Conflicting ideas about the Celts

Contrasting biographical portraits of Jane Austen

Irritating professors for the ages

David Freyne’s third film asks what to make of our memories www.the-tls.com/arts/film/e...

The writers Dick Cavett interviewed – backstage and on air

Cixin Liu’s stories of wonderment and altered natural laws

A daughter’s view of John Cheever and his fiction

The social history of saturated shades

Marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth

How Wayne Thiebaud rendered the stuff of life

We are all powerfully shaped by the films we have seen, especially, though not exclusively, at an impressionable age. I reviewed for @thetls.bsky.social a fascinating collection of personal responses to the impact of film.

Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life? ‘The song “From Her To Eternity” by Nick Cave.’ Twenty Questions with Mariana Enriquez

An unpublished story by Sylvia Townsend Warner, with a commentary by Peter Swaab

Two hundred years of the Decembrist Revolt

Poem: ‘Snow’ by Andrew Motion

The tech revolution that manipulates the subatomic world www.the-tls.com/science-tec...

‘People have been discovering Britain in one way or another for an awfully long time’: a journey into a nation’s past

‘Beer, like everything else, stores cultural memory, economic structure, rituals, resistance, class tensions’

‘That death is part of life can be a platitude, but also a deep truth difficult to grasp without experiencing it first-hand’: a novelist records her father-in-law’s last weeks

‘These letters excel at telling us that Updike was a great writer – prodigious, famous, revered – but if we had only them to go by, we’d have no idea why’

Proofreading for idiots (@wmarybeard)

John Updike’s literary letters; Jane Austen at 250; irritating professors; Cixin Liu’s stories of wonderment; beer as object and metaphor; our annual Christmas quiz – and much more. The new TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

My name is Irina, I'm obsessed with colour, and I wrote about it for my column in this week's @thetls.bsky.social www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

What does a writing day look like for you? ‘I write fiction on Wednesday and Sunday mornings between 1 March and 31 October (inclusive).’ Twenty Questions with Simon Okotie

Kathryn Murphy: Alternating perspectives on a secret relationship

Freddie Shaw on a story of uncertain existences

Ian Thomson on the life of a contrarian ‘who liked to annoy’

Nooresahar Ahmad: From the boxing ring to the nail salon

Juliette Bretan on a family's traditions and transitions in early twentieth-century Poland

Charles Foster on a philosophy of being close to the earth

Charlie Louth on conveying Rilke's German into French

Letters to the Editor: The future of the BBC, The US Supreme Court, Young Tennyson, etc

John Buchan at 150, Biblio-magic, W. H. Auden and beauty, Correspondence www.the-tls.com/regular-fea...

'They are not the fabled American road trips of so many bucket lists.' Tom Lathan: A meditation on a continent from a Greyhound bus

'When I am found, pray / my belly is full so they may understand / we believed in the harvest.' I am the last poet of the village by Tishani Doshi

'Read his books and you can’t avoid the inexplicable presagement – like spotting your doppelgänger in a nineteenth-century photo.' Regina Rini on Marshall McLuhan’s poetic prescience

'The conciseness, intricacy and focus of the short-story genre have given it a particularly delicate literary role to play amid the mammoth forces of invasion, oppression and annihilation that have devastated modern Polish history.' Larry Wolff on short stories from a rich literary culture

'Singer’s response to this self-alienation was to promote the possibility of a holistic Yiddishkayt in the US, composed of study houses, a café culture and inspired publishers.' Bryan Cheyette: Joys of Yiddish

'From a train window, “every village, town and city present[s] itself like a tease[r] trailer” – distant panoramas giving way to glimpses of living rooms.' Alev Adil: Train travel in the dark and trips to the British seaside

Leonid Tsypkin, who died in 1982, exemplified the “major minor” Soviet writer, to borrow a phrase from the American literary translator Bernard Guilbert'He only became a published author aged fifty-six, a week before his death.' Muireann Maguire on an unofficial Soviet writer

'In 1959, the psychologist Milton Rokeach brought three men, each convinced that he was Jesus Christ, into a shared therapy group.' Alice Wadsworth on delusions in every shape and form

'MacBeth laments traditions that have vanished, the ephemeral nature of costumes and the ease with which handwritten notes recording otherwise forgotten local customs and folk tales can end up in a skip.' Susan Owens on Britain’s lost arts

'No aspect of Furnivall’s life, however small, is overlooked. Even the size of his beard warrants a couple of pages.' A. S. G. Edwards on a scholarly editor of medieval and early modern texts

'To those alternately blessed and cursed with typomania – those who, to the bewilderment of their friends, are often too busy scrutinizing a menu’s font to pick out a dish – David Jury’s contribution will sing like a nightingale.' Tom Cook on modern fonts

'The problem remains: more than 125 years after Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, the field is still dominated by conjecture.' Russell Foster: Dreams defy exact scientific analysis

'What is analytic philosophy? Nobody seems to know.' Sarah Richmond on a Marxist polemic against analytic philosophy

'The Wound Man we encounter today – as spectacle and shorthand – is the inverse of its original form, which was to organize and visualize complex medical information in an accessible way.' Fay Bound Alberti on a representation of medieval medicine

'It is into this somewhat censorious environment that Mandeville hurls his beehive grenade.' Jonathan Egid on Bernard Mandeville’s defence of private vices with public benefits

'Something beside the seabed is being obliterated by deep-sea commercial fishing: namely, the small fishing communities that have existed for thousands of years in port towns around the world.' Isaac Nowell on the devastation caused by deep-sea commercial fishing

What does a writing day look like for you? ‘Early mornings basically in bed. Or late afternoon taking a walk. It looks like time.’ Twenty Questions with Fanny Howe