Notebooks

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

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Éric Rohmer’s Christmas classic for adults

The French filmmaker's My Night at Maud’s is a festive film like no other.

Guy Stagg December 8, 2025

US aircraft carriers and assault ships conducting patrols in the South China Sea, October 2019.

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Avoiding an American Suez

Taiwan need not be a repeat for the United States of the British imperial overreach that ended with the Suez Crisis.

Nikolas Neos December 8, 2025

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Tom Stoppard: Englishman, Czech, Jew

His Czech and Jewish pasts haunted his plays.

Samuel Rubinstein December 5, 2025

The title page of Arnold Bax's score for Symphony No 1 in E Flat.

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The restless passion of Arnold Bax

Intertwined themes of ecstasy, love, fantasy and flight shaped the composer's world, his music a monument to a man who could not abide permanence.

Alexander Voltz December 4, 2025

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The invention of Year Zero

The Republican calendar crystallised a French dream of rationality and symmetry, which echoes in everything from the geometry of garden design to the metric system.

Muriel Zagha December 2, 2025

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Stoppard’s brilliant surfaces

The playwright was a master craftsman of the stage, yet his knowing intellectualism sometimes got in the way of true understanding.

Armand D'Angour December 2, 2025

Russian tanker being loaded with coal. Credit: Evgenii Parilov

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Why Russia has come to the table

Moscow is burning through its reserves and staring into a deep domestic abyss. Everyone in Putin’s Russia — from the poorest pensioner to the wealthiest oligarch — is feeling the s..

Peter Caddick-Adams November 28, 2025