DISSENT MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Artificial Futures’….
Veena Dubal and Katie J. Wells
COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features…
Choices, choices
With a seemingly endless array to select from, Country Life contributors reveal the tulips they will be planting for spring.
Charles Quest-Ritson is hoping for warm days and cool nights to fuel a spectacular display of countryside autumn colour
Who let the dogs out?
Music and Man’s best friend go hand in hand. Harry Pearson collars canines calling the tune
Well, hello Salar!
David Profumo heads for the West Country in the wake of his fishing hero Ted Hughes
Luxury
Jonathan Self is dazzled by Coco Chanel jewellery and Tiffany Daneff is talking trugs
George Saumarez Smith’s favourite painting
The architect chooses a bold graphic linocut of the feline form
Country-house treasure
John Goodall admires the revival of the Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire
The legacy
Tiffany Daneff pays tribute to the family who cooked up the secret recipe for Pulhamite rock
Grandstand views
An inspirational outlook makes for a magnificent garden at Mount St John, North Yorkshire. Kendra Wilson surveys the scene
Hot pots
Amelia Thorpe picks standout planters to showcase top tulips
Forever flowers
Blooms of Hydrangea paniculata are a must for every garden, suggests Charles Quest-Ritson
Why build a new country house
George Saumarez Smith weighs up the allure of a new country house in place of an historic pile
A point of prospect
John Goodall finds a striking new memorial tower worth the climb at Doddington Place, Kent
Picture this
Independent rural cinemas will always offer the best big-screen experience for Madeleine Silver
Interiors
A feast of design ideas awaits visitors to key events such as Focus/26, reveals Amelia Thorpe
Back to the future
Harry Pearson meets the art conservators giving historic paintings a new lease of life
Shell we?
The secret to dressed-crab perfection is keeping it simple, as Tom Parker Bowles reveals
Lord of the flies
Fruit flies are more than a mere pest — Ian Morton reveals their critical role in medical research
New series: Countryside mysteries
Otherworldly cramp balls — or King Alfred’s cakes — fire the imagination of John Wright
Travel
Gabriella Le Breton unpacks the winter latest, from new Swiss ski lifts to the high life in Courchevel
Arts & antiques
Benvenuto Cellini’s golden Saliera is a 16th-century cellar worth its salt, as Carla Passino discovers
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Fall Books’…
As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.
Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
The Connoisseur: A Cultural History by Peter Burke
The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art by Shira Brisman
Among its peers in the Ivy League, Dartmouth was perfectly positioned to resist Trump’s attack on higher education. It chose not to.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes
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SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Exploring Mexico City’s Private Worlds’ – Intimate treasures await in the sprawling capital’s newest museums, from artists’ homes to buried ruins.
The ancient capital has plenty of artwork and fossils, if that’s what you like. Or tour the writing rooms of a Nobel winner, the fortified home of an exiled Russian revolutionary and towers of skulls
Before they become sandy souvenirs, the baubles in the bubbles of the shoreline serve as a veritable fortress for creatures like clams, mussels and conchs
Known for its elaborate courtship ritual, the white-headed duck is a conservation icon in Spain. Elsewhere, it’s fighting for a second act
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘Swept Away’ – After the Nepal-Tibet flood disaster…
Over the last week, the world has watched with horror the scenes from the Tibet-Nepal border where a devastating torrent of mud, water and ice tore along the Bhotekoshi River, destroying entire communities and leaving more than 1,000 people dead and several thousand more missing.
From the Nepali town of Devighat, our south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen describes a nightmarish scene of overflowing mortuaries and unidentifiable bodies, as shellshocked survivors of the flood slowly return to the ruins of their homes.
The disaster happened after the collapse of a glacier – and while global heating has not been definitively attributed as the cause, it is undeniable that steep mountain slopes and valleys are especially vulnerable to flooding and landslides, while extreme weather events such as monsoons and melting glaciers have become more common because of warming due to human-caused climate breakdown, as our global environment writer Jonathan Watts explains.
Then columnist Nesrine Malik paints a wider picture and argues that while for many people these floods may feel as though they have happened a world away, the climate crisis is coming for us all, one way or another.
Spotlight | Mark Carney shows combative nature in face-off with Trump
The Canadian PM is one of the few world leaders to stand up to the US president. Former colleagues say they are not surprised. Leyland Cecco, Heather Stewart and Kalyeena Makortoff report
Science | The robots are coming!
… Or are they? As entrants at the World Humanoid Games lurched from triumph to farce, Robert Booth finds that a robotics revolution may not be as close as it first appears
Interview | Gordon Brown on Burnham, billionaires – and a better Britain
The former UK prime minister is still shaping politics (even if he doesn’t want to interfere). He tells Charlotte Edwardes about keeping his temper, staying fit – and why he won’t splash out for a Scotland football shirt
Opinion | The tech titans must be stripped of their power, and soon
Those who said Meta harms children struck a blow, but the ability of big tech to gouge profits and cause harm is barely diminished. That’s the battle to come, argues Jonathan Freedland
Culture | Dolly Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out
Beneath the wig and rhinestones, the late US country singer was the genius behind strings of classic songs that continue to inspire new artists, says Alexis Petridis
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Philip Zelikow and Anchit Sathi on progress, AI and the death of the author…..
When doctors and families fall out over medical intervention By Charles Foster
Looking at John Berger By Margaret Drabble
Can literary culture survive in the era of machine intelligence? By Anchit Sathi
Why nations win or lose the technological race By Philip Zelikow
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
By Colin Burrow
What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing a work of literary criticism, as they happily did in the 1970s and 1980s. Even literary biography, literary criticism’s previously marketable stepsister, no longer brings a gleam to a publisher’s eye. The grassroots of the subject are also suffering badly. Since 2000 the number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third, to around 36,000, with an even higher drop among male students.
COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features…
Edward Impey admires the ambitious attempt to revive early-12th-century interiors at Norwich Castle keep in Norfolk
What did the Normans ever do for us?
Jason Goodwin examines how the 1066 invasion by William the Conqueror changed the character of England forever
Walk on the wild side
Nicholas Crane re-creates the 1,000-mile, 12th-century journey undertaken by Gerald of Wales, Britain’s first great travel writer
Architecture as power
The monumental castles and churches the Normans left behind still express their strength in stone, reveals John Goodall
That sinking feeling
Quicksand is the stuff of many a nightmare. Harry Pearson tries not to get sucked in
Arts & antiques
Artists have long been inspired by the Battle of Hastings, as Carla Passino discovers
Michael Whitehall’s favourite painting
The podcast co-host chooses an arresting work expressing movement and fleeting beauty
Save our seeds
Seed Detective Adam Alexander issues an appeal to gardeners to revive the Victorian tradition of gathering life-giving pips
The legacy
The fossil-hunter Mary Anning helped put palaeontology front and centre, finds Kate Green
Country-house treasure
The golden Jean Tijou gates at Burghley House in Lincolnshire catch the eye of John Goodall
New series: Countryside mysteries
In the first of a series on rural riddles, John Wright cracks the old conundrum of strip lynchets
Yell for leather
Corinne Julius meets the animal-hide experts conserving historic objects from their Leicester HQ
You little cracker
The neglected Kentish cobnut is making an overdue come-back, suggests Susan Low
Luxury
The runway returns and Amie Elizabeth White’s earthy tones
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe picks out elegant fittings to elevate the bathroom
Will Hosie asks what makes a pub a pub and eyes properties with a pop of colour, plus our writers have all you need to know this month and Gio Fio marvels at the reinvention of the north bank of the Thames
Out on the prairie
American plants may be the answer to our warming climate, reports Charles Quest-Ritson
Travel
Pamela Goodman roots around in the Nadder Valley in Wiltshire
MONTHLY REVIEW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘India’s Ruling Class and the Global Crisis’….
In recent years, India’s ruling classes claimed—and perhaps came to believe—that their time had come on the world stage. India was the fastest-growing major economy, due soon to be the third largest, constituting a new global power. India’s biggest tycoons figured among the world’s top twenty billionaires, part of the transnational elite. Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India would be a “developed country” by 2047, the centenary of the end of colonial rule.
It’s getting on for twenty-four years ago that I first read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Books tend to come to us when we need them, and it’s easy to see why Tom Ripley’s project of self-reinvention and triumphant class resentment was so appealing to me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate.
Few groups in history have been so variously defined, quarrelled over, misrepresented and appropriated as the Vikings. Their identity elusive, they have been passed around like historiographical tokens to the detriment of a deeper understanding of their cultural and political milieu. Neil Price’s The Sea-King and the Sorceress sidesteps these often sterile debates by examining the lives – and deaths – of more than twenty figures from the Viking Age and using them to shed light on wider themes, a bottom-up approach which is both logical and engaging.
A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently from the salons of Cairo to the palaces of Riyadh, from Atatürk’s Ankara to Khomeini’s Najaf, while keeping so many figures vividly in play.
When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days as his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci thought his career was over. He had become such an object of ridicule that a crisis PR adviser suggested he lie low for a few years before attempting to start again. Instead, the self-styled ‘front stabber’ from New York – who had naively assumed that a successful Wall Street career could equip him for the toxic political swamp of Washington, DC – launched himself into a round of media interviews, choosing to roll with the punches.
Intellicurious 