Notebooks

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

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

Image of Ahmad Shah Massoud on a wall in Kabul

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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

Gareth Southgate after missing his penalty during the European Championship Finals semi final between England and Germany at Wembley, on June 26, 1996. Germany won the match on penalties.

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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

A Lebanese protester chants wearing a mask from Spanish crime show 'The Heist'.

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Goodbye, Bella Ciao

Bella Ciao has been co-opted by activists and corporations the world over. Does Italy's most famous protest song deserve a beautiful goodbye?

Tobias Jones August 3, 2021