'One moment, they’re a rippling caribou herd, spines undulating as they process horizontally across the stage on all fours.' Emily May: Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney tackle the ecological crisis

Catherine Taylor: A ghostwriter's assignment in a ghostly house

'Mid-career, David Szalay has completely overhauled his prose style.' Claire Lowdon on Flesh, winner of the Booker Prize 2025 www.the-tls.com/literature/...

Miranda France: Binding books and community in twentieth century Paris

'Did any of Kojève’s famous fellow émigrés share his enthusiasm for Stalin?' Caryl Emerson on a Parisian intellectual star, maker of Europe, Stalinist

Deborah Campbell on the transformation of a medical case into literature

Lily Isaacs: An epiphany sparked by washing up

‘You can’t step into the same river twice? You say so? We can’t step into the thing at all, not until the water level goes down again’ Brian Morton on the rewards of isolation

M. Syd Rosen: A veritable rogues’ gallery of gurus

W. J. Davies on abandoning one life to write another

'Angelino's method quietly resists the idea that writing needs to be a constant activity.' Inés Arteta on violent tales of a rural collective

Zuzana Slobodová on a collection that strays between ‘now’ and ‘as it used to be’

E. K. Myerson: How the asbestos industry contaminated everything

'Shaw, a biologist who studies antibiotic resistance, draws important parallels between antibiotics and fossil fuels.' Jennie Erin Smith on the arms race between antibiotics and bacteria

'Is it good for the soul, I wonder, to hang on to old junk because you continue to cultivate the illusion of literary glory?' Tim Parks on the lucrative afterlife of literary papers

Collecting the ‘Long Sixties’, Nemo returns, Veronica Forrest-Thomson at Cambridge

'There were failed experiments in monotheism, and promising detours to henotheism ... before the God of the Israelites wiped out the competition.' Johanna Hanink: What the West owes to the ancient world

'About a fifth of the Amazon has been lost since 1975 to the expansion of mines, illegal lumbering, dams and other projects of dubious utility to anyone except moneyed elites.' Roger Atwood on a tragic eyewitness to the devastation of Amazonia

Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page? ‘On the page. I’ve never trusted people who think directly in words.’ Twenty Questions with Graham Harman

'Here they come / thirst-struck, grimy from the desert / their breaths burning like mirages / mouths dry and coated in dust ...' Silent Cry by Nadia Anjuman, translated by Diana Arterian and Marina Omar

'That beauty is a privileged way in which gods and goddesses are revealed to and compared to humans, mortals being both like yet ineluctably unlike the immortals.' Paul Cartledge on classical Greek and modern ideas of beauty

“All four women are middle-class, but their financial security is threatened by motherhood.” Terri Apter on four views of modern maternity

'The portraitist paints the sitter with his palette: Cercas likes the world he inhabits – lay-minded, sexually unforbidding, democratic, unheeding of eternity.' Felipe Fernández-Armesto on a Spanish novelist’s portrait of Pope Francis

'With our first words, we begin to gain control over our lives – or we are installed in an illusion of control.' Lynne Murphy on baby talk and deathbed speech

'Shamanism is enjoying a double boom in the modern world. One aspect of this is a revival of practices associated with the word by indigenous peoples after postcolonial emancipation. Ronald Hutton on Shamanism across many cultures

'The Arabic numerals found on the west front sculpture of Wells Cathedral long before their usage became common in the British Isles are also curious.' Gabriel Byng: Who built Europe’s cathedrals?

'Wars are defined by their political purpose. They are conducted as much by bureaucrats, financiers and propagandists as by soldiers.' Jonathan Sumption on a war that was always a losing game

'It is a measure of religious integration that Coptic Christians produced an Arabic translation of the Bible in 1131.' John Merrington on a tolerant Shia rival to the Sunni caliphs

'This long-awaited conclusion bears a considerable weight of expectation from devotees hoping for a resolution to the entire web of stories with Lyra at its heart.' Imogen Russell Williams on the conclusion to the Book of Dust trilogy

'Two homes, two versions of an American ideal, each stained by the acts they hosted.' Mark Storey: Dark tourist guides to America

'Why is a young man watching through a telescope as his neighbours discover bags of groceries he has left at their doors? What drives another young man to senseless killing?' Alison Kelly on the short story as an ‘event’

'For those of us who, as children, read the Magisterium as almost banally evil in its censoriousness, it may be time to revisit Lyra’s world.' Lucy Fleming on Philip Pullman’s debt to ‘the long seventeenth century’

'The topics of the thematic anthologies are also shrewdly chosen: from the predictable (forest-based horror!) to the obscure (haunted railways?).' A. K. Blakemore on spooky tales that resurrect the mythological past

'This is a study of the impact of violence on small commun­ities.' David Annand on a triple murder in the Outer Hebrides

'These pictures are crystalline examples of the modern glamour shot: clear, luminous, poised between Hollywood sheen and Mediterranean sensuality.' Nadia Beard: The rediscovered nudes of Elio Luxardo

'This isn’t Kafka, although Andrew Michael Hurley’s Saltwash is charged with some of the same dread.' Michael LaPointe: Guilt and atonement at a mysterious hotel

'Du Maurier is a portraitist of the grotesque, coolly judgemental, aroused to aesthetic as well as moral disdain for those of her characters who seem to be more evidently physical than others.' Joyce Carol Oates on tales of the uncanny

'One Battle After Another is not, at heart, about the now. It’s a film about the urgent then.' Nat Segnit: Paul Thomas Anderson on the road with Thomas Pynchon

'Despite the vast, fascinating cache of his papers in the Bodleian Library, there is a lot we’ll never find.' Sasha Garwood on E. F. Benson’s tortured sexuality

'Cursed Daughters dares us to believe in the spectral, even while it skewers the superstition business.' Beejay Silcox: Generations of women grapple with a family jinx

'The frequent use of bombast betrays an uneasiness with the sad heart of the novel, in which moments of rage and silence are finely balanced.' George Berridge on Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s myth

'Far from being separate compartments – philosophy, fiction, ethics, love – the elements of her thought interlace here in lyric form.' Miles Leeson on Iris Murdoch’s unseen poetry, transcribed for the first time

'The oddity of Duke’s career is that his popular music is politically, socially and culturally richer than the serious scores.' Simon Morrison on the memoirs of a high- and lowbrow émigré composer

'From time to time, the Ivanovs hosted parallel evenings at which guests would not only discuss erotic ideas, but also enact them.' Philip Ross Bullock on a pivotal figure in Russian Silver Age literature

'In spite of the challenge to belief, his fascination with science only grew with the years.' Angela Leighton on Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory

'What we need to understand is why common knowledge of something morally execrable isn’t enough to result in co-ordinated social action.' Jessie Munton: Can communal beliefs be reconciled with empirical facts?

The US-China confrontation; beliefs vs facts; Tennyson, science and catastrophe; Iris Murdoch’s poetry; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein; a history of shamanism – and much more. The new TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

'While the US still has the larger economy and a more youthful population, it now faces a peer competitor with four times as many citizens.' Katie Stallard: The troubled history of US-China relations

'At once a philosophical inquiry, a historical portrait of mid-century Albania and a novel of young love and political disillusionment.' Linda Kinstler on a family history scarred by communist rule

'The idea of the West began not in English-speaking countries, but in France.' Hans Kundnani: A civilization defined by Russophobia