Notebooks

Notebooks are snapshots from our writers, reflecting on current affairs and underappreciated aspects of culture and history.

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Why Jihadis are drawn to Khorasan

An apocalyptic hadith inspires extremists across the world. Tragically, chaos in Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban will spur them on.

Suzanne Raine September 21, 2021

People wearing VR headsets watch films during an exhibition at 'AHSPACE' immersive live broadcast base in Hefei, Anhui Province of China.

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The rise of the metaverse

The metaverse is on the way. Its utopian advocates claim that the next iteration of the internet will free us from the physical world. But Web 1.0 is a warning from history. It qui..

John B. Sheldon September 17, 2021

British visual artists (L-R) Angela Bulloch, Georgina Starr, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Gillian Wearing, who are part of the group known as the Young British Artists, photographed on 16th July, 1996.

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The strange death of the art school

The standardisation of British art schools has replaced a once living tradition of artistic practice with self-justificatory faux-academese.

Daisy Dunn September 15, 2021

A dissident student asks soldiers to go back home as crowds flooded into central Beijing 03 June 1989.

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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

Painting of Mian Mukund Dev of Jasrota, 18th century.

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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

Edward Dayes, Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight, 1788, watercolor and ink over pencil on paper.

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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

Dante meets the souls of great poets in Limbo, four of whom come forward, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan.

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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

British actor Edward Fox looking through the sight as he aims a rifle during filming of 'The Day of the Jackal', directed by Fred Zinnemann, 1972. The film is adapted from the novel by Frederick Forsyth, with Fox playing 'The Jackal'. Credit: Reg Lancaster/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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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