“Oh, I thought you were a man!” were the words uttered by the pioneering nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford when he first met Lise Meitner, the scientist who would go on to discover nuclear fission.

A review by Mario Vargas Llosa of Paper Tigers: The ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges by John Sturrock, first published in the TLS of April 28, 1978 ...

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In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

Central Europe has seldom been short of dissidents. Their names are celebrated in its crowded pantheons of national heroes: defenders of religious freedom, peasant tribunes, revolutionary Jacobins, ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Leo Tolstoy hoped to finish Anna Karenina quickly. Within a year of beginning the novel in early 1873, he was already looking forward to its rapid publication in book form. The entire “carcass” of ...

In football, bans are always “lengthy”, new signings are “unveiled” and the “saga” of a player’s move from one club to another can only ever be “protracted”. One hears of a cultured left foot, but not ...

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Readers of Maggie Millner’s semi-autobiographical verse novel will probably make the imaginative leap between couplets and couples, with protagonists who are (in)constantly coupling up. From the first ...

Arguing that Shakespeare makes us better people is always paradoxical. On the one hand, all of us involved in the humanities are drawn towards claims for their ethical or emotional power. On the other ...

I have been out of the country, which always gives a different perspective on British news (more online, even more Radio Four, fewer paywalled papers). So, I watched the Farage statement with the ...