Just a reminder

By MICHAEL CAINES

It's around this time of year that we receive calls from puzzled subscribers, wanting to know what's happened to their copy of the TLS. Has it got lost in the post? Has their subscription lapsed? Are we deliberately withholding it for fear of what they'll read on page 32?

The query is understandable – this is a weekly publication for weekly people, to mangle a phrase from The League of Gentlemen. Twice a year, however, in August and at Christmas, we publish a "double" issue (which last week managed to cover everything from Margaret Atwood to Angela Merkel, Janet Malcolm, obesity, poetics and garden gnomes), making the total number of issues per year fifty rather than fifty-two. If this is no concern of yours, please forgive this minor piece of housekeeping; but if you're a reader looking forward to a TLS for August 23, please be aware that it's already out there, in the form of the TLS for August 16 & 23 . . . .

NB: Two years ago, the image above, of an imagined meeting between Marcel Proust and Henry James, is what you would have seen on the cover of the TLS after the summer double issue. (The inspiration being this piece about literature and the mind by Gregory Currie.) They don't appear to be enjoying one another's company, do they? Suggestions for what M. Proust is saying – or James is, unspeakably, thinking – are welcome.