Edmund Gordon discusses whether Hilary Mantel's final Cromwell novel lives up to its billing - and whether, at 900-odd pages, it is the right length; Muriel Zagha looks at the female gaze in French cinema, with respect to the new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Irina Dumitrescu talks about how to write well, and when to break the rules

The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma

Why They Can't Write, by John Warner

Writing to Persuade, by Trish Hall

Every Day I Write the Book, by Amitava Kumar  

First You Write a Sentence, by Joe Moran

Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison

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This week the TLS is running an extract from The Mirror & the Light, the long-awaited third and final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, questions Geoffrey Pole, the youngest son of a great family. Pole is accused of conspiring against Henry VIII and attempting to bring back the old religion and reinstate the Pope as head of the Church. (The Mirror & the Light will be published on March 5 by Fourth Estate. The audio book is published by W F Howes and narrated by Ben Miles.)

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James Shapiro, the author of Shakespeare in a Divided America, discusses the history of West Side Story, the most popular and successful Shakespeare musical of all time, and Ivo van Hove's flawed Broadway adaptation; Toby Lichtig reviews Tom Stoppard's new play Leopoldstadt and talks us through a selection of Jewish-focused pieces in this week's issue of the TLS; David Horspool, the TLS's history editor and a keen consumer of audiobooks, tells us what he has been listening to this month

West Side Story, directed by Ivo van Hove

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, Wyndham's Theatre, London, until June 13

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Rebecca Langlands on lessons learnt in the only known ancient Roman brothel; Caroline Moorehead reviews Elena Ferrante's latest novel; Rory Waterman reads a new poem, "Defences" ("'Crikey!' you say. 'It’s gorgeous!'...")

Books: 

The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, class, and gender at the margins of Roman society, by Sarah Levin-Richardson 

La vita bugiarda degli adulti, by Elena Ferrante

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The Irish novelist reads an extract from her new novel, published in this week's TLS, in print, app and online 

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Is it the best of times or the worst of times to be a satirist? Madeleine Brettingham, a writer on the BBC's News Quiz, joins us to discuss; Toby Lichtig on a new production of Endgame and the constraints imposed on Samuel Beckett adaptations; founded in the 1960s, the Oulipo was – and remains – a group of writers and scientists striving for "potential literature". Anna Aslanyan considers the movement's legacy

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in print and performance 2016–2019, by Stewart Lee

The Joke is On Us: Political comedy in (late) neoliberal times, edited by Julie A. Webber

Endgame / Rough For Theatre II, at the Old Vic theatre, London

The Oulipo and Modern Thought, by Dennis Duncan

All that is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963–2018, edited and translated by Daniel Levin Becker and Ian Monk

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One of Germany's most acclaimed novelists talks to Maren Meinhardt about his new novel, Tyll, a vivid account of a seventeenth-century trickster's journey through a Europe ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War.

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Caryl Emerson on Tolstoy’s art, ideas and life, and the extent to which these came together; Benjamin Markovits returns to a treasured childhood book: The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook; Eve Babitz – a “fizzy”, “fabulous” chronicler of 1960s and 70s Los Angeles – is mid revival. Megan Marz fills us in.

Lives and Deaths: Essential stories by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Boris Dralyuk

Leo Tolstoy: A very short introduction by Liza Knapp

Leo Tolstoy by Andrei Zorin

The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook by Gary Gygax

I Used To Be Charming: The rest of Eve Babitz, edited by Sara J. Kramer

Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the secret history of L.A., by Lili Anolik

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Lucy Dallas reports on theories, developments and disputes in the world of science fiction; Lawrence Douglas adds crucial historical context – stretching back to the Middle Ages, in fact – to the current US presidential impeachment; the poet Hannah Sullivan emerges from Princeton University Library with fresh insight into T. S. Eliot's love letters   

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin

The Expanse, Volumes 1–8, by James S. A. Corey

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Did Byron have an eating disorder? Mummy issues? Daddy issues? Does it matter? Emily A. Bernhard Jackson joins us to discuss; Stanley Donwood, the artist and designer of Radiohead's record covers, makes the case for this most democratic of artforms; Keith Miller on the work of the designer and architect Charlotte Perriand, a high-minded high modernist whose life spanned the whole of the twentieth century

The Private Life of Lord Byron by Antony Peattie

Charlotte Perriand: Complete works, by Jacques Barsac

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Between 1916 and 1940, Mecklenburgh Square was home to the poet and novelist HD, the detective novelist Dorothy Sayers, the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, the historian and activist Eileen Power, and, finally, Virginia Woolf, who saw it reduced to rubble. Francesca Wade, the author of 'Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars', talks to Thea Lenarduzzi about what drew the women to this small pocket of Bloomsbury. Read an exclusive extract from 'Square Haunting' in this week's TLS, in print and online. 'Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on how to read' is available to purchase via the TLS website. 

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Muriel Zagha reviews Marriage Story and considers a few other deserving/undeserving films either lauded or ignored by this year's awards panels; a clip from an interview with Francesca Wade, the author of Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (you'll find the full interview in your podcast feed); this month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anne Brontë, the sister whose reputation has been slowest to blossom but who, according to Samantha Ellis, was the most radical and modern of them all

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Sanam Maher looks at how Muslim women are viewed in the West; Claire Lowdon finds puzzles and philosophy but no pleasure in J. M. Coetzee's recent work; Alan Jenkins explains the significance of the recently opened archive of T. S. Eliot's letters; Jeffrey Wainwright reads his poem "If all this did begin"

Books

From Victims to Suspects: Muslim women since 9/11 by Shakira Hussein

It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim women on faith, feminism, sexuality and race, edited by Mariam Khan

The Death of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

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Sam Graydon grapples with quantum physics and the subatomic world; Elaine Showalter considers the 'startlingly racy, contradictory, emblematic' E. Nesbit, the 'first modern writer for children'; Which out-of-print books should be back in circulation and why? Roz Dineen presents the results of a TLS symposium 

Books

Six Impossible Things: The ‘quanta of solace’ and the mysteries of the subatomic world, by John Gribbin

Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution: The search for what lies beyond the quantum, by Lee Smolin

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Author of ‘The Railway Children’, by Eleanor Fitzsimons

The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit: Author of ‘Five Children and It’ and ‘The Railway Children’, by Elisabeth Galvin

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TLS editors gather to consider some of the decade’s major cultural shifts and events, with specialist insights from Mary Beard on academia, Beejay Silcox on fiction and Zoe Williams on gender 

 

Go to the-tls.co.uk for the full twelve-page retrospective.

For the competition, Barbican membership Terms and Conditions can be found here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/join-support/membership#faqs. The competition closes December 31, 2019. Good luck.

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A newly discovered, pseudonymously signed mock-letter to the editor of 'The Lady’s Magazine' in 1823 tells the story of a wannabe writer who is visited by the "gentle spirit of Miss Austen". Not only might the letter offer new information on what Austen might actually have been like, says Devoney Looser, it is also the first piece of Jane Austen-inspired fan fiction; Anna Picard discusses the poet Anne Boyer’s memoir of modern illness and considers the intersections of literature and cancer; Jonathan Lynn shares memories of adventures with his cousin Oliver Sacks

For more on the Jane Austen story, go to www.the-tls.co.uk

'The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care' by Anne Boyer

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Norma Clarke considers the third and final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher; having spent the past twenty years reporting on Russia, Owen Matthews tries to put his finger on why Vladimir Putin may prove to be one of the most successful political leaders of our era

Books

The Code of Putinism by Brian Taylor 

Putin’s World: Russia against the West and with the rest by Angela Stent 

The Putin System: An opposing view by Grigory Yavlinsky

Kremlin Winter: Russia and the second coming of Vladimir Putin by Robert Service

The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev, translated by Stephen Dalziel

We Need To Talk about Putin: How the West gets him wrong by Mark Galeotti

Dealing with the Russians by Andrew Monaghan

Putin v. the People: The perilous politics of a divided Russia by Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson

Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The path from market economy to kleptocracy by Anders Åslund

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It's that time again... TLS contributors and editors share recommendations from a year of reading

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The author of 'The Five: The untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper', which won the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, speaks to Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi

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Just over ten years since introducing readers to a frustrated maths teacher called Oliver Kitteridge, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout reprises the character in a new novel, ‘Olive, Again’. Here, Strout talks to the TLS’s Roz Dineen about the craft of writing, why Olive has returned, and ageing on the page

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