A weekly journal for literature and ideas. We publish book reviews, book extracts, essays and poems by leading writers from around the world. Each week, we also review the latest in fiction, film, opera, theatre, dance, radio and television.

4 days ago · In this week’s TLS. In this week’s TLS, A. N. Wilson diagnoses Hope, Pope Francis’s autobiography, as a “riposte to his virulent opponents within the Church”.But the book is “as much a political as a religious polemic”, he notes

Since 1902, we have been publishing expert reviews and insightful, sometimes provocative essays by the best writers from around the world. We cover everything from The Tempest to the climate crisis; little magazines to Big Tech; The Rite of Spring to the Arab Spring; Dionysus to Diane Arbus.. Every year, we review 1500 books – that’s more than the London Review of …

Oct 4, 2024 · In this week’s TLS. Poor Cyril Tourneur. This didactic writer of the early 1600s was once regarded as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy, a mighty work of its kind – and Tourneur therefore figured (in the words of Harold Jenkins) as “one of the most fiery and energetic imaginations possessed by any Elizabethan writer”.

Jan 24, 2025 · In this week’s TLS. Can the life be separated from the work? Paying tribute to the capaciousness, depth and forensic brilliance of T. S. Eliot’s criticism in his lead review of The Collected Prose, edited by Archie Burnett, Stephen Romer argues that these volumes represent a …

Mar 1, 2024 · Thomas Hardy and women; Yaël Farber’s elegiac Shakespeare; Yiddish writing; Hannah Arendt for today; Canal Fiction revisited – and much more

The TLS Archive | More than 100 years of TLS reviews, essays and debate, featuring Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Mary Beard and more

Collection. Literature. Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, Murakami, Jane Austen and James Baldwin, metaphysical poets and the Bloomsbury set, New Criticism and post-colonialism: in essays and reviews, our writers assess the latest fiction in English and in translation, and explore poetry, prose and criticism from across the world and across the centuries

Baudelaire is not just the first great urban poet to capture fleeting modernity, writes Seth Whidden in his review of a new edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes, published by Gallimard – “he is also more; an urban chronicler, a nasty piece of work, a swooner, a crooner, a lover, a hater, a translator, a critic, the inventor of the modern prose poem”.

“Viva il Papa!”, somebody shouted at the Vatican on Saturday, after the handle of Pope Francis’s walking stick broke and he stumbled. But such warm sentiments are, as we know, far from universal. Only on Friday it was reported that an Italian priest, Father Natale Santonocito, had been excommunicated after describing Pope Francis as the […]