This week, Kathryn Hughes introduces her new book on the cat craze that swept Edwardian England; and she also tells us about an exhibition of the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman. Plus a review of Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart. The post Super Furry Animals appeared first on TLS ..read more

Some people are understandably worked up about a lurid possibility: that if Donald Trump reclaims the US presidency in November, he may become the office’s first holder to serve his term as a convicted felon. In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni has become the first serving prime minister to sue an academic for expressing his opinion of her. Luciano Canfora of the University of Bari was once described in the TLS (by Peter Parsons, February 22, 2008) as an “eminent classical scholar and controversialist”. But Professor Canfora’s latest battle has little to do with dubious theories about Thucydid ..read more

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is a novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action. It is set in the Monaro region in New South Wales, where Wood spent her childhood – a beautiful, windswept plateau known for its bitter cold, rocky outcrops and elemental plains. There is a sadness to the landscape, denuded by deforestation and now used as pasture for imported cattle. Wood’s narrative follows an unnamed woman who leaves her life – including her romantic relationship and her work at an environmental NGO – to shelte ..read more

“Spring View” is one of the most celebrated poems in Chinese literature. Du Fu wrote it in his mid-forties, having left a war-torn city (Chang’an) littered with corpses: “The country is broken but the mountains and rivers remain. Grasses and trees have deepened in the spring city. Even the flowers are shedding tears, so please don’t blame the crying birds” (my translation). In his final years he observed that “all my life I have teetered on the edge of disaster”. This is an understatement, given the poet’s well-known bad temper, impulsiveness and alcoholism. Arguably, his life was a disaster ..read more

How many times can a story be told before it loses its ability to enthral and edify? The story of the Buddha has been endlessly conveyed, in different ways and places, over the course of 2,000 years, as has the scholarly account of its retelling. Two recent books with the same title (but different subtitles) show that we have still have much to learn from – and about – it. Philip C. Almond’s The Buddha: Life and afterlife between East and West opens with two chapters offering a composite account of the Buddha’s life. For those readers not familiar with the Buddha’s life, this is an excellent i ..read more

Brian Lowery’s Selfless: The social creation of “you” is a welcome addition to contemporary discussions of the nature of human identity. The author addresses this difficult topic in an easily accessible, conversational voice that opens questions regarding the existence and nature of the self to readers unfamiliar with that vast literature. With a broad view taking in social psychology, philosophy, political realities and personal experience, he shows why it makes sense to say that “when we take a closer look at the idea of the self as a person inside us, cracks start to emerge”, and that “selv ..read more

The idea for a book on dust came to Jay Owens in 2008. She was lying on a sofa, thinking about the dissertation proposal she was supposed to be writing for her master’s degree in geography, when she noticed the dust bunnies under her table, “tangles of an oddly purplish fuzz and hair which were a prodigious size”. As she had cleaned only a few days before, and she was “neither balding nor scrofulous”, she found herself wondering where all the dust came from. Seven years later, during a trip to Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, she realized that “following the grey thread of dust through time ..read more

Humans have always fished for sustenance, but the earliest evidence we have of fishing for recreation is Dame Juliana Berners’s A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496), in which she outlines the catch-and-release philosophy: “Nor should a man ever carry his amusement to excess, and catch too much at one time”. Marina Gibson learnt to fish at the age of five, and in Cast Catch Release she describes her love of angling and her experience of casting through rivers all over the world. These are mapped alongside the migration of salmon. Fishing is both a science and an art, requiring an unders ..read more

Homophobia is endemic in Cameroon. Same-sex relationships are outlawed and the LGBTQ+ community is persecuted with impunity. In her debut novel the Cameroon-born Musih Tedji Xaviere explores the reality of living in a country where being open about your sexual orientation can endanger your safety and livelihood. Bessem and Fatima meet at university in 2002 and feel an instant attraction. But their relationship is brought to an abrupt end when the bar they frequent is raided by a group of thugs, one of whom is Fatima’s Muslim brother, Mahamadou. The women are brutally beaten and arrested. After ..read more

In Jo Hamya’s sharp debut, Three Rooms (2021), an alienated millennial narrator vents her frustration about generational structural inequalities that leave her struggling to find permanent work, let alone afford a flat of her own. For Sophia, the twenty-eight-year-old protagonist of Hamya’s second novel, The Hypocrite, the disaffection is personal. She is furious at her own father, a sixtysomething novelist in the vein of John Updike who writes books that are, as she rails to her mother, “like prolonged rape scenes in films”. The Hypocrite opens with a short scene from a family holiday on a Si ..read more