Notebooks

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

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Irrational Rationalists: Pythagoras matters

The Ancient Greeks are often held up as models of reason, but they combined rationality with the mystical and the magical, often to creative ends.

James Darnton October 5, 2023

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Karabakh is no more

After thirty-five years of trying to break away from Azerbaijan, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh have been forced into a definitive surrender, ending the last remnant of an Armen..

Jacob Judah October 3, 2023

People look at what remains of the tree at Sycamore Gap, next to Hadrian's Wall, in Northumberland.

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Death of a Sycamore

The story of the human being who destroys his environment and himself through greed and wantonness is a fable for our times, as the Greeks and Romans knew.

Armand D'Angour September 29, 2023

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Cort case shows why historical truth matters

The pressure on historians, particularly young ones, to produce work that conforms to a particular worldview, threatens the integrity of the discipline, as a recent controversy dem..

David Wootton September 28, 2023

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Giacomo Puccini: untormented genius

Both accessible and modern, Giacomo Puccini seems far too untroubled and content to be a major artistic figure. It is time we took him and his strikingly contemporary works, which ..

Alexandra Wilson September 27, 2023

Aged men gathering at Fontana dell' Elefante in Piazza Duomo, Catania, Sicily.

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Italy’s strangely seductive culture of mediocrity

Almost six million Italians now live outside their country, many of them young and highly skilled, fleeing an everyday life marked by pressapochismo ('sloppiness'). But many more s..

Tobias Jones September 25, 2023

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The ‘secretaries’ of MI6

While the activities of many agents in the First and Second World Wars have been known, the stories and legacies of the 'secretaries' of MI6 are only just beginning to be revealed.

Helen Fry September 22, 2023