Ideas in literature
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Before the 21st century’s climate grief, there was Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s 1939 novel Aranyak’
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‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’: What Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s novel says about preserving a river
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Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ actually romantic? Heathcliff would say no
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‘On Being Ill’ turns 100: Virginia Woolf’s ‘best essay’ still shapes how we read sickness
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How George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ predicted the global power shifts now underway
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How interwar fiction made sense of an increasingly noisy world
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How Maggie O’Farrell’s novel ‘Hamnet’ takes from – and mistakes – Shakespeare
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‘Blind Owl’: Sadeq Hedayat’s 1936 death-haunted masterpiece shadows the decline of modern Iran
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How young adult literature and philosophy can help provide better role models for masculinity
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An Antarctic ‘polar thriller’ and a neurodivergent novel imagine a climate-changed future
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Why poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal believed Plato’s ideas contribute to intellectual stagnation
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From the ‘Miller’s Tale’ to King Lear’s roaring sea, a history of flooding in literature
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A hundred years on, TS Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem for our populist moment
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How Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through his Sherlock Holmes stories
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Jane Austen’s world ran on gossip – and she revelled in it
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Forgotten migrants, unfinished decolonisation: Why Kalyani Ramnath writes about citizenship history
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Who are the worst mothers in literature? Readers pick their candidates
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Who are the worst fathers in literature? Readers pick their candidates
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Disabilities and madness: How literature treats them tells us much about society’s ideas
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Thomas Pynchon’s novel, ‘Vineland’, is translated for the Trump era in ‘One Battle After Another’
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Latin American literature contains warnings for American universities that yield to Donald Trump
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How Shakespeare can help us overcome loneliness in the digital age
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A 16th-century Chinese writer spoke of workplace burnout, creating a design for radical acts of rest
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Is there any hope for the internet? A sociologist imagines an optimistic answer in her new book
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‘Is a River Alive?’: Radical resistance and solidarity between humans and the natural world
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What timeless literature tells us about injustice, war and human nature
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Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Cosmology and the composition of verse
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Why Estonian writer Jaan Kross’s historical fiction is worth reading in India today
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How to live through the end of the world: Read William Shakespeare’s play ‘Cymbeline’
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Women who write themselves: The quiet strength of Tamil writer Imayam’s female protagonists
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A philosophical inquiry into technology illuminates our innermost nature, says Sundar Sarukkai
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What is the job of philosophy? Is it to make human beings better? Sundar Sarukkai poses the question
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What is the original impulse to a philosopher’s questions? It is ‘doubt’, contends Sundar Sarukkai
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‘Philosophy is an act of illuminating the invisible’: Sundar Sarukkai on human perception
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‘Do we perceive the world or do we think it?’ Sundar Sarukkai on thinking in philosophy
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Sundar Sarukkai on how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today
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The singularity of literary production: Nirmal Verma and Jorge Luis Borges in London, 1976
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Michel Foucault died in 1984, but his philosophy still speaks to a world saturated with social media
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‘The Three-Body Problem’: Liu Cixin’s novel is a heady blend of ethics, physics and Chinese history
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How ‘Dune’ became a beacon for the fledgeling environmental movement and the new science of ecology
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How literature and art can help us rethink our problems with sleep
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Gregor Samsa, the vermin: Reading Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ while Palestinians are killed
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‘Intercourse’: Why Andrea Dworkin’s radical critique of male power resonates with Gen Z feminists
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Slavoj Žižek: What do the ‘celebrity’ philosopher’s key ideas really tell us?
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How Francis Fukuyama’s idea ‘the end of history’ may have been misinterpreted
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Our interest in imagining future worlds is dying, says sci-fi author William Gibson
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Can these great writers and thinkers help us understand the current political mess around the world?
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#MeToo: How can literature (and publishers) respond to the problems of gender and power?
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Radical nationalist or progressive philosopher? How do we engage with Aurobindo’s ideas today?
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Ayn Rand’s dangerous ideas are becoming increasingly popular and dismissing her is not the solution
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Why Donald Trump’s policy of breaking up immigrant families is straight out of a Dickens novel
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Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the ‘banality of evil’. But did she miss a deeper meaning?
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Ten things Hannah Arendt said that are eerily relevant in today’s political times
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Is state monopoly on violence the price to be paid for an orderly society? Two books offer answers
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How literary rage arms us with a private arsenal to fight the battles that a mob cannot
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How to invent a Tolkien-style language
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The possibilities with a stranger: Complete love or extreme hate