The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.
English virtue battles the pagan
The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd
The texture of etcetera
What smartphones can’t record
Freeing Thomas Mann
Modern English translations that do justice to the work
In a landmark case, a California jury last week found social media companies Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products. The ruling came the day after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms.
Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, while governments around the world are starting to introduce measures to curb social media’s grip on children’s attention.
Guardian technology editors Dan Milmo and Robert Booth assess whether what has been called a “big tobacco” moment for the industry will lead to significant change. And in our opinion section, Jonathan Freedland argues that the court verdicts must be just the start of a global fightback.
The big story | A war of regression Weeks into a war that was going to take days and has cost billions, Donald Trump has bombed the US into a worse position with Iran, writes Patrick Wintour
Science | ‘On the shoulders of giants’ Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin have been unearthed and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany, Donna Ferguson reports
Feature | Circuit training After touring 11 Chinese companies making humanoid robots, Chang Che asks: just how close are we to a robotic future?
Opinion | Labour needs a thinker Ed Miliband’s stock is rising in a party in need of an old-style intellectual heavyweight, argues Gaby Hinsliff
Culture | Gimme shelter Catherine Slessor visits Henry Moore’s former countryside home Hoglands, now home to studios and a vast sculpture garden, to learn about a new exhibition of the drawings he made as a war artist, capturing people as they took sanctuary from the blitz
The Senate’s bipartisan bill to fund the agency is now formally back with the House, and the shutdown will continue at least through Monday, when the chamber will hold its next session.
The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…
Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By Antonia Senior
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware By Anja Shortland
Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..
President Trump said that he was considering leaving NATO over allies’ failure to support his Iran offensive, and suggested the closure of the Strait of Hormuz would be a problem for others to solve.
President Trump said he planned to attend arguments in a case that tests whether he can limit the principle of automatic citizenship for nearly anyone born in the U.S.
The defense secretary conceded that the conflict had not thwarted Iran’s missile capabilities. He said only President Trump could decide when to end the war.
A month since the first U.S.-Israeli attacks and Iran’s response effectively shut off Persian Gulf oil, drivers are paying significantly more to fill up.
How Milan is refashioning itself as a contemporary art hub
The city has long been synonymous with finance, fashion and design, but it is increasingly banking on art too
The dangers of playing the ‘beautiful’ game
The idea of the beautiful and the damned is a longstanding one, but a problematic one – in art as well as life
Restoring Dresden’s crowning glory
The city has been rebuilding the Residenzschloss, home of its one-time ruler Augustus the Strong, since the Second World War – and the results are worth the wait
Simply red: a short history of Shiraz
The Shiraz grape is native to France, but it has longstanding links with Persian courtly life and culture
The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects: DOGE and the mind-bending expansion of ICE. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Trump’s War Hits the Chaiwalas
Restrictions and attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have made fuel prices rocket. Just ask the roadside tea venders in New Delhi. By Nathan Heller
He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb
A former C.I.A. officer says that he recruited scientists as part of the United States’ effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. By David D. Kirkpatrick
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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