muhammad Iqbal visited the Great Mosque of Córdoba in 1933, he spoke for many Muslims as he hailed an edifice which he thought exalted Spain, Islam’s lost paradise, to the eminence of the Meccan…

The memsahib, literally “lady-master”, is the ultimate imperial cipher: a Victorian matron surrounded in our imagination by punkahwallahs fanning her in the heat, ayahs cradling her pallid offspring…

Julián Fuks’s multiple award-winning novel opens with an epigraph from Ernesto Sábato that wonders “how best to embody” the word “resistance”. The body at the centre of the novel is that of the…

Sylvie Tyler likes stolen kisses. Stuck on a small Scottish island, with only some rabbits and chickens for friends, she keeps a scrapbook – pictures torn from magazines or catalogues, postcards or…

In 2016, the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest was an entry about Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tartars during the Second World War. “They come to your house”, Ukraine’s Jamala sang, “They kill…

The Wolf and the Watchman is a novel of extraordinary, visceral horribleness. Loaded with blood and vomit, sweat and alcohol, it is a depiction of late eighteenth-century Stockholm at its most…

The most spirited example of James Baldwin’s desire to work in the cinema emerges from “The Northern Protestant”, a profile of Ingmar Bergman originally published in Esquire and brought together with…

What distinguishes today’s ecologically dystopian novels from one another is partly a matter of timing: how far along the path to inevitable planetary ruin the authors choose to situate their…

I don’t think that (in my kind of field, at least) the conference, as an institution, will last much longer. I am not talking about the many small scale specialist workshops, colloquia and so forth,…

William Hogarth’s frontispiece for the Account of the Hospital of the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Children in 1759 shows children aged around five returning to the London…

Writers and thinkers take on twenty questions from the TLS, revealing their favourite books, writing habits and best advice What is your favourite book published in the past twelve months? Murmur by…

It was not meant to be exactly like this. The programme playing at Wilton’s Music Hall this week is not the one initially announced – a shadowy lack of explanation invites speculation about artistic…

Perhaps no one was truly surprised to read, last week, that a large UK-based study of the “sexual attitudes and lifestyles” of some 34,000 individuals links a sharp decline in the amount of sex being…