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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

“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 ...

The origins of the modern-day Spanish nation do not predate the existence of empire. In 1492 the Genovese adventurer Christopher Columbus set sail under the flags of the Catholic Monarchs – Queen ...

Some novels, particularly those of a supernatural or fantastical bent, can read like working notes for their fullest iteration as a movie. By contrast, Andrew Michael Hurley’s grisliest jolts are best ...

One might have assumed that the political thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be occupied, in a significant way, with cities. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and other ...

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