As Peter Ackroyd says at the beginning of his book Thames: Sacred river (2007), water issuing from the earth has always served as a metaphor for life emerging from the unknown. Similarly, to travel up a river to its source is, in a sense, to go back to the springs of youth. In his poem “Sweet Thames”, first published in the TLS in 1975 and then in his first collection The Pleasure Steamers (1978), Andrew Motion hints at these meanings: the Thames, little more than a “pulse” of water here where it rises in Trewsbury Mead, is only “christened” later at more “spectacular springs”. Writing in The ..read more

I have given a couple of lectures recently in which I try to show that many of the controversies surrounding the modern museum (as an institution) have a long history and are not simply the product of a sophisticated twenty-first century understanding of the problems that underlie collection, ownership, expropriation and display. Those problems go right back to the origin of the modern museum, more than 200 years ago. There hasn’t been a time when what was on display, or who could see what in the museum, was not up for dispute. It is well known that the erotica in the Museum of Naples were mad ..read more

Aldous Huxley, that veteran psychedelic experimenter, once said of his younger and more turbulent acolyte, Timothy Leary, “If only Tim weren’t such a silly ass”. This could usefully serve as blanket condemnation for most of the philosophically inclined figures who owe their mind-set (these people must possess such an elusive attribute, as they themselves ascribe it so ubiquitously) to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Certainly Terence McKenna is a silly ass. But his heart is so clearly in the right place, and so much of what he says is a fresh synthesis of a collection of 1960s ideas tha ..read more

It is easy to imagine that lectures in the nineteenth century were not far short of boring. I am thinking specifically of university lectures, but much the same would apply to lectures at local museums or town halls. The stereotype is of an elderly gentleman, his head buried in a dog-eared text, reading out – in a monotone – words that he has read out many times before. In fact, that is what people of my generation tend to say of lectures when they were students. I suspect that it is a myth that people have always spread about their education (they’ll soon be spreading it about me), and a myth ..read more

In April, Colin Throsby reflected on the enduring vitality of Byron, 200 years after his death; Tom Seymour Evans looked back the elusive life of Carson McCullers; Regina Rini explained how eclipses have impacted philosophy; Edward Chancellor assessed the potential of green growth; Barbara J. King asked if humans are the only animals to possess language. Here are some highlights from the month: A chameleon life: Reviving Byron on the bicentenary of his death Life at the sad café: A novelist of the marginalized and ‘those struggling to understand who they are’ The ethics of belief: Eclipses and ..read more

This week, the Oxford Professor of Poetry A. E. Stallings explores the elliptical brilliance of Anne Carson; and an interview with the writer, filmmaker and artist Miranda July about her forthcoming novel. The post Better to Travel Hopefully appeared first on TLS ..read more

Anne Carson published a collection called Wrong Norma in February The post Martha Going appeared first on TLS ..read more

The reason I can never change my name is to be found on my bookshelf. My grandfather Mircea’s enduring passion was for a short, easy-to-overlook poetic form: the epigram. Verse epigrams have a long history, if not a particularly illustrious one. In English they no longer enjoy even the limited esteem they had in Ben Jonson’s time, when he described the epigram as “bold, licentious, full of gall, / Wormwood, and sulphur; sharp and toothed withal.” However, for some reason – possibly the sheer number of things worth satirizing – the form enjoyed a boom in twentieth-century Romania, with epigramm ..read more

Larry Backus is the sole survivor after his ship is sunk in a South Pacific naval battle during the Second World War. Naked and badly burnt, his facial features disfigured, he is rescued and taken to a Pearl Harbor hospital: What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance thereof, and went on from there. He has no ID, and naval officials wrongly identify him as Lieutenant Ben Davenant, whose wife, Ary, arrives in H ..read more

As we know from Covid, case numbers are only one measure of a disease’s impact. In 2001 Britain experienced its worst-ever outbreak of foot-and-mouth. To stop the spread, farms were quarantined, areas of the countryside were locked down and millions of livestock animals were culled and burnt. By the time the disease was stopped in its tracks in October of that year, just 2,000 infections had been recorded. But the cost to farmers’ wallets and mental health was immense. Scott Preston’s debut novel, The Borrowed Hills, is set in the epicentre of the outbreak: Cumbria. It begins in the early days ..read more