Notebooks

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The silence of Chinese intellectuals under Xi Jinping

Historically, there have always been great Chinese thinkers who have been bold enough to challenge the prevailing political order - but in modern China, intellectuals remain enigma..

Kerry Brown September 14, 2021

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The Indian countryside is more than a metaphor

Centuries-old romanticisation of the countryside has masked the unsanitised realities of Indian rural life.

Jessica Frazier September 10, 2021

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The countryside captured the novel

From Austen to Alain-Fournier to Proust, the countryside is as much a venue for literary speculation as it is rural world.

Francesca Peacock September 7, 2021

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Was Horace a town or a country mouse?

Romans - like the poet Horace - tired of the relentlessness of city life and depicted the country as a venue for retreat and relaxation. But they also knew that time in the country..

Armand D'Angour September 6, 2021

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Finding the future in France Profonde

Never be fooled by the bucolic France Profonde postcard. It exists of course, but not far away may stand the laboratory where tomorrow’s world is being imagined.

Agnès Poirier September 6, 2021

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‘The Day Of The Jackal’: How far was fiction from reality?

Could a real-life Jackal have pulled it off? Frederick Forsyth's picture of prickly Anglo-French relations isn't so far from the truth of an era when de Gaulle's grandstanding on E..

James Barr September 3, 2021

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A contested Afghanistan could be even worse

Imagine if Jihad in Afghanistan became again a rallying call for Mujahideen the world over to come and defend the Taliban’s victory.

Suzanne Raine August 24, 2021

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Football’s rhetoric of suffering

Today’s players and managers frame football as a process of pious struggle, vacillating between anguish and redemption. In the wake of Covid-19, can football maintain its self-pity..

Josh Mcloughlin August 20, 2021

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Drunk and disorderly: Michelangelo’s Bacchus

Whether an inspiring portrayal of inebriation’s ‘divine madness,’ a study of alcoholic dissipation, or a controversial depiction of same-sex desire, the sculptor’s statue has divid..

Alexander Lee August 11, 2021