'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

Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page? ‘On the page. Ideas in one’s head are like beautiful fish in the water.’ Twenty Questions with Yiyun Li

If I could dance, I’d be dancing at the sight of the latest @thetls.bsky.social! Simon Morrison, who knows all there is to know about 20th-C. music, has written a humdinger of a piece on Vernon Duke’s memoir and poems, out now from @pauldrybooks.bsky.social! www.the-tls.com/lives/biogra...

'The sense of duty to the dead captured by Wishart and Nally is extremely moving.' James O’Brien on a detailed account of the terrorist attacks of July 2005

'Borrow is tensely alert to the moral temper of any given situation, but not a moralizer.' Andrew Motion on George Borrow’s writing of the road

'The reader is obliged to wonder whether the integration of Stevenson and his family into Samoan society was as harmonious as it is represented.' Margaret Drabble on Robert Louis Stevenson’s flight from Presbyterian Scotland

'What keeps fascinating me is just the process of writing. Where will it lead me? What will I learn about the world this time? What will I bring to the world that I didn’t know about before.' Jon Fosse answers @thetls.bsky.social's Twenty Questions: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

There's a special pleasure to being in the UK and picking up a copy of @thetls.bsky.social with my column at the back. Because I write for publications based abroad (i.e. not in Germany) it's a rare experience.

Small press struggles, Ursula K. Le Guin’s cartography, Protesting poets

'Each course also featured a “sotelte”, or subtlety, an ornamental dish meant to impress, often sculpted in sugar.' Irina Dumitrescu on medieval attitudes to social class

'Sloterdijk is invigoratingly insightful, peeling back the curtain of western metaphysics to show how predetermined we are by metaphors of dark and light.' Ben Hutchinson: A negatively coded colour has become cool

'Proof draws helpful connections between theory and practice, between the way we reason about real-life case studies and how such reasoning can be generalized.' Andrew David Irvine on the weighing of evidence and human progress

'Cortical blindness is a metonymy for what even healthy brains are wired to do: rationalize themselves and their perceptions through stories.' Michele Pridmore-Brown on brain injuries and personality disorders

'Murch is a living link to a bygone era, when film editing was still an artisanal process involving sharp blades, hot glue and thousands of miles of celluloid.' Graham Daseler: A Hollywood film and sound editor explains his craft