Notebooks

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

A Japanese family cleans the home in advance of New Year celebrations.

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How Japan marks the turning of the year

New Year is the time when Japan’s Shinto underpinnings really reveal themselves, in rituals of forgetting, purification, and beginning again.

Christopher Harding December 31, 2025

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Brigitte Bardot was the face of France

She was a cultural icon who channelled the electric power of French femininity and, by extension, Frenchness itself.

Muriel Zagha December 29, 2025

The new head of Britain's MI6 Blaise Metreweli makes her first public speech.

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The evolving world of MI6

Technological shifts, alliance politics, and fractious great-power competition make the United Kingdom’s secret service’s work under its new Chief more complex than ever.

Gordon Corera December 29, 2025

A Christmas party for evacuees in Oxfordshire, 1941.

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Christmas in exile

Even in exile, Christmas offers a glimpse of hope that today’s struggles will one day fade into memory.

Fergus Butler-Gallie December 24, 2025

A performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio in Dresden.

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The wonders of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio

Why not turn Christmastide into a thirteen-day Bach celebration, experiencing the Christmas Oratorio as it was first performed across Leipzig’s feast days in 1734–35?

Elisabeth Braw December 22, 2025

Judas Maccabeus before the army of Nicamor.

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The Jews’ time of miracles

The story of Hanukkah inspires in both its spiritual and worldly dimensions; it is the national epic of the Jewish people.

Samuel Rubinstein December 19, 2025

The Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Dhankar Gompa, in the Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, northern India, close to India's border with Tibet.

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The troubled history of India’s Tibetan frontier

For centuries, India's history has been entangled with that of the Tibetan Plateau, a reality that has often fuelled tensions with the People's Republic of China – and may do so ag..

Ved Shinde December 18, 2025

The British Commander-in-Chief, General Percival, signing surrender terms in Singapore on 15 February 15, 1942.

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NATO’s 1937 moment

In 1937, British officers tried – and failed – to challenge orthodox assumptions about the defence of Singapore. Their experience offers a warning for how NATO should think about R..

Andrew Monaghan December 18, 2025

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Philip Larkin’s arrival, undeceived

The poet's breakthrough collection, The Less Deceived, anticipated the sexual freedoms of the 1960s while pre-emptively rejecting its promises.

Jeremy Wikeley December 17, 2025