“We cannot imagine the course of our lives except as it manifests itself in places”, said a TLS review of Fleur Adcock’s collection Time-Zones (1991). In the same review, the poem “House-Martins”, first published in the paper in 1990, is described as a space where “suburban gardens become a kind of breeding-ground for a future generation’s nostalgia”. The theme may have something to do with the fact that Adcock, who was born in New Zealand and settled in London in 1963, is still sometimes regarded as a New Zealander by anthologists – and in fact went back there to edit The Oxford Book of Conte ..read more

I have never felt a compulsion to judge works of art or literature on the basis of their artist’s behaviour or moral compass. I do want to face up to their biographies, and not to give out any simple “get out of jail free” cards to moral monsters, simply because they were brilliant at painting, sculpting or singing. But I can deplore what Eric Gill did to his family, while still admiring his “Prospero and Ariel” on the façade of Broadcasting House in London – and also, I hope, understanding that others feel differently about this. For me, there is some value in being reminded that great art is ..read more

Next month sees the opening moves in a trial that will prove to be the most important test case for literary censorship since John Calder finally won his battle to publish Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1968. It is important because it is not being heard under the Obscene Publications Act, which in practice has led to the end of significant literary censorship, but under the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876 (forbidding the import of “indecent or obscene material”), together with subsequent legislation controlling the importing of books and magazines. In April 1984 Customs officers ra ..read more

I confess to a soft spot for Victorian academic ladies – at least, those of the tougher sort. My distant predecessor at Newnham, the classicist Jane Harrison, was one of those. I strongly suspect that she would have been irritating in large doses, not to say a bit of a diva (that side certainly comes out in the testimony about her from contemporaries in the college archive). But I have nothing but respect for the way she faced down important, and self-important, men – from William Gladstone to the bullish archaeologist William Ridgeway. One story she herself tells in her memoir is about her en ..read more

As the TLS celebrates all things Shakespeare, Emma Smith goes to see Ian McKellen’s larger-than-life Falstaff; plus Rana Mitter on the immense impact and lasting legacy of the Tokyo Trial. The post Power Plays appeared first on TLS ..read more

Graeme Richardson’s review of new books by Michael Edwards and Marilynne Robinson (March 22) shows that there are many ways to read or hear readings of sacred scripture. But neither book appears to consider how most of our Bible was put together over decades and centuries of oral tradition. Events and stories were passed on in a memorable form before they were written down. Preliterate societies all over the world pass on their origins or past history, and the way they ought to do things, through recitation by bards or other remembrancers. Later the important texts are written down and often e ..read more

What counts as “indecent or obscene”? According to certain customs officers of the 1980s, the answer is: anything on the shelves of the bookshop Gay’s the Word. It is forty years ago this month that Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, as it then was, raided Gay’s the Word in Bloomsbury, as well as the homes of three of its directors and a few other shops. Numerous titles were removed for official scrutiny, and further imports held up. “They clearly didn’t know what they were doing”, Paud Hegarty, the bookshop’s manager, later recalled. “They had to keep ringing up to find out what they were mean ..read more

Houses, like Proust, are nocturnal. But still wide awake now at dawn. A lightening, a clarity, a tang in the air. As though behind these old dwellings the sea. Nascent ardour … of May, green bananas, Young children … the early Renaissance. And therefore intense presence – everything Freshly and keenly itself. Except me. We are actors impersonating ourselves, Nietzsche claimed. But no performance today. Be no one and all may be offered to you. Be nothing and the glad world rushes in. The post Early appeared first on TLS ..read more

The premiss of Ariane Koch’s debut novel is outwardly simple: a long-time resident of a small mountain town takes in an unnamed visitor and problems ensue. But Overstaying is rather more complex than that. The narrator’s attitude to her fellow townspeople is contemptuous from the outset. Sitting in a local bar, she imagines those alongside her shrunk to doll-like proportions, such that “I alone remained large, so I no longer fit in it. Then it occurred to me that this was already the situation”. She casually mentions that her great-grandfather was a cult leader. When the visitor arrives in tow ..read more

Helen Oyeyemi likes unreliable narrators. Her novel Peaces (2021), for example, was told primarily in the voice of a lying mesmerist. Oyeyemi’s new novel, Parasol Against the Axe, begins in what seems, at moments, to be the voice of Prague itself, which freely claims that it is “all right for a city to pull a leg or two when the mood is upon it”. Elsewhere our storyteller is the enigmatic Wendell Wechsler, who might be the Golem, and whose name combines German words for “turn” and “change”, a metamorphic trickster who marries one character and, under a different name, threatens to cut another ..read more