In the town, no one has a shadow. That is because the people have their shadows stripped at birth, or else leave them at the impenetrable twenty-six-foot-high wall that surrounds the town, guarded by ...

Joan Smith’s history of Roman imperial women in the first, Julio-Claudian dynasty is an uncompromising study of violent misogyny. Of the twenty-three individuals she discusses, sixteen were killed on ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

The origins of the modern-day Spanish nation do not predate the existence of empire. In 1492 the Genovese adventurer Christopher Columbus set sail under the flags of the Catholic Monarchs – Queen ...

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel The Morning Star (TLS, October 1, 2021), ordinary Norwegian lives are disrupted by the sudden appearance of a shining portent in the sky one unseasonably hot summer.

One might have assumed that the political thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be occupied, in a significant way, with cities. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and other ...

Ellen Jones reviewed Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil’s ÄÄ for the TLS in 2021 (In Brief, April 23). She has now translated it from Spanish into English as This Mouth Is Mine. In this collection of articles ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

“London has always been famous for its many and beautiful parks”, announced a 1966 guidebook to the capital; “just what those parks are famous for is not necessarily limited to the flowerbeds and ...

Thirteen-year-old Briar and his younger sister Rose are hiding out in an empty house against an unspecified threat. The keys to the house are attached to a see-through plastic keyring containing a ...

In 1911 Karl Pearson became the first chair of eugenics at University College London. Eugenics held that humanity could be “improved” by encouraging those with desirable mental and physical attributes ...