“The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it”, says a voice in Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21. For the Russian writer and intellectual, the winter in question ...

The TLS - Toby Lichtig travels to Oslo to interview the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse; Natasha Lehrer heads to Zurich for a compelling new play by Deborah Levy.

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

I once thought of writing an essay called “Borges, Novelist”. It is well known that Borges has not written any novels and that throughout his work he refers to that genre with the same scorn as André ...

How should we live? How should society be arranged? Utilitarians believe that such questions reduce to one simple principle: the better action (or policy, or social institution) is the one that brings ...

To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk ...

Some debates just run and run. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, thought that the economic inefficiency of slavery acted as a drag anchor on growth. In the other corner, Karl Marx argued in ...

Born in Cuba under colonial rule, the revolutionary writer José Martí died fighting Spanish royalists at the Battle of Dos Ríos in 1895. His life and writings were informed by strict humanitarian ...

In his illuminating new book The Cancel Culture Panic – an updated version of his German-language Cancel Culture Transfer (2022) – Adrian Daub examines how an American-born panic spread globally. We ...

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In 1898, Asher Wertheimer, a leading London art dealer, marked his silver wedding anniversary by commissioning John Singer Sargent to paint two portraits, one of himself and one of his wife. Sargent ...

“If you see me on the scaffolding of a house under construction … I’m Mario Fagiolo. If, instead, you see me belly up in the field, tickling the clouds with a blade of grass between my teeth, make no ...