Maren Meinhardt on an urban tree
From the TLS, June 2nd: Outside my window, there is a tree. Even without it, the view is not at all unpleasant: a row of Victorian houses, cars, a skew-whiff…
Category: tls
From “The Long, Long Life of Trees”, Fiona Stafford
In spring, you can feel life stirring in the barest twigs and the silhouetted catkins look as if a diminutive duck has run across the sky. One day the…
Yeats on Kipling: “I dislike his works so much that I feel sure it must have something to teach me”
(edit 30th August 2018 – for more on the uneasy relationship between another poet and Yeats, see here. For a TLS letter which also features Kipling (in a perhaps less than…
Der Untergang (Downfall) – reviewed for SAU Blog, April 28th 2005
Downfall loomed large in 2005 as a cultural phenomenon. Perhaps, at that point, the fact that some of the survivors of Hitler’s bunker were still alive made it all the…
How book reviewing works – my first thoughts on Raymond Tallis’ “The Mystery of Being Human”
Recently my review of Raymond Tallis’ “The Mystery of Being Human” appeared in the TLS. This review had a somewhat convoluted gestation. Put simply, I didn’t like the book much.…
Review of “The Mystery of Being Human” by Raymond Tallis, TLS, 15/02/17
Behind a paywall online, I have a review of Raymond Tallis’ The Mystery of Being Human : God,Freedom and the NHS, in the current TLS. Here’s the bit that you…
Nabokov and Epilepsy – my letter to the TLS
I have a Letter to the Editor in the current TLS responding to Galya Diment’s piece on Vladimir Nabokov and epilepsy. The letter is behind a paywall but you can see the much…
From More equal than others, Julian Baggini, TLS 20/7/16
Julian Baggini has a witty, stylish review of various books on the ethics of the human, animal relationship in the latest TLS. I was particularly struck by his trenchant criticism of utilitarian…
Séamus Sweeney 