Tolstoy
‘Genius’ is a dangerously misused word
It is best applied not to individuals but to teams or milieux, says Helen Lewis. The idea that a few special people are fundamentally more gifted than their peers is not only corrosive but inaccurate
Letters: The army that Britain needs
Common ground Sir: Katy Balls asks ‘Lawyer or leader?’ (Politics, 25 January), but it became fairly clear which Keir Starmer…
The joy of discussing life’s great questions with a philosopher friend
A higher form of love than romance or conjugal felicity was what Socrates offered in his dialogues, says Agnes Callard
Ruthless efficiency
George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories…
Linguistic games
David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…
All human life is here
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The man and the brand
‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and…
Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina
Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been…
A mirror to the world
The best new books celebrating Shakespeare’s centenary are full of enthusiasm and insight — but none plucks out the heart of his mystery, says Daniel Swift
Old masters
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
Pornographer-in-Chief
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
High life
Gstaad War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy…
Coming up for air
Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale…
Transported by Tolstoy
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on…
Parenting
‘Not still War and Peace!’ exclaimed my husband on 1 January during the all-day Tolstoy splurge on Radio 4. In reality…
An old classic in a new light
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
Neither saint nor sage
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
