I am sure that almost everyone was shocked by the video of one of Team GB’s Olympic equestrian champions repeatedly whipping a horse during dressage training. And in a rather different way, there was something very uncomfortable about getting an alleged glimpse, behind the scenes of Strictly Come Dancing, of a much nastier world than […] The post Cruel sports appeared first on TLS ..read more

Oscar Wilde thought conversation about the weather was “the last refuge of the unimaginative”, yet we persist. According to a study conducted by the social anthropologist Kate Fox in Watching the English (2004), 94 per cent of British respondents claimed to have discussed the weather in the past six hours, against 38 per cent in the past hour: “At almost any moment in the country, at least a third of the population is either talking about the weather, has already done so or is about to do so”. One obvious reason for this, over and above the supposed national frigidity, is Britain’s geographica ..read more

The abductions of Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel are the sudden deportations of Latin Americans by agents of the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, better known by its sinister acronym ICE. American Abductions is set in a near future in which the president, known simply as the “Racist in Chief”, has not only closed the nation’s borders to Latin Americans, but resolved to deport them all, as well as their descendants, and to “delete all files created on American soil by Latin American deportees” – a total erasure. It is a harrowing premiss, and depressingly plausible, predicated on a ..read more

Victor Heringer’s Glória tells the story of three generations of the Costa e Oliveira family, united by a tradition of “dying of heartbreak”. The novel was first published in Portuguese in 2013, and is now translated into English by Sophie Lewis and James Young. It is difficult not to read it today without the awareness of Heringer’s own death in 2018, aged twenty-nine, by apparent suicide. Glória is presented as a novel by “V. Heringer Costa e. O”, written at the request of another reclusive author, Ambrósio Silva Costa e Oliveira. The bulk of this novel within the novel follows the lives of ..read more

Layla Martínez’s debut novel is a claustrophobic slice of domestic horror, steeped in Catholicism and the supernatural, concerning a grandmother and granddaughter who share a haunted house in the barren Spanish interior. Shunned by neighbours, plagued by the sound of a gnawing “woodworm itch” – “cracracra” – the two characters uneasily coexist with the resident sombras, shadows of the dead. Although these crafty, clattering ghosts now torment them, they once protected the family home “for three years of war and forty more after it ended, when life was just hunger and dust and you couldn’t tell ..read more

Undervalued, underfunded and misunderstood, literary studies are in desperate straits. The state of the discipline is such that increasingly terrified and harried scholars must disgorge work not to say something significant, but to meet requirements for hiring, promotion or the Research Excellence Framework – that is, to justify their existence – even as the grants and resources shrink. As an eminence in the field said to me not long ago, where the table used to have loaves of bread, it now has mostly crumbs. There would seem to be two obvious ways to deal with this creeping evanescence: stand ..read more

What does it mean to say that a plant is conscious or intelligent? Terms created by humans, for humans, are relatively easily applied to other animals, which share roughly 90 per cent of their DNA with humans and live, like us, by hunting out and breaking down carbon chains. Can these concepts be applied to plants, which share as much as 60 per cent of their DNA with us, but have lives built on using light to build up carbon chains? This is the question that the environmental journalist Zöe Schlanger asks in this thought-provoking book. Her account unfurls a litany of miracles: the evening pri ..read more

As a lifelong perfectionist I’ve always been fascinated by those moments in history when a large group of people is seized by the desire to live by the highest possible standards. It’s no surprise, then, that I keep returning to the Desert Fathers. Beginning in the late third century of this era, Christian men and women around the eastern Mediterranean devoted themselves to lives of prayer and asceticism in desolate locations. Some lived alone, or in small groups, while others gathered in larger communities, the early monasteries. The desert was not just a geographic location, but a symbol of ..read more

There is nothing more alluring in polarized times than straightforward solutions to complicated questions. Much of the political and social turmoil of our time arises from the inclination to believe that overwhelming troubles can be resolved by partisanship. Authoritarianism reassures people who cannot figure out what to do and are relieved when someone else tells them. Such thinking has crept beyond the political to infuse daily life. Nuance entails uncertainty; in a confusing world it is easy to fall prey to almost any form of clarity. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a compendium ..read more

In his second volume of memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980), Elias Canetti recounted falling under the spell of the Austrian satirist and playwright Karl Kraus at a series of public readings in Vienna in 1924. Later, seeing Kraus in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht, at work on The Threepenny Opera, Canetti recalled that he “felt oppressed sitting at the table of a god”. Kraus “treated everybody at the table with tenderness; however, he treated Brecht with love, as though Brecht were his son, the young genius – his chosen son”. In his own life Canetti would adopt Kraus’s prophetic mien and, at least ..read more